Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8254649" data-attributes="member: 42582">Here is a quote of the post in which, in this thread, I used the phrase "playing to find out what happens in the GM's notes". That post occurred on page 17 of the thread ie some hundreds of posts subsequent to the OP.As you can see, it was a response to another poster - [USER=6698278]@Emerikol[/USER] - describing him and RPGers like him as "explorers" who "want to learn about a new world and explore it".So he was the one who introduced the idea of learning or finding out as a point of play. What I did was clarify what is actually being learned: given that the "world" being "explored" is purely imaginary, what is actually being learned is what the GM has made up and written down in his/her notes. I even described the process of play that will generate this learning.Now as I already posted, distinguishing between what Emerikol describes, and AP play, isn't a high priority for me. But one obvious difference between them is that the content of the notes is different. In sandbox play the notes are primarily guidebook-type notes: the sort of stuff one would find in a Lonely Planet. There may be a reference to future events, but that is to be understood as a way of pointing to a present disposition of some person or place in the fiction (a murder that will occur; a volcano that will erupt) which is apt to be thwarted if the players declare the right sorts of actions for their PCs (eg they apprehend the murderer first; they use magic to calm the volcano).In an AP, on the other hand, the notes are mostly a series of events laid out in a time sequence. So references to future events aren't just references to present dispositions but to things that will happen. Because of the way action declarations typically work in RPGing - ie they have a "temporal" aspect to them of generating things that happen next - there is some tension between APs of this sort and taking player action declarations seriously. That is why APs are full of advice to GMs about how to disregard or negate the effects of action declarations, like if the PCs apprehend person X then person Y will commit the murder or if the PCs find a way to calm the volcano, Imix himself turns up and makes it erupt.Those are differences in the content of the notes, and also differences of GM technique.</blockquote>

Verification