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As per my later post, this sounds like utterly pointless semantic quibbling to me. To bypass is go around something instead of straight through it. You're trying to treat words as as highly technical terms of art, laden with all sorts of deep and very specific meaning, while we're just having a...

Well, you can easily say they engaged with the encounter by responding to the situation and taking action. But this kind of semantic quibbling adds nothing of value to the conversation, because everyone knows exactly what happened and it matters not if we use slightly different words to say the...

That sounds reasonable to me. I certainly wouldn't dispute that by choosing to set my next sandbox in the Savage Realms, encouraging the players to maintain a body of troops, detailing the levels of grittiness etc that I'm have a large impact on the overall style of game. The things I choose to...

Is it really so hard for you to imagine that the PCs may, at any given time, have an objective in mind that they are trying to achieve? Or that there may be obstacles that lay between where they are now (physically or metaphorically) and where they want to be, that they need to overcome in some...

Not really, no. I've played some games with houserules that aren't rules I would choose to employ if I was making those decisions. I've implemented rules that haven't worked out as intended (and thus I changed or dropped them) but I don't recall ever being in any kind game with "actively harmful...

I have fifth, I think. I was running the Great Pendragon Campaign (which is a sandbox in parts, but very much not a sandbox in others), but doing so as a second game on alternative weeks and, eventually, the workload became too great so I had to drop it. I do hope to go back to it at some point.

I fully support people using what works for them. I would like to think nothing I've said in this thread suggests that methods different to the ones I use can't work, or shouldn't be used. When I've been more heated in this thread, I believe it's been when people are saying that the methods I...

Yes, I pretty much agree. Although, again, I'm operating from the assumption that, based on the hypothetical provided by @AbdulAlhazred, we're not just talking about an "innocuous random encounter" , we're talking about a significant bandit threat in the region that happens to have resulted in...

Accidentally hit post. See full response added in now.

When I replied to @AbdulAlhazred I already stated that if the bandits were a likely encounter, the PCs would know they exist. The question isn't one of whether the PCs are aware of things that exist in the world. Of course they do, and they must. The question is whether everything the GM makes...

Yes. The general background events going on in the world are managed by the GM according to their processes. No one in the thread had ever disputed that, as far as I'm aware.

I'm always very confused about objections to houseruling and tinkering on the basis that things might not work out. So you change something and it doesn't work they way you wanted or causes some unexpected issue. What are those consequences? A mild disruption to a game of make-believe? So you...

Indeed. Or the bandits have become emboldened and completely disrupted trade, or taken over a town or who knows. The PCs not interacting with features can have implications and consequences, just as interacting can. And maybe those consequences will affect them, or maybe they won't.

Some of this stuff seems to come back to @AbdulAlhazred's assumption that if the GM creates something, they'll make sure the players encounter it, but that is simply not the case if the GM is actually following the principles we're talking about. Plenty of stuff I've put work into simply gets...

So, why exactly are we assuming that the bandits are most common, other than it's convenient for the argument you're making? I'll let that pass. Let's assume the bandits are the most common. This means the PCs would almost certainly be aware that bandits are common. And yes, having established...

Same here. I usually have some idea what to expect prior to the session but that's only because I know the players plans ahead of time -- and I still don't know whether or not they'll stick to the plan, or what the outcome of those plans will be before it happens. As best I can tell, this is...

I will say, prior to this thread, I did assume (without having actually put much thought into it) that all the narrativist stuff was based around story-telling, but I've been convinced that's not necessarily the case. It probably has more in common with story-telling than I generally want in...

I don't have a big problem with the term as a generic descriptor with no more inherent meaning than DM or GM or whatever. I don't use it myself, and I wouldn't say I like it, but I don't generally read too much into it and I don't object to others using it. However, we're not just talking about...

I certainly have the power to take more direct control over the game. What some people are trying to explain to you is they choose not to use that power. Which really means, @Hussar not only knows he's right, he also believes that everyone secretly agrees with him.. You're not trying to "drill...

Some of us disagree that it's storytelling in any meaningful sense. We're not engaging in literary criticism here, so the fact that it might fall into a niche set of storytelling doesn't matter. The distinction is important to some of us. But the thing is, you're not just saying that story is a...