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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 7416208" data-attributes="member: 85555">We had a whole discussion on agency. I think it is safe to assume half the room is on a separate page from the other half when it comes to determine what agency means and what styles impact it. My quibble was over how you seemed to be characterizing each style in the mix. But it is a quibble and largely off topic. There are always edge cases. But the point is, a writer can easily sidestep areas of world building he or she doesn't want to engage. If thinking too deeply on where people get their grain from in this village, isn't important, the writer can just make sure that question never comes up. In most RPGs, a GM can't predict what the players will say or do. This difference is so obvious, it shouldn't even need to be argued. The characters in books and movies do what the writers want. The characters in RPGs do what they want, because they are controlled by players. That right there creates a massive difference in how important world building is. Sure, something might not come up because players don't think to ask. But it could. I know that I need to come up with at least some sort of answer for things like this prior to starting the campaign. If I were writing a movie script, I could just make sure that grain source, never becomes an issue in the story. Like I said, I wasn't embracing everything max was saying. But I also wasn't accepting the extremely narrow definition of world building being offered. Like I've said this whole time. If people are redefining world building to prove it is bad, or it is good, that isn't an argument. We need to deal with the term as it is used by most people in the hobby. We can talk about other definitions. But you can't use those narrow fringe definitions to then equivocate and prove all world building is bad. We are kind of going in circles here. But this is a major source of contention. Particularly when dealing with the way 'fiction' gets used in these threads by these posters. Not everyone agrees with this assumption at all. I am not saying there are not similarities. There are. But there are major differences in how RPGS function, that mean you can't just port in a rule or principle from fiction and expect it to work out all the time. But then, I'd even argue that fiction often needs good world building.</blockquote>

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