A Question Of Agency?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Except we are talking about different areas of the gaming community. There is an OSR and sandbox community. And yes that varies. But I think you can speak generally. Normally I would be only focused on my own style. But when you have a whole thread of posters attacking you because you think a GM deciding the brother is dead would be okay in a sandbox, it is relevant to share your view on what the norm among sandbox players seems to be. Now I could be wrong about that norm. It is always possible to be wrong. But I don't think I am, and I think at the very least, this is a style you see frequently among sandbox players, if not most of the time. That doesn't make it more right as a sandbox. But it does mean, people familiar with sandbox wouldn't be as shocked or surprised by my assertion as the posters here are (and again, I think that is relevant).

Well...
My answer is, I don't think even YOU actually believe it would be the norm, if you think about it objectively for a few minutes.

What I'm saying is, you probably wouldn't declare the brother pointlessly dead. I think you demonstrate a very significant amount of experience and understanding of how people want games to play out, and if this was literally happening on your table, you would be very unlikely to just present the situation as a dead end like this. I think you'd come up with something, just like you'd probably come up with something if the PCs decided to just head west off the edge of your sandbox map, right? It is really basically the same sort of thing, you would not (most likely) erect a 10 mile high wooden barrier at the west edge of your map!

So is it really the norm for anyone to play that way? (well, sure, it is probably for someone somewhere, but IMHO they have a short career as a GM ahead of them).

 

[Bedrockgames]

Well...
My answer is, I don't think even YOU actually believe it would be the norm, if you think about it objectively for a few minutes.

What I'm saying is, you probably wouldn't declare the brother pointlessly dead. I think you demonstrate a very significant amount of experience and understanding of how people want games to play out, and if this was literally happening on your table, you would be very unlikely to just present the situation as a dead end like this. I think you'd come up with something, just like you'd probably come up with something if the PCs decided to just head west off the edge of your sandbox map, right? It is really basically the same sort of thing, you would not (most likely) erect a 10 mile high wooden barrier at the west edge of your map!

So is it really the norm for anyone to play that way? (well, sure, it is probably for someone somewhere, but IMHO they have a short career as a GM ahead of them).

I really don't know how much more clear I can be: I wouldn't see making the brother a dead end in this case. I would follow the reaction that I gave in my earlier post about the Kushen Basin (see my response just a couple of posts ago). No one is saying it can't go anywhere. I am just saying in this playstyle it would be considered unreasonable for the player to demand that he get to have some kind of drama with brother down the live. The brother is an NPC just like any other, and while he could go searching for him, in an effort to create a sense of a real world, the GM is going to come to some decisions about what has happened to the brother since they last saw one another. And the possibility that he died is one such thing (now the player is free to investigate that death, go get revenge, spend months erecting a moment....whatever the player wants to do. This is really is not all that unusual, nor is it unreasonable, and it doesn't put a dead end in the campaign. To me it sounds like what is going on, is there is an expectation of exploring a certain character arc. Like I said, if this were my savage worlds group, I would totally do that. But for the sandbox, that just isn't how it would be done.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't see how this is a useful response to my statement. How is it not a 'dick move' for the GM to state, after however many sessions of searching, that all you found was your brother's parched bones and he was dead 10 years? The GM has complete freedom to NOT DO THAT, so what would motivate that behavior? By what theory of play would it be a better move than something more interesting? It simply doesn't hold water. Even in the most old-school forms of play this is really not good DMing. Again, there's simply no reason for it, except a) a GM so utterly rigid in their conceptions that they can't slightly adjust some piece of lore that might imply this result (or just add some additional confounding factor to change its outcome) or b) a GM who is actively interested in quashing even the smallest show of initiative and independence on the part of a player. Neither of these are redeeming features of a DM...

I am sorry but we just disagree. I don't see why this is such a difficult thing for people to get. I literally just got off the phone with a player of mine and asked him if finding his brother's corpse in the kushen basin (in the scenario described) would be an issue for him, he said no. And one of his reasons was it gives him a sense of a real world, with real events going on outside his character if things that can happen to anyone, can also happen to his brother. He also said it would give him something new to focus on. This is pretty much the reaction I would expect from most of my sandbox players.

Again, I am not saying this would be the outcome everytime. But it is a possible outcome, and there is nothing about it that doesn't hold water. Play with some old school groups and you will see this. I really don't see why this is so hard to believe. I mean, if you don't want to belive me fine. There are all kinds of ways to have fun playing the game and this is just one.

Also the GM is quashing anything. The player went in search of his brother and the GM honored that by figuring out what happened to the brother, where he is, etc. If this happened to me, I wouldn't feel quashed at all. I would just start looking into what happened, and how my brother died.

 

[FrogReaver]

I am sorry but we just disagree. I don't see why this is such a difficult thing for people to get. I literally just got off the phone with a player of mine and asked him if finding his brother's corpse in the kushen basin (in the scenario described) would be an issue for him, he said no. And one of his reasons was it gives him a sense of a real world, with real events going on outside his character if things that can happen to anyone, can also happen to his brother. He also said it would give him something new to focus on. This is pretty much the reaction I would expect from most of my sandbox players.

Again, I am not saying this would be the outcome everytime. But it is a possible outcome, and there is nothing about it that doesn't hold water. Play with some old school groups and you will see this. I really don't see why this is so hard to believe. I mean, if you don't want to belive me fine. There are all kinds of ways to have fun playing the game and this is just one.

