GM fiat - an illustration

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think that’s still missing half of the equation.

There is a map of meaning between the pressing of the real world buttons and the results in the virtual world that ultimately get output to the player via various output devices (haptics, monitor, speakers, etc).

Now there are real world limitations around the actual physical controls that must be considered. So you are right, we cannot just ignore that aspect. But the existence of that map of meaning means we do not need to talk about the real world game controls in order to understand what’s actually occurring in the game. It means we can also talk about what’s happening in terms of the virtual world actions.

It’s also my assertion that only talking about the physical world aspects actually leaves out nearly all the context around why the player is taking whatever physical world action he is taking. That context requires a map of meaning between the physical and virtual and it tends to be much easier to talk about when referencing the virtual side of that mapping.

I don't think this bears much relevance to TTRPG play, generally.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So I know this post was not directed at me, but reading it prompted some questions for me. I read the short blog on situational GMing, so I have an idea what's meant there.

What makes it different than sandbox?

What's the difference between situational GMing and living adventure?

What would be a mainstream adventure?

How can all these different things be "done in sandbox"?

Mainstream would be a module, you start at 1 on the map, usually with some lampshade as to how and why, and you go from there to the (or one of the) end(s).

Sandbox introduces an exploration element. The great desert stretches West. There are rumors of lost civilizations, ancient treasure, and great danger. You have all overstayed your welcome at the caravan stop, Abdul the barkeep told you his cousin found gold coins 2 days north in the old ruins, and there's said to be a pyramid 5 days March West. What do you do? Each of these locations is mapped out by the GM, along with the wilderness. It's up to you to explore and survive.

Situation play would add a layer of plots you can interact with, or maybe just experience. These will, often, arise out of what you do. Tried to steal camels to get to the pyramid? Got caught? The vizier agrees not to chop off your hands if you enter the Royal Tombs of Harad and recover the Rod of Health so he can cure his son's illness. Maybe this leads to additional plot elements later on, certainly it generates fiction and helps place the PCs.

But note that, while the GM can certainly grab an element from PC backstory or extrapolate from class/race/etc. to base elements on, there are no specific game structures or directives which make it likely that the game will involve or confront anything bearing on fundamentals of character, or some overarching theme/question.

 

[AnotherGuy]

How does "do what I think the NPC would do in the situation" or "consider what components of a scene seem realistic" or similar judgment

I'm not @Bedrockgames but these are your typical 5e D&D processes which exist (at least as how I imagine them to be)

For guidance, the GM consults the
(i) NPC's the pre-written/imagined ideals, bonds and flaws, background, alignment, class ...etc; and
(ii) The established fiction

And based on the above, the GM determines if uncertainty exists
If it does not, the GM declares the NPC's actions/reactions;
If uncertainty does exist, they allow for dice to determine the NPC's actions/reactions, perhaps modifying the difficulty based on (i) and (ii) above.

The GM decides is the most common form of play that exists in D&D, hence why it is critically important to find like-minded persons for one's playgroup.
A variation of the above is where the GM consults the table for possible judgements, and based on player input makes a decision either by declaration or via dice.

I would expect the variation above is most common at experienced tables (familial/friendship relationships amongst all players, players have GM experience...etc).

Once the action flows to dice there are other considerations

• Are stakes established prior the die roll? AND
• Is the mechanic to be used communicated?

By mechanic I mean Binary, Degrees of Success/Failure, Fail Forward...etc

If GM decides (or the dice) results in a dead-end in the case of a mystery/riddle or another type of challenge, what options are then available to the table?

1. The GM could provide further clues/insights. PCs attempt again - I feel this is a type of Illusionism.
2. The GM could offer further clues/insights at the cost of resources - I feel this is a type of Illusionism, particularly if it wasn't mentioned upfront and it is something the GM thought of later.
3. A different course of action must be taken (if available); or
4. The mystery/challenge must be abandoned.

There may be more steps I'm not considering. Just my stab at it.

 

[FrogReaver]

I don't think this bears much relevance to TTRPG play, generally.

Seems perfectly analogous to me. There’s a map of meaning between what ttrpg players do in the real world and what takes place in the imaginary world. Everything else I said flows from the concept of map of meaning and that concept isn’t specific to the digital medium.

