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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6732887" data-attributes="member: 42582">It's not a secret, and I've posted about it often enough.I discovered my preferred approach to GMing and play more generally around 1986, GMing Oriental Adventures. The Forge didn't revolutionise my play. It did give me useful tools for analysing my play. And, as I've posted in this thread, it was helpful for resolving some practical issues in running Rolemaster. Some of those techniques are what informs the design of Burning Wheel, which combines 80s-style heavy process sim (infinitely long skill lists, lots of derived attributes playing various baroque mechanical roles, a combat system with active defences, hit location, wound penalties, etc) with indie-style system elements to help drive character-and-situation based play.Rolemaster has the process sim elements that breathe life into character and situation, but lacks the system elements. Which, in my experience, can cause some problems. (Eg when following the mechanical details of framing and resolving a situation starts to lead the experience at the table away from what was significant about the characters and situation into mere minutiae.) The Forge essays helped me identify in a clear way what was going on with some of this, and then to handle it.I don't really know what you're talking about here. I certainly don't know what you have in mind by a "dungeon backstory". I don't use many dungeons, and the backstory beyond some initial framing is generally developed during play.But even in this thread I've made it clear that my game is not fully no-myth. Eg in my BW game we have the GH maps.Many things are matters of degree. The default approach to GMing on ENworld is heavy world-building. (Perhaps by proxy - using a published campaign setting.) The default assumption is that the richer and more developed the GM's world is in advance of play, the better the game.My best experiences come from the opposite approach: very light worldbuilding (eg in my BW game we have the GH maps, and not much else prior to play), and developing the world through play.Yes. I know all this. I'm not confused about how you run your game. All I'm saying is that that is not my preferred approach, because of the way it prioritises the GM's concerns and preferences in respect of the fiction.For me, the key concern in play is not so much the freedom or power enjoyed by the PCs, as the freedom and power enjoyed by the players. In your game the PCs are free to do what they want, but subject to what exists in the gameworld. What I am talking about is the way the gameworld is created.Now if your sandbox is in fact a game in which the GM generates content more-or-less in the course of play, in response to player-expressed cues and interests, it's probably no different from how I run my game. But that doesn't seem to me to be what you're describing (eg because you're describing a gameworld which has a whole lot of stuff going on that is not part of the actual events of playing the game).</blockquote>

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