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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6589979" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION]'s point is that we can extend this to every possible common situation which will now and then present some interest to the players. In fact in a real living world we are bombarded all day with a myriad of information. Today I've seen 1000's of cars, 100's of people, overheard 10 different conversations, talked to several people, heard a bunch of stuff on the radio, and observed a vast number of other rather mundane and trivial facts. Of course I am a pretty mundane person living in a mundane world, I'm not looking for things that are out of the ordinary or interested in getting into anyone else's business as a general rule. What if I was an adventurer? Every day I hang around in streets and alleys and shops, frequent bars and taverns, talk to people both familiar and unfamiliar, and all in the course of some sort of agenda, while probably watching out for possible enemies, rivals, allies, etc. Clearly there is simply no way, not even close to any way, to reproduce the full texture and depth of life in anything but the most 'spartan' world. ALL YOU CAN DO is deal with the actually interesting cases, or at least some very small representative subset of possibly interesting cases, as Balesir has just outlined. In fact one of the primary difficulties with executing intrigue type plotlines is just the very fact that every single time the DM mentions someone or some fact the PCs MUST necessarily take it as significant. If it really isn't then they've become fixated on irrelevant trivia (a common pitfall in this sort of play), and if it is then clearly its had a big flag put on it saying so. The best you can do is fall back on the Perception and related skills, but then you run into the same issue as the left/right choice where if the PCs fail a Perception check then the story goes in a less interesting direction. I don't think that framed play necessarily by itself solves all of this, and I understand the position that maybe it doesn't ALWAYS need to be solved, but I've seen a lot of sandbox games flounder on just this issue. I've watched several of them sink because the DM simply couldn't get anything interesting to happen at the table (or conversely the DM finally became so leading that the game lacked player engagement). Invariably these games quickly improve vastly as soon as someone takes charge and starts to really engage the players. I've taken over a couple groups like this and made this turnaround happen. Anyway, I just noted the use of 'Naturalist' as a replacement for 'Simulationist'. I kinda like it, it seems like at least more of a reachable and definable goal.</blockquote>

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