If anything it's the establishment of a NEW rule.

"Retconning" is altering something that had prior existence, then assuming that it always worked that way. In this case nothing substantive was changed, only added.

Quote from: DrewIf anything it's the establishment of a NEW rule.

"Retconning" is altering something that had prior existence, then assuming that it always worked that way. In this case nothing substantive was changed, only added.

Correct.

Quote from: J ArcaneFor once I agree with the guy with the Mars bar on his forehead.

 OFF-TOPIC : Not this avatar , dude ...you must be browsing two other forums. On this one I'm a smooth-headed guy that runs TRAVELLER games.

 There's probaly a lot of stuff we agree on - just those things haven't popped up yet.

- Ed C.

I don't think so.  It's a player contributing to the setting within the rules of the game even with GM fiat.  If WE (the playing group) think it is fun, it becomes part of the campaign setting.  It has hardly anything to do with rules.  That's just good ole' player communication voicing what they would like to see.

No, it´s illusionism. A player says: "They are afraid of the light!"
Not because he wants them to be afraid of the light.

He is craving for interconnections and a strucured world to explore mentally.
Making it up as he utters it is cheating him of that.

And the best way to have a structured, explorable and consistent world is NOT by defining stuff because it is kewl at the moment of creation.

See, I can see and have seen lots of nifty ideas springing up via this route. But from a player perspective, it´s not right to do this. It´s lame and it is cheating.

Creation =! Play

Calithena,
sorry for hijacking. You want to discuss how, not IF creation through play happens. Go ahead, I´ll be spreading my thoughts of purity in sandbox play somewhere else.

If there were a Rotwang! Bible, this idea would be in the first chapter.

In hot pink, too.

You should write it, Rotwang. At least give us a few mottos, like those in my sig. Even the Swine Settembrini has a gaming motto in his sig.

This is a good discussion. Only time for two individual replies now, sorry.

Settembrini,

Something to consider for the other thread perhaps. You do realize that one consequence of your attitude is that a GM must either put a huge amount of work into developing his own setting in heavy detail before play, play an established setting out of the box, or run a setting entirely dependent on the 'implied setting' of the rules?

One big payoff of being a GM for me (other than thrilling my players, when I can) is developing my own fantasy world through play. Exploring it with my players and finding out what it contains. Your method seems to make that more or less impossible. But maybe that's for your other thread.

I'll also add that almost everything cool about D&D monsters grew out of people doing this process themselves with the very sparse descriptions of OD&D and other early fantasy games. The more robust descriptions in AD&D, Elminster's Ecologies in Dragon, all that stuff is just a particular group of people doing exactly what I did with the centipedes over time.

And the Wilderlands of High Fantasy is a retconned Middle Earth.

If you want to say "well, I'd rather use the weird stuff that Gary Gygax and Bob Bledsaw and Roger Moore and Ed Greenwood came up with when they were retconning their games, exactly as they did it, than retcon myself" that's a fair atttitude, I guess, but for me I'd rather be the one engaged in creative reconception.

That's not quite what you're saying, because you're leaving open the option of the GM writing his own monster book or setting from scratch so that his sandbox was well defined from the get-go. But, well, that's not realistic for most of us. What we do is start with what the other people did and gradually retool it for our own purposes. This necessitates contradiction.

--------------------------

Melan,

There aren't any easy answers here. Certainly both GM retconning and fudging can be instances of cheating your players. But when they are and aren't is very difficult to judge a priori.

The problem is it's very hard to judge the line between clever/interesting improvisation (which ought to be OK) and reworking the system to give an unearned "let" (which in some cases some of us including me feel undermines the game). I think the GM just has to go with his own gut and his observations about what people at the table are thinking and feeling here. Also being honest about why you're doing it is an ingredient: are you just making things easier for the players because you don't like it when their characters die or get screwed, or do you really think they improvised something cool?

Calithena,

Exactly. World creation as a process is one thing, actual play a different beast.
Both yield a totally differnt evaluation of this method.

For world creation through/during play, you make sacrifices. And I highlighted one of those sacrifices, that´s all.