Also the GM is quashing anything. The player went in search of his brother and the GM honored that by figuring out what happened to the brother, where he is, etc. If this happened to me, I wouldn't feel quashed at all. I would just start looking into what happened, and how my brother died.

To me, the question ultimately comes back to, why did the player agree to play in a campaign using a playstyle that allows for the possibility of their brother being dead with them having no say in the matter? If the player agreed to that then the DM isn't doing anything bad for playing by the rules the player agreed to.

 

[FrogReaver]

Anyways, getting back to agency. I think it might be fair to say that what I mean by agency is a subset of agency as defined by the other sides terms. Anyone want to take a crack at defining what Bedrock and I mean by agency using your terms?

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think you demonstrate a very significant amount of experience and understanding of how people want games to play out,

The issue is in a sandbox you are very much playing to discover the world and discover what happens. It would be counter to the style of play for the players say the campaign needs to be about finding the brother, with the baked in assumption that the brother ought to be a live. You can certainly have more focused sandboxes, but even those are tricky given the spirit of sandbox (for example I am working on a campaign book that focuses on the criminals in a prefecture of the empire. Some groups have been more than happy to play there, and remain criminals. One group went off and became heroes due to a dramatic development. But some just decided to go off map and do other things. If you are really playing an open sandbox, living world type game, things are going to go in unexpected directions, developments that in another campaign might look like a storyline, could suddenly stop due to a host of factors (character death, bad rolls, GM decisions about what an NPC does, etc). And for clarity I do call my campaigns Drama and Sandbox, but even in those, the player wouldn't be expected to set an expectation like the one with the brother.

If I declared him dead, would he be pointlessly dead? I don't think so. Things happen in a setting, that doesn't make them pointless. Now that I am thinking about it and not simply reacting to the example that was offered, I would say it is actually probably more dramatic than finding him alive. I wouldn't expect a player to just shrug his shoulders at that discovery, turn around and go home.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I believe that character autonomy was offered earlier in the thread. It seems accurate to me.

 

[Aldarc]

All I can say is this is how it is likely to arise in a sandbox.

It's what is likely to arise in your sandbox games. You have repeated many times that there are different varieties of sandbox games out there, but then you fallback to generalized language that makes it sound like your preferences or tendencies are universal ones for running sandboxes. But that's clearly not the case. There are people in this thread who likewise run sandbox games who have been pushing back against what you have been saying or how you run them. So maybe not act like it's universal or one true way to run a sandbox.

I am sorry but we just disagree. I don't see why this is such a difficult thing for people to get. I literally just got off the phone with a player of mine and asked him if finding his brother's corpse in the kushen basin (in the scenario described) would be an issue for him, he said no. And one of his reasons was it gives him a sense of a real world, with real events going on outside his character if things that can happen to anyone, can also happen to his brother. He also said it would give him something new to focus on. This is pretty much the reaction I would expect from most of my sandbox players.

We get it. I think by this point we are super gosh darn aware that there are people out there for whom this wouldn't be a problem, like your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate, especially when you repeatedly use normative language like "norm" and "traditional." Give us a little more credit here and stop treating us as idiots who don't get your point just because we may not agree with it.

I really don't see why this is so hard to believe. I mean, if you don't want to belive me fine. There are all kinds of ways to have fun playing the game and this is just one.

You are framing this as a matter of whether we believe you or not. I don't think that's the appropriate framing here for the pushback your are receiving.

Also the GM is quashing anything. The player went in search of his brother and the GM honored that by figuring out what happened to the brother, where he is, etc. If this happened to me, I wouldn't feel quashed at all. I would just start looking into what happened, and how my brother died.

Okay? But everyone obviously does not share your sentiments, and those people would like you to understand why it invalidates their sense of play. Capeesh?

 

[Bedrockgames]

To me, the question ultimately comes back to, why did the player agree to play in a campaign using a playstyle that allows for the possibility of their brother being dead with them having no say in the matter? If the player agreed to that then the DM isn't doing anything bad for playing by the rules the player agreed to.

This is it exactly. I have said in response to peoples posts that I play other ways too. I mentioned the savage worlds games, which often are more open to entertaining a character arc a player has expressed (and that seems to fit okay with savage worlds in general for some reason). But if we are playing a sandbox, which is what I am offering in this case, it would be odd for a player to walk in with this expectation (and as a general rule, while I do think of myself as flexible to the players at the table, if you have just one player who wants something, and the rest are there to engage sandbox on its own terms, you would have to weigh the pros of catering to that one player with the con of it taking away from the sandbox experience the other players are after). My sense, is in a functional group, the odd person out is usually willing to adapt. If it is a major problem we can certainly talk about it. I am not going to be a jerk to another human over a game. But it may be I have to draw a line in the sand in a respectful way if the request seems disruptive.

 

[Bedrockgames]

It's what is likely to arise in your sandbox games. You have repeated many times that there are different varieties of sandbox games out there, but then you fallback to generalized language that makes it sound like your preferences or tendencies are universal ones for running sandboxes. But that's clearly not the case. There are people in this thread who likewise run sandbox games who have been pushing back against what you have been saying or how you run them. So maybe not act like it's universal or one true way to run a sandbox.

I am trying to describe the general sandbox sensibilities as accurately as I can. I am not going to describe it less accurately because there are people on the thread who play sandbox but don't match what I see generally in the OSR sandbox community. That said, there are plenty of types of sandboxes. But so fair, with the exception of the people who agree with me in this thread, many of the posters favoring sandboxes seem to be coming from a much different perspective (which is one that may have its own norms, but I can't really speak to, as I am not deep into the PbtA community).