Search results

For me, it was a moment when my players were being all awed by my awesomeness, and I pulled the curtain back and said, "This is how I did it." I'm not sure if they even cared. But as soon as I spoke, their adulation immediately meant nothing to me, because I could see how it was built on...

I said I wouldn't engage, but here I am again ... @EzekielRaiden You are asking what protections you have against a GM who intentionally or inadvertently railroads you, if you play a game where the GM has the power to intentionally or inadvertently railroads you. The answer is, you have none...

If they have buy-in from the players and everyone is having fun, there is no need for the "who don't know any better" suffix. If everyone is on board, there is nothing inherently wrong with illusionism. It's not my thing these days (and I stopped using it when I realised it made the game feel...

Sorry to dredge this back up, but I have been thinking about this post after a recent exchange. There are a number of trad sandboxers in this thread who have stated they see a lot of similarities between what they do and the principles outlined in Blades in the Dark. This has gained a...

Honestly, I am genuinely torn when I try and understand where you're coming from. Half the time it feels like you're just being genuinely curious at best and, at worst, too invested in the debate for the sake of a debate for my liking, but not acting in bad faith. The other half it feels like...

Who has been even a little coy about this? We've been talking for thousands of posts about our processes that involve keyed maps and timelines. @robertsconley alone has posted dozens of keyed maps. Edit: Although I note that elsewhere you seem to be implying that with map and key prep you also...

So, like I said earlier:

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.