A Question Of Agency?

[hawkeyefan]

again, it isn’t about discovery the more I think about it, that is just a component. The diagram is for me, so I can decide how factions act and respond. It is more about the interactions. Yes, the players may want to learn something about one of those sects as they plan and act, but I think it would be a mistake to liken that to hex crawl discovery. Sorry if this text terribly clarifying, I just think we can over essentialize play if we distill it to a concept like points of discovery: it is much more comprehensive and dynamic than that ImO

You can’t break it down a bit? Just so we can have a conversation?

You don’t sit down to a new campaign, having built this fictional world for the players, with any kind of expectations?

I mean, that can’t be true. What guides you when you craft the fictional world? You have to be thinking “oh this would be a cool place for them to go” or “I’m interested to see how they might deal with this guy”.

 

[FrogReaver]

Okay then engage with something else man.

Okay.

I was connecting my post back to the topic of the thread, but doing so that let anyone draw whatever conclusions about agency that they’d like. It was a comment on how examining play can help us understand agency or any other goal of play.

I get that. I wasn't trying to crap on your post just to be crapping on it. My fear is that bringing that up will only cause this discussion to go south again. Apparently even voicing this fear has already done that

So, to move away from the dead horse....what would you say might be some of your goals in play? You sit down to start a new campaign....what are the things you want to see your players engage with?

In a 1 shot I tend to expect that they will incorporate the goal of the 1 shot as their goal. My current 1 shot is stealing the MCguffin from the wizard king's vault. This is to give the other DM time to finish up the details for his more sandbox style campaign.

In a sandbox style campaign, there might be some high level initial goal but they are ultimately free to move away from that anytime they want. I guess that's the biggest thing about this kind of sandbox, they make their own goals.

This is just a question and is not a trick or a trap. It literally is me trying to have a conversation.

Thanks.

 

[Fenris-77]

This thread may not be the worst place to pilot such a write up, allowing you multiple inputs from various playstyles and perspectives.

Yeah, could be useful. Hawkeyefan just got a little taste of this system in an OSR game I'm running that he's in. The party just agreed to their first 'quest'. They're being paid for it, but perhaps more importantly, they now have a marker with a faction in town that may or may not prove important. The game in question isn't urban, so I'm using a pretty abbreviated version of 'the system', but I am using it.

If I were to write it up, I think I'd do it system neutral but with an index to OSR, which would also make it broadly compatible with D&D. I think the feedback loop would work no matter what game you slotted it into, which is kinda neat.

 

[Bedrockgames]

You can’t break it down a bit? Just so we can have a conversation?

You don’t sit down to a new campaign, having built this fictional world for the players, with any kind of expectations?

I mean, that can’t be true. What guides you when you craft the fictional world? You have to be thinking “oh this would be a cool place for them to go” or “I’m interested to see how they might deal with this guy”.

I tend to think in terms of 'is this content that players can engage'. But that is about it. So I try to avoid making setting material that is just there to be toured for example. But often all that means is giving my NPCs and groups palpable motivations that can serve as fuel. For locations those tend to be an outgrowth of things in the setting or just things that feel like they would fit. So in a wuxia campaign, it is about getting in interesting things that seem to fit the genre. And each Jianghu I do has a slightly different flavor.

But in terms of that map, there are no procedures related to it. I do have my sect war guide (which has evolved a lot and in its present form is different from the one posted below). i posted this earlier but in case you didn't see it, this might clarify how I handle things related to the sects. Again though, this is just a tool:

WAR OF SWARMING BEGGARS CHAPTER ONE: RUNNING THE ADVENTURE

Note: I will include the stats and sect information in coming days as I release sections of Gazetteer chapter and NPC chapter. If you have ...

thebedrockblog.blogspot.com

 

[Bedrockgames]

If it helps, the faction and face map I'm talking about is something I use for more socially indexed urban fantasy campaigns (although it could be used for any social exploration game I guess). What it isn't is a node based clue crawl, although my firm decision not to do that informed some of my design choices. I don't show the map to my players either, but the products of the map are something they get. Influence and favors measure ease or possibility of access to various factions and individuals (and places). The point is to give the players something tangible to use for planning.

