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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gorice" data-source="post: 8438044" data-attributes="member: 7032863">I've been reading this thread with great interest, since it relates directly to some problems/questions I've been having in play recently. I hope no-one minds if I make a couple of observations.Firstly, I think preferring purely in-universe ('diegetic', I guess) descriptions of things is a real and valid aesthetic preference. It's one I happen to share. The problem is, in D&D-style games, the diegetic and mechanical elements often have an extremely tenuous relationship to one another. In 5th edition D&D, an ogre and a troll are both 'large', savage humanoid creatures, but a troll has significantly more health and does much more damage than an ogre. Without mechanical or metagame information, there's no way for a group of players to properly assess the danger posed by a large humanoid.This has been a serious problem in my current 5e campaign. Recently, I almost killed the entire party when they blundered into a fight whose danger and stakes weren't properly telegraphed. At this point, I've decided to bite the bullet and start providing at least some rough mechanical information about enemies to my players. A better long-term solution might be not to play D&D or similar games.The discussion about sandboxes reminds me a bit of something people used to talk about regarding sandbox videogames, which is the distinction the Russian Formalists made between fable (the events of a story) and plot (the way information is revealed). In a 'dead' sandbox, the fable about how the skeleton king was sealed inside his necropolis is fixed, but the plot about how that information is uncovered, if at all, is in the hands of the players. This is clearly 'story before', but it is not in any way a railroad.In a 'living' sandbox (I have some experience running these), the environment is initially 'dead', but continues to evolve based on both its own logic (I guess this is 'story before') and the actions of the PCs (this may be 'story now'). To give an example: in one game, a player wanted their PC to commit a very public, incendiary crime in a city, and frame another faction for the crime. They rolled well, so the city authorities responded by cracking down on this faction, which led to a virtual civil war (though not in quite the way the player intended, due to some predetermined setting information the player was unaware of).Now, I really don't want to re-litigate any ancient arguments about threefold models or whatever, but I think the ambiguity (to me) of the example I just gave might be due to the fact that story now/story before/story after isn't the only goal of this style of play. Creating an immersive, life-like world is a central priority. Maybe I'm missing something important, though.</blockquote>

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