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="pemerton" data-source="post: 7075165" data-attributes="member: 42582">In that case our experiences differ. I've never found (as a player or GM) that "tracking situations out of sight of the players" produces a better game than the GM narrating the unfolding situation in a way that responds to the dynamics and concerns of the actual play at the table.I posted an example some way upthread in a reply to [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] (for me, <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?531049-Judgement-calls-vs-quot-railroading-quot/page17&p=7057574&viewfull=1#post7057574" target="_blank">it's post 298</a>, but may not be the same for you), of the PCs in my main 4e game returning to the underdark after various excursions on the Abyss. I narrated the changes they noticed: roiling chaos due to the death of Torog; the duergar a somewhat destroyed society (as on of the PCs had, far earlier, predicted - because the same thing had happened to his devil-worshipping people, the tieflings) who were easily led by the PCs (somewhat against the PCs' better judgement) to through their lot in with the renegade archdevil Levistus; the drow mad and purposeless following the death of Lolth, but ready to be led back to the surface of the world (as had been the aspiration of one of the PCs since he was introduced into the game at 3rd level).A very different example arose out of the 18-month break period in the OP game, that I mentioned to Lanefan not too far upthread: the PCs spent 18 months in a ruined tower in the Abor-Alz, training, in one case healing, and in a couple of other cases eking out a living by selling cheap magical charms and doing minor mending works for the local hillfolk. In this time, their only real contact with the outside world was via a caravn of elven traders (whom they met as a result of the player of the elven princess succeeding at a Circles check) - and among the news from the elves was that the Gynarch of Hardby had become engaged to marry the leader of another PC's sorcerous cabal. Needless to say, the PCs have a generally poor relationship with that individual, and their last interaction with him had been killing his familiar when it was spying on them in the Bright Desert.In both cases these are changes in the situation which establish the "living, breathing" world, without being the result of behind-the-scenes tracking.</blockquote>

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