 

[FrogReaver]

But note that, while the GM can certainly grab an element from PC backstory or extrapolate from class/race/etc. to base elements on, there are no specific game structures or directives which make it likely that the game will involve or confront anything bearing on fundamentals of character, or some overarching theme/question.

AW has been brought up a few times, what does it do to involve or confront anything bearing on the fundamentals of character or some overarching theme/question.

Like I’m not super familiar with that game so I’m not saying it isn’t there, but the vibes I’ve been getting in discussion is that it’s more of an open ended/broad question like what will these characters make of the world? But a question like that seems fitting for any kind of more open d&d game as well.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Mainstream would be a module, you start at 1 on the map, usually with some lampshade as to how and why, and you go from there to the (or one of the) end(s).

See that's a bit odd. I hear mainstream, and I think of what is currently the most popular mode of play, which is adventure path style books.

Small discrete adventure modules are not really mainstream anymore. But I'm glad you offered your take. I asked @Bedrockgames because to me, these terms are pretty fuzzy. Not that most such categorizations aren't... but I would think of some of them as almost interchangeable. So I'm interested in hearing ideas on them.

Sandbox introduces an exploration element. The great desert stretches West. There are rumors of lost civilizations, ancient treasure, and great danger. You have all overstayed your welcome at the caravan stop, Abdul the barkeep told you his cousin found gold coins 2 days north in the old ruins, and there's said to be a pyramid 5 days March West. What do you do? Each of these locations is mapped out by the GM, along with the wilderness. It's up to you to explore and survive.

So, this definition of sandbox play where a lot is predetermined is kind of an odd one to me. Having a setting that scaffolds play is one thing... having multiple adventure sites and hooks and the like is a step further. I look at some of the games I've run over the past few years as absolutely being sandbox style... but they run against some of what you say here, and I know there are others who would vociferously disagree.

I'm thinking of games like Blades in the Dark, or Spire, or iterations of PbtA.

Situation play would add a layer of plots you can interact with, or maybe just experience. These will, often, arise out of what you do. Tried to steal camels to get to the pyramid? Got caught? The vizier agrees not to chop off your hands if you enter the Royal Tombs of Harad and recover the Rod of Health so he can cure his son's illness. Maybe this leads to additional plot elements later on, certainly it generates fiction and helps place the PCs.

I don't really see a distinct style here, I don't think. It seems very much in line with what GMs of other games would do.

But note that, while the GM can certainly grab an element from PC backstory or extrapolate from class/race/etc. to base elements on, there are no specific game structures or directives which make it likely that the game will involve or confront anything bearing on fundamentals of character, or some overarching theme/question.

But does that lack define them? If you include such matters of character or premise, does that mean the game is no longer a sandbox or mainstream or what have you?

 

[zakael19]

See that's a bit odd. I hear mainstream, and I think of what is currently the most popular mode of play, which is adventure path style books.

Small discrete adventure modules are not really mainstream anymore. But I'm glad you offered your take. I asked @Bedrockgames because to me, these terms are pretty fuzzy. Not that most such categorizations aren't... but I would think of some of them as almost interchangeable. So I'm interested in hearing ideas on them.



So, this definition of sandbox play where a lot is predetermined is kind of an odd one to me. Having a setting that scaffolds play is one thing... having multiple adventure sites and hooks and the like is a step further. I look at some of the games I've run over the past few years as absolutely being sandbox style... but they run against some of what you say here, and I know there are others who would vociferously disagree.

I'm thinking of games like Blades in the Dark, or Spire, or iterations of PbtA.



I don't really see a distinct style here, I don't think. It seems very much in line with what GMs of other games would do.



But does that lack define them? If you include such matters of character or premise, does that mean the game is no longer a sandbox or mainstream or what have you?

I generally hear sandbox used in conjunction with OSR/old school style play these days, and it absolutely has a whole lot of preset hooks/content developed that the players can go out and explore. All the good hex map stuff, rumor tables, random encounter tables, perhaps some degree of a larger situation at play that the players can run into perhaps not depending. Like this is a big selling point of Dolmanwood, not just that it has a neat whimsical and dark fairy wood setting-but also that it has I forget how many hexes of developed hooks out there are just waiting for players to get a rumor table to and go for and explore; or drop your favorite module or dungeon into.

