A Question Of Agency?

[pemerton]

I don't disagree with you that TRPGs have historically overemphasized maps--I never do anything for cities that's more than the neighborhoods in relation to each other, and I've never done anything for larger areas other than overall continent-ish map/s. That said, I don't think having done some sort of maps is a bad thing: I find they help with consistency and with letting the players/characters have an idea of where things are.

I also think I agree with your implication that the Supers campaign is something of a special case: I've never played a Supers game that used anything other than the occasional tactical map (if the game in question had tactical movement, of course).

We had a multi-location battle in Washington at one stage: War Machine hung his opponent from the top of the Washington Monument, while Iceman froze the pond/moat at its base to trap someone, and Nightcrawler teleported to the top of the Capitol Dome where he abandoned a supervillain after proposing marriage to her (and broke her heart the next day by not turning up) and he then teleported to the Smithsonian.

I've never been to Washington but one or two of the players have. I don't know how much, if any, geography we mucked up in ways that might matter, but free narration of the locations seemed to work.

Also on neighbourhoods: I've lived in the same neighbourhood for 20+ years. It's inner city and has many little sidestreets and lanes (these were once for carrying out the "night soil" and many of them still remain). About a week ago I discovered a little side-street that runs for about 2 blocks, less than 1 km from my house, that I reckon I've never known about before. My partner reckons I have, but if she's right I'd certainly forgotten it completely, because the surprise when I discovered it was genuine.

This is why in urban contexts I think you just add in what you need to make the unfolding fiction work!

 

[Lanefan]

Okay, this is what I mean. You start with a specific adventure. Do you mean a specific published module? Or one of your own design? Or can it vary by group?

I've only ever started three campaigns (ignoring one-offs) so it's a pretty small sample size, but in order it went: homebrew, homebrew, published.

Okay, cool. That's a perfectly good starting point, thank you. Where did it go from there?

Like, when the party split.....why? They must have had a reason....how did they come to this decision? Meaning, what information did they need, and how was this information provided to them?

On the meta-level: a new player wanted to come in, and two of the existing players had extra characters and were willing to start a second party; so those two plus the new one started party (B) on Fridays while the original four players (including those two) carried on with (A) on Sundays. Not too long after, another new player came in to (B).

In the fiction, things found/seen/encountered during KotB and the lands around it opened up a raft of further adventuring opportunities (i.e there were hooks dangling all over the place!). Party A followed up on one, party B was going to follow up on another but then kinda blundered right into a third when it fell into their laps. And note this was all completely gonzo - their run through KotB might never be matched again for the sheer insanity that went on, nor for the level of hilarity and entertainment we all found in it - and that tone prevailed for quite some time after, though a bit less so in (B) due to the addition of different players.

But if you don't give them some kind of prompt.....a map found in a treasure hoard, a rumor heard in an inn, a reward poster on a community board......absent those kinds of prompts, how do your players know what to engage with? Are they that familiar with your setting that they can simply set their own agenda?

Heh - sometimes I go the other route: there's more prompts than they can ever hope to deal with, so they have to pick and choose which one(s) to act on. Or, as happens occasionally, they manage to ignore the lot of 'em...

Everyone's talking about "players get to do whatever they want" so I'm trying to understand how those wants might develop.

 

[prabe]

We had a multi-location battle in Washington at one stage: War Machine hung his opponent from the top of the Washington Monument, while Iceman froze the pond/moat at its base to trap someone, and Nightcrawler teleported to the top of the Capitol Dome where he abandoned a supervillain after proposing marriage to her (and broke her heart the next day by not turning up) and he then teleported to the Smithsonian.

I've never been to Washington but one or two of the players have. I don't know how much, if any, geography we mucked up in ways that might matter, but free narration of the locations seemed to work.

I've lived in the DC area for most of my life. I've always derived amusement from watching how film and TV (and to a lesser extent novels) get the geography wrong. I'm sure you didn't make any mistakes a non-native would catch.

(FWIW, if the body of water Iceman froze was rectangular, it was the Reflecting Pool; if it was irregular, it was the Tidal basin. )

 

[Fenris-77]

We had a multi-location battle in Washington at one stage: War Machine hung his opponent from the top of the Washington Monument, while Iceman froze the pond/moat at its base to trap someone, and Nightcrawler teleported to the top of the Capitol Dome where he abandoned a supervillain after proposing marriage to her (and broke her heart the next day by not turning up) and he then teleported to the Smithsonian.

I've never been to Washington but one or two of the players have. I don't know how much, if any, geography we mucked up in ways that might matter, but free narration of the locations seemed to work.

