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!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8444725" data-attributes="member: 42582">Right. This really struck me, particularly when it was presented as a supposed point of convergence between a "living sandbox" and my BW experience.Am I right to think that the bolded "it" refers to 5e D&D as a whole, rather than just the combat minigame?Anyway, I think that what you describe here can become a frustrating play experience if the GM does not hold the fiction relatively constant. What counts as "relatively" constant is of course highly contextual. But the less constant the fiction, the less predictable the results of declaring actions that manipulate it, and the less that the players are solving puzzles as opposed to making implicit suggestions to the GM as to what they should say happens next.In Gygax's DMG, I think this sort of issue arises in his discussion of "living"/"reactive" dungeons (pp 104-5). If a GM really takes that advice to heart, then the player advice in the PHB (about scouting and planning an objective for the dungeon mission: pp 107. 109) becomes less useful and even unhelpful, because the knowledge obtained in today's mission will be rendered outdated and perhaps even irrelevant by the changes the GM makes between incursions. My own experience of GMing in a "living sandbox" style suggests that this is a significant risk for that approach. The game can be in danger of drifting into "living novel" territory.I think this is a reason why the puzzle-solving/fiction-manipulation approach is associated with rather simple or even corny/inane backstory setups. It's not that the author couldn't think of anything cleverer or more realistic: it's that they wanted to keep the fiction relatively constant so as to preserve the integrity of play.The last time I played in this sort of game, the puzzles were a series of interlocking prophecies connected to one (maybe multiple?) PCs (it's been a while, and it may be that we never got clear on that as players). Over time the impression grew that we were in a "living novel" game that was masquerading as something else. That didn't improve the play experience!</blockquote>

Verification