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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7335355" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION]: the idea of "finding the map as a challenge" proveids an answer to the OP question "what is (GM-preauthored) worldbuilding for"?Here is my understanding of what you mean by "finding the map as a challenge":The GM writes that the map is in X place. The players "explore the gameworld" (that's metaphor), which is to say they make moves by declaring actions for their characters that trigger various bits of narration by the GM: eg "We look behind the tapestry." "There's nothing there but a whitewashed brick wall." Some of this narration contains clues that point (directly or indirectly) towards X. Eventually, the players declare "We go to X and [insert appropriate details that pertain to how one might search X] and look for the map." Assuming the details are correct, the GM tells the players "You find the map."That's the sort of play that I personally don't enjoy.I mentioned upthread that in my Traveller game I had to resolve an attempt to find trinkets of alien manufacture being sold in a market on a low-tech world whose inhabitants have mixed alien/human ancestry. Traveller has no generic Perception mechanic, nor does it have a Scavenging mechanic. (It has Streetwise, and maybe that's what we should have used, but it didn't quite seem to fit.)As I said in that earlier post, I made what was probably the wrong call in adjudication method: I assigned a chance to their being such a trinket for sale and rolled that (I can't remember what it was - maybe 9+ on 2d6?), and then - when that came up affirmatively I had the relevant player roll against his PC's Education (which is high, and which was already established to represent a PhD in xeno-archaeology - his focus on this activity explained why, although quite competent, he had not been promoted in four terms of service as a navy enlistee),If my (first) roll had been a fail, that would have been a type of block, and I'm not sure how I would have handled it (hence, as I say, I think it was the wrong call - but I was also bumping into limits of the system).But what I can say is that the game play was never going to turn into a hunt for the right clue. The whole idea of looking for alien trinkets was invented by the players (after I dropped in the bit of fiction - in the mouth of a NPC scientist who had been DNA anaysing the inhabitants' blood - about the alien ancestry). It was an important "quest" for that episode of play, but I didn't have any idea about how it might be fulfilled. That was going to depend on plausible action declarations plus dice rolls to resolve them.So the "challenge" in finding the trinket is not about getting to the right bit of pre-authored fiction. It's about identifying plausible (and hopefully interesting) action declarations - in this case, the players decided to check out local markets on the world in question - and then getting lucky with the dice. (Burning Wheel, 4e and Cortex+ Heroic all have varying devices that allow a player to put more "oomph" behind a dice roll, in the form of various sorts of player side resources. Traveller doesn't, which is one way in which it is a very dice-driven game.)If the players get lucky early, the game moves on to the next bit of action. If they are unlucky, a mixture of fail-forward resolution (not as much a part of Traveller as those other systems, but not impossible either) and deft framing of new scenes should keep the action moving.</blockquote>

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