Why Jargon is Bad, and Some Modern Resources for RPG Theory

[Charlaquin]

Using @niklinna's idea of a flowchart of possible events, this doesn't seem like its A to B to C. For instance, couldn't the PCs get to the secret door and then go back to room 2 to make an offering, or study the reliefs or memorise the oath? Plus there are the patrols which may or may not ambush depending on what the players have their PCs do. And the PCs might (say) Charm the Bugbear boss and send boss with squad to fight the undead.

As I've said, I think there is something going on in the usage of the term that I'm not picking up on.

Consider each keyed encounter a scene. There’s really only one order these scenes can play out. The party can backtrack to a room they have already visited, but they’ve presumably already resolved the encounter there, so there isn’t much to be done. There’s also a bit of a spectrum. Yes, the fact that there are two ways to open the secret door and the use of random encounters means that this dungeon won’t play out exactly the same way every time, but there’s pretty minimal room for variation. The keyed scenes still play out in the same order every time. So, maybe it’s not completely linear, but it is pretty far towards the linear end of the spectrum. Contrast it with, like, The Caverns of Thracia, which has multiple entrances to each level, and many paths between any two keyed encounters. That dungeon’s structure is far less linear, but still not totally open, as the players are for the most part restricted to the dungeon’s predesigned paths. I would call it a branching structure. Contrast both with Isle of Dread, where there is no restrictive dungeon structure, merely an open hex map that the players can explore in any direction.

 

[Lanefan]

@Lanefan

I feel like your analysis of the two play structures smuggles in a view that setting must be predefined that is not a fundamental conceit of that second play structure. That second play structure uses setting as a means rather than an ends. We only define what we need for play to happen, often on an as needed basis. The event in step #1 comes first and is later justified.

If the inciting event is, say, that someone has just stolen a family heirloom of which I'd been given custody - I heard the culprit upstairs in my home but saw nobody; then the details of my-as-player/character's immediate reaction (to try to find/chase the thief) are in at least some part going to be based on the surrounding environment. Some examples:

--- if I'm in a city or town I can ask for help from others*1 ("did you just see someone go by carrying something that looked like [my heirloom]?") that I can't ask for if I'm in a cabin ten miles out in the woods.
--- if it's snowing out, or if there's snow on the ground, I can look for fresh tracks in a rural area that I can't very well look for in a busy city.
--- the layout of my home and-or neighbourhood will play a role in determining my action e.g. what route might someone have taken to get down from upstairs on the outside and-or how quickly can I get to where that potential route meets the ground?
--- other than the thief, am I alone in my home or is anyone else there; and if so, how many; and have any of those people been harmed?

*1 - whether it's day or night will make a difference here also, as will the weather conditions, as those things will probably affect the number of potential helpers/witnesses I can quickly access. If it's a cold rainy night, for example, I probably won't bother going the look-for-help route as there's most likely nobody out there.

It's also important to note that the player is not free to just do whatever they want. They must address the threat in some way in step #2. Casually exploring their environment will generally only lead to more trouble.

Fair enough. My point is that the environment and-or setting has direct effects on and influence over how I go about addressing that threat, as noted in the example above.

In step #3 fallout does some work. What happens must have an impact on the player character in some way. It should change the way they view the world or themselves. It's not just a naturalistic extrapolation of what should happen.

Here, if I don't recover the heirloom I'm likely to view myself as a failure not worthy of carrying on the family name.

In general, there seems to be this desire to extend an emphasis on world building and exploration of setting as like a thing onto games that do not feature either to any great extent in their play process. I'm not quite sure why.

Even if the setting never gets explored it's still there as a background in the moment, much like a movie set as someone (you?) mentioned upthread. That setting is there to answer the following type of questions, which in theory will always*2 be known by my PC and will affect pretty much any scene even if only by providing atmosphere:

--- where is my character in relation to anything or anyone else relevant, or am I lost
--- what time of day/night is it
--- what's the weather doing

*2 - except in very unusual circumstances e.g. I've jumped to a different world where day and night have no meaning

 

[JiffyPopTart]

As I said upthread, it's not a concept I've ever fully grasped and I still don't.

You say where you can only go from A to B to C in that order. But what generates the can only? Where is the constraint on possibility coming from? Does the adventure tell the players what action declarations are permitted, kind of like a choose your own adventure book does?

The adventure (as in prewritten thing) is written in a way that each step of progression leads to one and only one next step.

Location 1: PCs acquire a key and a map.

Location 2: Locked door only opened by key from 1 opens to a mine. Mine is an ambush and PCs are captured.

Location 3: The jail the PCs are in is attacked by dragons allowing them to escape in a helicopter piloted but Hero Man.

Location 4: Hero Man takes PCs to his hideout and teams up with them to attack RoboHitler. He flies them to a hidden island.

Location 5: Robohitlers Island Fortress Showdown.

That's a linear adventure. The PCs ARE somewhat free to not go from 1 to 2....but not doing so just stalls the adventure until they do.

