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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8242984" data-attributes="member: 6785785">Hey, kumbaya everybody!I agree it was a great post. I think that it highlights some of the breakdown earlier in the thread, about terms and how they are used. To me, the idea of a "Living World" is a goal. That's the result you want. There are different means of getting there, and they can be quite different, and so I think that's part of why the term is a bit fraught. However, there are plenty of people who use it not as a goal, but as a quick descriptor of how they play, based on many elements commonly found to produce that goal. They've essentially taken a noun and turned it into a verb. And I think that's fine in a casual way. But I think in a discussion like this, it creates more problems than it's worth because you can have two radically different games both aimed at portraying a Living World, that use entirely different techniques. It would be like taking the goal of "Fun" and then referencing it as the technique. "I tend to take a Fun approach to GMing". Hey, awesome.....but to anyone who is trying to understand how you make a game fun, it does nothing.Yeah, it's tricky.....because really, ultimately it's all artifice. And I've found this resistance to that idea, at times, where people can be reluctant to admit the mundane process in place of the effect it may have on them. And I know I've done this myself, for sure. I think a lot of long time gamers (and this is probably true of any hobby, though not universally so for any of them) have just internalized so many things about gaming and the processes involved that it can be hard to step back and examine things in a step by step manner, breaking things down into their most basic components. This is one of the reasons I've become really drawn to games that clearly describe a process or play loop with the expectation that it is to be applied as described. I just like that as a GM, and I like that it makes things so clear for players.So that's exactly the kind of thing I had in mind at the start of the post. One GM can be preparing an OSR style sandbox hexcrawl, with a mix of prepared locations and procedural generation using tables and the like. The PCs are to be newcomers to this area, with the goal to explore and maybe report back to some employer or patron. Maybe they've been tasked with mapping a frontier or similar. This GM wants to portray a living world for his players to explore through their PCs.Another GM could be preparing a no-myth game set in an industrial city, with factions competing for power and influence. The PCs are to be citizens of this city, and so they will have connections and obligations and goals based on that. The PCs will be working together to further their own goals while dealing with the other factions in the city. This GM also wants to portray a living world for the players to interact with. They both want a living world. The scenarios are different, the methods of GMing are different, perhaps the player input will be different....my examples are mostly absent mechanics, but even so, we can see there would be things that need to be handled differently. The biggest in my mind is the fact that the setting doesn't need to be discovered by both the players AND the characters....the characters will already have a good deal of knowledge about the setting. Perhaps the players will, too, but perhaps not. How to handle that seems to me to be one of the biggest factors to consider. These games will play differently, for sure, but the goal is largely the same.</blockquote>

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