What is *worldbuilding* for?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Is it always as absolute as that, though?

Sometimes, e.g. in a sandbox-style campaign, there doesn't really have to be a story* at all for play to begin and in fact it's the game itself that does the work to build a story as a simple telling of the tale of what the PCs do/encounter/say/etc. over time. It's story-after.

* - beyond a simple static background with no ongoing plots behind the scenes.

Now if you're talking about story-first type of campaign e.g. a hard AP then yes, without the pre-authored story the game won't accomplish much.

And even in story-now you are, like with story-after, building the story as you go along. You say that without a story an RPG can do no work, but in two of three possibilities (story-first, -now, or -after) the work of the game (and the people playing it) is in fact the building of the story. Only in story-first is the story built...well, first; leaving the actual run of play with a lot less work to do.

Lanefan

Eh, I don't like to actually get into a deep analysis of the mythology of the 'sandbox', because it raises so many hackles, but suffice it to say that I think this is theorycrafting. The GM is always building stories. He may be letting them lie somewhat passively, but even sandbox GMs constantly ask themselves "how do I push this thing forward?" At best they may be neutral in terms of which way it goes forward, but they're never satisfied with just leaving lie. Every tavern has a tale, every library has a dusty book (that the PCs will likely be the ones to find), every court has some sage with a story about this or that lost McGuffin, etc.

Why is it always the PCs who find these hooks, and they weren't long ago exhausted? Because the GM needs a STORY! Why do the PCs always (almost always) stumble upon a level-appropriate adventure location? Because it wouldn't be interesting to tell the tale of them getting slaughtered by 7HD monsters at level 1! Why is there always some easy beginner dungeon an hour's walk from the town (B2 please stand up)? Right where every greedy git would be able to find and loot it? Because we need STORY!

Sandbox is a way to be coy about setting up and running the story, but its still fundamentally story-oriented gaming. I put it as, in real practical terms, not theory, as a subcategory of 'Story Before' (though I don't think I like these terms, 'classical' play seems more like 'Arranged Story' vs Story Now being 'Developed Story' or something, but I quibble).

Anyway, I get what you're saying, but I really do think that when you get down to actual play, if you were to analyze sessions of play and what was happening, and why, and what the actual roles of the participants were in practice, vs theory, my assertion is that you'd find creating story, and driving the game with it, is quite important. In a sense even Gygaxian play has story as a central theme. I mean, why do the players care? Why is advancement of the characters meaningful? The very fact of level names and name-level domain rules and such signifies that somewhere at the core of it is trying to enact a kind of tale. None of this is surprising either. Even very abstract games like Chess actually come with a story attached. Story is so fundamental to everything to do with human thought and experience that it cannot be anything BUT central to play.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I find that the theory, and the hypothetical practice, don't actually live up to and exist in real play at real tables, for MANY reasons.
...
4) The GM has a vested interest in producing something that isn't boring or frustrating to the players, meaning again he's not a neutral arbiter.

I wish I hadn't personally experienced so many counter-examples to this last one.

There are other things, I could go on for a long time. GMs are like 'ring masters', they orchestrate. The idea that GMs are 'referees' is prevalent but nonsense.

I don't have to tell you why, either: DM as 'judge or impartial arbitrator was inhereited from the wargaming of the day. The need for impartially is more or less gone as the game is no longer comparative, but expectation remauns...

 

[Maxperson]

Eh, I don't like to actually get into a deep analysis of the mythology of the 'sandbox', because it raises so many hackles, but suffice it to say that I think this is theorycrafting. The GM is always building stories. He may be letting them lie somewhat passively, but even sandbox GMs constantly ask themselves "how do I push this thing forward?" At best they may be neutral in terms of which way it goes forward, but they're never satisfied with just leaving lie. Every tavern has a tale, every library has a dusty book (that the PCs will likely be the ones to find), every court has some sage with a story about this or that lost McGuffin, etc.

Why is it always the PCs who find these hooks, and they weren't long ago exhausted? Because the GM needs a STORY! Why do the PCs always (almost always) stumble upon a level-appropriate adventure location? Because it wouldn't be interesting to tell the tale of them getting slaughtered by 7HD monsters at level 1! Why is there always some easy beginner dungeon an hour's walk from the town (B2 please stand up)? Right where every greedy git would be able to find and loot it? Because we need STORY!

We had a running joke among the players when I was in junior high and high school that every dungeon or item was within 3 days walk of town. We grew out of that and outside of Undermountain, I can't think of any dungeons that close to a city or town.

Sandbox is a way to be coy about setting up and running the story, but its still fundamentally story-oriented gaming. I put it as, in real practical terms, not theory, as a subcategory of 'Story Before' (though I don't think I like these terms, 'classical' play seems more like 'Arranged Story' vs Story Now being 'Developed Story' or something, but I quibble).

