NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertsconley" data-source="post: 9639737" data-attributes="member: 13383">I want to clarify where I’m coming from when I talk about plausibility and how I handle timelines in a World in Motion campaign.Outside of gaming, I’ve read a fair amount of alternate history fiction and created a small number of stories myself*, and that background heavily influences how I think about campaign prep. In that community, plausibility is not hand-wavy or vague, it’s a serious standard of critique. A good alternate history story doesn’t just ask “what if X happened,” it works through the logical consequences of that divergence. It’s judged based on how well the outcomes follow from the point of departure, factoring in motivations, constraints, and secondary effects.So when I say that I use “plausible extrapolation” to update my game world, I don’t mean “whatever feels likely at the moment.” I mean I take stock of the current state of the setting, what the NPCs want, what constraints they face, what’s recently changed, and I think through how those forces would logically interact. That’s the first pass. Then I think of other plausible alternatives and do the same. That's the second pass. Where there is uncertainty, I use various randomizers. Then the final pass is a dice roll weighted by circumstance to decide which outcome becomes part of the timeline. The unused alternatives remain useful as they may describe possibilities that could be relevant depending on the choices of the PCs.Doing this part of the fun, I have with refereeing.  They help prevent me from forcing outcomes and keep me surprised at the results.When I build a timeline, it’s basically a structured flow of “what would likely happen if no one intervenes,” based on the world as it stands. It’s not fixed, it’s not authorial destiny. The players can derail it completely, and when they do, the new state becomes the basis for further extrapolation. It’s like an evolving simulation, not a plotline.This is why I push back on the use of “GM fiat” to describe this style. I get that, from a distance, it might seem like I’m just deciding what happens. But for me, and for many others who run games this way, it’s not about controlling the world. It’s about constructing a believable framework where outcomes emerge from prior causes, and the referee serves as the adjudicator of that framework, not its author. The creative fun for me comes from developing interesting situations given these constraints. This is not unlike the creative fun authors have when operating under the constraints of alt-history.If anything, it’s a different kind of structure from tools like clocks. Clocks formalize change into a visible mechanic. My timelines organize change into a sequence of projected events. Both are procedural. They just express it differently.*This two-parter is one of my favorites that I wrote. I even had people ask me if it really happened:<a href="https://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2009/11/travelling-alternate-vision-of-rpgs.html" target="_blank">Travelling: an alternate vision of RPGs</a><a href="https://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2009/11/travelling-continued-alternate-look-at.html" target="_blank">Travelling continued, An alternate look at RPGs</a></blockquote>

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