When to give PCs the reins?

[gamerprinter]

Well, it depends. Unless I spend hours and hours describing the setting of Dark Sun to you, you might not realize just how much defiling is hated by the populace - until you cast a spell in the town square, and get chased out of town.

Likewise, if my campaign has a noble warrior sergeant-type race, unless I go out of my way describing how awesome these guys are to you before PC Gen, I'm kind of responsible if you decide to attack him right off the bat thinking "he's just like all the other mooks".

Well if a character was born in Dark Sun, he would be expected to know this - it all depends on whether the PCs came from some other setting and was suddenly teleported into Dark Sun, its possible they don't know not to cast defiling spells in public. However, if the PCs are supposed to be locals and the DM never mentioned the danger of defiling in public - that's a DM problem, and not a player problem.

The DM is not supposed to keep obvious knowledge away from the players.

Sometimes a setting has secrets that aren't obvious to everyone, and that by rights requires the PCs to discover the truth on their own.

 

[Ycore Rixle]

I think it's fine to start a campaign off on a bit of a railroad. Just make sure it's a railroad that the players built. In other words, build your world to suit the characters, to challenge them, to match the players' goals and vision. If the world is built to match the players' choices for their characters, then the players won't be stumped as to what to do: they'll just follow their original goals.

 

[Barastrondo]

I'm not sure I see it as a conflict. Sandboxing is about presenting situations, rather than plotlines. A focused start like you describe is essentially presenting one strong situation that, for a variety of reasons (presumably one per PC) grabs the lion's share of attention. In the course of resolving that situation, the players should theoretically find out enough about the world and the various events that set said situation in motion that they get more ideas about what to go do.

For instance, I started one game in a pseudo-Norse setting with the premise that a local jarl was getting married, and the PCs all had various reasons to attend the wedding -- friends of both families, professional interest, even the one PC who had a crush on the jarl and found his marriage very bittersweet. The bridal party was ambushed on the road by outlaws, and all murdered, including the bride-to-be. The immediate situation was such that going and killing the hell out of those bandits was an obvious act of revenge that all the PCs were there for. Along the way they found more clues as to who might have backed these outlaws, and decided to track it all back to its source. It was pretty sandboxy somewhere along the line, but some would probably say it was kind of railroadish because the PCs had this goal of retribution in mind for five levels or so, so they were going directly after that goal whenever they could.

I don't think at any point I actually thought in terms of giving them the reins; I was pretty much ready to let them do whatever they felt was right. But they had that initial focus and emotional engagement on that first situation. It's the best of both worlds, to my mind: you have all the focus and intensity that you'd get from a railroad, but with the emphasis on players pursuing a resolution however they like. Of course, this does kind of require you to have a decent idea of what motivates your players, and a clever way to put them all in loose consensus. But it's quite manageable.

 

[JamesonCourage]

Well, here's my new policy: The players make characters, letting me know where they're going to start (as long as it's approved, obviously), and then we roleplay "backstory" for the first session, only.

For example, my players are starting a new campaign with a new setting on Wednesday. They bought up enough Status each to all pitch in and collectively own one castle, with some silver left over (gold equivalent from most games). The players are going to be roleplaying taking the castle, with two guarantees: they won't die, and they'll wind up with the castle. Now, they've been thinking over how to get an army working for them, so they were planning on bribing the current army (which is pretty much a mercenary force). They have to go through negotiations in the first session with everyone that they want to keep: the general, the chancellor, the sages, etc. Depending on how it goes in-game, they change the details that would otherwise have been glossed over. However, it's "railroad" in that the destination of the first session is set, albeit loosely.

If, instead, they were, say, "all shipwrecked, and banding together for survival" I'd start them out on the boat, with the first session ending where they decided.

Anyways, hope that helps. As always, play what you like

 

[Lanefan]

I need to be a fly on the wall at one of your games, ha.

side note

[MENTION=40177]Wik[/MENTION] you can do better than that if you like: I'm down a player on Friday nights, feel free to dive in!

/side note

Lanefan

 

[Wik]

side note

[MENTION=40177]Wik[/MENTION] you can do better than that if you like: I'm down a player on Friday nights, feel free to dive in!

/side note

Lanefan

side note

[MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] PM for ya.

/side note