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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6108065" data-attributes="member: 4937">It occurs to me that I keep using my own personal language to describe things and it might not always be clear what I mean, in particular I've used for about the third time the term 'open world' so I better define what I mean by that.I intend the term to refer to a style of campaign that has particular features that stand in contrast to the 'Dungeon World' of Gygaxian play.  It's not a judgment.  It's not an agenda.  It's not GNS.  Rather, it refers to features of preparation and resolution that tend to produce a consistant experience between tables regardless of agenda.  I've enjoyed 'Open World' campaigns, and IME probably everyone does open world scene framing from time to time.In open world play, there is a tendency to do low physical preperation and run the game without tactical level maps or prior physical description of place.  1) The most salient feature is that most encounters occur outdoors and there are few dungeons.   Often the campaign is urban focused, with most battles seeming to occur in the streets but quite often they experience a lot of planar travel, teleportation, and so forth as well (arguably forcing low physical preperation).  Very rarely are open worlds actually wilderness focused, although I guess they could be and I just haven't been in that campaign.  The reason I started thinking of these things as 'open' is that most of the time there are no walls that actually effect tactical play.  All the walls are far enough away, all the battlefields large enough, that there aren't constraints on movement and to the extent that there could be constraints on movement, they aren't tracked.  Terrain that battles tend to take place on tend to be flat and effectively featureless.  If tactical distance is tracked at all, it's loosely.  If terrain is tracked at all it's bound to the location of an NPC.  Travel is almost always hand waved.  Even dungeons when they appear tend to behave according to these rules, and there is no real way of knowing or interest in what may be adjacent to the field of play.  In other words, for the most part there aren't 'rooms' or 'corridors'.  At a metalevel you can think of all the activity occuring on a single stage where the director changes the backdrops between scenes or acts in the play.  If the players indicate their intention to move, they just engage in the fiction of leaving stage right and entering stage left while the backdrops and props are shuffled.2) Exploration in the normal sense isn't part of the agenda of play.  Players can still discover new things, but they don't usually do so by engaging in activities that correspond to a physical process of exploration.  For example, most travel might be initiated by recieving clues or permission from NPCs who reveal to the players the existence of another 'scene' they can participate in.  The details of getting there are rarely important.   Keep in mind that this lack of focus on travel though doesn't imply that the game isn't simulationist or any other sort of game.  Scenes themselves may be resolved in very simulationist ways or the over all experience of play might be a series of tactical mini-games, it's just that tactics will tend to focus on the 'weapons' (player abilities) side of the equation rather than on 'terrain' (the environment).  You just won't see a lot of using choke points to hold off large numbers of enemies, or tactical withdraws to improve your fighting position or attempting to take the high ground or putting difficult terrain between yourself and a foe, or whatever.   Contrast with Gygaxian where (aside from spells) player abilities are very limited and generic and so tactics focus heavily on the environment side of the equation (if at all).3) Play tends to be high drama.  Open world games tend to focus on political intrigue, the agendas of powerful factions, and saving the world (or at least your rather large corner of it).   Not having to worry about details, indeed not being able to worry about details, tends to push play in the direction of big awe inspiring backdrops (even if they are seldom interacted with) and big stakes. Occasionally I've seen campaigns that bounce back and forth between open and dungeon play.  The DL campaign as written is intended do this especially early in its trajectory, interspacing the big high drama of the narrative with classical dungeon crawls.</blockquote>

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