 

[Lanefan]

Using @niklinna's idea of a flowchart of possible events, this doesn't seem like its A to B to C. For instance, couldn't the PCs get to the secret door and then go back to room 2 to make an offering, or study the reliefs or memorise the oath? Plus there are the patrols which may or may not ambush depending on what the players have their PCs do. And the PCs might (say) Charm the Bugbear boss and send boss with squad to fight the undead.

As I've said, I think there is something going on in the usage of the term that I'm not picking up on.

To me, that adventure linked to by @Malmuria is the very definition of a linear adventure: you can't get to area 3 without going through 2, you can't get to 4 without going through 3, etc. until you get to area 6 and there's nowhere further left to go. Your only exploration options (and note the terms linear-branching*-open are almost invariably used with regard to exploration options and-or map/encounter sequencing) are to go forward or to go back.

* - dendritic is another term that means the same thing; it's a term used to describe river systems where you start at the ocean with one main river which then branches into many smaller rivers as you go upstream, and each of those branches eventually ends without ever looping back on to itself or any other part of the river system. White Plume Mountain is a fine example of a dendritic dungeon layout.

 

[Lanefan]

Contrast it with, like, The Caverns of Thracia, which has multiple entrances to each level, and many paths between any two keyed encounters. That dungeon’s structure is far less linear, but still not totally open, as the players are for the most part restricted to the dungeon’s predesigned paths. I would call it a branching structure. Contrast both with Isle of Dread, where there is no restrictive dungeon structure, merely an open hex map that the players can explore in any direction.

My usual cutoff between branching/dendritic and open design is whether or not there are any loops present in the paths. Isle of Dread is almost a fourth classification, that being hexcrawl.

 

[Charlaquin]

My usual cutoff between branching/dendritic and open design is whether or not there are any loops present in the paths. Isle of Dread is almost a fourth classification, that being hexcrawl.

A dungeon with looping paths isn’t really what I would consider open, because the paths still create restrictions on the players’ ability to navigate the space. I mean, unless they’re freely able to just tunnel through walls or something. A hexcrawl is, in my view, the clearest example of an open structure, though not the only example.

 

[Lanefan]

A dungeon with looping paths isn’t really what I would consider open, because the paths still create restrictions on the players’ ability to navigate the space. I mean, unless they’re freely able to just tunnel through walls or something. A hexcrawl is, in my view, the clearest example of an open structure, though not the only example.

Fair.

I prefer to differentiate between a) a true dendritic (a.k.a. branching) dungeon* where choices exist as to which branch to take but when approaching any place for the first time you will always be coming from a predictable direction, and b) a what-I-call open (or looping) dungeon where there are choices as to which way to go and those choices will ultimately affect from which direction you might enter new areas later and-or the sequence in which you might hit those areas.

White Plume Mountain is a true dendritic. Secret of Bone Hill is much more open, or looping.

I wish I could easily draw diagrams on here - this is way simpler with visuals.

* - or adventure, if different than an actual dongeon-crawl situation.

 

[Charlaquin]

Fair.

I prefer to differentiate between a) a true dendritic (a.k.a. branching) dungeon* where choices exist as to which branch to take but when approaching any place for the first time you will always be coming from a predictable direction, and b) a what-I-call open (or looping) dungeon where there are choices as to which way to go and those choices will ultimately affect from which direction you might enter new areas later and-or the sequence in which you might hit those areas.

White Plume Mountain is a true dendritic. Secret of Bone Hill is much more open, or looping.

I wish I could easily draw diagrams on here - this is way simpler with visuals.

* - or adventure, if different than an actual dongeon-crawl situation.

Yeah, I get what you mean. Like an actual tree branch, where it starts from one point and diverges from there, vs. a Jennel Jaquays style dungeon where there are many entrances and many paths to any given point. There’s definitely a meaningful difference between those two types of structure.

You can also get mixed structures - for instance an open hexcrawl might have linear or branching (or looping) dungeons in it. The paths within your looping dungeon may at a certain point converge on a linear section, only to then diverge into a branching structure on the other end. You might use gate-and-key design to make a dungeon linear to start, and branch out as the players explore and acquire the metaphorical keys they need to open additional paths. Such compound structures are often the most interesting, in my opinion, but also the most complex to design.

 

[Aldarc]

Until and unless people start using the term as if it refers to a Big New Concept that didn't exist before.

Quite the reverse. That said, a lot of indie publishers did try to codify "fiction first" principles into the rules and play procedures rather than "that's the way that it's always been played."

I'm sure I heard both "sandbox" and "railroad" in relatively common use long before the 3e era - as in, back in 1e days - and being used to mean roughly what they mean today.

I have told you before but our memories about our pasts tend to be highly deceptive. We often project false histories onto the past based upon the present, and the more time between the present and a given moment in the past, the greater the potential room for misremembering. It's no secret to scientific studies that our memories play tricks on us and cause us to misremember in a variety of different ways. This is pretty clear when some American politicians project a utopian like society on the 1950s.

