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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7383016" data-attributes="member: 42582">I just want to think about this example, and how it plays out in two different systems. I am not focusing particularly upon player agency over the content of the shared fiction; I am just looking at the impact, on play, of the GM's pre-authorship of this geographic state of affairs.In AD&D, the rules for travel begin with "miles per day". Then there are "encounters per day". There is also "food required per day", and there is "gp required per unit of food".So, suppose that a player declares "My PC goes from AD&D New York to AD&D Boston." The movement rate - a mechanical property of the character - interacts with the GM's decision about geography to determine a number of gp the player must cross of his/her PC sheet (to get enough food) and also a number of encounter dice rolls to which the player is subject.In Cortex+ Heroic, travelling from NY to Boston would generally be part of a transition scene. It will mostly be done by free narration, provided that fits with the PC's established backstory (eg if the game is MHRP, and one of the PCs is War Machine, then the player can just declare "We take the Stark company Jet!" - this is what happened when the PCs in my MHRP game wanted to travel from Washingon, DC to Tokyo). If the player wants to make a bigger deal of it - eg wants to have the Stark company jet available to contribute to actions declared in a subsequent action scene (= roughly, in D&D terms, an encounter) - then the player can spend a player-side resource (a plot point) to establish a useful resource (generally rated at either d6 or d8).If the player backstory doesn't simply provide for easy travel from NY to Boston (eg the PC in the MHRP game is Bruce Banner/the Hulk, broke and on the run from Thunderbolt Ross) then the player will have to spend a plot point to create some sort of resource to permit the travel, or otherwise is going to be stuck in NY - or, at least, is going to get caught up in some sort of action scene before making it to Boston. (In Banner's case, if an action scene results in transformation into the Hulk, then he can of course leap from NY to Boston no worries.)With Cortex+ Heroic mechanics, basically nothing turns on the details of the geography that the GM has come up with. In mechanical terms, travelling from A to B is basically the same process whether A and B are NY and Boston or Washinton, DC and Tokyo. There are no rules for movement rates; no rules for food consumption; no rules for wealth; no rules for random encounters. The mechanical framing is completely different from AD&D.Games like HeroWars/Quest and Fate could easily be played in a way very similar to what I've just described for Cortex+ Heroic. So could 4e, if one wanted - although 4e does have a "keep track of gp" wealth system, the impact of food on that at any level above low heroic is so minimal that it can be easily ignored, and there is no exhaustion system or spell duration system or anything else like that that forces keeping track of travel time. All travel could just be resolved by a mixture of skill challenges and free narration. Likewise Burning Wheel, if some of the optional subsystems (eg the upkeep rules, which depend on tracking the passage of time and so generate some pressure to keep track of travel times) are ignored.This is another reason why I find [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s and [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s insistence that the GM must tell the players about the intervening intersection (or, in the NY to Boston example, some crossroad encountered along the way), and that it is "cheapening" or "railroading" to just free narrate the travel and arrival, as bizarre. That insistence rests on very specific assumptions about the mechanics for the resolution of travel that simply aren't true for a wide range of RPGs, which (not coincidentally) also tend to be the sorts of RPGs best suited to Eero Tuovinen's "standard narrativistic model".</blockquote>

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