Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8167798">This doesn't sound too different from what I do in practice. The difference may just be the tools we draw on. For example all the stuff about debts, the players would just make notes about that, I would make notes about that, as it comes up. And if they wanted to call in a favor, they would go to that person or group and call it in (and we'd all essentially be working from memory and our notes of what happened-----in a long, long campaign, those notes might be very important). I don't give the players anything to interface with though. Sometimes I will draw rough sketch maps of setting for them, of cities, etc. But for the most part it is all theater of the mind. There may be one point of difference worth examining here, and I might be wrong about it. The way I see some people describing things, we may deal with specificity differently, in that specifics in the setting come first, always. And this is something that has made using certain tools or models difficult (especially those that abstract things). Any mechanics or tools we draw on are in service to those specifics. And OSR GMs and Sandbox GMs are very big into having tools. But they are more like optional levers for the GM to draw on more than anything else. As an example of how specifics can make procedures and tools unhinge a bit, whenever I run my crime campaigns I always tried to make a crime subsystem (with rolls for committing crimes, having a steady flow of cash from ongoing rackets, etc). For like 20 percent of players in my groups that isn't a problem. They can let a racket burn in the background and just leave it to weekly or monthly rolls. But with a lot of old school players and a lot of players who like direct setting interaction (which always seems to be like 80% of my group) those kinds of tools break down because want to micromanage their rackets (where instead of being able to abstract it to a monthly amount, I am almost forced to deal with specific moments of them earning through the racket: i.e.. This happened so much, I just gave up on using my crime subsystems (these are actually still in my mafia RPG books, but I stopped using them myself long ago).</blockquote>

Verification