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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8344794" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm having trouble reconciling "I feel like you're describing how I go about things" with "the players only have indirect access to to [the gameworld] through me". It's that second bit which I picked up in your earlier posts, and which prompted my remarks - which were intended to be honest, but not as a "harsh judgement" - my statements of my preferences are not normative for you, any more than vice versa is the case!As a general rule, I expect my players to have direct access to the gameworld, both in the PbtA-ish "questions and answers" way (eg in our Traveller game it was one of the players who suggested that the starting world was a gas giant moon; in our 4e game the player of the wizard/invoker used to do a lot of the explanation of how magic works in the world; I generally expect players of religious characters to handle the gods; etc); and also via action declaration if we're talking not about backstory but about resolving a situation here-and-now (that can be anything from punching things to finding things to meeting people to befriending them, etc, depending on the system in use).And if I insert something into the fiction it won't go unnoticed because it will be part of the framing! I don't think I've used a haunted house since the early 90s (the RM module Orgillion Horror) - in that case the PCs passed through some sort of teleportation gate or event (I can't remember the details) and I told the players where they were and what they saw. The most recent house-related situation I remember is the giant steading in <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/into-the-north-cortex-plus-heroic-fantasy-actual-play.530990/" target="_blank">our Cortex+ Vikings game</a>. The campaign started with me having written up pre-gens that could work either for Vikings or Fantasy Japan; the players voted for Vikings, and chose their PCs, and came up with the reasons why they were being sent out on a mission to the north, and then I narrated their travels for maybe a minute or so and told them they could see the steading - at which point we started the first action scene of the campaign.I don't really get what you mean by "slipping things past [the players]" and "pretend[ing] it was 'there all along'". Do you mean all along in the fiction? Well of course I'm pretending the steading was there all along in the fiction - it's not a spontaneous appearance - although I hadn't thought of it until I started narrating it (obviously drawing on a more famous Steading of the Giant Chief). Do you mean you've thought of it all along in the real world? In that case, I'm a bit puzzled - why exactly does it matter when you think of something, and why are your players worrying about the time at which you engage in authorship?Is there a premise that's important to what you say that I'm missing? Eg are you using map-and-key resolution, and you're talking about when these are authored? Or are you using secret fiction (ie stuff you're making up but that hasn't yet been established at the fiction) to make fiat determinations  in response to action declarations? Something like that would make sense, to me, of how you talk about the gameworld and "the 'plot'" - but again wouldn't fit with  "I feel like you're describing how I go about things", as I don't use map-and-key resolution very often (and not at all in any of the water voyages I described) and don't use secret fiction to resolve action declarations.</blockquote>

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