Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="prabe" data-source="post: 8253841" data-attributes="member: 7016699">That's part of it. It's also kinda an aide de memoire, so I can keep things consistent with what's gone before. My wife takes excellent notes, but I can and to distill those down so the relevant bits stay in my head.Also, anything that I'm specifically framing in probably come out of my prep for a given session.Other than not using published stuff (because I can never make the kind of sense I need to, to run it) I concur that our games are probably similar. There are certainly instances when I have no idea what the party will next pursue, or how, or where. I improvise a lot those times.There's certainly at least one feedback loop.The players have some influence on the setting, both as they write stuff in as backstory and as they do stuff. I think some of the stuff they've done has been more or less directly responding to the setting as presented to them. I think a lot of the stuff they've done has been mostly pursuing their own desires and needs.I think it's possible that their influence over the setting and my influence over their actions is roughly equal: They only get to influence the setting by backstory and by character action, and I only get to influence their actions by framing events in (and to an extent by defining the setting, which I think of as outside any individual campaign, if that makes sense).I definitely think the description was ... provocatively phrased. It's interesting that it's gotten maybe a little less provocative (at least for some of us (or for me anyway)).So ... I think I have to answer that question twice.The setting notes are to give me (and the players, if they bother to look at them) a sense of place. Maybe better phrased as a sense of context for the place the characters are in. They're on Urnod, which is part of Erkonin; here's where the biggest cities on Urnod are, and the biggest geographical features. They're in Embernook; here's where the neighborhoods are, and kinda what's in them, and here's an overview of the city. These are some of the oddities of Erkonin, overall. This is how clerics are organized on a world without gods.The session notes are there to help me keep straight what's going on right now. This is a situation which the PCs might encounter.  This is where the PCs are now in whatever they're doing. This is the opposition and what they're doing. These are the creatures and/or geographical oddities they might encounter along their travels. This is the treasure an enemy has.That's probably dividing the idea of "GM's notes" up more than you intended.I won't deny being less collaborative about creating the setting than ... someone running Dungeon World, so I'd probably phrase it in a way that didn't imply there was active collaborative worldbuilding going on, but there's definitely collaboration on a fiction happening, and I'd say my input as a GM is probably roughly equal to the players', overall.</blockquote>

Verification