clearstream
(He, Him)
Apologies, I misread your comment. Specifically, I misread "The" in "The process of play" as "That", which lead me to my question.
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Why do RPGs have rules?
- Thread starter pemerton
- Start date
Bedrockgames
Legend
I just woke up as well so hopefully mt post makes sense
The primary difference I am seeing is the GM seems more greatly constrained by system. You could very much have a downtime mechanic in a sandbox. You can also be transparent about resolution of that downtime in a sandbox. I can't say whether the faction clock would be useful or not to a given sandbox GM. I have read through Blades in the Dark and I like the concept of a faction clock, but the particulars don't quite work for my style (which isn't a knock on the clock, as I think it is a pretty clever way to conceive of what is going on----there are plenty of procedures I like that I would change or alter to fit my style). One caveat is I read Blades in the Dark but didn't fully grasp it, so keep that in mind here. My understanding of the block may be a little foggy.
I think another major difference here is while something similar is likely to arise in a sandbox (for instance building a crew, conflict between crews, etc). It is likely to emerge more from what is going on in the setting with the characters other than a mechanic (though you can definitely have mechanics for this stuff, it is just that what is happening in the game is the priority). So like I have said many times my last several wuxia campaigns have been about factions and sect wars (think of any classic kung fu movie where martial sects are in conflict, kind of like a gang war). In those game the players will be trying to build their sect. I have on occasion come up with formal sect building and management procedures. Here is one example of such an attempt.
I also had sect war shake up tables (these even made it into one of my supplements) and a procedure for managing NPCs advancing to higher levels 'off camera'. Having such tools and procedures is totally fine, but I think the major difference is the GM is not constrained by them and the players are still expected to do everything through their character (that said there are still going to be many mechanics in the game they can rely upon to function as written)
What I have always found though, because the priority is the player saying what they specifically want to do, is these types of procedures rarely work in every instance and are more likely to be one tool among many that I may draw on (and to be frank usually what I end up doing is going back to ruling uniquely on each attempt because it is very hard to fit specific requests by players into a broad mechanical structure like that (that last one was my attempt to address this issue but I would only call it partly successful, ultimately it is much easier for me to hear what the players are specifically trying to do to build and manage their sect and for me to say "Okay this is how I am going to handle that mechanically". That way I can tailor it specifically to the action. This is something that isn't coming from me the GM trying to impose my idea of sandbox, personally I would find it much easier to have a regular mechanic that I can just use every time, but rather it is coming from the players who want me to honor what it is they are trying to do. The same thing happened to me when I came up with rackets and crime tables for my mafia campaigns. I loved the procedures but they fell apart when players wanted to do specific things and I had to deviate from them.
I also think conversations around sandboxes and procedures in them are likely to be much less structured than:
However sandbox features a similar type of dynamic. Not saying it follows the procedure you outline above this statement, just that I could take what Rob said or what I said or what another sandbox GM elsewhere might say and follow that with a statement about how whatever it is we did 'fed devision points, which feeds the resolution, which changes the game state-setting, and comes back to new decision points'. The would not be a formal thing like a play loop to us but the magic of a living world sandbox is there is a jazz like quality to it in terms of no one, not even the GM, has any sense of where it is going to go, and it naturally builds off the interactions of the players saying what they try to do, the GM responding and doing so with principles that value player agency, the living world, etc.
Bedrockgames
Legend
also @Manbearcat on transparency. I think in a sandbox that is very much going to vary from group to group by taste. I am very transparent and usually tell my players what procedure I will use to determine something, often giving them a say and incorporating their suggestions into the process (and I always ask if they think a particular procedure feels right and fits what is going on). However some groups will react more negatively to that----and again, I think the determining factor there is the players more than the GM: i.e. do the players find that kind of transparency disrupts their immersion.
robertsconley
Adventurer
That wasn't the point of my post.
You omitted and thus not addressed
You have misunderstood my analogy by not understanding what it is I am comparing.
