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Agreed. More specifically, the goal should be sufficiency, or what I call "good enough." If a referee can think of a handful of plausible outcomes, that’s already more than enough. In most situations, even two possibilities will do the job. The only real drawback in this process is that the...

You're misreading what I’m doing, and it’s leading you to conclusions that don’t match how my tables actually work. First, plausibility isn’t an “exclusion criterion” in the sense you’re implying. It’s a way to frame outcomes so they follow from what’s already established in the setting. That...

Not quite. The players are free, as their characters, to do anything within the setting, constrained only by their character’s capabilities. That includes not just what the mechanics allow, but also what makes sense for a sentient being to attempt in that world. But that freedom isn’t my sole...

Which is why good-faith discussions about different approaches are invaluable. While I may not share the same creative goals as Blades in the Dark, the mechanics, tools, and aids developed to handle the dynamics of Doskvol, and other BitD settings, have applications in other systems and...

That’s accurate, but not the whole story. Some of us never stopped using those methods. Over time, we gained experience both in applying those techniques and in creating or adapting new ones. The 2006 release of OSRIC and Basic Fantasy was a tipping point, people like myself began going the...

You think this thread is long, you see the debate over whether SeeLowe the German invasion of Great Britian, can be successful over on the alt history forums. Short Story: It has been analyzed to death, and yes, there is an overall consensus, but it still crops up repeatedly. It's bad enough...

The key distinction isn’t that I sometimes choose an outcome that’s interesting. It’s that I only choose from outcomes that are consistent with what’s already been established in the setting, character motivations, and current world state. I’m not inventing scenes to escalate drama or to test a...

Sometimes the analysis yields a unique outcome, and sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on the circumstances, the character’s capabilities, and what is being attempted. That’s the nature of thinking about possible futures, even when that future is just the next moment. In my experience, outcomes...

I already replied to another post about how plausibility works with fun, not against it; it's just a different kind of challenge. The fun in a Living World sandbox comes from dealing with a consistent world that doesn't revolve around the PCs but does respond to them. Link to Post In the...

The players are in the living world sandbox because they want to experience a different kind of challenge.

Since you missed it the first time, here is the complete post I made about how I use plausibility. The comparison of plausibility is grounded in what makes sense from the perspective of the world and the people in it. I look at what each faction or NPC knows, what resources they have, what...

I looked it over. A lot of it is perfectly clear, but there are some areas that I’m not sure what happened. I’ve quoted those below. During the Day in a Rural environment 14 or better on a 1d20. It was a timeline encounter. The young couple were travelling south from Woodford. The party...

Some further thoughts on my Living World Sandbox campaign as a result of working on my actual play writeup. 1) People, Not Plot, Drive a Living World The primary mechanism that makes a Living World campaign feel alive is first-person roleplaying. After reviewing footage from one of my actual...

I appreciate the compliment. Among other things, one of Blades in the Dark’s creative goals is outlined like this: And the main rulebook (other BitD games focus on different genres/settings) centers on the industrial-fantasy city of Doskvol: Given that focus, it makes sense that the system...

The first thing to remember is that people are the most interesting thing you have in a setting. You may have a killer magic system, like Ars Magica, but what elevates it is the culture that develops around it. The same goes for Burning Wheel, one of its major strengths is how its creative goals...

My comment wasn't about my versimilitude post. Since I wasn't clear, here is the clarification. I invite you to illustrate precisely where I lack a set procedure by using my actual play breakdown linked below...

I was trying to point that out with my rhetorical analysis posts, especially in the case of @pemerton I haven't read up on so much rhetoric since college.

Agreed. I do think it’s fair for a novice to ask how plausibility is handled, just like it’s fair for someone new to narrative play to ask what makes a story compelling, or how character belief-testing works. If we want sandbox play to be understood on its own terms, we need to be ready to...