A Question Of Agency?

[Bedrockgames]

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?

I don't really know what you mean. Twin Fisted eagle sect and Yellow Mantis have objective headquarters in the setting. So they arrive at them by traveling from one to the other (and obviously in a sect war, traveling into enemy territory is potentially dangerous). Maybe I am missing what you mean. But I do think this may be a place where we just don't conceive of play in the same way

Sure, they could try to pursue another ally or obtain the Thousand Deaths flower. It is a big setting. They seek all kinds of things.

There are knowledge skills in the game. So these would be used to determine what they know about sects, or artifacts. They can also seek out people who know these things. Usually this come up because players are looking for possible allies and weapons, but sometimes NPCs who know about specific things could offer the information organically. It very much defends. A lot of times a player might say something like "Do I know of any device rumored to exist that can kill dozens of people at a time" for example. That might lead to a check (or no roll if they have a very high skill rank), and then I would tell them about the Thousands Painful Death Flower. Also a lot of times, by this point in the campaign, the players have amassed knowledge of this stuff already and just say "the thousand painful deaths flower we heard about at the House of Paper Shadows might be useful here" .

 

[Bedrockgames]

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?

The GM can add complexity however they like. But given it is a sect war, one of the most likely developments is other sects join in. For this game I have PDF sect books, so people who have those could incorporate them. Or they could use other sects from the core book, sects in the war of swarming beggars book, or make up their own.

Getting their aid would be played out. And that would all depend on the specifics of how they do it. They would obviously need to find a group whose interest aligned with their own, and give them a good reason for risking the lives of their own men (and often that is going to mean tangible rewards of somekind).

In terms of learning about crocodile sect being a potential ally, that might be knowledge they already have (if they have been playing in the setting a while) or it could be resolved with a Sects knowledge roll)

 

[Fenris-77]

For the purposes of this thread I think what is important is the player facing side, or the output side of the things we're talking about. Pure GM organization isn't really that novel, nor does it bear on agency in and of itself. Social and faction interactions can be complex to run and can be baffling for players who don't have those GM notes to fall back on, even if their character would know at least some of the details in question.

So how do our various techinques, tools, and mechanics impact the decision making processes of our players? Do they make players more capable of formulating a plan without constant GM help, more knowledable about the setting and how it works, more able to bring thier character mechanics to bear on problem solving, or less?

 

[pemerton]

Yeah, you still need a map of the physical space, for sure,

Can you elaborate on this?

I tend to think that maps of physical spaces aren't that important outside of the context of map-and-key resolution. Eg in my Prince Valiant game we've had action in multiple castles, as you'd expected, but have not had maps of any of them. When the action of three or four sessions took place on the coastline of Bordeaux we didn't have any maps (we knew the water was to the west; we just used free narration to describe trips from coast to village to castle and back). In fact, it was one of the players who established that we were in the Bordeaux region - I'd just narrated travel to the south of France, and that player said "Bordeaux!" That worked well because I had a duke in my castle, and with that extra detail from the player we were able to make him Duke of Bordeaux.

I do use Hex Maps for my wuxia sandbox, but because most of it is set in a civilized area, the hexes are more for gauging distance and charting courses than to use as discovery hex crawls.

As I've posted upthread, I am trying to get a handle on some differences of technique.

When you are counting hexes to gauge distances, what follows from that? I'm guessing passage of time calculated via movement speeds. And therefore encounters?

As I already posted, when the PCs in my Prince Valiant game crossed the Balkan Peninsula from Dalmatia to the Dacian Black Sea they only had two encounters, neither random: the Huns and the ghosts.

 

[Lanefan]

Gygax's AD&D has a prohibition on retries for picking locks (I think you can try again when a level is gained), for finding and removing traps, for trying to open locked or magically held doors (assuming STR is high enough to permit a check in the first place) and for bending bars and lifting gates. Also, I think - though maybe it's not as clearly stated?, I haven't gone back to check - for searching for secret doors.

I think you can try again on many of these if something materially changes in the meantime. For example, a Fighter fails to bend bars at a portcullis, continues exploring elsewhere, finds and dons a Girdle of Giant Strength, and returns to the portcullis. Because something material - in this case her Strength - has changed, she can try again. Same thing if someone cast Heat Metal on the bars to soften them. Gygax doesn't spell this out - he wasn't always great on following up on obvious what-if scenarios - but it's implied.

But yes, in general your one roll represents the best you're going to do. I like this, in that it makes resolution far less binary and-or final than does, say, a take-20 mechanic (one of 3e's very worst ideas IMO).