Now, is it important for that method whether the players know how the cookie crumbles?
What will be the result of that?
What happens when they know can change the world via making a remark instead of playing within the estabished box?
These are the questions I raise.

Settembrini's approach is totally legit to me, even if I think he maybe goes to far.  Cal's little technique should yield some awesome stuff that can help make a campaign world seem more detailed and customized.  I would be careful of overusing that methodology.  Once in a while is often enough.  If my players and I were riffing like that all the time through every session I'd start to suspect we were playing Universalis, not D&D.

Quote from: CalithenaI like RPGs that have lots of room for this kind of improvisational creation over time.

Are there ones that don't? Maybe I'm missing something, but what you described seems very run-of-the-mill to me.

Seanchai

I hadn' thought of the Donjon parallel... not a fan of that at all... but I still like the idea that in the course of play a bunch of flimsy monster descriptions will eventually turn into a parallel-universe MM, and how that mimicks the actual development of D&D.

OTOH I find the idea of achieving this through some kind of collective kewlness fest horrible. "Wouldn't it be kewl if...?" NO, IT WOULD NOT.

But then, you're usually advocating this gradual fleshing out as above all the GM's job, aren't you, Cali? To me, that would make the difference--the world and the game grow as the GM works as the medium through which past experiences (good and bad) become codified as rules/encounters.

Seanchai -

Good point, I'm thinking that through as part of this thread. I do find that lighter games make it easier for me, but that may just be my experience. I don't see any principled reason you couldn't work with say GURPS or D&D3 in this manner.

I do think that the more complicated a game gets the more some people (not all) will want to stick to published texts etc. as a way of managing the firehose of information. But only some, and especially if you're willing to put up with a certain amount of 'floating' (new facts being added before you go back to the number or system grinder and figure out exactly how it all fits together), there's no reason you can't do it.

Systems where there is a currency for introducing things into play or where things not included in some pre-existing currency have a universally defined effect do directly cut against it, but most mainstream designs don't even push in this direction, with the exceptions of a few games by Robin Laws.


Pierce -

I don't know what a 'collective coolness fest' is, but if you mean any time anyone says 'hey, maybe it's like this' it goes in, or even that a substantial part of play is spent on making stuff like that up, then no, that's largely not a technique I'd be interested in. (Exception: out of play brainstorming settings with friends I already respect as knowledgeable and with compatible aesthetics to my own.)

In traditional play the GM will come up with most of these ideas and have a veto power over all of them. This is just as well, since the GM is (a) typically the principal developer of the setting in question, though he may have collaborators in a game with multiple GMs and (b) the primary source of versimilitude and resistance in the world's responses to PC actions. I tend to like this kind of play myself.

Quote from: flyingmiceBy extension - in RPGing - a sandbox campaign is a campaign where the PCs can go in any direction and do whatever they want to do, and no one will get pissed because the story got broken.

N.B., the D&D 3.5 DMG uses the term "status quo" campaign to mean the same thing.

Quote from: CalithenaYou do realize that one consequence of your attitude is that a GM must either put a huge amount of work into developing his own setting in heavy detail before play, play an established setting out of the box, or run a setting entirely dependent on the 'implied setting' of the rules?

I see a little wiggle room in the use of dice and judgment, plus mature back & forth between GM and players.

Dice: Since making up everything beforehand is impossible, you can leave some judgments up to a spot evaluation of the possibilities, plus a roll of the dice.

Judgment: Reasonable extrapolation or even inspiration, based on established facts. (And by "established", I do not mean only "publicly narrated". If the GM has facts in the campaign notes, they're facts even if the players aren't aware of them.)

Mature back & forth: Reasonable suggestions by players of stuff that might be possible or extrapolated (see above), combined with a GM who in all humility recognizes that maybe he isn't the expert on all aspects of the game world. Of course the players must not be munchkins, and the GM must have final say.

Finally, I can completely respect the type of game where challenge (in terms of the need for ingenuity, deduction, and problem solving) is dialed way down, leaving only risk, and instead the game becomes an exercise in interactively making stuff up by stringing input-diceroll-output together. I don't know Mythic and I haven't read Heroquest closely, but I think some variation or combination of those two might work well for such a game. (TSoY, too, perhaps Trollbabe?)