Sandboxes were created in 1850 in Berlin's parks. (Yes, sand existed in enclosed spaces before that.) Sandboxes have served as a metaphor for creative interaction and play since even the late 1800s. So it is no surprise that "sandbox" existed as a term in TTRPG circles; however, in earlier publications its meaning was closer in meaning with "the campaign" or even other more generalized uses rather than its present specialized meaning describing a particular playstyle or setting.

Dragon #25, Tim Kask

He still clings to the shibboleth that wargamers are classic cases of arrested development, never having gotten out of the sandbox and toy soldiers syndrome of childhood.

Dragon #247, Page 123

Grubb has a phrase for working with existing games, settings, and characters: playing in other people's sandboxes.

Later in the issue

Having gone freelance three years ago, Grubb has explored new sandboxes. I worked on Mag Force 7's Wing Commander and Star Trek (original series) trading card games, ...

This latter, more restricted meaning supposedly came more directly from video games. According to designer Robert Conley:

The term originated in computer games and it's meant to describe a game where its playing field is wide open for the player to do what they want. Around 2005 with the release of Necromancer Game's Wilderlands of High Fantasy Boxed Set, its authors—I am one of them—used it to describe to people what made the Wilderlands different from other settings. It was designed to make it easy for the referee to adjudicate his players roaming freely across the map.

Later still, the term got attached to a specific playstyle as mentioned by mxyzplk. However this is beyond what myself and other Wilderland authors intended. The problem is that people take the hard-core simulation of wandering the map too literally. This often results in frustration as many PC groups feel rudderless and the game feels without direction. In fact, if you read through various forums posts, such as on ENWorld, you see these campaigns fail more than succeed.

The trick to overcome this is "World in Motion." You work with the characters to give them a background they like in the setting. This provides a framework in which the players can make their initial choices. This background can incorporate what some consider railroad elements, like being members of a noble household, a guild, a temple, etc. But the key difference is that the players are free to leave or ignore those elements, as long as they are willing to suffer the consequences.

Along with this you develop a timeline revolving around NPCs and events. This timeline is created with the idea that this is what happens if the players didn't exist in the campaign. This timeline becomes your plan. It gets altered as a result of the consequences of the players' actions. At some point the campaign will become self-driving as the consequences of the consequences start propelling the players forward.

Again the Sandbox was meant to describe a type of setting, not a playstyle. But you can't control how these things go on the internet, so hence the confusion.

People often get confused due to the prior use of Sandbox in campaign. The term "Sandbox" was used for RPGs prior to the development of the Wilderlands Boxed but for other aspect of gaming than a type of campaign and setting.

Most of what I have found on the Internet seems to conform with the above point that our current sense of "sandbox game" came from video games, even if both "sandbox" was used and this style of play existed in TTRPGs prior to its coinage. (I also saw one TTRPG source use "story telling game" back in 1980 for what we would now clearly call a "sandbox game.")

The above also matches up with the development of the term "sandbox games" in video games: "The Theory and History of Sandbox Gaming" -

Encouraging Player Experimentation​

The metaphor of the "sandbox game" finally emerged at the turn of the century, around the publication The Sims and the following year, Grand Theft Auto III, the two games which are traditionally considered the two original and canonical "sandbox" games.

The invention of the term did indeed accompany a new development in game design, but this was not, as the term suggests, player freedom, which was already available by any number of means: non-linearity; the lack of objectives or central storyline; automatic variation of the game-world and game-behavior.

It was in terms of responsiveness and encouraging player experimentation that these games represented a gradual but transformative change in game design.

"Sandbox" was a new development because it indicated a new promise: automated responsiveness to player behavior. In this sense it does not mean "free play," "non-linear," and the rest; rather, it indicates that which makes this style of play specifically and particularly interesting in its own right.

This article points out that while games that we would retroactively consider as "sandbox games" existed prior to the coinage of the term, it was only with the advent of The Sims (2000) and Grand Theft Auto III (2001) that we see "sandbox game" coined to describe a style of video game. These are also the two games mentioned as redefining the genre on the Wikipedia article on Sandbox Games. And unsurprisingly both of these games predate the Wilderlands of High Fantasy (2005) book by Necromancer Games.

Even if you search for "sandbox" on the ENWorld forums from about 2005 back, no one is really using "sandbox" with this more specialized meaning. It's much closer to what we find in the Dragon magazine snippets above, where it's used more akin to "playing in someone else's sandbox" (i.e., a game, a campaign, a setting, the table, etc.) rather than its more contemporaneous sense. In one such post, Eberron is described as WotC's "sandbox," with a meaning that is closer to what we would now probably refer to as a "kitchen sink setting."

 

[kenada]

I would add that it’s not like there is agreement on what constitutes a proper sandbox. I make heavy use of generative techniques to create the sandbox during play, but that would not be adequate for others. They expect a significant investment of up-front authorship to make it feel real. Just see the sandbox thread here for examples. In that regard, it’s similar to other jargon where proponents might not agree on all the specifics or details.