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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7328873" data-attributes="member: 16814">So, here's my thoughts, based on how this conversation has ranged:  this is really [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] coming back to the concept of "secret backstory" using a different appropriation of terms, redefined into what pemerton wants to get at rather than the broader definition more commonly used.  Most the rancor in the thread (and a good bit of the confusion) is the appropriate of "worldbuilding", which already has a useful and widely understood definition,.  pemerton has instead defined worldbuilding as that part of the fiction the DM has prewritten and kept secret from the players, which may then mean that player action declarations may fail or succeed due to things not determined by the game mechanics, but instead on this secret truth that DM hasn't revealed.  pemerton greatly prefers a playstyle where such secret knowledge doesn't exist and everything is determine in play.Is this correct?  Because the rest of this is going to be based on that understanding.  I have no problem with this as a position -- it's fair, understandable, and I can see the appeal.  I've even played in such games, and enjoyed them.  I also play and run (mostly run these days) games where there is secret backstory.  My current group has at least 2 players that would very much dislike the style of game pemerton (and others) enjoys -- they would very much dislike having to author fiction as part of their action declarations, and would feel that the world was too subject to whim to be enjoyable.  I know this because I've discussed it with them, and tried to play some icebreaker games that go down this path:  Fiasco was, for one of them, a fiasco, he didn't enjoy it at all. I love Fiasco, and all of its fiaconess, but I see their point:  if everything not already nailed down is up for grabs, then it doesn't really matter much.  You can disagree with that, and believe differently, but you need to accept that some, maybe even many, people do think this.  Enough, at least, that the predominate playstyle is secret backstory and not more story now methods.What doesn't help this discussion is that you (pemerton) keep casting the use of secret backstory in the worst light -- as a tool bluntly wielded by the DM in defiance of his players.  And, you're right, it can be that.  I think that's enough for you to dislike it, but it remains that the vast majority of DMs don't use it that way.  They use it to build a world to be explored, which is what their players are looking for (mine are -- they don't want to make a world through play, they want to play in a made world).  Further, it's not very helpful that you ignore that your chosen method does some fiat negating of actions as well -- you just hand wave that away under the guise of good play.  The ray gun example is on topic, here.  Declaring that you look for a ray gun in the study of a game that has the setting of Greyhawk and the genre conventions of low fantasy sword and sorcery would be negated, and also an example of play that violated the agreed social contract for the game.  Well, using secret backstory in inappropriate ways to confound players is also generally viewed as poor play. Not finding the map in the study is fine, because it's in the library, and the scene that's framed isn't just the study, but the whole mansion, so the map is to be found in the scene, when the fictional positioning is good for map finding.  Much like finding ray guns is good when the fictional positioning and scene framing allows for it (provided that the play has led there).  You have a habit of insisting that things are impossible in your playstyle when, in reality, it's just that such play violates the assumptions of your play.  Well, same goes for the other side:  most of the egregious examples you posit are bad play as well.The real crux here is to cater to the players.  I'd be fine playing in a story now style game.  One of my DMs essentially ran this style of game behind the curtains as presented it as a secret backstory game.  Essentially, he crafted a great illusion that we, as players, were finding out things he's written down, but this wasn't the truth, he adapted to player action descriptions and responded much more like a story now game than anything more traditional.  He made it up on the fly, for the most part.  But, because of the desires of some of our group, he did a really good job of presenting it as a planned game rather than something he just made up.  That, and we all trusted him to run an entertaining game.But, I run for a group that enjoys the tactical aspects of D&D combat.  They like the role-playing, too, but all have expressed a sincere desire to play on a grid rather than TotM.  This puts hard limitations on the ability to 'wing it'.  In playing D&D, as you've noted, stats are important.  So is encounter design, lest you have boring combats or combats that are unfair to the players.  Both are fine to have, in moderation (and with good foreshadowing) but too many of either is a problem.  Then you have encounter maps, which are hard to do well on the fly, and the preference that encounter maps encourage dynamic fights, so they have elements that can be utilized by either side:  cover, obscurement, environmental hazards, z-axis elements, etc.  This is all very hard to do and provide in response to player declared actions, on the fly and without prep.  