The downside for me trying to run that was the lack of the players and their characters having concrete immediate built-in goals so that all I had to do was put obstacles in their way and ask what you do. Very different sort of play from what I’ve been doing the last year or so.

Edit: to your point though, Harper calls Doskvol a sandbox.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I generally hear sandbox used in conjunction with OSR/old school style play these days, and it absolutely has a whole lot of preset hooks/content developed that the players can go out and explore. All the good hex map stuff, rumor tables, random encounter tables, perhaps some degree of a larger situation at play that the players can run into perhaps not depending. Like this is a big selling point of Dolmanwood, not just that it has a neat whimsical and dark fairy wood setting-but also that it has I forget how many hexes of developed hooks out there are just waiting for players to get a rumor table to and go for and explore; or drop your favorite module or dungeon into.

The downside for me trying to run that was the lack of the players and their characters having concrete immediate built-in goals so that all I had to do was put obstacles in their way and ask what you do. Very different sort of play from what I’ve been doing the last year or so

Oh, for sure... the OSR space tends to be very pro-sandbox.

I think that, for me, the idea of what makes something a sandbox is very close to the metaphor of the actual sandbox. That it's a set space (the box) and you can kind of go wherever and do whatever (make what you want from the sand).

I don't necessarily see that as oppositional to more character focused play.

 

[Bedrockgames]

So I know this post was not directed at me, but reading it prompted some questions for me. I read the short blog on situational GMing, so I have an idea what's meant there.

Unfortunately it has been a long day so I may not get to every post (I see I have a number of notifications)

What makes it different than sandbox?

This is a long topic and who you ask will likely answer in different ways (as describing things as situational adventures is on the niche side). But I see situational GMing as an approach that developed parallel to sandbox and then kind of merged with it a bit (to the point that few people make this distinction anymore). But importantly a sandbox is a premise where you have a pretty sizable area where the conceit is the players can explore wherever they want. You are also generally expected to prep a lot prior to start of play (i would call sandboxes heavy prep before the campaign but generally light once the campaign gets going). Situational GMing is much lighter on prep. You prep what you need and if you notice in the blog the implication is you prep a scenario, not a bunch of scenarios to pick from. You can take this and port it into sandbox and many do, so I think the distinction is not really that strong these days. But what clash is talking about there is much closer in my view to living adventures, which are more about the GM responding to the energy of the players and doing things through NPCs and groups (again if you look at clash's post there is a strong emphasis on NPCs and group dynamics). Also like Clash says, this isn't meant to be some genius or new notion, it is how a lot of people have run games.

The way I would describe a situation adventure is you prep a scenario with a lot of potential energy and drop the players in and see what happens (you don't have any real plan beyond lets see where this goes once the players enter in and start interacting with people). And there is a mindset of the GM really trying to run NPCs and groups as authentically as he can (really focusing on what this particular NPC wants, not where the adventure ought to go).

But as you can see there is a lot of cross-over with sandbox (especially as discussions about sandbox refined more and more over the course of the OSR). But the real point is a lot of us who came into sandbox, were really coming in from a slightly different perspective grounded in the things Clash talks about in that post.

I am having a little trouble today putting this into words so I will happily answer any questions if things are unclear (also I haven't talked about situational adventures in a while so I am finding myself having to summon up some old memories here)

What's the difference between situational GMing and living adventure?

I don't know that there is one. I first encountered the term situational adventures/situational GMing with that clash post (and I think around the same time or soon after I saw the alexandrian post) and I started talking with Clash online, because I felt what he wrote was how I ran games. And how I ran games was just what I called a living adventure. Again this comes from the Feast of Goblyns module where there is a section on something called wandering major encounters. It talks about treating NPCs as active forces in the adventures (something that comes from the original Ravenloft module really). But he put it better here in my opinion and gave you a bunch of NPCs to do this with. The basic idea was whatever antagonizing forces are operating, those are live pieces on the board, and the GM should run them according to their goals, their abilities, etc. And in response to what the players do. The designer, Blake Mobley, ended this section with a kind of dramatic "They live!" flourish. Now none of this is anything super unusual. GMs do this. He just kind of put it in a language that made sense to me, and this was the first time modules actually started coming alive. The adventure itself has a kind of planned out structure, but once I started fiddling with this 'live' concept, I realized my adventures were much more dynamic and organic.