Also on neighbourhoods: I've lived in the same neighbourhood for 20+ years. It's inner city and has many little sidestreets and lanes (these were once for carrying out the "night soil" and many of them still remain). About a week ago I discovered a little side-street that runs for about 2 blocks, less than 1 km from my house, that I reckon I've never known about before. My partner reckons I have, but if she's right I'd certainly forgotten it completely, because the surprise when I discovered it was genuine.

This is why in urban contexts I think you just add in what you need to make the unfolding fiction work!

This is quite similar to how the city 'map' in the Dresden Files in handled. You could use a city map if you wanted, but mostly the characters just decide where their going and then get there, no navigation needed. The campaign is more focused on the places associated with factions and investigation as set dressing rather than being concerns with their physical relationship in space. That makes great sense in a modern or futuristic city setting, especially for a Supers game IMO.

I agree with your sentiments here, both that the need for maps is overblown in many cases, and also that a GM should use whatever maps he actually needs to run the game he wants to run. I think a lot of GMs might over prep and overuse maps. What's more, too much map can be, IMO anyway, a real distraction for the players in some cases.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I don't claim to run complete sandboxes, but in the campaigns I run, the PCs have things in (at least some of) their backgrounds, and they find things as they adventure--sometimes they find those things by accident (from their POV) and sometimes they find those things by intent. By the time the PCs get to mid-high level, they can pick and choose among things from their background/s and from prior campaign events.

That’s cool. It sounds similar to my 5E campaign and how we do things, at least as far as I can tell.

What kinds of things do the PCs have as agendas? What kind of background details shape their goals?

In my own campaign, we have a fighter who is a Neutral human. He took the soldier background and determined that he was a mercenary. This was the first PC the player made for 5E (this was when it first came out) and the player specifically wanted to just focus on mechanics and so on. The character was almost a blank slate.

But through play, we established that he’d been a member of a righteous mercenary company, but eventually left. He had a dwarf cleric companion that became a NPC and later a PC. With the players’ input, we determined that the merc company lost its leader, and the new one who took over started taking on less righteous work. That NPC and the merc company became ongoing foils for the PCs.

Each of the PCs has similar stuff going on. Most of them have been incorporated into ongoing events to one extent or other.

How do you guys handle it?

 

[Fenris-77]

I'll take any opportunity, at any time, to connect a character to the larger setting. Nothing (very few things?), IMO, fosters investment or immersion more.

 

[prabe]

That’s cool. It sounds similar to my 5E campaign and how we do things, at least as far as I can tell.

What kinds of things do the PCs have as agendas? What kind of background details shape their goals?

In one campaign, it's been mostly PCs who'd lost either their whole family or their home village (after the rest of their family moved). There's another who's kinda obsessed with elemental stuff.

In the other campaign, it's mostly a PC whose lover disappeared prior to the campaign's start; the party has since found they're a "guest" of a fey noble. There are further details to be worked out. There's another PC who has ... history with diabolists, and another who is struggling with her attitude/s toward people in authority.

How do you guys handle it?

I ask for backstories for the PCs, but it's voluntary: I get written backstories from about half the players, overall. Other motivations arise during play, as favors that need repaid, places to find information/treasure, whatever. After the initial adventure sequence (I kick off campaigns by throwing smelly stuff at a convenient fan) the party can choose from among the various things they have pending, from whatever source.

 

[hawkeyefan]

They make decisions in the game setting and that indicates where they want to go (or they ask me questions like "is there a school here that teaches sabres techniques). It ins't like a menu where they say "I want the high adventure with a dash of romance please". It is more handled through their characters and setting.



Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. The longer they play, the more familiar they become. When they first start out, they have a more narrow field of vision.




This really depends. If they have goals, they can share those with me. It doesn't mean I am going to craft adventures around them. It is more about what their characters actively do in the setting. I try to make my settings comprehensive enough to handle all kinds of campaigns. That is why there are dungeons, there is wilderness, there are supernatural threats, but there are also sects, heroes, politics, etc. The players are pretty free to set an agenda and pursue it, they just have to do that through their characters. As an example one of the campaigns that we had, one of the players was focused on building alliances with different groups and forming a secret powerful sect made up of many key members of the martial world (but they all assumed disguises when serving the secret sects interest: this I believe I added to the War of Swarmign beggars material). However two other players in the group were less interested in that, so they decided to help him achieve his bigger goal, by seeking out manuals and artifacts that would increase the sect's prestige and power. So they basically went on a bunch of adventures that were more like heists and dungeon crawls (which is what those players felt like doing). I have no problem running a split party (as long as things don't get too disconnected). Once the other player had established this power base, they returned to help him manage things.

Everything is pretty much through the characters. The players can definitely talk to me, but most of our conversations tend to be about what is possible for their characters to achieve. That said I do listen to what my players want. I'll give an example.

