What is the point of GM's notes?

[hawkeyefan]

A living world is a world that changes without PC stimuli. It will of course also change due to PC stimuli but that alone doesn't make it a living world.

Think of a dead body. if I pick up the corpse arm and move it, the corpse is still dead. If the arm starts moving all by itself then it's not dead. (Maybe in D&D it's undead but that's not what I mean here ;-)).

How it changes without PC stimuli can vary of course but I would absolutely dismiss the idea that it can be done as just in time response to PC action. That is a PC stimuli. A living world will over time have events that occur and are never seen by the PCs and never reacted to by the PCs. I achieve that affect within the sandbox by using a calendar. I map the movements and actions of my NPCs based upon those NPCs personalities and agendas. When the party interacts with an NPC in some significant way, I change the calendar for that NPC. If the party interacts with the entire sandbox in some significant way, like burning down the entire village, then of course I have a lot of calendar changes to make. Many of those might just be marking NPCs as dead who lived in the village.

So the key is that events happen that do not always affect the PCs. That is a living world. If you try to make it look like the world was changing but it really wasn't, then I'd say that is similar to what a novelist does to simulate a living world in his writing but it would not be a living world.

Right. So what RPGs don’t do this?

 

[Aldarc]

Right. So what RPGs don’t do this?

The ones I'm not familiar with. Out of sight, out of mind, out of existence.

 

[prabe]

Wait, what?

You try to stop your PCs from going back to the same town, or the same tavern, just because they've been there before?

Or am I missing something?

I explained it in another post, but the signal-to-noise ratio in the thread isn't the best. "You can't step into the same river twice." If the PCs go back to Embernook, Embernook is (in principle) not as they left it. Clearly I wasn't at my clearest, sorry.

 

[Maxperson]

I explained it in another post, but the signal-to-noise ratio in the thread isn't the best. "You can't step into the same river twice." If the PCs go back to Embernook, Embernook is (in principle) not as they left it. Clearly I wasn't at my clearest, sorry.

At least you were transparent with your apology.

 

[prabe]

At least you were transparent with your apology.

I assure you, I knew what I had done, there.

 

[Imaro]

Right. So what RPGs don’t do this?

Games where the players focus and steer the fiction around their dramatic needs and the GM is constrained to only create fiction in response to said steering and dramatic needs.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Games where the players focus and steer the fiction around their dramatic needs and the GM is constrained to only create fiction in response to said steering and dramatic needs.

So which games are those?

 

[Imaro]

So which games are those?

Well one thats been discussed on this thread is BitD. But honestly that is a playstyle I'm not really a fan of so maybe those who are can list more.

EDIT: For clarification I am speaking to games with high levels of protagonism (as the word was defined earlier in the thread by... I believe...Ovinomancer??)

 

[hawkeyefan]

Well one thats been discussed on this thread is BitD. But honestly that is a playstyle I'm not really a fan of so maybe those who are can list more.

EDIT: For clarification I am speaking to games with high levels of protagonism (as the word was defined earlier in the thread by... I believe...Ovinomancer??)

I’m familiar with Blades in the Dark. And although I would say that the focus is on the characters, there is still plenty involved with establishing a living world.

This is why I don’t find the “living world” as an approach to be all that enlightening. It would appear to include all manner of games that otherwise have some significant differences.

It doesn’t seem to do anything more than the term sandbox, which is something that all kinds f games can be.

 

[Lanefan]

I suspect hence "story now" rather than "story before." I guess another less glamorous way of putting it is "notes later." From what I gather part of the idea behind this, though not all of it in its entirety mind you and me both, is since note-making/taking doesn't occur before play, the GM has less reason or even resources to coerce outcomes and/or player agency using those notes.

Going back to the OP, if we were to think again about "play to discover the GM's notes" (and for sake of conversation, let's gloss over the controversy), we could also ask more generally: "how, when, and by whom are 'notes' generated in different games?"

Some games will say, "the GM should prep notes for play." Some games will say, "the GM should use these notes and keep players focused on them." Some games will say, "here are guidelines/procedures for GM note generation." Other games will make note generation mostly an exclusive task of the GM. Other games are more liberal with player note generation.

And there my own personal preference comes in: I'd far rather do as much of the work ahead of time as I can - ideally before the campaign even begins - such that during play I can somewhat sit back and enjoy running the game in the moment without having to worry about remembering and-or writing down any more than I asbolutely have to.

I can see how that would be a potential issue. A lot of this, IMHO, will vary between the actual games that are being played, as myth vs. no myth will vary even between PbtA/FitD/etc. games. But again, I'm not sure if it's necessarily as incompatible as one would imagine, since I could easily see a FitD game work for a West Marches style campaign, especially since every "gig," adventure site, or dungeon basically exists as a "heist" scenario. Instead of trying to take over territory in a city, you are trying to expand territory from your point of light in the frontier. Instead of law enforcement, the pressure comes from other oppositional forces that are competing for similar grounds and resources (e.g., BBEG, hordes of monsters, chaos cultists, etc.).

In other PbtA games, this won't be possible. For example, if one were running Stonetop (a Dungeon World-modified game), you are all residents of a vaguely Celto-Germanic iron age village called "Stonetop." There can't really be multiple parties or multiple PCs of the same "class" because your playbooks establish that you are THE Heavy (fighter), THE Marshal (warlord), THE Ranger (ranger), THE Fox (rogue), THE Would-Be-Hero, etc. of the village of Stonetop. One could definitely run the Stonetop game such that other parties are inhabitants of other settlements (e.g., Marshedge, Gordin's Delve, etc.).

Yeah, that Stonetop model would never work for me for anything longer than a one-off in that I always assume two things about any ongoing setting: one, there's other adventurers in the setting beyond just the PCs and two, there's going to be some character recruitment/turnover and the replacements have to come from somewhere.

As for the West Marches scenario, it'd be cool if the oppositional force faced by one party is in fact one of the players' other parties!