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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8165967" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think, with BitD specifically, that it is a game which largely eschews highly concrete structure, even in 'tactical' play. So, your PC's inventory is at least somewhat abstract, for example. You could technically pull almost anything out of your pocket, following some sort of mechanical process (I'm no expert on the details). The same thing applies to things like 'turf' and whatnot. The bonuses your crew might get from those MIGHT actually be described in specific terms, when they become relevant to the fiction. Otherwise they remain relatively abstract, the players know certain benefits can accrue to them, and maybe they are even defined a bit more clearly in various ways (I'm not sure, I know there is 'downtime', 'vices', 'patrons(?)' etc.). So, clearly there is a bit of an 'impedance mismatch' there, your players expect a concrete mechanistic 'rules as physics' sort of approach. The process outlined above however is disconnected from that. IME it is hard to bridge the gap. In the 90's I tried to make a really thorough sort of sandbox (it had a strong meta-plot, so maybe some purists would balk at this description) which had a lot of this sort of abstraction, and tried to 'map' it back into concrete terms. It didn't turn out to be a very viable approach. Players simply have their own agendas and unless you either constantly rework things, or use a lot of force, the whole structure simply won't hang together. It also ends up being very obtuse. The players rarely can figure out exactly what is connected to what, etc. This feeds back to my observations of 'game reality' not really existing to any appreciable degree. It turns out players were simply inventing all sorts of reasons why things happened in their minds, which they took to be both canonical and totally reasonable. In the meantime I'd simply started from different assumptions, of which an almost limitless range exist. Now, maybe someone else can make this work, but my realization, particularly when I started running 4e, was that simply granting the players the authority to 'be right' in their assumptions and not trying to nail much of anything down worked a VAST amount better. It was 100x less work for me, and the player's engagement with and feeling of identifying with the world and seeing it as working in a comprehensible way, increased a LOT. So the 4e game ran as basically a reprise/follow on to the supposed events of the 90's 2e campaign, and it was a lot more successful and fun. That game ran for a few years, although it kind of bogged down a few years ago. Maybe I should revive it <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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