In the Disposable Disciples campaign, the players came into conflict with the House of Paper Shadows, an organization that is intentionally mysteries in the setting (all they really knew about it was it had these supernatural shadow puppets that did its bidding, and it had a vast information network). One of the players told me at the end of a session that he was planning on attacking the house of paper shadows next week. Because this was a very important organization and I didn't have much material on it, and I knew it would take me at least two weeks to research what I needed and flesh it out, I said he can do that, but could he wait three weeks so I have time to prepare (because I had only a rough sense of what existed in their headquarters). This is something I don't mind doing at all. There is a location, the players want to go there, I genuinely don't have enough information and it seems too big to just ad lib (I could have ad libbed it if I had to but I just think it wouldn't have been underwhelming if I had). That way I was able to just think for a straight week about what it ought to be, then set to work on fleshing it out and mapping it out. It worked very well. I was quite happy with how it came out and the player seemed happy that I put the work in.

Okay, so I get the sense that you design the setting and that you’re very thorough about it.

What I’m asking about and struggling to see from your example is how your players learn of the goals they want for their players. You said it varies....and I get that. But without a specific example, it’s hard to gage.

What are the nuts and bolts of how your players learn enough about the setting in order to craft their goals? Do you start with a setting gazetteer? Do you use random tables? Do you base it on geography? Like, if they talk to this person, they’ll learn about A and B, and if they talk to that person, they’ll learn about Y and Z. Then they can engage with whatever they want of those options.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sorry, mate, but if you're thinking through that sequence every time a GM puts a forest in front of you you're taking this all way too seriously!

How else would one proceed then and actually play? When a GM says "You see a forest in front of you" then you, as a player, start to ask yourself questions:

1. Does the GM intend this forest to be an obstacle we must overcome, or is it just scenery?
2. What sort of challenge does the forest represent? Is it filled with fearsome beasts, or is it a rich landscape with lots of game and bountiful firewood?
3. What sort of probabilities is the GM going to assign to different tasks, like navigating, finding food, avoiding encounters, etc.? How will that contrast with the difficulties WRT these things if we go up into the hills and avoid the forest?

Probably a lot of what the players are going to think is going to be in terms of 'campaign logic' and 'logic of play'. Like, there wouldn't be a forest here for no reason, something about it is different from 'grassland' or whatever terrain we were in before. You might even think in terms of parsimony of play, like "we might as well go into the forest and deal with it, the GM has probably prepped something here and if we go around we'll undoubtedly still run into some sort of challenge, but it will likely be less crafted." These are all thoughts that go through my mind when I play, as a player. Obviously I can also resort to thinking in character, but when the level of detail in campaign worlds is fairly sparse, there's often not a lot to go on. It helps here to learn to ask a LOT of questions, and this is one reason that techniques like those espoused by DW can be handy, because they speed this up a lot!

 

[Lanefan]

How else would one proceed then and actually play? When a GM says "You see a forest in front of you" then you, as a player, start to ask yourself questions:

1. Does the GM intend this forest to be an obstacle we must overcome, or is it just scenery?
2. What sort of challenge does the forest represent? Is it filled with fearsome beasts, or is it a rich landscape with lots of game and bountiful firewood?
3. What sort of probabilities is the GM going to assign to different tasks, like navigating, finding food, avoiding encounters, etc.? How will that contrast with the difficulties WRT these things if we go up into the hills and avoid the forest?

You as a player might think these things and in this degree of depth, but I rather suspect you'd be in a minority.

I - and I think most players - on something this mundane* would say or think "That's nice" and carry on; and whatever the forest turns out to be, that's what it'll be. Maybe a small consideration for "what's in the forest" as per your #2 above, but that's it unless we were specifically heading to this forest for some particular reason.

* - exception: if the forest has suddenly appeared in a place in the setting where it was previously established there was no forest then we're all going to sit up, pay attention, and start asking questions such as where did it come from, why is it here, and did we just time-travel without noticing it.

Probably a lot of what the players are going to think is going to be in terms of 'campaign logic' and 'logic of play'. Like, there wouldn't be a forest here for no reason, something about it is different from 'grassland' or whatever terrain we were in before. You might even think in terms of parsimony of play, like "we might as well go into the forest and deal with it, the GM has probably prepped something here and if we go around we'll undoubtedly still run into some sort of challenge, but it will likely be less crafted." These are all thoughts that go through my mind when I play, as a player. Obviously I can also resort to thinking in character, but when the level of detail in campaign worlds is fairly sparse, there's often not a lot to go on. It helps here to learn to ask a LOT of questions, and this is one reason that techniques like those espoused by DW can be handy, because they speed this up a lot!