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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7401000" data-attributes="member: 29398">If the above doesn't happen then what's the point of playing?Sure it does, only the GM narration is disguised as scene framing and is not drawn from pre-authored notes.  The GM still has to set the table, as it were, to give the players something to interact with even just on a scene-by-scene level; and the underlying action-resolution-narration-reaction cycle doesn't change.  The only difference is that as the game world is being created in effect on the fly through play neither the GM nor the players* can effectively plan ahead for anything beyond the relatively-immediate, which to me is a loss.* - this is an overlooked piece here: it's not always just the GM who wants to plan ahead, sometimes players do also; in terms of where to go and what to do in what sequence and over what timespan; and having a more-concrete world really helps in doign this.That worldbuilding will have consequences in play, e.g. making it impossible to find a sage in a town that has none, is not in question.What's in question is why this could ever possibly be seen as a bad thing...except by players who dislike not always getting what they want, for whom I have no sympathy and nothing more to say.In real life, if I come into a town I've never been to before and look around for a shop selling crystals and incense, it's impossible for me to find one there if there isn't one there to find.  Same is true in a game world: if there's no sage, there's no sage - and that the GM has determined this ahead of time rather than it being determined on the fly by success or failure on an action declaration is irrelevant to the immedaite here-and-now result.  It IS relevant, however, to the long-term overall results: the population and distribution of sages isn't left to the whim of cumulative here-and-now random chance.Which means no more published settings or even shared settings, then, if every setting is supposed to be uniquely built and tailored for the particular group of players/PCs being run at that time.And how on earth would this work with any sort of shared "organized play" e.g. RPGA in the past or AL now, where characters can be and frequently are taken from one table to another?  I ask because if you want your game genre to become at all successful then like it or not it'll have to be able to support this sort of thing.No.  The setting must be neutral.Without knowledge of what's around them beyond just the framed scene the players have no information on which to base...anything.At campaign start you frame me in a market in downtown Karnos; you provide all sorts of detail about what I can see including that there's a merchant here selling feathers.  For that immediate scene, that's fine.  But by no means is it all I need.Where is Karnos?  What is Karnos - a mining town, a capital city, a village in the hinterlands, a seaport?  What lives here?  Who rules here, and how, and why, and for how long?  Is this a pirate town, a farming town, a military town?  Are thieves and muggers a known and frequent risk, or is the town generally safe?  What's the weather doing (beyond your saying in the framing that it's a warm sunny day) - is it likely to rain later?  Is there a drought?  What's around Karnos - desert, forest, farms, mountains?  What modes of transport are available beyond just foot, should I not find what I want here in Karnos and decide to try elsewhere?  Are there any unusual local customs or modes of dress etc. that I need to be aware of?  Etc., and I haven't even got to nation-region-world-astronomy questions yet.If much of this wasn't provided ahead of time (i.e. this part of the world wasn't built) then I - as would, I suspect, many players - would be asking most of these questions before I ever get around to declaring an action!  Even if the questions don't directly inform my action declaration right now they'll inform my general approach later; and very little of this is stuff players should be expected to just make up on their own (and if they do then the GM has to be scribbling like a madman to record all of it in the interests of future consistency - why not just do this work beforehand when you've time to relax and think it through?)The players don't get to write their own adventures; it's on the DM to provide those, even when the players decide to head for the mountains just to see what's there.  The players, however, are now driving the overall story; and the DM is in react mode.Lanefan</blockquote>

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