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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7403080" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, the inverted commas around "stage" tell it all, don't they?An actual stage is an actually existing material thing. Once constructed, its existence is independent of the mental states of any particular person. The same is not true of a purely imaginary thing.  [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] is drawing attention to this point, and expressing a view about whose mental states should be understood as constituting the "gameworld" - namely, all the participants, not just the GM.The last quoted sentence seems as good as any to describe what is going on. I think the current usage of "worldbuilding" in discussions of RPGing brings with it an assumption of GM authority over that process. I think this is very evident not just in many of the posts in the current threads, but other threads one reads on ENworld, blogs one reads, presentation in D&D rulebooks, etc.It's also very often taken for granted, in RPGing, that a "gameworld" is more-or-less independent of any particular group of players or characters - which relates to the idea of "neutrality" that has been put forward by more than one poster in these threads. The process you describe for City of Mists does not produce a "neutral" setting.This description seems to be of a game that broadly conforms to <a href="https://isabout.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-pitfalls-of-narrative-technique-in-rpg-play/" target="_blank">the "standard narrativistic model"</a>:One of the players is a gamemaster whose job it is to keep track of the backstory, frame scenes according to dramatic needs (that is, go where the action is) and provoke thematic moments (defined in narrativistic theory as moments of in-character action that carry weight as commentary on the game’s premise) by introducing complications. . . . The actual procedure of play is very simple: once the players have established concrete characters, situations and backstory in whatever manner a given game ascribes, the GM starts framing scenes for the player characters. Each scene is an interesting situation in relation to the premise of the setting or the character (or wherever the premise comes from, depends on the game). The GM describes a situation that provokes choices on the part of the character. The player is ready for this, as he knows his character and the character’s needs, so he makes choices on the part of the character. This in turn leads to consequences as determined by the game’s rules. Story is an outcome of the process as choices lead to consequences which lead to further choices, until all outstanding issues have been resolved and the story naturally reaches an end.Now given that it's a PbtA game, I suspect (without having read it) that the emphasis on scene framing is less than in the standard narrativistic model. But I think in the context of this thread that's probably a minor point. I think the difference between what you describe, and a traditional GM-heavy-worldbuilding game, is fairly striking.</blockquote>

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