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="pemerton" data-source="post: 8440401" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've just read [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER]'s account of the living sandbox he played in. I think it drives home the central place of principles or, if one prefers, reasons, that determine how the GM extrapolates and adjudicates.Is the goal to present things as naturalistically as possible? To engage the players' hooks? Is the GM's prep a set of "tools" and other stuff to support improv? Or is it binding?I don't mean my categories in the previous paragraph to be exhaustive - they're just some of the more obvious possibilities. And even if the GM has authority over much of the shared fiction, the play experience that results can vary greatly depending on what principles the GM follows - or to use the alternative vocabularies, depending on the reasons that inform the GM's decision-making about the shared fiction.We can see this in [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER]'s "story now in the streets, right to dream in the sheets". That might involve the same degree of GM authority over the shared fiction as a procedural hexcrawl does, but is going to produce a pretty different play experience! For instance, it's going to support dramatic character development in a way that a hexcrawl won't.EDIT: Just to elaborate further on one aspect of this - when a GM posts that they treat their backstory as flexible and non-binding, is that a reason to think their game is more or less raildroad-y than it might otherwise be? The answer is - we can't tell from that statement alone! At the very minimum we'd need to know the way that flexible approach to prepared backstory affects their framing and their resolution. After all, a railroader has to be pretty flexible vis-a-vis backstory to keep things on the track (eg by generating new offscreen backstory that ensures things go the right way even if the PCs miss a vital clue, or kill a vital NPC too early, or whatever); and a "situation first" GM running a system like BW or AW has to be pretty flexible vis-a-vis their emerging ideas about backstory in order to present consequences and to feed into framing in the way those systems demand.</blockquote>

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