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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6103245" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, yes and no. The fiction includes a setting. But the action at the table may or may not emphasise that setting. It can be an obejct of exploration and manipulation in its own right, but it can also be a simple backdrop, providing colour to the real action which is focused on (say) character and situation.For instance, to start with a movie example, compare Star Wars (original) to Phantom Menace. I would say that in Star Wars setting is a mere backdrop. There are planets, and cantinas, and an evil empire, and rebels. But we (the audience) are not expected to engage with the minutiae of any of these. How is life on Tatooine economically viable? Where did all those cantina aliens come from? How exactly does the Empire govern? What is a Princess doing as a defender of an Old Republic? These aren't the questions with which the movie is concerned.The Phantom Menace is quite different, at least in my view. It puts forward setting - geography, landscape, minutiae of government and economics, etc, as themselves objects of interest. There are scenes, like the travel underwater and the creatures eating one another - that play no narrative role but showing off setting. I would say quite a bit of the plot exposition at various places in the movie (eg on the Trade Federation ship; in the Senate) are similarly doing nothing but showing off setting.I thnk this helps explain the diffrent feel of the two movies.To turn now to another tried and true example, let's imagine LotR from an RPG perspective. Aragorn's player has a goal for Aragorn as a PC, namely, becomeing king. This sets up some other goals - reforge Anduril, travel to Minas Tirith, tread the Paths of the Dead. It also sets up some likely confilcts - with Boromir, with Denethor, perhaps with Faramir, with the King of the Dead, etc. But at this point we can't tell whether or not setting matters, or will be important to play.For instance, will the geography of the Paths of the Dead matter? Or will that particular episode of play be resolved essentially as a social conflict between Aragorn and the King of the Dead? Different tables will probably have different preferences. And, perhaps, look to different systems.Marvel Heroic Roleplaying is an RPG that prioritises situation over setting, and it has this to say on the matter (Operations Manual, pp 54, 69):A lot of things in the story don’t have [mechanical traits] associated with them because they’re a part of the fiction that everyone at the table just agrees on. Lampposts, sidewalks, plate windows, random passersby, bouquets of flowers, newspapers, and other items that aren’t immediately important are just context and color. You can make them important by using your effect dice to make them assets, or use them as part of your description for stunts . . . Heroes and villains aren’t alone in having Distinctions [a form of mechanically significant keyword]. The Scene (or the location the Scene takes place in) may also be described using Distinctions. These are defining qualities of the Scene that could help or hinder the characters in it. Examples of Scene Distinctions include Cluttered, Flooded, Noisy, Pitch Black, Quiet, and Unstable.So setting is not an object of exploration, so much as a shared and presupposed background. It becomes of significance to play either because the players leverage it by deploying their resources and creating "assets" or performing "stunts"; or the GM leverages it by establishing Scene Distinctions (and there are various mechanical guidelines associated with this).In this sort of game, how is a secret door going to resolve? It won't be like in classic D&D. Rather, it will be a contest between the heroes' Perception and some ability of the villain that lets him/her escape (say, Superhuman Speed), with the secret door being a Scene Distinction that acts as a buff on the villain's escape check. If the villain wins the contest, the secret door may or may not figure in the GM's narration of the escape, depending on what the overall context suggests, what the actual die rolls suggest (if anything), and what seems most likely, in context, to propel the game forward.Crossing the desert might be resolved similarly: the contest would be between the PCs' endurance and travel skills, and the environmental difficulty (in MHRP, this is represented by the Doom Pool). Relevant Scene Distinctions might include "Hot" and "Blinding Sand". The centipede would be an asset granting a buff to the players' side of the contest. This might either be a brief stand-alone scene, or - if it is the context of tracking someone down in City B - it might be simply one contest in that overall challenge. You could even frame the contest identically to the secret door example, with the contest being one of the PCs' travel attribute vs that of the NPC they are chasing, with the desert simply adding in some colour plus a Scene Distinction that the GM can draw on to buff the NPC's roll.Now D&D prior to 4e doesn't have any sort of generic scene resolution mechanic, and even in 4e it can't be done via a single roll (the smallest skill challenge is 4 successes before 3 failures). But there are a range of informal tehcniques that can be used to achieve outcomes similar to what I've just described, where the setting itself figures as a backdrop that colours and informs situations and the conflicts within them, but is not itself an object of exploration or focus for play.An answer was intended. I've tried to elaborate it above.TL;DR - you can call all of the fiction other than the PCs "setting" if you like, and that won't as such do any harm, but you'll still probably need to find some terminology to capture the difference between how classic D&D handles the secret door case, and how MHRP handles it. And also to explain why some players like one way and others the other.</blockquote>

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