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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6120457" data-attributes="member: 42582">For me, I see "setting" mostly as the established backstory shorne of its emotional connotations or dramatic significance: the history, the geography, the relationship map, etc. And it also has a big importance for colour: the colour of a Conan-esque desert setting is very different from a Grimm-esqe Germanic setting, let along a Lucas-esque scifi setting.Building the PCs should, in my preferred approach, link them into the setting both in bald descriptive terms (I'm an elf or a dwarf, I'm from this town or that town) but also emotionally/dramatically (I want this, and to get that this other thing will have to change). This investing of the setting with emotional resonance and dramatic significance is, for me, what transforms it from mere setting into situation: something is about to happen, and the PCs will be at the centre of whatever that is, because the they are confronted by the things that, if they're to get what they want, they will have to change. At the start of the game, this is achieved via pre-play setup - once the game gets going, it's achieved by deft GMing - following the players cues in framing new scenes that respond to their evinced interests and passions.The reason that, for me, the desert fails as situation is because the things that the players (via their PCs) have to change (or interact with more generally), in order to make progress, aren't the things that matter to them, that have that emotional heft given their (and their PCs') goals. That's what I was trying to get at in my post above this one, where I said that if I had found myself having to run the phyalctery quest, the opposition that the PCs encountered would not have just been thematically unrelated monsters or traps. I would have found a way to connect it in to those elements of the fiction in which the players are emotionally invested.Of course that way of speaking is very general; it's hard to be precise outside of some particular context. For instance, sometimes it can be enough that the opposition is a demon, if the PCs are dedicated demon hunters and their ultimate foe is Orcus. Sometimes, though, a tighter or deeper connection is needed. That's also part of the point of leaving elements of backstory (in other words, setting details, like NPC personality) unfixed - so that if it turns out that I (as GM) miscalculated, and the heft isn't there, I can tweak things or introduce more stuff via the NPCs to try and amp it up a bit.As to plot, my concept of that is pretty simple: it's the sequence of events that constitute the fiction. In my preferred approach we don't know what the plot is until we play, because only play can establish that sequence of events.</blockquote>

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