A sandbox is story neutral unless the players want the DM to come up with something. When they are in a tavern listening for rumors, I just make stuff up. If they want to investigate, that their choice and I have to come up with more along that particular tangent. I've learned to improvise fairly well. If they want to continue with their own plans, that's also their choice. Sometimes they will tell me that they are going to X place to see if services are needed for something, indicating to me that that they want me to come up with a hook or three. Sometimes they bite, sometimes they walk out and leave the hooks behind. It's all a big so what to me. Often, though, they will establish their own "hook" and tell me what it is they are going to do.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Eh, I don't like to actually get into a deep analysis of the mythology of the 'sandbox', because it raises so many hackles, but suffice it to say that I think this is theorycrafting. The GM is always building stories. He may be letting them lie somewhat passively, but even sandbox GMs constantly ask themselves "how do I push this thing forward?" At best they may be neutral in terms of which way it goes forward, but they're never satisfied with just leaving lie. Every tavern has a tale, every library has a dusty book (that the PCs will likely be the ones to find), every court has some sage with a story about this or that lost McGuffin, etc.

Why is it always the PCs who find these hooks, and they weren't long ago exhausted? Because the GM needs a STORY! Why do the PCs always (almost always) stumble upon a level-appropriate adventure location? Because it wouldn't be interesting to tell the tale of them getting slaughtered by 7HD monsters at level 1! Why is there always some easy beginner dungeon an hour's walk from the town (B2 please stand up)? Right where every greedy git would be able to find and loot it? Because we need STORY!

Sandbox is a way to be coy about setting up and running the story, but its still fundamentally story-oriented gaming. I put it as, in real practical terms, not theory, as a subcategory of 'Story Before' (though I don't think I like these terms, 'classical' play seems more like 'Arranged Story' vs Story Now being 'Developed Story' or something, but I quibble).

Anyway, I get what you're saying, but I really do think that when you get down to actual play, if you were to analyze sessions of play and what was happening, and why, and what the actual roles of the participants were in practice, vs theory, my assertion is that you'd find creating story, and driving the game with it, is quite important. In a sense even Gygaxian play has story as a central theme. I mean, why do the players care? Why is advancement of the characters meaningful? The very fact of level names and name-level domain rules and such signifies that somewhere at the core of it is trying to enact a kind of tale. None of this is surprising either. Even very abstract games like Chess actually come with a story attached. Story is so fundamental to everything to do with human thought and experience that it cannot be anything BUT central to play.

If story is that fundamental, I guess it doesn't matter. If the stories are going to flow anyways, we don't need to worry about making sure they do. But the point of something like sandbox, is provides an easy framework for longterm regular gaming, gives player freedom to go where they want, and can produce lots of unexpected results.

Just to take the 7HD example: this does occur in lots of sandbox style campaigns. Total Party Kill can happen, and encounters are not always perfectly balanced like you have in say the 3E/3.5 Encounter Level system. That is part of the attraction as a player. The sense of danger, rather than mere danger through slow HP attrition or boneheaded mistakes, makes the game more exciting IMO.

You can go on about the theory here. I think anyone who has played the kinds of games were talking about at length, has enough direct experience with them, to be skeptical of your assertions. One can take a skeptical lens to anything. We could go into a narrative style campaign with the same lens and dismantle it. But all you are doing is making a linguistic argument to dismantle and change the language, so we have to agree with your play style. Personally I don't care why sandbox works. I just like that it works and is fun. And I think story is such a broad term, the problem that occurs in these discussions is people equivocate on it, jumping from its various meanings, in order to build arguments for what good games should include. I think you'd be much better off, making good games, showing them and getting people to play them, than building this highly theoretical arguments for why sandbox might not be as enjoyable as we seem to think it is.

Again I am not the best person to make this argument. And I personally don't really care about play style conflicts. I think it is better for everyone when there are multiple playstyles out there to choose from, so people can try different approaches, mix and match, etc. But if your just hostile to a style, with no curiosity about it (except as something to destroy or argue against), you'll never really understand it. Believe me, I've been on the other side of the fence doing that and it does not lead to understanding what excites people about the type of play you think you are analyzing.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

1) The mental construct will never be perfectly imagined by all involved, but in my experience this only rarely results in a conflict of imagination that needs to be resolved. The vast majority of time what is imagined by those involved is close enough that the game runs smoothly and nobody every really realizes what those differences are.

Sure, it is self-evident that we manage to play despite this. What isn't self-evident is that there's a commonly held set of facts from which to reason about the game world. This makes it difficult, at best, to make the game 'about' a particular thing. Story exists, but its several conflicting stories and nobody has really 'bought' a particular one. Story Now helps with this (though nothing makes it go away as an issue, and for that matter people get different stories out of a book too). I don't think it disqualifies any mode of play, but it calls into question what the technique really actually is in practice.

