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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nameless1" data-source="post: 5298960" data-attributes="member: 83379">This is not perfectly in line with the conversation as it has been going recently, but to respond a little to the OP, one thing that I often do that I forgot to mention upthread is to cite my inspirations for my games. I like to use movies so that people get a more concrete and often more visceral idea of what I am getting at. As a recent example, I had a short game that was a dungeon crawl/recover the McGuffin type game. I told my buddies that I wanted to run a fantasy themed Indiana Jones game. "Like we are sorta wizard/thief adventurers who raid ancient tombs to get artifacts?" "Yeah, think Tombraider/The Mummy/Indiana Jones, and I want Nazis as the main bad guys." "Can there be undead Nazis?" "Bitchin'!" Not as much situation generation, but it really set the tone. We all knew there would be no "meet in a tavern" and we all knew that we would be exploring some tombs. We knew that we would face some Nazi undead. We started out at the entrance to a tomb. We lost our first artifact. We spent the rest of the short campaign trying to get it back. From Nazi vampires. It was glorious. Completely unoriginal, but fun. We knew what to expect, we created characters to fit, and there was instant action. No waiting. Not a ton of real situation, and hardly a sandbox because we cared nothing for the rest of the world, but great fun. I was a very cohesive game, and was not at all linear, even though there was a "plot" (get back the Necronomicon (yeah, we ripped that off too) from the Nazi vampires), but we did not know how it would all unfold. There was no A->B->C->Win! It was A-> lots of other stuff that was improvised -> Win!Did I mention it was a fully improvised GMless game of The Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries? No GM so no chance of railroad, but also not at all a sandbox. It was driven by a common understanding of tropes and a shared interest in the theme.So point is, defining a set of influences for your campaign can help create a cohesive shared set of expectations, and can get players to engage with the story/world because they know the genre.(Yeah, I am pretty well agreeing with The Shaman here. I said upthread that I often prefer a situation based game, but at times, all that is necessary is a shared understanding of a strongly defined theme. Even this might have been helped with a tighter situation though. Maybe. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />)</blockquote>

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