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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 9637543">Unfortunately it has been a long day so I may not get to every post (I see I have a number of notifications) This is a long topic and who you ask will likely answer in different ways (as describing things as situational adventures is on the niche side). But I see situational GMing as an approach that developed parallel to sandbox and then kind of merged with it a bit (to the point that few people make this distinction anymore). But importantly a sandbox is a premise where you have a pretty sizable area where the conceit is the players can explore wherever they want. You are also generally expected to prep a lot prior to start of play (i would call sandboxes heavy prep before the campaign but generally light once the campaign gets going). Situational GMing is much lighter on prep. You prep what you need and if you notice in the blog the implication is you prep a scenario, not a bunch of scenarios to pick from. You can take this and port it into sandbox and many do, so I think the distinction is not really that strong these days. But what clash is talking about there is much closer in my view to living adventures, which are more about the GM responding to the energy of the players and doing things through NPCs and groups (again if you look at clash's post there is a strong emphasis on NPCs and group dynamics). Also like Clash says, this isn't meant to be some genius or new notion, it is how a lot of people have run games.The way I would describe a situation adventure is you prep a scenario with a lot of potential energy and drop the players in and see what happens (you don't have any real plan beyond lets see where this goes once the players enter in and start interacting with people). And there is a mindset of the GM really trying to run NPCs and groups as authentically as he can (really focusing on what this particular NPC wants, not where the adventure ought to go). But as you can see there is a lot of cross-over with sandbox (especially as discussions about sandbox refined more and more over the course of the OSR). But the real point is a lot of us who came into sandbox, were really coming in from a slightly different perspective grounded in the things Clash talks about in that post. I am having a little trouble today putting this into words so I will happily answer any questions if things are unclear (also I haven't talked about situational adventures in a while so I am finding myself having to summon up some old memories here) I don't know that there is one. I first encountered the term situational adventures/situational GMing with that clash post (and I think around the same time or soon after I saw the alexandrian post) and I started talking with Clash online, because I felt what he wrote was how I ran games. And how I ran games was just what I called a living adventure. Again this comes from the Feast of Goblyns module where there is a section on something called wandering major encounters. It talks about treating NPCs as active forces in the adventures (something that comes from the original Ravenloft module really). But he put it better here in my opinion and gave you a bunch of NPCs to do this with. The basic idea was whatever antagonizing forces are operating, those are live pieces on the board, and the GM should run them according to their goals, their abilities, etc. And in response to what the players do. The designer, Blake Mobley, ended this section with a kind of dramatic "They live!" flourish. Now none of this is anything super unusual. GMs do this. He just kind of put it in a language that made sense to me, and this was the first time modules actually started coming alive. The adventure itself has a kind of planned out structure, but once I started fiddling with this 'live' concept, I realized my adventures were much more dynamic and organic. To answer this again, I am not sure there is a big difference, just that living adventure is a term I used, and situational adventure is a term Clash Bowley used (I don't know that he invented it or anything, this is just where I first encountered that language). So any difference is probably more a reflection of what I would do, or he would do. I'd have to really sit down and assess his style versus mine (and it has been a while since I have chatted with him on these so I don't want to assume anything here: wouldn't want to put words in his mouth). This gets muddled because as you probably know, living world was something that was being used to describe sandbox play to (and I would say that definitely includes things like NPCs being free to move around, it also includes things like having the world in motion, where events occur as they might in a real world----so it is a slightly different concept). When I did the adventure Landlord's Daughter for example for Colonial Gothic, I called that a Living Adventure. It is definitely not a sandbox. It is more of a mystery horror scenario with a countdown threat. Also I am sure other people use "living adventure" as a term and maybe even use it in slightly different ways, so it probably even more muddled. I guess what I really meant here was a non-sandbox adventure very easily. You can simply have a bunch of ongoing situations in a sandbox. And living adventure ties in very smoothly with the living world concept. Like I said you aren't reinventing the wheel here, you are really more emphasizing certain aspects of GMing. If I want to do a living adventure in a sandbox, I could easily have a location that is a haunted house even a question adventure, so long as the NPCs involved have the flexibility to respond to things the players do and take the adventure in different directions as a result. With  a living adventure the focus is really about bringing the NPCs and the groups operating in the world to life. So it isn't anything you couldn't already do in an existing RPG. Mobely was just placing the emphasis on this and also telling the GM, you don't have to be a slave for example to the encounter table, you can have an NPC take initiative and send a hit squad after them or try to arrange a meeting with the party and work out an agreement (and if they are untrustworthy they might be trying to stage an ambush). You can also have NPCs seek out other people in the setting to try to help them (that the sort of thing Mobley seemed to have in mind, was not just you running NPCs as individuals but realizing they fit into a broader social fabric)</blockquote>

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