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="robertsconley" data-source="post: 9652575" data-attributes="member: 13383">So first off, I appreciate the effort you put into offering a full explanation in this post and others. I’ll be happy to discuss the other points you raised later today, but I want to touch on this part first because I think it highlights why our approaches differ.From this and your previous posts, my understanding is that you prefer campaigns that are creative collaborations, where worldbuilding, themes, stories, characters, and the process of play are shared among everyone at the table. That makes sense to me, and your comment follows from that foundation.While we often use similar tools, like having a referee, or in the case of Torchbearer, random tables, you use these tools to support the creative goal of collaborative campaign creation. That creative goal is a fundamental choice that shapes everything else.Before I go further, I want to emphasize: we're talking about ways to have fun. And there are different ways of achieving fun, even if we’re all starting with the same basic tools, dice, pencil, and paper.In contrast, my creative goal with a living world sandbox campaign is not collaborative creation. Instead, I build worlds and invite players to visit them, to spend a portion of their hobby time living as characters in these worlds, having adventures. In this setup, I’m both a travel agent and the engine of the world. What I’m not is a tour guide. Some have criticized sandbox campaigns with strong referee authority by saying players feel like tourists watching the referee perform. But in my campaigns, I’m not a tour guide who leads them once they pass the gate. I’m the travel agent who built the destination, and the engine that makes the world respond logically to what they do as their characters once they arrive.And there’s one more thing I do: I make sure the world remembers what the players do. Visiting fantastic places is fun, but the secret sauce is running the same setting for the same genre over and over again, tracking the lasting consequences of player actions. As a result, the Majestic Wilderlands I run today isn’t just a product of my creativity; it’s the sum of my efforts and those of my players. That’s how I began this whole living world sandbox path, when my second AD&D campaign took place in the same Wilderlands as the first, shaped by the kingdoms and towers that the players in the first campaign had built.I hope this helps clarify why our approaches differ and that it adds clarity to our future discussions, especially when we talk about techniques and how they serve different creative goals. I’m always happy to explain how a specific technique follows from my approach and how it shapes interaction between the referee and players when my goals are a factor.</blockquote>

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