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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aenghus" data-source="post: 7351416" data-attributes="member: 2656">For a while as a player and referee I thought comprehensive accurate simulation was a goal to aim for in a RPG gameworld. At some point after more refereeing experience I came to the conclusion that such an accurate simulation was (a) impossible and (b) not something most players wanted or needed. That the work I put into generating background stats and tweaking rules was often not productive, and cut into time that I could have used to work on npcs and plots which were far more likely to be relevant to the game as played.My extensive view from behind the scenes of various gameworlds suggests at least to me that from the referee's point of view the gameworld is fictional and to some extent malleable. There are always unknowns and placeholders, some of which players unerringly seem to home in on, ignoring the surrounding pre-prepared content. I do less preparation nowadays, but then I know my setting very well and have got much better at improvisation in recent years.As I see it, in a conventional GM-run RPG, my job as referee is to present a believable gameworld to the players and facilitate them playing their characters in a hopefully-enjoyable way. I know the gameworld is fictional, fake, made up and that knowledge can IMO help me run it better because I work hard to present a dynamic, interactive setting to my players, and I'm willing to change details of the gameworld when it's necessary. Most changes are off camera, but I do rarely retcon previously established details for various reasons I feel are legitimate.I devised large parts of my gameworld, and my players contributed a lot of it, subject to my editorial control. I prefer clear transparent rules, as I found obfuscated or deceptive adjudication, as a player ,extremely annoying and discouraging. That said, I've found that so long as players are presented with sufficient real choices, it's possible to remove temporarily a lot of the the conventional trappings of fantasy RPGs. In my campaigns, particular in trips to other planes where cause and effect work differently, I've experimented with a mixture of real choices and railroaded narration. It can work well in short doses for an otherworldly feel.For a long time I though rules as physics was a worthy goal, but I have come to the conclusion that it's impossible, as rules are imperfect and generally not written to produce viable simulations of cause and effect. It's still possible to produce "good enough" gameworlds and I do like to extrapolate some findings from the rules, but I no longer feel obliged to accept dodgy extrapolations that aren't clearly stated in the setting.From behind the GM screen, I create the illusion of cause and effect for the benefit of the players. I as a referee know it's an illusion, I don't have numbers for a bunch of stuff I describe until it's clear I need them and then I make them up. But now I try to create only what I actually need and leave out stuff I don't need right now. My NPCs and monsters don't need to follow player rules, as they serve a different purpose to PCs in my game, and simplifying them significantly reduces the prep workload on me.</blockquote>

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