Forcing ordinary doors and listening at doors permit retries, but there are other costs built in (eg chance of wandering monsters due to noise made and/or the passage of time).

In Burning Wheel the ban on retries ("Let it Ride") is interesting because it cuts against the GM as well as the player.

As it does in 1e also, if the DM is true to the principles of the game as regards her NPCs if-when they try similar things.

 

[Lanefan]

On maps and "fairness" etc: as I've mentioned a few times, in my Prince Valiant game we use maps of Britain and of other parts of Europe, super-imposing a rough conception of 7th to 8th Century CE over the top of them. (For Britain this is done for us via the map on the inside of the Pendragon cover. I also have some photocopies of relevant pages from a historical atlas, which are pretty low-res.)

I'm curious what the sandbox practitioners think of that approach - it's obviously quite different from a discovery-oriented hexcrawl.

For a quasi-historical setting/game such as you're doing, this is cool. I like it!

For a full-on fantasy setting/game I'd probably find it a bit disappointing, as I-as-player would already know far more of what's where than my PC likely would and that'd spoil some of the exploration piece for me.

 

[pemerton]

The flowchart is metaphorical, mostly. Although the more I’m thinking about it, I think we could likely breakdown all play into a flowchart of some kind. And I don’t think I’m introducing a new concept here, just this is what’s been bubbling in my mind.

I think there are some tensions in the notion of a "flowchart", because a flowchart implies a network of options/choices over time.

This can be at odds with "no myth" approaches, and I'm not 100% sure it works for dungeon-crawls either (I've heard dungeon maps described as "flowcharts", but I'm not sure I agree with that).

Maybe I'm taking your flowchart metaphor too literally? Moving on to the next quote . . .

I think if we’re examining our play, our first step is to find out what are the points of discovery. What are the boxes on the flow chart?

Then I think we have to look at how they inform one another. How do the players go from one box to the next?

And then the next step may be to look at how the boxes and their connections are determined. Are they decided ahead of time by the GM? Are they procedurally generated in some random way? Are they based on player input in any way?

If the boxes and connections aren't determined ahead of time, I'm not entirely sure we have a flowchart.

Anyway, the two campaigns I've GMed where this was really a big thing were the second RM one, and my 4e one. In both of them I had a beginning sense of the cosmology, but it unfolded over time as (i) the players made moves that required me to establish more details, and (ii) I introduced new elements or new connections as part of the process of maintaining pressure on the players.

In the RM campaign one of the players maintained a chart of the relationships: it's attached. But it wouldn't have been possible to draw that chart at the start of the campaign. Just as one example: the chart has the PC Hideyo as an Animal Lord fallen from the heavens; but at the start of the campaign everyone (including me and his player) thought that the character was an ordinary fox who had managed to "improve" himself into human form (along the lines of the movie Green Snake).

 

[Bedrockgames]

As I've posted upthread, I am trying to get a handle on some differences of technique.

When you are counting hexes to gauge distances, what follows from that? I'm guessing passage of time calculated via movement speeds. And therefore encounters?

As I already posted, when the PCs in my Prince Valiant game crossed the Balkan Peninsula from Dalmatia to the Dacian Black Sea they only had two encounters, neither random: the Huns and the ghosts.

It can reflect time. It definitely is a reflection of how long it takes to get from A to B in the setting, and generally each hex is a day's travel and warrants one survival check to see if encounters or difficulties arise. It also indicates things like the time it takes to send messages through the imperial postal service or by messenger pigeon.

 

[pemerton]

This is just a question and is not a trick or a trap.

I wanted to add - that's not very Gygaxian of you!

 

[Fenris-77]

@pemerton Sure, I can expand. Moat campaigns still need some kind of map, some kind of guide to what is where and how far. The exact need really depends on the campaign. For a city, in any setting, it might be as little as a map of neighborhoods or sectors, or something really detailed with all the building and alleys detailed. In your case you didnt need maps of the castles, which is fine, your game obviously didnt need them. If someone wanted to run an infiltration scenario in those same castles then they might need a map.

I've run D&D with maps not much different from your maps of Europe, and little in the way of scenario or encounter maps. I've also run keyed hexcrawls. It just depends on what you need. Knowing what 'that' is a key GM skill.

Really it comes down to the breakpoint of what players can keep in their head without risking confusion. I can't think of a campaign that would require no maps at all though. Im sure there are examples but those examples are going to be niche, IMO.