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First off, the sentence you've expressed here is an oxymoron, a paradoxical state. The only reason to create and maintain a "continuous," "growing and evolving," "fully realized living world" is to involve PCs in the goings on within it. But 95% of the time those things are only made concerns...

Just picked up a copy of Tales of Xadia from an FLGS. Had been hoping to find a hard copy of Cortex Prime out in the wild, but those are exceedingly rare these days. Tales of Xadia should be pretty close to the next best thing, and my kids love the cartoon series. I figure I can pick up...

Best thrift store find was my wife finding a near-perfect condition WEG d6 Star Wars 2e Revised, but that was about the only time I can recall finding anything even remotely interesting over the years. Second hand book stores have never been all that great for me, except for one. The Black and...

The answer is both "quite enough" and "not nearly enough" at the same time.

The One Ring, as already mentioned. The art for the Interface Zero 2.0 setting book for Savage Worlds is next level. Not all of it is truly "great," but there's a consistency and level of detail throughout that holds the book together in a way that the OP describes---it's evocative and compelling.

Animal companions are the one and only non-negotiable banned items in any campaign I run. I've just been burned too many times by getting into rules-lawyer-y battles over their mechanics---what are they allowed to do, when do they act in turn, what are the limits of the master's control/hold...

So I'm of two minds on this. One -- by any measure, the "open source" movement across intellectual property contexts (software, books, games, music) is a huge boon to the public at large. The internet as it exists in its current form would bear little resemblance to what it would otherwise...

I can definitely confirm that Ironsworn and Ironsworn: Starforged have mechanics that either explicitly or implicitly ask players and GM to prioritize intent over "hidden backstory." That once agreed-upon stakes and fictional positioning align with the result of invoking the mechanics, that the...

Sure. But that's you choosing to prioritize your own desires over the players'. "I totally made up this fictional thing 6 hours / days / weeks / years ago, and somehow just because I totally made it up 6 hours / days / weeks / years ago, I cannot possibly change it. My version of this totally...

Very much this. But man oh man, was I extrapolating to keep the "living world" alive and running. I was a darn good extrapolator. I could extrapolate upon extrapolated extrapolations, then extrapolate some more on the extrapolated extrapolated extrapolations. And for a long while -- well over a...

I was never a tyrant GM even when I was running Savage Worlds for 9 years in about as "trad" a fashion as possible. But neither was I, as GM, really giving weight to character stakes and intentions during my GM play. It simply didn't occur to me that I should be, because nothing about the...

See, this is one of those things that until you give narrative mechanics an honest try, feels like it should be the absolute right move. Before I really, truly embraced what Ironsworn had to offer, I was just as terrified of "breaking the plausibility of the living world" as the most traddiest...

That's all fine and good. But the point of mechanics that point to fiction-first, non-"diegetic" conflict resolution in games like Ironsworn are to keep the character stakes relevant. So, the player is ambivalent to the fate of the princess. Okay, so, why is the player putting so much at stake...

I don't own Blades in the Dark, but I do own a hack of it called Court of Blades, so if the answer isn't one-to-one with BitD, bear with me. But when I look at the Court of Blades character sheet, I see stats, a spot for gear, the name of a general profession/playbook, a list of possible...

As far as I can tell, you've sort of broken the first paradigm of "narrative" style games, which is that you weren't bringing thematic character intentions and stakes to the table. Like, real, meaty stakes that slot into your character's real sense of self within the fictional world.

This here is the magic >>> The magic of narrative games happens when players bring thematic character intent + stakes to the fore of play, and the players and GM take advantage of the game's implicit and/or explicit mechanics and incentives to honor those intentions, stakes, and themes above...

I think I've said it probably a dozen times by now on this forum, but if anyone who has no experience with "narrative" style games wants to understand the mindset for it, go play a 2-2.5 hour session of Ironsworn solo. Then come back with how you saw events playing out in your mind, and how you...

Because as I described above --- Dungeon World both implicitly and explicitly expects the GM to hold character theme, stakes, and intent above his/her conception of the game world. Not every moment of DW play, or Ironsworn play, or BitD play, is going to differ wholly from the basic D&D play...

Yes. *Edit to follow up -- the player is welcome to then declare some other action, one that does not trigger the move in question, one that triggers a different move (or no move at all), to such point that the fictional state has been modified in a way that (s)he can then enact the move...

To carry the theme of this thread forward from my last post --- Narrative games are those that bring thematic character intent + stakes to the fore of play, and have implicit and/or explicit mechanics and incentives for GM's to honor those intentions, stakes, and themes above their own...