Playing a game is not plot. D&D is a game. You can deliberately choose to add plot to a game - a murder-mystery game likely has plot, unless it's random like 'Clue(do)' - but by default games have no plot.
Well, it's true that by default chess has no plot.
But a game that is about a sequence of fictional events, occuring to a group of protagonists in a fictional world, looks like it is apt to
generate a plot in the course of play.
The definition associated with narrative has no place in any campaign in which there is an actual game taking place and the decisions of the players have meaning.
Therefore when speaking of plot as it applies to gaming, a plan or scheme is the only definition I bother thinking about. If you want to discuss story or novel crafting, the other sort of plot is certainly desired.
In addition to my reply to S'mon - if you think that an RPG can't
both allow for meaninful decisions by players, and ensure that the play of the game will generate a substantive plot, then I think you need to look at some exampls of modern RPG design - HeroWars/Quest, Burning Wheel, Maelstrom Storytelling, My Life With Master, and - dare I say it - even 4e!
The basic feature of this sort of design is (i) to have mechanics ensure that players can enject thematically and narratively central (rather than peripheral) material into the fiction, and (ii) to have rules that require the GM to respect this material, and have regard to it, when framing scenes and adjudicating their resolution.
I didn't mean to imply that I think our games are similar. I just think they run more similar than it seems.
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Different method, similar results.
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We've each chosen or created a game world to provide a setting. We've each chosen a method to present 'events in the fictional world' (plot).
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My intent is not meant as a challenge to any kind of "DM cred."
I never thought for a minute you were challenging anyone's cred. In fact, your posts are (especially by the standards of these boards) incredibly generous and civil!
But still, I think that you're running together things that are different. For example, in some games (including mine) the
players provide key elements of setting (in building their PCs and writing up their backstories, and then bringing those backstories into play). This is not a trivial difference from strong GM control over setting, in my view, because it has a major impact in play.
And when you talk about methods of "presenting events in the fictional world" - well, yes, every RPG involves that - that's part of what makes it an RPG - but the different ways of doing this (does the GM do it, or the players, or sometimes one and sometimes the other) make a huge difference to the experience of play. I tried to make this point in my last response to Hussar - whether the landslide is (mere) situation or (potentially railroady) plot depends on a whole lot of factors, including the expectations of the players, the play activity leading up to it, etc.
Another example. The GM says "You walk into the throne room. The king falls over, dead. You see the assassin, bloodied knife in hand, darting out through a window." Is this mere situation, or full-blooded plot? If the players have all agreed to play a game focused on intrigue and skullduggery at the royal court, and have built their PCs as courtiers, court wizards, etc, and this is the opening narration of the campaign, then we have situation. The GM has delivered on the promise to run a court intrigue game, and kicked things off in a dramatic fashion. Classic situation!
But suppose a different context: the players have spent the last few sessions identifying the threat to the king's life, puzzling out who the assassin might be, working out how they can get close enough to the king to thwart the assassination, etc. And having worked it all out, they've just finished explaining how their PCs are making it into the throne room just in time to stop the assassination! And the GM narrates the above, without even permitting the playes to make some sort of die roll to try and influence the unfolding course of events. In my view, that's about as heavy-handed as GM exercise of plot authority gets.
Same words, describing the same event in game, but hugely different experiences at the table. That's because plot - both in a novel, and in an RPG - is
not something that exists independent of the fictional location and orientation of the protagonists. And in an RPG, protagonism is something that is distinctively important to the
players.
In a sandbox campaign, are there hooks for the characters to follow? IME, yes.
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Whether a DM plans hooks in advance or on the spot during the game, the process seems much the same to me. Where the DM mines the hooks from is certainly important to the feel of the game, but I don't feel this makes it any less a plot element than the hooks in an AP.
I can't speak for a sandbox game, but in the sort of game I run the GM does not hook the players. Rather, the players hook the GM.
That is, the players - through the backstory and build of their PCs, and then building on those things over the course of play - signal clear goals and thematic concerns, and as GM I design encounters and scenarios that speak to those goals and thematic concerns. In 4e terms, you could think of this as player-designed quests.
Which is why, like I said upthread, "sidequests" make no sense here. "Sidequests" imply that there is a main, GM-dominated, quest, and that player-initiated activity is peripheral. That's not how I prefer to approach the game.
Although obviously I have my preferences, I recognise that others have theirs. Various exchanges I've had on these boards, and also the evidence provided by sales of commercial RPG products, show that many RPGers don't like the sort of "player authorship" that my preferred approach involves - they prefer, as players, to "experience the story" or "explore the world" rather than to jointly craft the story and thereby jointly build the world. Which, as goes without saying, is fine. But which also requires different sorts of tools and techniques from the tools and techniques that I need to run my game.
And one of those points of difference is - different techniques for distributing situational, content and plot authority, and different tools (encounter design guidelines, action resolution mechanics, etc) for underpinning those techniques.
Which is why I think it is more helpful - if we're all going to better understand our games, and get better at running them the way we want to run them - to recognise rather than elide over differences! Which is not at all to say that any of us is doing it wrong - of course we're still all playing RPGs!
