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="clearstream" data-source="post: 8398173" data-attributes="member: 71699">That is accurate. Seeing as the DM is the source of truth about the game world, players are forced to trust them. The DM is the accurate authority on their world, and that is not a matter of realism. In cases where their world is based on another person's fiction - say if one were to DM a campaign set in EarthSea - then it is their EarthSea. Not Le Guin's.I believe you overstate the prep requirement (or maybe more accurately, those you cite do). A crucial skill to DM this style of play is your ability to develop your world rapidly on the fly in whatever direction your play takes you. And to do that in way that feels plausible and consistent (within the terms of your world.) It is that freedom - to go rapidly in any direction - that I believe is one of the most exciting draws of this play style for players. I read tactical infinity and actually that falls short. Players embrace limits on solutions available to them comfortably. Each statement they make about their character, amounts to a statement of the infinity of things that they will do less well... all the ways in which they will not be able to solve their problems. What I see excites players is the infinity of the world itself, where they can go in it, and of course what they can do in it. Perhaps that is what the writer intended?Prep can be light, in a way, or it can be everything you've ever read, in another way. It's a kind of quickfire authorship with the participation of players... actually in response to the players. You ideally enter a state of flow where you simply know what must be the answer to any question about your world. What lies East? Who is this person beholden to? There are a few tricks of course, such as littering the world with seeds that you will back-fill later. That's part of what is exciting for a DM - the same thing Tolkien identified - 'discovering' your world. Things that feel to you like they were always there, just waiting for you to notice them.You might recall that I'm an advocate for immersion. By which I mean entering the world as a real place. Rules are always incomplete (generally, technically, and philosophically.) Thus rules can only ever work to fail to capture what is real in your world. Our brains have this amazing ability to gloss over blank spaces. To assume that something is drawn in where there is in truth nothing. I think this style of play leans on that ability to do a great deal with what is unsaid. Through avoiding committing to rules, an illusion of realism is sustained.</blockquote>

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