Elaborate please? Tell us more of this blown mind! (Besides the usual spectator sport, I hadn't been expecting to blow your mind and so am curious what you read that's new. Maybe I said something that has implications I didn't notice?)
I commented in the original thread that linearity is an attribute of "situations"—locations, events, people, objects, objectives, etc.—but didn't really examine that location is generally assumed, as you pointed out here. Even if the linearity is of other things, those are commonly scripted at given locations, often with maps, as if that mattered for anything other than, say, the tactics of a fight or something. And maybe it does! But it could quite easily not. And I realize I failed to point out that situations in linear sequence need not be of the same kind! You might have to go to a particular location, obtain an object there, deliver that to particular NPC wherever they happen to be, and so on.
Also, there is a difference between enabling linearity (you need A to be able to get to B) and restricting linearity (you can only go from A to B). But usualy the latter is meant, and the enabler is added on. This is wandering off the point, apologies for free-associating.
As for "
who gets to decide where things happen" and "
where a PC is determines what scene the GM frames", I've seen many variations. Often the scripted adventure decides, or the GM decides, but I have played games where the GM asks us, "So where are you doing the thing?" (Blades in the Dark, in particular), or as noted, once the scene is framed in terms of who or what is there, "So where is this actually going down?"—not that it always mattered, but it's nice to have some grounding. My Blades GM never used site maps (we did work with the city map as a general background, but could have done without that too). So my experience has been this isn't required, but I hadn't really thought much of it until now.
I will admit to a certain fondness for maps and keys. I just like them and I like to have that sense of groundedness in place. But they are good for certain kinds of play, and just as easily a technical distraction for others. Some of the games I have played, in fact do not use maps. But some still do, even though it doesn't help (and I have seen GMs ditch them, especially on virtual tabletop platforms like roll20, where they just freeform things and don't worry about the grid). This is getting into more lower-level detail than I think you originally meant but it's still related.
This is making me remember some Traveller sessions which have involved physically separated but communicating PCs.
But when I made the OP I was thinking of something more pedestrian - like in The Green Knight that we were talking about, it doesn't matter where the Green Chapel is, or whether it's north or south or east or west of where the PCs meet the farmer. (Weirdly, the game box includes a stylised map of Britain (I think it is - many of the place names don't Google well, but Venonae is apparently in Leicestershire), but it plays no role in the actual play of the game.)
That's true, it's really irrelevant in a great many senses. Maybe the players have an interest in where on the island of Britain their characters are, but it still doesn't affect what they're going about.
Edit: Fixed a typo.
