D&D 5E What is a Living world forum Exactly?

[Sezarious]

Hi all. As it sounds. I'm fairly new to PBP play and find it to be quite fun. I'm trying to understand how exactly the living worlds function. Am I to understand that one thread could represent a shop that anyone from any campaign could visit? That another thread might be dedicated to a tavern that a volunteer DM keeps active? I'm just trying to get my head around it.

Thank you

Regards
Sez

 

[CanadienneBacon]

[MENTION=40413]GlassEye[/MENTION] is well-equipped to answer this question, as he's a Living Pathfinder Judge. And DM.

 

[GlassEye]

A living world is a persistent world setting. It is a version of organized play similar to Pathfinder Society or Adventurer's League. You create a character and can play that character from adventure to adventure, potentially with different DMs and different players, in the same setting. In our Pathfinder version here, we do have specific threads for a shop and an inn that cater to adventurers. Between adventures the PCs can buy and sell their treasure in the shop and sit in the inn and chat with other characters.

There are at least three different living worlds here on ENWorld: Living Pathfinder (LPF) which I am involved with, and also a 3.5 (LEW) and 4e version in their own worlds. There may be a fourth, but I'm not sure as I've only participated in LPF.

 

[Creamsteak]

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?60862-(Discussion)-General-Part-I

That was the first "Living" thread on this forum.

I don't actually know much about anything but the original LEW. There were a lot of different goals going on at once when that was the thing. It's one part shared world game. You could tie together multiple different games run by different GMs with different groups and different levels and have it all be part of one shared meta-plot. Another component was that it was persistent, so you could play a character in one game and when that game sort of died you could just carry the character over with its progress into any other game. Then there was a component of the characters being the movers and shakers of the setting. Bob the fighter might become the lord of a keep that is regularly visited by other adventurers.

I think that over time the different communities that cropped up served slightly different purposes and refined the concept in different ways.

 

[Sezarious]

Sounds awesome! Wow. Something to get into eventually.

 

[Creamsteak]

It is, conceptually, pretty awesome. I had a huge hiatus/absence, and LEW continued without me fairly well. People even had a Pathfinder and 4e community game.

I can't really communicate just how cool that is. A random late-night thought I had in my college years resulted in over a hundred-thousand posts over ten+ years.

I'm still a big fan of the idea conceptually, but it also is a LOT of work... give or take, depending on what aspects you want to focus on.

If at some point someone wanted to get the ball rolling on some 5e shared community game thing, I'd probably set aside some time and effort for it. It was rewarding and it was interesting. There's some value there, in sharing a "world" with people and advancing characters.