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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 6246466" data-attributes="member: 1210">If you cannot change the route or the destination, that's a railroad, at least in my judgment. In fact, that's the very definition of a railroad. How does "I'm level x so I must have a +y weapon and +z armor!" contribute to the setting? When I hear about player entitlement, it's usually someone complaining that their pc has been denied "fair" loot, got into an "unfair" encounter, etc. It's rarely that his or  her setting idea has been rejected.But you know what? If a player wants to be from the country of Skalinstad and there is no such country on the map, he's not contributing to the setting; he's trying to rewrite it. Different groups feel differently about these things, of course, but to me, it is my setting. No other DM is entitled to run games in my world. Nobody, no matter how much they've played in my game, gets to decide what the political scene is like in a given nation- nobody except me. It IS my setting. I wrote it; I drew the maps. If a player wants to contribute to it, he or she can certainly pitch ideas or help develop/flesh out things with my approval, but he or she can absolutely not expect me to integrate everything he or she wants to create into my game. For one thing, there are almost always things that players don't know that affect the stuff they are working on, and I'm not inclined to rewrite deep setting elements to appease the whim of a player. Is it? I have written literally thousands of pages of material for my campaign over the years. I have shelves of binders full of stuff. There's an internal consistency that runs far deeper than anything any player can possibly realize, because so much of it is based on assumptions that aren't obvious on the surface. It depends on what you mean by contributions, of course. The way for a player to contribute to the setting is in game. He wants a nation of Skalinstad? Well, go found one- in game, as part of the campaign. N.B. It's possible that you mean something entirely different than I do by "player entitlement". I've only been skimming this (gigantic) thread.</blockquote>

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