So we seem to have a consensus that if you don't have player ownership of characters, it's not roleplaying. But what about the game setting? There seem to be two rival schools of thought. One, exemplified by Bill Stoddard on Pyramid Online, states that the GM 'owns' the setting in the same way as the players own their characters. The world may have a lot of hidden secrets behind the scenes, only parts of which the players are aware of. The other approach is that the entire game world is the collective responsibility of the group. I know of a group that plays exclusively that way. There are no deep gameworld secrets, only things which are yet to be defined. I've heard members of this group declare that you should never define *any* aspect of the world in advance, because it "limits what might happen in the game". Of my own games, Kalyr most definitely follows the first approach. There are deep secrets which have never been revealed in eight years of play (and 5+ years of FtF play before that). My other game, the space pirate adventure AEF, leans towards the second approach. I inherited the game from another GM who'd quit, and I don't feel any sense of proprietorial ownership of the game setting, which owes as much to ideas from a couple of the other players as it did to the original GM. If one of the players decides to define some aspect of technology or politics that had previously been left vague, I'll most likely take their idea and run with it. What about anyone else's game? ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
