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<blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 8238995" data-attributes="member: 5142">I have read through your posts, and I'm thankful for all that you posted clarifying your approach. I feel that we are approaching some progress in our discussion, which is always welcome. Some of my own personal takes to those posts have already been said by [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER], so I would mostly be repeating things. This is a fairly nice summation of the underlying process though. However, here this does make it metaphorically sound like &quot;GM as spirit medium&quot; or &quot;GM as telephone operator.&quot; In order to engage the world, the players are primarily engaging the GM in order to decipher and interact with the apparitional fiction. IMO, this post also shows that there is a difference between &quot;GM as spirit medium&quot; who prioritizes a living world and one who does not. Also, this somewhat comes across as &quot;playing to discover what the GM is thinking,&quot; where &quot;playing to discover the world&quot; for players requires first &quot;playing the GM,&quot; which is a situation I think nearly all of us have experienced firsthand. [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]'s whole &quot;Setting Solitaire&quot; analogy does seem apt. A lot of sandbox games, including Kevin Crawford's fantastic distillation thereof, focus on providing the GM with tools to help support their role in generating a sandbox campaign. When we look at what those tools are doing, many of those tools are a lot about generating/running kingdoms, factions, and NPCs in the background of and (at least partially) independent of the PCs. The PCs may affect through their actions which things get generated by the GM first, but the GM is still running other setting programs in the background until the PCs decide to engage them. This also seems fairly contingent with what [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER]'s approach where the setting is much bigger than and self-reliant from the PCs.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Aldarc, post: 8238995, member: 5142"] I have read through your posts, and I'm thankful for all that you posted clarifying your approach. I feel that we are approaching some progress in our discussion, which is always welcome. Some of my own personal takes to those posts have already been said by [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER], so I would mostly be repeating things. This is a fairly nice summation of the underlying process though. However, here this does make it metaphorically sound like "GM as spirit medium" or "GM as telephone operator." In order to engage the world, the players are primarily engaging the GM in order to decipher and interact with the apparitional fiction. IMO, this post also shows that there is a difference between "GM as spirit medium" who prioritizes a living world and one who does not. Also, this somewhat comes across as "playing to discover what the GM is thinking," where "playing to discover the world" for players requires first "playing the GM," which is a situation I think nearly all of us have experienced firsthand. [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]'s whole "Setting Solitaire" analogy does seem apt. A lot of sandbox games, including Kevin Crawford's fantastic distillation thereof, focus on providing the GM with tools to help support their role in generating a sandbox campaign. When we look at what those tools are doing, many of those tools are a lot about generating/running kingdoms, factions, and NPCs in the background of and (at least partially) independent of the PCs. The PCs may affect through their actions which things get generated by the GM first, but the GM is still running other setting programs in the background until the PCs decide to engage them. This also seems fairly contingent with what [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER]'s approach where the setting is much bigger than and self-reliant from the PCs. [/QUOTE]

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