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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 8244379" data-attributes="member: 85555"><p>There is nothing wrong with clocks. There are similar tools one can use. But I think this misses what I mean by living world. You really have to focus on the NPCs and their goals, not the procedures you are using from time to time to simplify and abstract complicated elements of the living world. I may need from time to time, to resort to rolls or system to resolve things. But the important part of running a living world is being able to know how a given faction would act and respond when something occurs (for example if the players intercept opium shipments that a rival gang was going to buy and sell, the living part of the setting is seriously thinking what that gang and its leaders are going when they learn about the shipment being intercepted: what information do they gain access too, if and when they discover the players involvement what plans do they start formulating, what resources do they have to expend on this, etc). It isn't any extremely special, it is just taking these groups and the characters who make them up as seriously as the players take their characters (i.e. Lady 87 is now extremely pissed at the party and devotes her energy to destroying them: first thing she is going to to is send a squad of 7 elite fighters to kill them where they sleep). It is about being responsive. Tools and widgets are not as important as the mindset and as the guiding principles. A living world in this case begins with taking the character of Lady 87 as a real piece on the board and moving the piece under the real constraints she would face). Widgets, tools, etc these are all important, but they are going to vary from system to system, from GM to GM, etc. I for example use a lot of d10 dice pool rolls on the fly (assigning a dice pool rating to groups or people and rolling to see if they succeed at various tasks). Stuff like territory and completing missions or crimes, you can devise abstractions for. But for me personally I have found the specifics just come up too frequently and undermine my efforts at abstraction (so I have shifted to more of a book keeping approach: charting the shift of gang territory, charting revenue from various places they control, various rackets, etc basically dealing with things in real world terms)</p></blockquote><p></p>

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