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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreenTengu" data-source="post: 6766367" data-attributes="member: 6777454">If your world exists separate from players and when you sit down with 5 other players, no aspects of it can bend-- you don't have a roleplaying game. I don't really know what you are doing, but ideally you should be open to altering the world the moment you sit down to play the game.No one would actually want to play Game of Thrones as a roleplaying game. I mean unless you are with a particularly perverted and sexually open group and none of you mind your characters abruptly being bumped off at any random inopportune time without any chance of a replacement... and everyone was in on this whole "betray and kill each other" concept and your DM didn't mind splitting the party again and again and again.... well, its about the worst possible concept you could float for an RPG.As for Lord of the Rings? Only things in there that were certain before the story was written was... nothing. The world exists as it exists only because the books exist. Had Tolkien been working with someone else on the story and that person insisted that one of the protagonists be a 7' tall sasquatch thing called a "wookie" then a 7' tall sasquatch thing easily could have been in the book and it wouldn't have been any more out of place than the Hobbits, Dwarfs, Elves, Orcs, Treants, Trolls, etc. and every person who came after him and basically copied his world for their own games probably would have copied it and it would have become ubiquitous and you would think it odd for a fantasy world not to have wookies. The proof is Orcs-- Orcs were never remotely a thing before Tolkien put them in his book nor were "elves" generally depicted in the way he depicted them and how that's about the only way they are depicted. You ask anyone in the 19ths or 20th century before the Hobbit was written and their description of an Elf would likely be more akin to a Hobbit or a Pixie.These worlds are not created independent of the characters that exist in them. They are not forged in stone and then characters that fit precisely the predetermined molds attempted to be made be they compelling or not. And it is certainly worth noting that every single example you give about a world that must exist solely in one particular way and one cannot be allowed to play something a little off kilter comes from.... books and movies, which means they were worlds that were created specifically to incorporate the characters that were thought up for them. The only reason the world seems hostile to other concepts is simply that they were not in those original stories and those original stories seemed to detail the world enough to preclude their inclusion. On the other hand, if you have a world without a story, I guarantee it is not a particularly well-made world... which is precisely why you can't come up with an example.Now, granted, I would be willing to concede that you can certainly make a world that is human-only should certainly be human-only, but that is part of conceptual theme. Once in the world someone can play something akin to Elves, it is just stubborn, bullheadedness that insists that means something akin to Orcs or Dwarfs or Catfolk or Dragonpeople or Wookie or whatever can't exist in the world nor be protagonists without disrupting the world.So if I sit down at the table and you hand me a sheet and say "you can be one of these three things, and here are the strengths and weaknesses, the specialties and the precise personality traits that every single one of those three things in the entire world display and so you must be one of these three peoples that don't appeal to you as one of the two flavorless undynamic classes that each is allowed to be and you must display the character I have already determined that those people have because that's what I said the world is like and I will not have you disrupting my ideal narrative with your wrong choices!"Well, unless you are compensating me as a paid actor or as a paid play tester, I am going to play at all, I am going to do so begrudgingly at best, keeping quiet and dragging my feet.It is one thing if one is going to do that in a video game. I understand that in a video game there needs to be a precise script and there is only so much one can do in order to go off script. But then there is also a clear rewards system, actual challenge based on my hand-eye coordination skill rather than the random side the dice happen to land on and I get instant feedback from my actions and am encouraged to react to things quickly. That aside from actually getting to SEE things rather than going off your amateur descriptions and if I screw up, I can reload from my last save and try again.So if I am doing a table-top unscripted game, then you'd better have me hooked by being able to do something i couldn't do in a computer game and that certainly starts at character creation, but in general means valuing the creative input I and everyone else at the table contributes and incorporating it into the narrative.</blockquote>

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