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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9040867" data-attributes="member: 42582">There is no such play, to the best of my knowledge. (Perhaps Toon, which sits at the edge of my knowledge.) Even Over the Edge has "world facts" that are beyond the characters - eg it is set on Earth, circa the mid-to-late 1980s, and so it has all sorts of facts about (eg) Canberra and Buenos Aires.In the first quoted sentence we have "external to player purposes". Given that someone has to have a purpose, I assume therefore the "world facts" serve some GM purpose (eg aesthetic pleasure in creation of a work of fiction).Then in the last quoted sentence we have "adopted without regard to characters". But of course "world facts" can't be adopted without regard to anything - so again, I assume the GM has some reason for adopted them, again most likely some sort of aesthetic reason.I don't see the connection between setting that reflects the GM's purposes and motivations and realism.What you seem to be describing here is the players establishing their goals for play out of the material the GM has presented to them (what you call "independent world facts"). I don't really see how this is more realistic than any other way the players might establish their goals for play.I don't know what you mean in saying that "the path of the Deeping Stream is an externally true fact regardless of whether players (characters?) ever got to Helms Deep.Nor by the related remarks about facts being "contingent" or "warping". When I think of "warping" facts I think of dreamscapes and strange dimensions of the sort that Dr Strange often seems to visit. I have included such things in my FRPGing from time-to-time, but they are not typical of the sorts of setting I use in RPGing.In combination with the previous blocks of quotes, the implication seems to be that where the fiction is not authored by the GM having regard only to their own motivations, but instead is authored by the players or in any event having some regard to players' purposes, the fiction is a "warping" one in which the "world facts" are "contingent". This implication is obviously false. The reality of the stone that the PC kicks to one side as they trudge along the road doesn't change depending on who authored the scene, the stone or the kicking.Anyway: there is an "externally true" fact that JRRT drew something on a map. I've used that map in RPGing, though not the Deeping Stream. I've used other maps too - maps of places on earth, maps of Kara Tur, maps of the Grand Duchy of Karameikos, most often maps of the World of Greyhawk. Yet I am being told in this thread that my methods of scene framing and action resolution produce less "realistic" fiction than others. So presumably maps are not the key to "realism".I also wish that people would talk about decision-making processes. Eg how do we resolve the action declaration "I head west, hunting for the Orcs who slew my family!"The fact that we resolve that via (say) a Wises check or a Spout Lore check, rather than via the GM checking their map and notes and from those extrapolating what happens next, doesn't mean that one fiction has "world facts" beyond the characters and the other doesn't!You are describing here are method of answering the question "What happens next." In the method you describe, the GM resolves certain action declarations by reference to a map, a key, and associated random encounter tables. I'm pretty confident everyone posting in this thread is familiar with this method, which has been in use for close to 50 years.The fiction that this method creates is not more realistic than the fiction created using other methods. Here's a concrete example: my Prince Valiant game, which uses a different method to create the fiction, is more realistic than any D&D or RM campaign I've ever played. Years pass. The warrior PCs have built up a war band. The PCs accrue castles by strategic marriages, by diplomacy, by clever tactics and bold strokes. You can read the actual play threads on these boards - where is the ostensible lack of realism?This too. When characters are deeply embedded in the context of the shared fiction, when the GM is framing scenes that speak to the concerns that are evinced in this way, it is not "contrived" in any particularly remarkable way that the PCs' lives revolve around the things they care about.</blockquote>

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