Quote Originally Posted by Florian View Post
Well, ok. This touches on a little bit about the difference between stage and background.

Take Space Opera of any kind, be it Star Wars or MechWarrior. The setting, as in the background, is more or less normal with regular folks doing regular things as is part of the in-game reality. The setting as stage is quite different tho. Only a handful of people really matter and their actions are blown out of proportions (in contrast to regular folks).
That might be because the use of high-level abstractions or because the focus is on the symbolic value of the action.
(In Star Wars, you can have 1,2,... 300 Rogue Ones and they still can't compare to Luke killing the Emperor)

Point being that I know that Max doesn't like the separation of the setting in stage and background, but that's what happens at most regular tables and should be acknowledged as such, simply because it is an reduction in complexity.
Um. Why are you making a distinction?

In my sandbox worlds I can derive / extrapolate content to answer questions I or the players had. This seems consistent with what Max likes. In that same sandbox there are many entities and the degree of agency each entity has can differ drastically. The local blacksmith has a lot less agency that the entity "John Smith" that is playing at running a general store both of which are NPCs. So without differentiating between a "stage and background" you have a some entities that have a lot more impact than other entities.

However, how do I know if adding "John Smith" is going to add, detract, or do nothing to the game? I personally cannot answer without knowing the players. Although I can make some guesses based upon how such an entity would impact the amount of agency the PCs have in the game and what tone of game I wanted to run.