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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7360728" data-attributes="member: 42582">I answered this a long way upthread, I think in multiple posts. A range of answers have been given.Worldbuilding provides material for the GM to share with the players as triggered by their moves - this is generally described as "exploration". On the GM side, this can be a creative exercise. On the player side, it seems to be described mostly in terms of immersion. "Immersion" in this context seems necessarily to involve someone else telling fiction to the player, but that characterisation has been resisted to quite a degree.Worldbuilding provides the players with "levers" to do things - [MENTION=23935]Nagol[/MENTION] is the main poster to have talked about this. It hasn't been fully analysed in this thread, but there are multiple ways this could play out. One is in what I would call White Plume Mountain style - worldbuilding provides material, by way of fictional positioning, that the players can directly engage to proffer solutions to the puzzles they are faced with (I call it WPM because the paradigm, in my mind, is removing doors from their hinges so as to "surf" down the frictionless corridor over the pits with super-tetanus spikes).Another, which is less OSR-ish/WPM, and probably therefore more typical in contemporary RPGing, is that the players - by engaging with the "levers" - trigger the GM to narrate stuff in ways that go beyond pre-authoring. When this really starts to reflect player pro-activity, I think that we may see a transition to player-driven play without anyone in the game having to get self-conscious about it. Now that I think about it, [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] has, quite a way upthread, pointed to this sort of thing as particularly being a feature of upper-level AD&D play.Quite different from the idea of "levers", worldbuidling provides a uniform aesthetic vision for the game. And at least somewhat relatedly, it provides a drive/direction for the game where the players are not themselves interested in providing this. And these two things may come together in the context of a drop-in or AL-style situation.And another function for worldbuilding that has been mentioned in some recent posts is that it creates a "space" in play between the player's expression of a desire to engage with situation XYZ, and actually engaging, in play, with situation XYZ.Some of these answers are not surprising. Probably the most surprising are the last two - the uniform vision/driving of the game is part of an approach to RPGing that I find really very foreign to my own experience; and the idea that it might be desirable to create space in play between wanting to engage with XYZ, and engaging with XYZ, in the way that is being described is not something that would occur to me through reflection.</blockquote>

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