So, I prep a bit.  I build a few maps that I can use, I build a few encounters I can use, etc, etc.  But, to do this usefully, I have to understand how they might fit together in play, so I reference the maps and information I've already generated.  This spirals outward until I have built up a few layers of secret DM knowledge, and this is important because I'm providing information to my players on what possible threats they may encounter in an area so that they can prepare.  A good example from last week's game:  the players decided to explore towards a distant tower-like structure from the outpost they're currently based in.  I had rolled a number of random encounters for the area to prep ahead of time, and, because this area has dangers above what the part can handle, I generated a few higher level encounters as well.  I like the T-Rex encounter so generated, but spriging a T-Rex on a 2nd level party is not nice, so I had the outpost leader tell the group before they headed out to watch out, a large dangerous beast (and I then described a T-Rex) had been seen in the upper grasslands in the direction of the tower-like thing as foreshadowing.  The party then can plan and take precautions if the T-Rex encounter came up.So, that part of secret backstory is useful to me, because I play and enjoy a game that requires more prep than some others.  I also had the tower mapped out, with encounters, because that's easier for me to do.  Still, this is a guideline for me, and pretty much every encounter in the tower deviated or expanded on notes due to play rather than a slavish adherence to the sketch I made.  The initial room had a barricade that wasn't trapped until a player declared they were checking for traps and failed their check - I added a noisemaker to alert the floor above because of this.  The encounter on the next floor had the NPC they interacted with shift away from my notes to better match the kinds of questions they were asking him -- he was mostly there to maybe become a future resource for the players and to warn them about the encounter on the third floor -- a golem the party had not real hope of defeating without extreme luck.  Still, they went up to investigate the golem and ended up setting it free (it was locked in a warded room) because they were trying to drill a hole through the door to look into the room with the golem and failed another check to recognize the arcane wards on the door.  This caused the wards to fail and the golem to burst out.  And the entire tower was built the way it was because I have unique magic item rules that need power sources appropriate to what you want to create, and electricity was something that one player in interested in, so this tower marker on the map (I placed it there without any idea what it might become) because a source of lightning energy through the destroyed wizard's lab where the wizard was making flesh golems so the tower has a huge iron spike at the top to attract and channel lightning -- useful to the player for creating magic items based on electricity, as soon as they figure out how to deal with the golem (which they ran away from, btw).So, yeah, I have to have secret backstory, because I have to have at least a framework to build my prep for games onto -- some concept of how they fit together so that I can provide the necessary foreshadowing to the players so they can effectively plan and engage the world on their terms.  I leave a lot out and figure it out in play, but sometimes things are a certain way because changing that detail means that my prep no longer makes any sense.  So, lets say, the players declare that they're going to investigate the tower because they think it was a storage place for magic weapons, I'm not going to let mechanics or a check validate that -- firstly because magic weapons are personally created and unique to each person (no sharing) as a genre convention, but secondly because would need to do a different set of prep to prepare a tower that has appropriate guardians for a stash of magical weapons (assuming that was a thing, of course).To sum up:  the amount of needed secret backstory, or DM determining facts outside of play (which I think is a better descriptor of what you're talking about), really does depend somewhat on the game being played.  It depends even more on what the players want.  Not everyone wants to 'find out' during play.  Some want to figure out the DM's puzzle.  You are one of the latter, and that's fine, but you should, by this point and after all of these threads, at least come to a grudging understanding that not everyone is you.And, finally, I think there's a lot to this about putting trust in the DM's hands.  Many statements you've made over many threads leads me to believe that you just do not want to play in a game where someone other than the dice decides what you can do.  I think you fundamentally do not trust that any DM can provide good enough play over you having control over what gets introduced (and this is true both through you successful action declarations and that the GMs in your preferred playstyle is restricted to narrating failures by engaging your character build hooks).  And, that's absolutely fine.  I've had the unfortunate experience of some pretty bad DMs over time (I was one those, once <shudder>), so I can grok that desire.  I don't share it, but I do understand it.</blockquote>

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