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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7396535" data-attributes="member: 82106">I would make this observation. The pre-authorship of individual encounters, assuming that the GM has got the scene framed properly (which is harder before the fact, but not impossible) is not as problematic as some other aspects of 'back story/world building'. An encounter is tactical. The PCs have arrived at the point where the ritual is to be disrupted, the GM can probably anticipate the most likely approaches. Even things he cannot anticipate are going to be limited in focus and present no more or less issue than with dynamically framed and generated encounters. Depending on the scope of the encounter, the larger the more this is true, the players might try to use action resolution in ways that bypass or skirt the main issue at hand. So the GM might need additional framing in a large complex situation. The more tactical, the less problematic it is. I mean nobody is really doubting that I can put 3 orcs in an empty room and how that's going to go down.I think world building is also less problematical at a large 'world scale' where it blends into genre and more general milieu construction. A world map, or a general designation that 'orcs exist somewhere in the west' is not super problematic most of the time. Particularly if there's plenty of room for some enclave of orcs in the east that some player wants to invoke to set up some sort of goal or whatever. This is largely how Dungeon World works. You can have 'swiss cheese' and the holes get filled in by moves made by the GM and sometimes the players. Its the creamy middle filling part where things get ugly. When you have maps that are solidly filled in and places where an enormous amount of detail about NPCs, towns, whatever exists then you start to have problems just tossing stuff in where it seems to be needed at the moment. It also becomes a lot harder with 300 pages of setting material to maintain complete consistency. I'm not a huge adherent to the need for perfect consistency, particularly with events that happened in games long past, but inconsistency seems to obviate the point of world building for sure!</blockquote>

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