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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5975802" data-attributes="member: 54877">Even in the abstract, there are at least two different meanings of "living, breathing world," that I know of. There might be more:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The illusion that the world is living by having things occur outside the agency or reaction to the players.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Having the world react in plausible ways to changes or events that the players are aware of or even involved in.</li> </ul>Naturally, in the hands of a skillful DM, there is a lot of overlap in those two. So they might appear to be the same thing. The party raids an orc lair but don't clear it out. The orcs respond by getting reinforcements, but this takes time. On the way back, the party meets a rival adventuring group going to deal with the orcs, not realizing that the orcs have already been hit or have been reinforced. I've seen the illusion run separate as downstream "story hook" effects that were never bit by the players. Some bard show comes through town, maybe mainly as a bit of color. The players don't really interact with it at all, but they keep seeing it traveling, perhaps sometimes just ahead of the watch, after getting thrown out of another tavern. The more pure reaction is when you have things like orc tribes that have been quite stable for several months, in the face of supposed heavy adventuring by rival NPCs, but suddenly when the party goes in, the orcs are forming alliances. (It's tricky, because this one is even a plausible mix if you assume the rival NPCs weren't very successful. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />) That is, IMHO, the skillful living world is neither pure illusion nor pure reaction, but a mix where the two parts reinforce each other. Though you also have to be careful with that, if the players start treating every event as if they had some part in it, if only as the observer. There's a fine line between saying the "minstrel show only appeared because the players were passing through town," versus the "minstrel show only appeared because the characters were passing through town." The former is true enough, as there ain't no other players sitting around the table, but if there is suspicion that the latter is true, then there's a kink in the story thread somewhere. In the worst form, the players get paranoid, AKA "There's a living world, and we know this because it's breathing down our neck! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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