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I’ve mentioned it before, but V. baker is much taken with her Blorb principles (and likewise she notes in there that an AW game run per agenda and principles is likely hitting the Blorb concept of play).

I remember as a pretty young teen getting the 3.5e FR book and being so excited about all the potential stories in there. And then all the products and buzz forever are Sword Coast!!!111 (and occasional Icewind Dale)

Is it artificial if it’s a specific meaning with weight around dynamics of the game, player facing mechanics, premises of play, and table outcomes, just because you don’t agree with it? @hawkeyefan seems to generally prefer a degree of player-side agency that is greater in aggregate then what...

We’ve spent pages (and threads! 3 in the last couple months alone!) spinning on the fact that there’s a number of different definitions of agency, and some styles of play put more emphasis on different degrees or types. The priority on “how much of what sort” seems to be intractable!

oh no we get to have the “what do we mean by agency” talk again. I guess it’s been a hundred pages. This is as bad as oil arguments on a motorcycle forum.

Motorcycling, riding a lovely Moto Guzzi these days. Hiking, trail running, high intensity workouts. Reading, constantly. I’ve slacked off recently (running too many RPGs), but I used to read an average of > 120 books a year. Visiting botanical gardens, one of my absolute favorite things...

To provide a similar but different game input: When you start a game of Stonetop, you present the Playbooks it has to the players, along with the Setting Guide. It has a pretty well defined setting that mixes the goal of improving the small community all characters are tied to in some...

I think there’s degrees of “character crucible” or whatever as well. I definitely don’t push as hard as some of the folks who participate here, but my play across games is very character-relationship centric even when in an exploration/expedition type phase. I think the "intensity" there tends...

You can find the core of the guidelines available for free on DnDBeyond. That’s where I’m quoting from - I bought TOV instead of 5.24!

Did I miss a thread of discussion with all this talk of contrivance? I don’t have any context for the back and forth about it these last couple pages.

????

I’ve just chalked his posts down as coming from an alternate reality, since pretty much everything shared is like totally opposite or alien to my experiences around play.

Oh for sure, and maybe you don't think it quite meets Baker's definition for whatever reason that you experience in play or how you think of your games; but like @prabe 's games are pretty much textbook "vanilla narativism" in 5e since his folks do AFAIK everything in those and he then...

Idk man, when I read this: What I get from it is "in contrast to these other games we're talking about, because of all my hard work my game actually feels real and players feel like they're actually there as their characters." Because that's how it reads to me? My imagination feels like Im...

@robertsconley Baker recently posted about revisiting Narrativism (which is distinct from whatever a "narrative RPG" is and good god it's all very easy to get backwards and confused isn't it), which I think somebody else shared in this thread but, in his words this is narrativism as a play...

The 2024 DMG agrees with you that you should establish before play the ground rules for stuff like this!

Again, stuff like "present a setting that feels real" is the sort of thing that gets some of our hackles up. This post here suggests that Doskvol can't feel real because of the other framing you've added. I'm not sure that follows at all, considering that Doskvol is a really rich setting that is...

The DM guide also covers player exploits/various examples of poor play when it talks directly to players, as covered on this site and across the internet. We're now hitting directly at the OP of this thread here - 2024 has taken some big steps forward to try and place guidelines and limits for...

I was the one who said IMO that if you take a step back, from a "player decision within a GM authored area POV" a sandbox ran with procedure and integrity and a well-designed classic dungeon don't look all that different. In both, you're setting up problems for the players to engage with...

The 2024 DM guideline’s emphasis on “will this change/ruling make the game more fun for the the table / improve the game? If not yes to both (and get feedback from your players), don’t it.” Is pretty neat. It spends a lot of words on establishing the idea of mutual respect, communication...