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Bedrockgames
Legend
Something that is really crucial to understand is how different sandbox play is from linear adventure paths and similar structures (even different from Monster of the Week) because it fully embraces the player's ability to not engage what has been planned, to strike out in completely new and unexpected directions. In a sense this can exist in any RPG in any RPG adventure structure but it tends not to. So a sandbox in my view is a full commitment to honor the players desire to do what they want. One substantive difference in this argument is this concept of authorship. I think sandbox GMs would reject the label of author, and that is one of the reasons this kind of conversation can break down. There are a couple of reasons for this (and probably more that aren't coming to mind right now).
First we may be planning material, we may create NPCs, etc but we don't see ourselves as the authors of the PCs experience in the way we might if we had a clear adventure in our mind that we were imagining the players would go through (for example an adventure where you can easily imagine the players start at point A, go to point B, even Y happens, players go to either point C or D, maybe even E, etc). In sandbox it is more likely you are preparing some basic elements that will become live at some point (and certainly you would establish and map out locations but those are rarely thought of as static). I tend to see a good sandbox campaign as the GM designs a setting, establishes NPCs, their connections, their goals, ongoing situations, etc but once the rubber hits the road, the PCs are like a catalyst for a chemical reaction that could go anywhere and lead to anything.
Second reason is more semantic. Author implies you are simply writing an adventure the way an author might a novel and to a lot of us it harkens back to GM as story teller from the 90s (which I would say is one of the things most current day sandbox GMs are reacting against).
I know for me, thinking of myself as an author seems very counterproductive to what I am trying to achieve at the table (and I get the term high shave broader or more narrow usage than that, but I do find it hard for my mind to escape that meaning, especially do much of what my time in the wilderness as a GM was about was finding ways to not be "GM as storyteller" and to avoid things like structured adventure paths.
robertsconley
Adventurer
For me what happened is that I got my start with wargames while I was in elementary school then a little later when I moved on to junior high in the late 70s, I encountered and played D&D and other roleplaying games.
From wargaming, I was used to the idea of a scenario and how to set one up. The focus was to set up a situation and play out it using the rules you had. For example, a small unit encounter using AH's Squad Leader. You didn't know how things would play out and or when things would happen.
The early adventures I used, like the Village of Hommlet, my 12-year-old self viewed them as scenarios with a grander scope. Not only they did not have a defined victory condition, but there was also a wealth of details and implied details that could make for something that was far more interesting than the wargames I played at the time.
When I started my campaign, I found the different ways my friends approached things to be far more interesting than achieving some imagined end condition. That led to letting players trash the setting, which led to learning how to make that an interesting challenge*, and ultimately led to creating my ideas on how to run sandbox campaigns. Putting them into practice and testing them.
*Focusing on a 20k walk and making sure that everybody has their lunch packed becomes a lot more interesting when the point is to get to the royal castle before the king's brother "would-be usurper" does and the brother's allies are hunting the party. This is not happening because a narrative demands it, but rather a result of what happened when the party decided that opposing the king's brother was an important goal.
If the party hasn't decided to oppose the king's brother then his allies would be used for some other purpose that would further his plans to usurp the throne. If the players haven't gotten involved at all, then I would resolve the attempt and it would be mentioned as part of the background news the group would hear as they pursued their adventures.
innerdude
Legend
You've just described the absolute heart of play in my experiences with Ironsworn.
Though the GM does ultimately hold final say, the overall attitude is exceptionally collaborative, with the intent of including other players' inclusions/suggestions in the broader picture, and that if at all possible, the GM should incorporate/integrate player suggestions as reasonable.