So, for example, you need to see the duke but he won't see plebs like the players, so you investigate his secretary looking for foibles or something to exploit. As it turns out the secretary has a gambling problem. The players decide that they're going to engineer some gambling debts which they will then take on as a favour after some carousing allows them to position themselves as new friends. That gets them a favor owed. The favor isn't exactly a metacurrency, it's an actual in-game measure of indebtedness. In this case the payers cash it in to get the meeting they need. In another scenario they might keep it and count it as influence with the the duke's faction (those are the two ways favors get used in my game). The idea of influence works as a bonus to reputation, but just with that faction.

So, back to tangible for a moment. They players get a list of favours owed and influence with various factions. The point of that is to allow them, at a glance, to have a good handle on where they stand in the political currents of the place. Having something specific, something written down, gives the players handles for planning and execution that they wouldn't have with a more nebulous list of "this is who you know". This doesn't have to be tied to the plot either, in fact I prefer it not to be. This but accretes over time in the campaign, and favors earned several adventures ago can all of a sudden prove useful later in ways I could never have predicted as the GM. It gives the players a lot of control over things, which was the goal.

What I really need to do is write this up more formally, as the system currently exists more in the form of post-its, scraps, and after game analysis.

This doesn't sound too different from what I do in practice. The difference may just be the tools we draw on. For example all the stuff about debts, the players would just make notes about that, I would make notes about that, as it comes up. And if they wanted to call in a favor, they would go to that person or group and call it in (and we'd all essentially be working from memory and our notes of what happened-----in a long, long campaign, those notes might be very important). I don't give the players anything to interface with though. Sometimes I will draw rough sketch maps of setting for them, of cities, etc. But for the most part it is all theater of the mind.

There may be one point of difference worth examining here, and I might be wrong about it. The way I see some people describing things, we may deal with specificity differently, in that specifics in the setting come first, always. And this is something that has made using certain tools or models difficult (especially those that abstract things). Any mechanics or tools we draw on are in service to those specifics. And OSR GMs and Sandbox GMs are very big into having tools. But they are more like optional levers for the GM to draw on more than anything else. As an example of how specifics can make procedures and tools unhinge a bit, whenever I run my crime campaigns I always tried to make a crime subsystem (with rolls for committing crimes, having a steady flow of cash from ongoing rackets, etc). For like 20 percent of players in my groups that isn't a problem. They can let a racket burn in the background and just leave it to weekly or monthly rolls. But with a lot of old school players and a lot of players who like direct setting interaction (which always seems to be like 80% of my group) those kinds of tools break down because want to micromanage their rackets (where instead of being able to abstract it to a monthly amount, I am almost forced to deal with specific moments of them earning through the racket: i.e.. This happened so much, I just gave up on using my crime subsystems (these are actually still in my mafia RPG books, but I stopped using them myself long ago).

 

[Bedrockgames]

I mean, that can’t be true. What guides you when you craft the fictional world? You have to be thinking “oh this would be a cool place for them to go” or “I’m interested to see how they might deal with this guy”.

To address this specifically. Sure but these are just things I consider among many other things. And sometimes I might be thinking of specific groups of players, sometimes not. It kind of depends on the type of group I am dealing with. But the thing is, I dont' want to plan too far ahead in my mind where it will all go. I mean, I may have a sect in a canyon that does X, and believes Y, and is allied with this sect, enemies with that sect. But that may or may not be relevant to the direction the party goes. I have no idea going in if that group will be of zero interest, if they will be someoen the players try to work with, fight against, etc. So for me, my fun, really comes from not knowing what will arise. I tend to view the campaign as a chemical reaction. And each reaction, produces a moment of history that steers the campaign in a direction.

 

[hawkeyefan]

In a 1 shot I tend to expect that they will incorporate the goal of the 1 shot as their goal. My current 1 shot is stealing the MCguffin from the wizard king's vault. This is to give the other DM time to finish up the details for his more sandbox style campaign.

Okay, so with a one shot, things may be a bit different, because things are going to be more constrained. I was thinking of more sandbox or open world play when I was picturing flowcharts, but let's see what we can come up with.

So if we were to break things out as a flowchart for this scenario, how would it look? I expect that there's a base location of some kind, and of course there's the wizard king's castle, and his vault. So maybe those are three boxes on the flowchart. So how do we move from one to the other?

Are the PCs hired to steal the maguffin? Is in something of personal interest? How do they know about it?

What makes them move from the base location to the wizard king's castle?

