robertsconley
Hero
First, I want to say I appreciate the way you wrote your response. I think it advances the conversation and raises some good points.
While I wouldn’t characterize what we’re doing as fundamentally different, because there’s considerable overlap in techniques, I will agree that BW, PbtA, FitD and my living sandbox all have distinct play styles. So distinct that BW, PbtA, and FitD, created their own niches and families of games. My Living World sandbox campaign uses some of the same techniques but applies them in different ways toward different goals.
That said, I do still disagree with you on a few points.
Let me start with the quote from Baker and his example of a character in Thatcher’s London:
Here is my side of the fence. Unlike my actual play, this is an account of what happened in the campaign. How it played out was similar to the actual play account, mostly first-person roleplaying, with some descriptions, combat resolutions, and skill checks.
Imagine a medieval fantasy city of stone walls and thatched buildings, teeming with people going about their daily lives. Imagine a young Viking prince, living in exile in that city with his aged aunt, a prince who has little memory of his father or his homeland.
That’s Zahkhar. He was the player character in a Majestic Wilderlands campaign I ran from June 2022 to June 2023. His father had been King of Ossary, a Viking kingdom on the Padizan Peninsula. That kingdom fell after his father was captured in battle by Prince Artos of Nomar. Zahkhar’s aunt fled with him and his sister to the City-State to live in exile.
Zahkhar was 18 when the campaign began. The player, Greg, said during pre-game, “I want to play a young exiled Viking prince.” That was it. No elaborate backstory, just that one sentence. But I had a situation on hand that fit perfectly, so I slotted him into it.
From there, we played week to week. Early on, Zahkhar was just a hellion, competing in City-State’s arena, trying to make a name for himself. He even won a few tournaments. Then his aunt was murdered, his sister wounded, and he survived an assassination attempt ordered by his uncle, his father’s brother and the man who is his rival for the throne of Ossary. That changed how Greg played him. He focused on tracking his uncle down.
Late in the campaign, they succeeded. Zahkhar killed his uncle on the island of Croy with the help of his companions. Along the way, they befriended a young noble named Constans of Tegal, the secret bastard son of Prince Artos and the last legitimate heir to Nomar. Zahkhar helped Constans assemble an army and prepare to reclaim his birthright.
Then came the twist. Morgana, a powerful NPC magic-user, revealed to Zahkhar that Constans planned to crown himself Prince of Nomar, the very realm that had conquered Ossary, Zahkhar’s homeland. Greg didn’t say much out of character. He never gave a belief statement or wrote a monologue. But in play, his character began to shift.
They boarded a ship for Nomar. Zahkhar, quietly, made his move. During the voyage, he and the party assassinated Constans. It wasn’t discussed beforehand. Greg never told me his intent. He just did it, because it made sense to Zahkhar, in the moment. Afterward, he told me: “It was time. That’s what he would have done.”
To be clear, none of this was pre-scripted. I wasn’t framing scenes to test Zahkhar’s beliefs. I didn’t need to. The world kept moving. The NPCs had their own plans. Zahkhar had to respond. And the weight of those responses changed the character.
This all happened without any explicit mechanics for “beliefs,” “flags,” or “arcs.” And yet, there was an arc. A good one. A young exile became a killer. A survivor. A man poised to reclaim his kingdom.
I didn’t ask Greg to spell out his motivations. I just made sure he had the information he needed to act, and then I let the world push back. That’s the difference in my Living World sandbox: players act, and the world responds. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes with a sword.
So while our methods are different, I don’t think mine are lesser. I’d argue they’re just as capable of producing rich, character-driven campaigns with long arcs and deep emotional turns. Not because the players and I planned them, but because the world has continuity, pressure builds, and players rise (or fall) in response.
In conclusion:
Yes, the systems we’re discussing use very different methods and produce a different feel at the table. But they are equal in their ability to support deeply realized characters, to generate meaningful arcs, and to manage the scale needed to bring those arcs to life.
They don’t all look the same in structure. They don’t all need beliefs or moves or flags. But they all, in their own way, can carry the weight of campaign play, and do so with integrity, continuity, and consequence.
The whole situation involving Zahkhar’s father, Artos, and Constans was the result of an earlier campaign I ran and recounted on blog. I linked to this campaign before, the Nomar Campaign. That campaign began in 2012, ten years before the campaign with Zahkhar, and laid much of the groundwork. Since then, I’ve run three other Majestic Wilderlands campaigns: two using D&D 5e and one with my Majestic Fantasy rules. As I updated my campaign notes over the years, I continued to advance the situation in Nomar, along with other regions. One of those notes was the projected year of Artos’s death.
When Greg decided to play a young exiled Viking prince in 2022, I realized my campaign’s "present day" was now close to that point. So I set the campaign’s start date accordingly, timed so that Artos was likely to die during the course of play.
If the assassination attempt against Zahkhar had gone differently… if Greg had chosen not to avenge his aunt… or if any number of other events, some entirely unrelated to Zahkhar’s situation, had gone a different way, then Zahkhar wouldn’t have ended up in Croy. Constans would have reached Nomar and fought his cousin Modran for the crown.
But the butterflies flapped their wings just so, and the events I’ve described came to pass..