Bedrockgames
Legend
This is an interesting point. I think when we came into the hobby has a large effect on us. I started in 1986, so I was gaming with a lot of people initially who came from your point of view I believe (or at least something similar to it as I recall those early sessions often feeling more like scenarios that had been set up). The only caveat here is I also remember a lot of modules being used and this could introduce wildly different approaches by the same GM because they were just trying to run the module. But I entered higschool in the 90s and that is when I did most of my gaming and when I began GMing. There was still residual elements of emphasizing things like exploration and scenarios but obviously the style of module support by then had greatly changed and there was definitely this idea of GM as storyteller that got stronger and stronger as the 90s went on (it wasn't ubiquitous like some people say but it is was a powerful trend). Within that trend though there were other things happening. And for me it was a combination of trying to realize the promise of modules like feast of goblins, being exposed to more open-sandbox style campaigns through my friend (and future business partner) Bill Butler (his style of GMing was very much just start the sessions and let the players say what it is they want to try to do, he was a very reluctant hook giver), getting very invested in some of the more structured thinking about adventures in the early 2000s then becoming extremely frustrated with that. I would say sometime in the mid-2000s I started going through a bunch of old TSR stuff, including the original DMG, material like 1000 Bushels of Rye for Harn, classic modules like Isle of Dread, and then having discussions with people online who were similarly in the wilderness with their GMing, before I started to cobble together an approach that satisfied all the different things I was looking for in a campaign (and my chief concern which grew out of the whole EL CR adventure path thing was not wanting to feel like I should just hand my players my adventure notes for the note to show what was planned-----because too often I felt like things were overly structured and too predestined to occur). I will also say a lot of that reflection I did a the time was looking back at my early experiences playing, going back to my early high school campaigns where we were still more open about exploration and spontaneity, and even taking a closer look at things like Knights of the Dinner Table and realizing if BA Felton just put aside his exasperation he had a very engaged and active group (to me they capture the destroying the scenery element you often talk about).
niklinna
satisfied?
@innerdude's recent quote drew my eye back to your 2nd bullet point (bolded above), which I didn't address in my first reply; I was focused on the self-discovery you mentioned in the 1st & 3rd.
So it's an interesting point, exploring shared creations. In the Blades in the Dark campaign I played in, there was something that kind of looked like that...I mean, each player authored events, characters, and such as we went along. And I know I didn't share everything I had in mind when I did so, but when other players or @Manbearcat referred to them or extrapolated on them, I had a decision to make: Go with their contribution (Story Now, baby!), or say no, that isn't what I had in mind and it's actually this way instead (preloading, to use @pemerton's term). As someone new to the playstyle, it caused me some confusion and difficulty. A third option, of course, was to say, no I don't like that, even though I hadn't developed any ideas about it prior to that moment. Some negotation may be required.
But this negotiation, even of preconceived ideas that I hadn't shared before, is of provisional material. It can be discovered that I had something in mind, but that discovery isn't in the fiction. By folks at the table agreeing to it, it becomes part of the fiction, but that agreement is more akin to creation, in my view. Nonetheless, an out-of-fiction exploration is going on, which, as you say, can lead to self-discovery.
I still think we need to maintain a clear distinction between creation (authoring) and discovery, and similarly between reality and fiction. That's a space with four quadrants though, which interact in ways likely worth...exploring.
I didn't fail to address it. I addressed it fully by noting that "All the action is buried in the sentence 'the referee's job is to be a neutral arbiter adjudicating what the players do as their characters and bringing the setting to life'."
I mean, the fact that players can declare actions for their PCs is a trivial one, and doesn't distinguish sandbox RPGing from any other sort of RPGing. The fact that players use knowledge about the setting to inform those action declarations also seems a fairly trivial one, unless you're wanting to contrast with death-match/arena-style RPGing, or "dungeon of the week" games in which there is no meaningful setting.
But no one in this thread is posting about those sorts of games.
In a game of Burning Wheel or Apocalypse World, the players are free to declare actions for their characters using whatever knowledge they have about the setting, and those actions can encompass anything that makes sense within the setting and situation. The difference between those systems and a sandbox consists in the fact that, in those systems, the referee's job is not to be a neutral arbiter adjudicating action declarations and bringing the setting to life.
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