Again, the answers to these questions may be incredibly obvious for one shot that has such a specific goal, but maybe the above helped explain what I'm talking about.

In a sandbox style campaign, there might be some high level initial goal but they are ultimately free to move away from that anytime they want. I guess that's the biggest thing about this kind of sandbox, they make their own goals.

Based on what? Surely there has to be some structure in place in order for them to base their goals, no?

So if the goals might be to accrue wealth and magic relics (a pretty classic motivation) then that likely means that there is treasure to be had, right? Which implies a geographical map with locations that may offer treasure of some sort.

So, again to kind of view this is a flowchart.....there's likely a home base town as the starting point, with a few options for potential treasure hunting as other boxes in the flowchart. Things like "the ruined temple" and "the cave of the lizardfolk" and "the dungeon of lunacy" and so on.

Now, these boxes need not be set ahead of time, but I'm kind of assuming that's the case based on what folks have been saying about the sandbox style. They could just as easily be generated procedurally through random charts and the like. They could just as easily be crafted according to actions declared by the players. There are multiple ways to do it, but let's go with "GM creates the setting prior to the start of play".

So you have these locations and they're there for the PCs to engage with.

How does that engagement get facilitated? Do they need to explore the map and find one at random? Are there NPCs who offer clues or suggestions about the locations?

What do you do as a GM to help the players set their goals and then what do you do to help them try and achieve those goals?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Movies, novels, and plays all have the same issue but yet they manage the immerse the viewer. And prior to tabletop roleplaying wargames managed to be pretty immersive. There is such a thing as good enough. Which means one doesn't have to throw up their hands and say "It too complex so it not a consideration". Which is what your post is saying.

I'm not making an argument about 'immersion'. In fact it seems like I would have to take your comment as indicating that only a game which works in a certain way can achieve that, though I certainly don't think you're actually saying that. In fact, IMHO, by providing vivid and focused characterization, IMHO a game that centers on specific concerns and themes can lead to an experience in which immersion in the RP can be quite intense. Obviously this is subjective. I have heard a lot of variations of arguments that 'story games' are anti-immersive before though, its a trope, but hard to really substantiate.

Yet in real life people have adventures. Of course what we do at the table isn't as detailed as life or as it could be if a fictional place actually existed. Down the lane from Bag's Ends were hobbit living their lives despite Tolkien never describing them. Yes a bunch of short cuts are used couple with some clever techniques to bring the setting to life.

However when there a creative choice to be made, I opt for the one that reflect the reality of the setting. That what I choose to do. Other may use different criterias, for example opting for the choice that makes for the better game. Or the choice that makes for faster resolution of the action. It a creative exercise, and deciding what would realistically happen is as valid of a criteria as any other.

Yeah, my experience with this line of discussion is that nothing can really be concluded. I agree it is a creative exercise, and my observation is that the 'creativeness' is the overwhelming part, while any constraints placed by the 'reality of the setting' are basically just matters of underlying agendas. There are also genre/tone sort of factors in there. While story now certainly works fine with different tones, it is much harder to maintain the fiction of 'a place which actually existed' when the genre moves in a more fantastic direction. That is, lower level or 'lower powered' play works well in a setting like Middle Earth, where the really super fantastic stuff is a lot more abstract and is the realm of NPCs who deal largely with the concerns of immortal beings and such. The sorts of action that might happen in my 'Heroes of Myth and Legend' play doesn't usually make sense unless it is couched in terms that are PC-concern centered. When I tried to do such play with straight up D&D (particularly 2e) it was not real pretty. 4e is better, but doesn't quite give the right feel for "Mythic Figures", though epic tier is fairly robust in a lot of ways.

 

[FrogReaver]

Okay, so with a one shot, things may be a bit different, because things are going to be more constrained. I was thinking of more sandbox or open world play when I was picturing flowcharts, but let's see what we can come up with.

So if we were to break things out as a flowchart for this scenario, how would it look? I expect that there's a base location of some kind, and of course there's the wizard king's castle, and his vault. So maybe those are three boxes on the flowchart. So how do we move from one to the other?

Not seeing setting that up as a flowchart being helpful. What might be useful is a flowchart of the obstacles they are going to encounter, but the kinds of physical details a map would provide for the whole locations, trivial details for this 1 shot.

Are the PCs hired to steal the maguffin? Is in something of personal interest? How do they know about it?

