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Glad to have helped. :):) One useful thing I got out of the process of participating in this thread was a framework on which to structure my thoughts and observations on how I handle my own particular take on sandbox campaigns, the living world. I always felt a step behind in articulating what...

That is something Narrativist design does better. I can accommodate PvP conflict in my Living World Campaigns, but that runs into the same bandwidth issue I talked about earlier. So while it has happened, it is infrequent. The basic issue is that with my focus on players feeling like they are...

Apathetic players in general are not an issue with my Living World Sandbox. Apathetic doesn't mean they don't have goals; otherwise, they wouldn't be playing tabletop role-playing campaigns in the first place. The goals are generally pretty basic, i.e., grab an ale at the tavern, head out, and...

I stressed that it’s about emphasis, not exclusion. Emphasis doesn’t mean other elements can’t be present, it means they aren’t the focus. Baker’s approach emphasizes passionate play and dramatic escalation. There are many ways to achieve that in a campaign, and extrapolation based on logic and...

If your critique was aimed solely at my description of Narrativist play, then I will address that directly. First, I reject the claim that I’m being “loose” with the term or that I’m conflating Narrativism with systems like Fate or Hillfolk. I didn’t reference either one, and I’ve been careful...

It's not uncommon in my campaign for players to want to play out nearly every minute of a day as their character. I exaggerate a little, but the result was that I had to abandon a flat XP award per session for my GURPS campaign in favor of a RuneQuest-style method of increasing skills. There's...

I know this is weird, but when I saw this, I thought it needed to be a haiku! Railroad or sandbox, Steel tracks hum or soft paw prints, All play finds its path.

You’re misreading my post by selectively highlighting words like “drama,” “dramatic,” and “story” as if they prove I’m secretly describing narrativist play. That’s not analysis, it’s quote-mining out of context to force an interpretation I explicitly rejected. In the post, I contrast...

You’ve laid out different procedures for resolving travel, and yes, each of those represents a kind of structure. But that’s not what was under discussion. When I said players “aren’t constrained,” I was referring to narrative constraint, meaning the referee doesn’t dictate story arcs, scenes...

The problem with asking any AI is that all it tells you is what is in its training data. Paleontologists have long taught that the fossil record often doesn't represent how life was in the past, but represents what is preserved about life in the past. For example, we are far more likely to have...

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Thanks for sharing Baker’s post. Here’s a detailed breakdown of how his narrativist dynamic compares to my Living World sandbox approach: 1. “The PCs have vision, self-interests, best interests, passion, an ideological commitment: something they want and care about.” Narrativism: The players...

I had run several long-term game store campaigns in the past, and run about a half dozen convention sessions a year with people I am not familiar with. The last time I had any issue with any of the players was before the pandemic, when I ran a variant of my Scourge of the Demon Wolf as an...

I’ve now seen a few people suggest that the way I’ve framed my posts comes across as dismissive or exclusionary. To be clear: I’ve made structural comparisons between game systems, not moral judgments about the people who enjoy them. If pointing out procedural differences between, say, a Living...

This mischaracterizes both the intent and content of what I wrote. I’ll break this down clearly, step by step: 1. “Offhanded comments... I don’t think you even realize you make.” This is a mind reading fallacy, suggesting that myself and @Bedrockgames are subconsciously demeaning other games...

To be clear, the response about players being “constrained” by things like distance or money misses the point entirely. It relies on a shift in meaning, what I referred to as constraint, was narrative constraint: the idea that the referee directs the story or limits player options through...

I never offered a definition of agency. I gave a description of how agency functions in my own campaign structure. Not sure how that’s any more challenging to grasp than Pemerton’s or Ron Edwards’ descriptions, which, by the way, were also treated as intelligible and worth engaging. So we have...

That makes no sense. It’s like accusing The Pitt of dissing other medical dramas just because it focuses on realism. Blades in the Dark is very clear about its intended approach, look at sections like Playing a Session (structured like a TV show) and Touchstones (Peaky Blinders, Lankhmar, Thief...

I’ll take your word that you’re not framing sandbox play as ideologically suspect, but you're still misrepresenting how agency works in my campaigns. The referee maintains the world, but the direction of play comes from the players. They aren’t constrained; they choose what to pursue, and the...

An outsized role in what, exactly? This is not about challenging your statement. If we want to avoid talking past each other, we need to be specific: what is the referee controlling, and what are the players controlling? Too often “referee control” gets thrown around without clarifying whether...