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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7393612" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, the poster to whom I replied seem to be asserting that worldbuilding in advance, presumably by the GM, is going to improve the richness of the RPG experience. I deny that.If you think that neither method in relation to novels has been proven to be better, then presumably you accept at least the weak version of my claim, namely, that the claim that worldbuilding in advance must enrich the RPG experience is unproven.(Obviously I am also intending a stronger version of my claim also, but I don't think you would agree with that.)I don't know what better game and enhance gameplay mean in this context.Obviously, perhaps tautologically, the constraints that a setting establishes in respect of action declaration will enhance the fidelity of the gameplay to the setting. But it's not a self-evident fact (as per the quote I responded to) that this is simply an addition to the strengths of a game without a strong setting. It's clearly a change, a new constraint.Personally I find the appeal of fidelity to setting, as an element of gameplay, to be rather modest. Particularly if, by "setting", we are talking about not broad tropes, genre elements and labels (like "City of Greyhawk", "Suel Empire" etc) but are talking about the sorts of details (geographic minutiae, historical minutiae, NPC locations and motivations, etc) that one typically finds in published setting books.Well, all I can report is that no one in my group found what I said "nebulous" or had any confusion. Nor has any confusion emerged in the course of play.I suspect that if you asked one of my players (the player of the invoker/wizard) whether there are orcs in the gameworld he would answer "yes" - because he knows there are goblins and hobgoblins, and I think he's fairly casual about distinguising them from orcs (or perhaps believes that I am, which I am in non-D&D games, and so is projecting that onto this campaign). If you asked the player of the drow sorcerer, I think he'd be more likely to say "I'm not sure." Not because he's not aware of orcs as something in the Monster Manual, but because I think he's more sensitive to what has or hasn't come out in play.But frankly, "Do you want to play a default 4e game?" simply doesn't mean - at least in my langauge - "Do you want to play a game in which we take for granted that everything mentioned in a 4e book is part of the gameworld?" It means do you want to play a game in which the assumption is that everything in default 4e, especially the PHB which is what you're working from as a player, is permitted; and in which the basic setting conceits are the core 4e ones.If half-orcs were a PC race in the PHB then probably it would be taken for granted that there are orcs in the world - but half-orcs aren't such a race. (They turn up in PHB2, which came out after our game had started.) So orcs are ambiguous. Likewise wildens shifters and shardminds.But all this means is that if orcs turn up, they're 4e orcs as described in the 4e MM. It doesn't mean that we're committed to orcs showing up.The point is even easier to see if we look not at orcs - are fairly generic D&D monster - but (say) all the devourer variants which (for me, at least) are new to 4e. Are there all these devourer undead in the gameworld? Well, none of the players have ever raied them (I suspect that the players have never heard of devourers, unless they've looked through the MM). I haven't thought of devourers for years until this post - I looked through the MM to find a monster I'd never used and don't think about because it's not part of my intuitive "GM's palette".Saying "We're going to play a default 4e game" can't possibly mean And the gameworld contains this monster that none of us have ever heard of or even think about except when reminded by those pages of the MM.I really don't understand why you're making such a big deal of this - but to reiterate, if an orc shows up it will be a 4e orc. If a devourer shows up it will be a devourer as per the 4e MM.This is about permissions and expectations - stuff in the 4e MM and PHB is clearly not off limits, and the world those books present is our world. But "the world those books present" is not synomous with every single thing they say. Presentation is at least in part about audience uptake, and if no one takes up orcs, or devourers, then we're not committed to them being part of the world.I don't think that's very confusing or ambiguous.Well, it's not really part of playing a default 4e game, so it's a request to depart from the default. Enslavement by orcs would seem pretty lame, and so I can't imagine any of my players going with that. Enslavement by aboleths would be weird for different reasons, and would probably only make sense if someone wanted to play a dwarf battlemind or similar (but PHB3 wasn't out when we started our campaign, so this was never going to come up).So to give an actual example: page 130 of the 4e PHB says that a fey pact warlokc hasforged a bargain with ancient, amoral powers of the Feywild. Some are primitive earth spirits, grim and menacing; some are capricious wood, sky, or water spirits; and others are incarnations of seasons or natural forces who roam the faerie realm like wild gods. They bestow magic that ranges from feral and savage to wondrous and enchanting.So I don't think it's canonical that feypact warlocks can have a pact with Corellon (by default Corellon is a god, not an amoral power of the Feywild), but that was one of the starting PCs in the game.</blockquote>

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