On Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 03:44:18PM -0600, Tim Hall wrote: >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. Unsurprisingly, this is where I tend to live. I have in the past been involved in some collaborative world-building exercises, though they didn't go well. Even then, the plan was for each person to have specific areas of responsibility rather than to allow free modification of the world. On the other hand, I'm quite prepared to let people come in and play in my worlds - in specific areas, and with me as an editor prepared to throw out anything that doesn't fit (which may be a clash with something I haven't made public yet). In Tempt Not the Stars, one of the players came up with the idea for, and wrote up, the Gabrielites - and I gave them their name, and hit them with a wrench to make them fit with the Reformed Catholic Church. On a smaller scale, I'm quite happy to have players who say things like "is there a rope I can swing on". >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". As a creator, it's in my interest to document the world in fine detail - or at least the bits of it that I use (see, erm, practically anything under tekeli.li). Who keeps things consistent? R -- Roger, gaming grognard Lots of role-playing stuff: http://tekeli.li/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
