Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crimson Longinus" data-source="post: 9421233" data-attributes="member: 7025508">I am not saying it is not measurable, just that if you measure it, for most games the result will be "eh, it's a mix." Different GMs certainly will have different emphasis, and there are some people who have very strong preference to push into one direction or another, but most don't. And not just because they have not given it thought, they might have, and concluded they don't like the extremes.Like there are HC narrativists that feel that everything that is framed should somehow be addressing and informed by the characters and then there are HC simulationists who think that the GM should be just completely neutral arbiter and the world should run like a clockwork without any consideration for who the characters might be. But most people do not fall in either of these camps. It is fine to say that the world can have established myth, may have things going on not directly related to the characters, and still, as the GM needs to make million choices and invent thousand things anyway, at least some of those should be tailored for the characters. Like in any story, some moments might about character development, and some might be more about problem solving, and perhaps sometimes it might be just about experiencing the world. And it's fine. More than fine in fact, to me it is preferable to just always being about the one thing, regardless of what that thing was.Thank you, that was genuinely nice to hear.So I am a tad perplexed by "upstaging." What does it mean for the setting to upstage the characters?  That certainly isn't an expression I'd use. But if the meaning is that the setting has its own objective reality, that it is not  just malleable and vague mush shaped to what feels most convenient/dramatic/thematic at the moment, then I get it. And I guess that is usually meant by "living, breathing world." It has reality, it has teeth. Certain things are in certain way, NPCs have personalities and agendas they will pursue, certain things are going to happen, and that's that.Both as GM and as player I prefer this to be the case to a certain extent. (Granted, as a player it is enough that it appears to me to be so. I don't really care if it is an illusion, as long as it is a convincing one.) Now I am not even remotely HC about this. Things can be defined in broad strokes, and the PCs obviously are "the main characters," we want cool, interesting, dramatic and thematically appropriate things happen to them, and there is plenty of leeway to make it so. But I do feel that there indeed is a point, if everything in the world seems to revolve the PCs, if everything is always conveniently related to them, things happen always in conveniently dramatic way, where it starts to feel artificial and false. And this doesn't even apply just to NPCs, in other storytelling too it is possible to lose the suspension of disbelief, if this happens.But the world is not there to compete with the PCs for attention. It exists to give context to their actions. It also exists to be immersed in, to help feeling like you're a person living in this fictional reality. So I don't get the upstaging. It is not a competition.</blockquote>

Verification