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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2433007" data-attributes="member: 7240">I know what protean means. You are defining magic in opposition to physics rather than as a subset of physics. A system of physics, is a system that explains everything, including magic which is one of the things a good system of physics systematized. Physics=how the universe works. In this world, all systems of physics included magic until we decided magic did not exist.What did you not understand?That list is premised on the physics and sociology of any world resembling the physics and sociology of ours. Even if we simply delve into our own world's past, you can see systems, like that of Aristotle and Plato, that would posit a different inventory. What you keep doing again and again is saying, "because things work this way in this world, they must work this way in all possible worlds." If you have an environmentalist theory of culture like that of Hippocrates' followers, all cultures in hot places will fundamentally resemble eachother as will all cultures in cool places. If you have a Platonic theory of cutlure, you are going to assume that all cultures in whcih there is learning equal to or greater than yours, people will have essentially the same philosophy you do. Etc. All you need to do is make one of these theories of how the universe works true in a world you are GMing and suddenly, you will find that just because a culture is isolated does not mean that it can be different in all the ways that the physics of the real world would permit it to be distinct.Sure. This is a theory of how cultures develop. More power to you for having it and spelling it out. Based on this theory, you can see that a player cannot unilaterally define his character without the GM notifying him of a whole bunch of attributes of the culture. That's the original point I was trying to make. Characters are culture-dependent; cultures cannot be added to a game world by player fiat; therefore, for a credible character to be created, there must be substnaial GM input.It doesn't control everything. But it does define quite a bit.But the GM evidently exerted enough control that nothing violated the premise/structure of the world, right? Surely this must have entailed limiting and channeling character background choices. People's characters could not come from cultures that made a lie of the world structure. This is why I say that characters are collaborative creations. Because if culture really mattered in your play and was, in the ways you have outlined above, dependent on the physical world, then, in fact, your GM had a fairly profound role in defining character.</blockquote>

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