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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 9332814" data-attributes="member: 85870">Very much this. But man oh man, was I extrapolating to keep the "living world" alive and running. I was a darn good extrapolator. I could extrapolate upon extrapolated extrapolations, then extrapolate some more on the extrapolated extrapolated extrapolations.And for a long while -- well over a year -- everything just sort of hummed along in my homebrew Savage Worlds fantasy campaign setting, people were having fun, I was having fun, the world felt "alive" and "vigorous" and "full of mystery and enchantment."And then somewhere around month 14 or 15, it changed. The extrapolations were no longer maintaining full fidelity to previous events, because, how could they? Unless I was willing to record in odious detail every possible thing that transpired during play, of course gaps in the details would appear. Suddenly an NPC may have been in one place instead of another, because "Otherwise, how did he/she manage to steer events in a city 400 miles away?" I had to suddenly invent new NPCs retroactively, because there's no way the main "baddie" could be orchestrating absolutely everything.And then the question began to arise, "How is this all going to end? What's the real end-game?"Do we just keep running this forever with different villains and quests? Is there supposed to be "an ending to the story," or is that something I'm not supposed to impose? How do I keep events moving forward as if they are a "living world," but now I'm facing immense pressure to bring about a "satisfying conclusion" to the PCs efforts, to move toward a "story ending." And because of that, I was then flooded with all these ideas of how things could/would/should end, but if I implemented any of them or enforced any of them as "hidden backstory," would it have changed player perceptions of the outcome and campaign as a whole?And then the cognitive dissonance started setting in---this isn't a "living world." It's a mish-mash of stuff I made up 2-5 years ago, extrapolated stuff I made up based on what we did during play, stuff I'm making up now out of whole cloth (with additional extrapolated made up stuff), and stuff that I may or may not be making up in play tomorrow when we get together again.Very true, and I really appreciate what Ironsworn and Starforged have unlocked for me as a GM. So much more freedom to play and GM in a different way.But I'm also very much encouraged by some things I read recently from Eero Tuovinen, which is that it's okay to embrace the GM role as "Story Hour" provider for trad play, as long as you as GM are doing the work to create a "story" structure worth playing through.[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.arkenstonepublishing.net/isabout/2020/05/14/observations-on-gns-simulationism/[/URL]If it's agreed upon with you and your players that you're largely going to be playing through elements of a "structured story" together---and what else is module and/or adventure path play than this?---that you and your players are along for the ride together, and largely understand the structures and limits of what the entails.And this all made sense. When I created story structures worth playing, the game was great. The best, most functional parts of my trad Savage Worlds GM-ing were the parts where I had very carefully aligned NPCs, "fronts", factions, geography, and current PC objectives to come together.And the parts where I was mostly "slumming it," playing ad hoc, lesser preparation segments inevitably came across as bland and relatively tensionless.For a long time after that Savage Worlds campaign finished, I felt like I never wanted to run a "trad" campaign again, because I felt like I would GM-ing under false pretense. But Eero's essay has just recently given me a renewed sense of appreciation for trad GM-ing. Like, I wasn't doing anything wrong, I was simply playing the game as largely enforced by the boundaries of "traditional" RPG game style, and that the pursuit of "worthy storytelling" through "living world extrapolation" isn't a bad thing. It's just not going to lead to other specific gameplay "happenings" (read: strong character-driven intent, protagonism, and stakes becoming a broader part of play). As long as I'm good with that tradeoff, all is well.</blockquote>

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