2) That level of detail is just not necessary and it hasn't been since at least 1e when I started playing the game. If a detail becomes important, or at least worth looking at in some way, the DM will say yes, no, or if the outcome is in doubt call for a roll to see if the detail is present.

It isn't about 'can we resolve X', it is about who can say if X is going to be significant and determine in an objective fashion the odds of ANYTHING at all? This is the problem which plagues lots of play, including examples in this thread such as the "unknown operative" example (much earlier) where the PCs inadvertently made an enemy by hiring some woman due to facts which they could not possibly know. Even had they known SOME of the facts they couldn't reliably reason from that to some inevitable conclusion that they would make an enemy. In truth its impossible to know if any particular action my character is going to take is even feasible or not. I have to rely on some very highly conserved conventions of play for that.

3 & 4 and your last statement) I'm putting these together since "arbiter" and "referee" are synonyms. The DM should strive to be neutral, meaning that he's not putting his wants and desires into the game, but is instead trying to make things fun and interesting for all of the players as equally as possible. In that regard he is neutral. As for "referee" and "arbiter", the DM is those things. He just isn't ONLY those things. When the rules don't cover a situation, cover it badly or inadequately, or come into conflict with other rules, the DM does act as a referee and make a ruling. It's one of his hats.

Yes, they are synonyms. Which 'hats' belong to whom is of course some of what the thread seems to have become about. My point was that 'neutral' is not realistic. It just isn't something that can be viable in practice, regardless of theory. I don't even see how it is desirable to be perfectly honest! I mean, the GM shouldn't be biased against any particular player or character. At least not in most games (I think Paranoia and similar things might allow for it).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's not the sort of conflict he's talking about. He's talking about situations where things important to the character are put into conflict with other things in the game.

In one game I was playing a ranger of Mielikki who was trying to become a multi-class ranger/cleric of Mielikki(in 2e). I had established him as having a hatred of slavers as they took away freedom from others and freedom was a critical issue for my character. At one point while scouting for the party, he encountered a small caravan of slavers and wiped out the slaver in surprise attack. He showed them no mercy, even when they surrendered. After it was done, he told the slaves to gather the weapons, money and food that was there and get as far away as possible as they would be killed if they were close by when this was discovered. Then he left them free to do as they wished and went back to the party.

Later he found a grove sacred to Mielikki and went out to pray and dwell there for a while. After a few days he had a dream. In that dream I was in a large field where there was a group of slavers carrying slaves away towards a city. Across the field there was also a group of orcs surrounding a bound unicorn, about kill it. I had a choice. What do I do? THAT'S the sort of conflict he's talking about. The sort of conflict where the decision is tough and no matter which way it goes, you learn something about the character.

That's a perfectly reasonable example. My point is that, in every sort of game, however it is run, these sorts of things arise, and they OFTEN drive the entire game. In fact games which lack any of this at all are hard to drive, period. They can work, to an extent, as just "we want treasure", but even that doesn't work WELL.

Your example is very similar to one of my own PCs, and that was in 1e. The GM in that case was pretty good about playing to our interests. Still, he was ALSO infamous for railroading! He would have had a lot better game, IMHO, if he'd had something like DW (but this was the early 80s up through the mid 90s).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I wish I hadn't personally experienced so many counter-examples to this last one.

I don't have to tell you why, either: DM as 'judge or impartial arbitrator was inhereited from the wargaming of the day. The need for impartially is more or less gone as the game is no longer comparative, but expectation remauns...

Yup! you are entirely correct. LOTS of 'classic play' is a holdover from wargames. This was first noted back in the mid-90s.

 

[Doug McCrae]

We grew out of that and outside of Undermountain, I can't think of any dungeons that close to a city or town.

Castle Blackmoor, from Dave Arneson's campaign, is right beside the village of Blackmoor.



Outside of D&D there's Pavis and the Big Rubble from RuneQuest's world of Glorantha, which are adjacent.



I've not been able to figure out how close Castle Greyhawk was to the City of Greyhawk in Gary Gygax's original campaign. The distance must be relatively small though.

 

[pemerton]

There are no 'literal terms' that mean anything because this is a construct of the imagination.

But I think we can talk meaningfully about processes of establishing constructs of the imagination. We can - and people often do - talk eg about how a film was scripted, filmed, etc.

Its the construct itself which is held to have value. If you want to make it concrete, then we can talk about mental activity, which obviously has a concrete physical basis, but I'm not entirely sure where that analysis can go

I think talking about mental activity is not that productive in the sort of conversation we can have on these boards! That's why I tried to focus on talking, which is the shared, social manifestation of that mental activity.

