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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 8239025" data-attributes="member: 85555">And I am a fan of Crawford as well. Most sandbox GMs are (even those who take different approaches than he does). His material is widely respected for a reason. But he also talks about living worlds in Stars without Number:[ATTACH=full]135117[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]135118[/ATTACH]The only area where I'd quibble, at least form an underlying assumption in this section and the one that comes before it, I think sandboxes and living worlds can have genre conventions baked into them. The world doesn't have to be purely run on what I'd call "History logic" or "game of thrones" logic, it can be run on Seven Deadly Venoms logic, or Goodfellas logic. I always like to talk about establishing what franchise the players are in for example. I do agree though on having the NPCs act when they'd act, rather than a dramatically appropriate time (even when I am doing genre stuff: you can see that kind of thinking in the boxes tracking how many days before Feast Beetle Li kills the abductee and in the boxes tracking how long before she drops the beetles on the PCs themselves-----part of the reason for doing this is to make sure I am not tempted to have a final moment rescue (the possibility is there, but more likely the players arrive well before or well after). And the one part here I might actively disagree with, though it has been a while since I've read this whole section so I might simply be misunderstanding his point, is NPCs acting without reference to what the PCs are doing or have done. I don't think he intends this meaning, though he may, but that doesn't seem to leave as much room for the NPC to be responding to actions the players are taking and to adjust their plans accordingly. For example I often pay a lot of attention to intelligence gathering done by NPCs. An NPC who is dealing with the party, very likely will send people to follow them, or use an information network to acquire info about them. And if any of that is done, I will actively be tracking how that is happening (in order to give the players a fair shake: so they might potentially see someone following them, or might hear someone has been asking about them). I doubt Crawford is against this. But I think that phrasing might suggest something more like the setting solitaire Manbearcat talked about, that I don't think living world is meant to capture (I can at least say for me, the player characters, their actions, and the synergy that creates with NPCs are very important in a living world)</blockquote>

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