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="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8440379" data-attributes="member: 16814">And they are....  This is where discussions like this always falter.  There's a statement made that things are wide open, but it's just left there without any support.I can say how the living sandboxed I played in worked.  The GM had a huge amount of setting backstory in their notes, much of it secret.  We played by taking actions seeking to explore this backstory and engage the secrets.  Actions were adjudicated by the GM first and foremost with respect to the backstory, and then, as needed, by invoking the system.  However, the outcome space was always tightly constrained by the GM's backstory notes and the GM's conception of what made sense here.  If the player wanted a clean success, but the GM felt that this wasn't warranted due to backstory/the GM's conceptions, the clean success was not ever on the table, rather some lesser success was.In short, even in a strong living world game where the world reacted to what the players did (we started wars, ended them, saved cities, started and stopped a demon invasion, got into a huge war with the Drow that embroiled much of the surface, lots of stuff we did had impacts on the gameworld) the primary means of action resolution was whatever the GM thought should happen.  Our GM was pretty good, and usually fair, so it was fun and we kept playing.  But the fact that we had a benevolent GM (he was personally quite abrasive, but ran a good game) didn't change the fact that resolution was entirely up to the GM and their backstory.  Players had little ability to actually enforce anything at any point unless the GM agreed.Now, that said, that game was immensely fun for me, and defined my play for more than a decade.  When I ran, I strove to imitate it quite often.  I can point to games I've run in the last few years that have elements of this in play -- the hexcrawl I ran about 3 years ago was strongly about being a "living world" sandbox, with player choices about things changing how the game played out.  But, I'm not fooling myself into thinking that this was the players having authority -- it was still very much me as GM extrapolating from backstory and resolutions as to what happened next.  This is violently different from how the game played out when I ran Blades for the same crew.  Or how the Blades game I playing in operates.</blockquote>

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