Search results

Technically that is true, but like the weather, no two starting points are ever the same with the players. Appreciate the compliment. So you know your experience mirrors mine. So is it fair to say....

What I do in my campaigns, structuring the world to respond to the players' choices, updating NPC agendas, tracking regional dynamics, mixing in die rolls and judgment calls, isn’t just about realism or immersion. It’s about creating a chaotic system in the technical sense. I didn’t bring this...

I’ve done something close to a controlled experiment in this hobby. I wrote two sandbox adventures, Scourge of the Demon Wolf and Deceits of the Russet Lord, and ran each of them repeatedly, nearly three dozen times combined, across the United States with different groups of players. Every run...

I’ve been reflecting on your recent reply. Looking at it again, I see a familiar pattern: You open with a framing that subtly misrepresents my point. You follow it with a personal anecdote, watching my video, reading my posts, and use that to suggest there's no real difference between our...

There is no such thing as "referee's logic." Just bear with me. What we each have is our own way of reasoning about how we roleplay or adjudicate. As a result, we each have our own process that we go through. I described mine. You have yours. In the course of the discussion on this thread, I...

I would like to see an example of play like I posted. I tried searching, but all I came up with were videos that may or may not have a relevant example. And no I am not going to try to listen to them as I am partially deaf and it was hard enough with my own. In addition I can't find any official...

Sort of. For the Want of a Nail by Sobel is written as a history book mostly focused on economics. But certainly Turtledove's and Stirling's work are more dramatic history than regorus alt history. But on the Alt History forum, it is a completely different story.

Thanks for the reply. But I think you’re conflating internal logic with rationality. I’m not claiming people (or NPCs) make optimal or logical decisions, just that their behavior still follows from causes: past choices, emotions, goals, constraints, etc. That’s the kind of logic I’m using...

I’d argue that the real world follows internal logic; we don’t always see it in real time. So-called “Black Swan” events appear implausible only because we overlooked or dismissed relevant factors. Once those are known, the chain of events often makes sense in hindsight. While there are often...

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...