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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 3473904" data-attributes="member: 26473">I was referring specifcally to a roleplaying game setting - my bad for not making that clear, h&w99.Some people enjoy carefully assembled plots as part of their adventures - that's not my personal preference, though, as either a player or referee, so in general I agree with the sentiment here.To read this and other posts like it, it seems that some believe that gamers are infinitely creative if they're just given a blank slate.My experience tells me that most players fall back on pretty routine schticks, often based on rules system constraints. For all the talk of how 3e gives characters nearly unlimited options, what I see in actual play is that most players, with a few exceptions, tend to create characters to the system, gaming the game as it were. They may be "creatively" combining elements, but they are still working within constraints.With respect to referees, my experience is that some of the most "creative" referees I've encountered were also the ones with whom I enjoyed playing least. Creativity without consistency or some identifiable internal logic is brutal for players who need to make some sense of the world in order to make reasonable, meaningful choices for their characters. Referees who know what's beyond the horizon tend to make life much easier for players than those who are just making stuff up as they go, even if the latter refs write it down and expand on it later - in my experience the prepared referee who's spent some time on setting prep beyond what's in front of the adventurers' noses are better able to adapt to players exercising their creativity by going in an unanticipated direction.The "infinitely creative referee" who can adapt to whatever the players do on-the-fly, who can make up a bill of fare full of exotic dishes and the styles of dress of traders from foreign lands at the drop of a hat and keep it all straight a month later, is a myth, a strawman, exceptional beyond reasonable measure. Most refs in my experience tend to fall back on familiar schticks as well when faced with the unexpected from their players, leading to a pretty homogenous (and, for me, dull) environment pretty quickly.(Emphasis added.)Leaving aside that contradiction, as a player I don't want to "suggest" what our characters will encounter - that takes me out of the game very quickly. Some players enjoy that - I'm not one of them. When I want to indulge in world-building, I put on the daddy-pants and sit behind the screen instead.The idea that in order for the referee to run an exciting game there must be blank spots on the map just doesn't hold up. As I noted earlier, by planning for a variety of encounters (my personal preference to plot-heavy adventures) during world-building, I don't need a blank space in which to insert a "desert" in the middle of the game - I've got a desert, probably more than one actually, and the players can go explore it at their leisure.</blockquote>

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