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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7388561" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yet Middle Earth is not consistent. The economics and sociology of The Shire are absurd (there is so much metal, but where is it minded and smelted? it is isolated, and yet appears to have almost unlimited supplies of traded goods; etc). Where do the elves of Lorien get their food?The narrative achievement of JRRT's Lorien is not to make that place consistent, but to make the &quot;faerie queen&quot; trope believable in the context of a more-or-less naturalistic novel. (As opposed to in what would more clasically be thought of as a fairy tale.)The &quot;consistency&quot; of fantasy worlds is about tropes and genre. Which is, in fact, what most &quot;story now&quot; games rely upon to support framing and setting.In my experince it's actually not that hard.But in any event, my main contention for the past 500+ posts is this: the more that the GM is authoring, and the more the GM is authoring unilaterally, then the less the players are authoring. Hence their agency over the content of the shared fiction is reduced.If the game is mainly about establishing a shared fiction, then it follows that their agency per se is reduced. As the OP noted, not all RPGing is about establishing a shared fiction - eg classic Gygaxian D&amp;D is closer to a type of puzzle-solving - but I think that a lot of contemporary RPGing is not classic D&amp;D.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7388561, member: 42582"] Yet Middle Earth is not consistent. The economics and sociology of The Shire are absurd (there is so much metal, but where is it minded and smelted? it is isolated, and yet appears to have almost unlimited supplies of traded goods; etc). Where do the elves of Lorien get their food? The narrative achievement of JRRT's Lorien is not to make that place [I]consistent[/I], but to make the "faerie queen" trope believable in the context of a more-or-less naturalistic novel. (As opposed to in what would more clasically be thought of as a fairy tale.) The "consistency" of fantasy worlds is about tropes and genre. Which is, in fact, what most "story now" games rely upon to support framing and setting. In my experince it's actually not that hard. But in any event, my main contention for the past 500+ posts is this: the more that the GM is authoring, and the more the GM is authoring unilaterally, then the less the players are authoring. Hence their agency over the content of the shared fiction is reduced. If the game is mainly about establishing a shared fiction, then it follows that their agency per se is reduced. As the OP noted, not all RPGing is about establishing a shared fiction - eg classic Gygaxian D&D is closer to a type of puzzle-solving - but I think that a lot of contemporary RPGing is not classic D&D. [/QUOTE]

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