They were released from death row after being wrongfully sentenced to death by a resistance sympathizing magistrate to steal a particular treasure.

What makes them move from the base location to the wizard king's castle?

Not doing so would have meant not playing the game.

Again, the answers to these questions may be incredibly obvious for one shot that has such a specific goal, but maybe the above helped explain what I'm talking about.

Not particularly.

 

[hawkeyefan]

To address this specifically. Sure but these are just things I consider among many other things. And sometimes I might be thinking of specific groups of players, sometimes not. It kind of depends on the type of group I am dealing with. But the thing is, I dont' want to plan too far ahead in my mind where it will all go. I mean, I may have a sect in a canyon that does X, and believes Y, and is allied with this sect, enemies with that sect. But that may or may not be relevant to the direction the party goes. I have no idea going in if that group will be of zero interest, if they will be someoen the players try to work with, fight against, etc. So for me, my fun, really comes from not knowing what will arise. I tend to view the campaign as a chemical reaction. And each reaction, produces a moment of history that steers the campaign in a direction.

Yes, I understand all this. I get it. You don't need to describe this in general any more. I am asking for a specific example of how you do this. Pick a specific group of players you ran a specific adventure for and talk about it.

To lean on your linked blog post about the War of the Swarming Beggars, you say the below:

There is not an “Adventure” written in advance because the adventure is discovered in the course of play.

How was it discovered when you GMed this material?

However, there are still likely courses of action that could occur. The most likely scenario is the players get drawn into the War of Swarming Beggars through the manipulation of Twin-Fisted Eagle, who seeks an alliance with brave and powerful heroes.

Does Twin-Fisted Eagle reach out to the PCs? Do they hear of him by reputation and seek him out? So it sounds like you have two factions set up in conflict and the PCs are kind of in the middle, free to join one side or the other, or play them against each other, or whatever.

This is what I mean when I ask what play is meant to be about. It's the central premise of the campaign, seemingly.

Then once they are drawn in, they need to use their wits and brawn to survive and help Twin-Fisted Eagle defeat Yellow Mantis, leader of Southern Hill Sect. They will contend with Killer Squads and intrigue. They can also explore and help find new allies, weapons, and other resources to increase their side’s chances of victory. The most coveted object, would be the Thousand Painful Deaths Flower at Iron Temple. But it is a dangerous place, rumored to be haunted.

So to kind of place this into my idea of a flowchart.....Twin-Fisted Eagle might be one box and Yellow Mantis/Southern Hill Sect would be another. How do they get from one to the other? What other boxes would be between these two?

Maybe they pursue another ally? Maybe they try to get the Thousand Deaths Flower from Iron Temple? How do they know of these allies or items? How are these introduced into play?

In the below, you kind of touch on how some of these things may be introduced:

The Gamemaster can add complexity to the adventure by bringing other sects into the conflict (either sects from the core rulebook, the Sects of the Martial World Books, or of the GM’s own devising). If you use the Sects of the Martial World Books, the Crocodile Sect and Silken Robe Society are good fits. The daily event tables also account for this, bringing other sects in automatically on certain rolls.

But is that just for additional factions? Are other methods involved?

How would the players learn that The Crocodile Sect might be a willing ally? How would they go about securing their aid? What might they have to do?

GETTING THE PLAYERS INVOLVED
This is meant to be a brutal adventure, that emphasizes the dark underbelly of the Martial World, so the Gamemaster should feel free to bring the players in, in a way that matches that feeling. This needs to be tailored to the specific party in question. But at the start of the adventure both The Southern Hill Sect and the Twin-Fisted Eagle Clan are equally eager to defeat the other side and looking to gain any advantage they can. It is possible either side reaches out to them. An unorthodox party would most likely be contacted by Twin-Fisted Eagle Clan, while an Orthodox Party would most likely be contacted by Southern Hill Sect. However, keep in mind that Twin-Fisted Eagle is not above deception and would happily invite a powerful group of orthodox heroes, even lie to them about the reasons for the conflict.

The reason the party is recruited is both sides would have heard of the players exploits and are attempting the recruit heroes from all over Qi Xien to give them an edge over their foe.

Above you provide some suggestions on how to get the PCs involved in the conflict. This is followed by some tables for rumors and daily events. These are the kind of specific things I'm asking about. It seems like these charts are meant to highlight the growing conflict, and to show how it is escalating.