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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2430720" data-attributes="member: 7240">If I create a world based on certain principles and a player unilaterally creates a piece of it that violates those principles, then the central plot, theme, etc. of the world can easily fall apart. Because I don't tell my PCs what the big universe-building equation behind my world is, we have to work a little differently. The player has to ask "If I wanted to play someone from over there, what would they be like?" Now, plenty of things about "over there" are up for grabs but some portion of them has been predefined because they inhere in the structure of the world itself. Let's say you had a bunch of ancient Hellenistic players gaming in a particular world and you were working on character background with them for a campaign set in this world. "Well my character is from some Brahmin-like culture," one might say, "but he's a Platonist (or Stoic or Pythagorean or whatever) and worships Poseidon." Because of the way people in the Classical world understood the world, they assumed that philosophy inhered and gods inhered in the very structure of the world and that no matter where you went, there would be Pythagoreans and temples to Poseidon everywhere. You can see that there is a basic conflict between two worldviews about what is local and particular and what is universal and entailed by the structure of the world itself. In this case, the inherent structure of the world you have built (this one) says that culture, philosophy and gods are local and particular and cannot be deduced from non-local data. Conversely, your player might say, "Well, my character will be very surprised by how travel works around here given that where he's from, water usually flows up hill and the sea is often burning." Here, he believes that the properties of water can vary at the local level based on regional particularities, whereas you know that the properties of water are universal in your world. Every world has a structure that implies that certain things can vary locally and individually and certain things are universal. Many people who play RPGs seem to like putting new things in the the "local and individual" column but rarely take anything out of that column and slot it into the "universal" category. I find the most vibrant and interesting worlds are ones that switch a few (not too many) between the two columns.</blockquote>

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