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Message: <blockquote data-quote="molonel" data-source="post: 3491381" data-attributes="member: 10412">My DM wasn't building plot. He was building his world. It was the exact same sort of fiddly bit development that you guys were talking about, except that instead of merely mapping out all the rooms we never visited, he had cultures and countries and NPCs doing stuff, and we were like a monkey wrench thrown into the cogs. He was always doing damage control. Trying to salvage his world. We joked about it being his "museum" and we were the proverbial bulls in the china shop.Trying to separate what he did and calling it "plot" or whatever is needless hairsplitting. Ultimately, the problem in his campaign was that he was more concerned for his precious world than he was for the adventure or the characters playing in his game for three years.He was like a director who spent most of his time working on set design rather than the play itself, or the actors. He almost seemed annoyed by the actors, sometimes.And that's EXACTLY what the author in the original post was talking about. That's EXACTLY what Tolkien can sometimes be criticized for. The world is not the point, whether it's fiction or D&D. The adventure is the point. The characters are the point. Background is supposed to be just that: background.That's why what I'm saying - despite Hobo's curiously zealous efforts to claim otherwise - is quite relevant to this discussion. It's the same thing.</blockquote>