There's very little similarity between 'playing in a world' and 'reading a novel'. Playing in a world means depicting the actions of a character or characters, as constrained by the parameters of this artificial constructed world. The parameters are EMBODIED IN the Game Master, literally.

The "embodied in the GM" claim is obviously controversial eg [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] described it as worse than a "red flag" (a "red neon sign" I think was the phrase used).

But again the notion of "embodiment" heads towards imponderables. That's why I've tended to focus on narrating or telling. These, again, are shared, social events.

As you present it, but with my translations into terms of talking, it seems to look like this: a player says "I do X", where "I" denotes the PC; the GM narrates results/consequences, having regard to the parameters of the world.

I think there are three main types of X in RPGing.

(1) I go to . . . .. The relevant parameters are the world map/key/encyclopedia-like description. The GM tells the player what his/her PC see/encounters. There is a difference between this and just reading the notes/description the GM is working from. What underpins the difference? I've conjectured that second-personality is part of that.

(2) I look for/recall information about . . .. Knowledge and search checks are the paradigm here. This is more likely to involve a check than (1). If things go according to plan, the GM tells the player what it is that his/her PC discovers or recalls. Again, there is a difference between this and just reading the description the GM is working from. Is it related to fact that the player is seeking the information so as to solve a problem?

(3) I inflct condition PQR on such-and-such a part of the gameworld. This includes attempts to attack, to persuade, to demolish, etc. In this sort of action declaration, the outcome is extrapolated by some combination of application of the mechanics and GM intuition about the "physics" of the situation. The more the GM is relying on intuitions about the "physics", the more this can start to resemble (1) and (2). The more there is reliance on mechanics, the less it will resemble those.​

Even if the above was reasonable as a starting sketch, there's a lot more to be said - eg what motivates the player to declare an action for his/her PC? How does the GM's narration of results/consequences feed back into that motivation?

But any analysis has to start somewhere!

 

[Maxperson]

Sure, it is self-evident that we manage to play despite this. What isn't self-evident is that there's a commonly held set of facts from which to reason about the game world. This makes it difficult, at best, to make the game 'about' a particular thing. Story exists, but its several conflicting stories and nobody has really 'bought' a particular one. Story Now helps with this (though nothing makes it go away as an issue, and for that matter people get different stories out of a book too). I don't think it disqualifies any mode of play, but it calls into question what the technique really actually is in practice.

I agree that the game isn't about one particular thing, except perhaps fun. I'm not sure that I agree that story is comprised of multiple conflicting stories. The stories that differ slightly don't have to be in conflict, and I don't think there will be many, if any major deviations in the story we are sharing. For example, when the party goes into a dining room and has it described, we will each have a different image of what the table looks like, and perhaps we will add in a few details about what might be on it. That's not really going to matter, though. The relevant shared image of a table is what will matter and that's not going to be in conflict from one person to the next. The same goes with the 8 orcs heading towards us. We will all be envisioning different looking orcs, but it's the orc itself that matters, not the appearance. Still no conflict.

It isn't about 'can we resolve X', it is about who can say if X is going to be significant and determine in an objective fashion the odds of ANYTHING at all? This is the problem which plagues lots of play, including examples in this thread such as the "unknown operative" example (much earlier) where the PCs inadvertently made an enemy by hiring some woman due to facts which they could not possibly know. Even had they known SOME of the facts they couldn't reliably reason from that to some inevitable conclusion that they would make an enemy. In truth its impossible to know if any particular action my character is going to take is even feasible or not. I have to rely on some very highly conserved conventions of play for that.

Hidden things can be a problem, as are unforeseen consequences. As for what's important, I think that is determined by the actions of the players and the descriptions the DM gives. If a player wants to make sure a window is securely shut, that window becomes something significant and it will be addressed. If the DM is describing a chest of gold and an iron cobra with glowing green eyes sitting on top of it, that's pretty obviously going to be something significant. If no one addresses/emphasizes a detail, then it's not going to be something important, unless it's a hidden detail that has to be found first, such as a map in a drawer.

Yes, they are synonyms. Which 'hats' belong to whom is of course some of what the thread seems to have become about. My point was that 'neutral' is not realistic. It just isn't something that can be viable in practice, regardless of theory. I don't even see how it is desirable to be perfectly honest! I mean, the GM shouldn't be biased against any particular player or character. At least not in most games (I think Paranoia and similar things might allow for it).

Yes, of course. Hats can be shared and the style of play and game being played will affect things. I was just pointing out that in the traditional sense, the DM is a referee as one of his duties. I also agree that neutrality is impossible to achieve. That doesn't mean that DMs shouldn't strive to achieve it. That way any deviance will typically be minimal and almost certainly unintentional. It won't have the same impact as the DM who likes to insert his powerful DMPC into the party, or act to keep his NPCs alive when the party in all rights should succeed in killing them.