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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 7412738" data-attributes="member: 85555"><p>I think the reason people are so reluctant to describe things is because people keep twisting what we say. But just to lend another voice here. What it means literally in play for me, is I create the places, the people, the groups, and the customs, etc. When the players explore the game world they inevitably meet people, develop relationships, conflicts, connections, and produce a history in that environment. All that stuff is fuel going forward. And it is also there to help guide me when I have to invent new content on the fly. Part of my job is to react to what the players are doing and decide how the characters and setting respond. I try to handle the developments through NPCs and groups first, situations second. I try not to think in terms of the outcomes I want. Just to use a simple example, if the players stop investigating a local mystery all of a sudden and go visit Iron Temple Sect to help smooth over a conflict in the region, and murder the Iron Temple Master in his sleep out of the blue, I immediately am going to try to figure out what Iron Temple will do as an organization as soon as they discover the body (or better yet, what Iron Temple Master's son will do since he's the new leader). Now I have to look at who the allies of Iron Temple Sect are, consider the resources available to them, and any local martial heroes they might hire to handle the PCs. This is all a product of interaction between the GM and players. The only difference in our approach from what some of the people are describing here, is players affect the world through their characters, and the GM is mainly building off of world building stuff to carry things on. In this scenario, killing Iron Temple Master in his sleep wasn't something I had expected when the session started. And the players deviated from what I was probably expecting to be the focus of the session. The point is to respect their agency if they don't want to engage the mystery and to use the world building stuff to help handle whatever directions and actions they happen to take (and you can bring that to more dramatic and story focused places if you want, or less---whether your decisions are guided by dramatics, character motivations, physics of the world, story or a blend is entirely a GM preference thing).</p></blockquote><p></p>

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