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Sounds good. I am pretty much the same except I never do inner thoughts. I do describe body language when it would be obvious along with skill checks when it is not certain the PCs will pick up on the body language. I will attempt to do the voices. Do a few of them very well the rest are...

Method acting honed through 15 years of roleplaying in larps event as part of staff like NERO, Although I don’t need to live as the character outside of the acting moments like some do. I do run drills in my head imagining conversations with other characters. Your technique is closely related...

I don’t know the outcome. The PCs are involved. It’s that simple. If they weren’t involved, say the party is in Blackmarsh and something’s happening way off in Eastgate, half a continent away, then yes, I might know how that situation resolves. There are no player decisions affecting it, and...

Putnam may have moved away from internal realism because he was concerned with how we know truths about the real world. But that doesn’t apply here. In a fictional world, like an RPG setting, when a sandbox campaign is the focus, internal realism actually fits better, because the only “truth” is...

Constructivism says, “If we follow the rules, like rolling the dice or spending a token, whatever happens is valid,” while internal realism says, “It’s valid if it makes sense within the world we’ve already built and how things have played out so far.” Both constructivism and internal realism...

I leave it for the readers of this thread to decide.

You’re basically saying that because I made the setting, everything I do is just my opinion, that nothing I decide can be fair or logical. That’s a view called constructivism. It means you think all the “logic” in a world is just whatever the referee feels like. But that’s not how I run things...

We’ve gone over this before—my earlier posts lay out the procedural differences clearly enough for anyone interested. No need to repackage it again under a new framing. In the meantime, this post covers what I do, with links for anyone who wants to dive deeper...

You’re admitting both outcomes are plausible, so picking one doesn’t break world logic, it follows from it. That’s the contradiction: you say the logic holds, then claim it doesn’t the moment I make a choice.

I don’t agree, but I understand where you’re coming from. This is the same type of issue I mentioned upthread about Poussinist vs. Rubenist debates in art history. We have two fundamentally different views on structure versus expression. We're operating from a similar kind of divide. It’s clear...

Sure, why not? The history of the creative arts is full of debates over this kind of tension. Take the classic example of the Poussinists vs. Rubenists, where one side emphasized structure and reason, and the other championed emotion and sensory appeal. That debate was never really resolved...

Appreciate the compliment. I still have work to do, but interestingly enough, the comments in this thread, from everyone involved, including yours, have helped me organize my thoughts on how to better present the Living World sandbox approach as a whole. I've always been comfortable writing...

I’m concerned with both sets of goals. Read what I actually wrote before asking a loaded question. Every system has creative goals and priorities. I place plausibility first. Other systems place their priorities first before plausibility. I don’t find clocks to be a useful aid for tracking...

My friends gave me so much grief (in a fun way) about including air currents and ocean currents in my How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox. But it was my book so in they went. I tried to distill down to a few useful rules of thumb to make placing vegetation and biomes easier, rather than some involved...