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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 5435330" data-attributes="member: 3887">The distinction is central to the DM'ing approach I'm outlining, so let me try to clarify. It's the difference between accepting a character's premise and then challenging that character vs. invalidating a character's premise, making it difficult for a player to enact their chosen premise in the first place. Here's a good example, from my pal shilsen's long thread about his, ahem, earthy paladin, Sir Cedric.Cedric's premise is simple: he's a paladin who frequents prostitutes. He saw this as perfectly acceptable according to the tenants of his faith . Quite a lot of his fellow churchman disagreed. And yet, his god still blessed him with cool powerz.The gist of the thread, and possibly its title, was "Would you allow this paladin in your game?"Did I mention this was thread was long?Most posters agreed Cedric sounded like an excellent character --especially after shilsen added snippets of fiction fleshing him out. But many had problems with him being a paladin. They suggested alternate classes, that he start off as a fallen paladin or an aspirant fighter who might become a paladin once he changes his ways.In other words, they suggested playing a character with a different premise. They were challenging shilsen to play the character he conceived of.My response was to Sir Cedric was: cool concept.. I'd love to run a game with him in it. My mind turned to all the possible conflict inherent in the concept, in Cedric dealing with both supernatural evils and a Church hierarchy on the verge of labeling him a heretic. I was thinking about how to challenge shilsen  using the character he conceived of. I think the distinction is extremely important. I don't keep issues of world-building and campaign-running separate. That strikes me as putting form too far ahead of function. Why was the game world created in the first place?If I'm writing a novel, the setting need only meet my requirements; it needs to support the kind of fiction I plan to write. But if I'm creating a setting for the purpose of a role-playing game, then the setting needs to support the fiction(s) I'm interested in and the fiction the players want to create. The joint needs to be big enough to handle more than my story. It's a very different form of subcreation, one that, tacitly, at least, acknowledges multiple authors. Not a fan of this. For starters, the unintended consequence of this is to incentivize the playing of generic classes with less, or at least less interesting connections to the game world/game fiction because they're less vulnerable to having the DM strip them of their core abilities. That's pretty much the opposite of what I want to encourage.I also think it's a mistake to consider a god to be just another NPC in this context. A PC who decided to double-cross a mortal patron/partner can lead to interesting play. It could be an interesting challenge. The same can't be said of a god, the kind of entity that can pop into the nearest burning bush or thundercloud and essentially do whatever they like to the character. It makes for a bad game. Because the player can't win. There's only one move available; do as the god says (or retire the character). I do! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I didn't mean to, sorry. You threw me with the "license to commit moral relativism" line... you sounded like someone adopted the "DM-as-ethics-cop" stance.  Proxy-fights over actual morality can be fun! If we're talking about systems that employ behavioral advantages/disadvantages, then I agree. Exactly!I'm interested to see someone put up a vigorous defense of designing a game world without any concern for the people playing in it, but that might be something for another thread.</blockquote>

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