To answer this again, I am not sure there is a big difference, just that living adventure is a term I used, and situational adventure is a term Clash Bowley used (I don't know that he invented it or anything, this is just where I first encountered that language). So any difference is probably more a reflection of what I would do, or he would do. I'd have to really sit down and assess his style versus mine (and it has been a while since I have chatted with him on these so I don't want to assume anything here: wouldn't want to put words in his mouth).

This gets muddled because as you probably know, living world was something that was being used to describe sandbox play to (and I would say that definitely includes things like NPCs being free to move around, it also includes things like having the world in motion, where events occur as they might in a real world----so it is a slightly different concept). When I did the adventure Landlord's Daughter for example for Colonial Gothic, I called that a Living Adventure. It is definitely not a sandbox. It is more of a mystery horror scenario with a countdown threat.

Also I am sure other people use "living adventure" as a term and maybe even use it in slightly different ways, so it probably even more muddled.

What would be a mainstream adventure?

I guess what I really meant here was a non-sandbox adventure

How can all these different things be "done in sandbox"?

very easily. You can simply have a bunch of ongoing situations in a sandbox. And living adventure ties in very smoothly with the living world concept. Like I said you aren't reinventing the wheel here, you are really more emphasizing certain aspects of GMing. If I want to do a living adventure in a sandbox, I could easily have a location that is a haunted house even a question adventure, so long as the NPCs involved have the flexibility to respond to things the players do and take the adventure in different directions as a result. With a living adventure the focus is really about bringing the NPCs and the groups operating in the world to life. So it isn't anything you couldn't already do in an existing RPG. Mobely was just placing the emphasis on this and also telling the GM, you don't have to be a slave for example to the encounter table, you can have an NPC take initiative and send a hit squad after them or try to arrange a meeting with the party and work out an agreement (and if they are untrustworthy they might be trying to stage an ambush). You can also have NPCs seek out other people in the setting to try to help them (that the sort of thing Mobley seemed to have in mind, was not just you running NPCs as individuals but realizing they fit into a broader social fabric)

 

[Bedrockgames]

But I would expect them that the GM is going back, thinking up some situations they deem interesting, and introducing them into play at some point. Many of those may be spun off prior action. The PCs freed some kobold slaves, who bring them a treasure map! It could get more involved than that, but IME there's an 'operational' kind of thing that goes on here.

I can only speak for myself, but the whole point is to avoid doing this. You are trying to operate through NPCs and groups. These might naturally lead to new situations, but the purpose is to avoid the artifice of "and now this scene/scenario" happens. But nothing to stop a GM from doing this if they want

I ran a lot of this general sort of play in the AD&D era. Honestly any durable campaign using traddish techniques will kind of land here by name level, as classic play kind of stops working, or else resembles ToH more and more. If you look at Gygax's play, it converged mostly to this kind of stuff.

But I agree with you, the immediacy is a difference with Narrativist play. There's also the focus on more of an operational, this is the party and the adventure, thing.

It is the nature of it being more about the players are doing something and the NPCs react to it (it isn't this binary but the basic idea is should feel a little like a pinball machine got set off and you had no idea where anything was going to go)

But I agree with others, this is pretty nebulous. Deeper, more detailed looks at what the rules, the GM, the players, and the 'process of play', the actual laying out of what happens is hugely valuable.

That is all going to be system dependent though. This isn't about what system you are using. This is about a style of GMing (and one probably more suited to tradition play). But those of us who were talking and writing about this, didn't really care too much beyond the broad strokes you see Clash addressing in the article. Now if that is nebulous for you, that is fair, but try to understand, these were terms and ways of talking about play that greatly clarified for us how to run an effective session. I think you guys have a focus on process, that we simply aren't that interested in exploring. It isn't especially relevant to what we are talking about (how a person runs NPCs in a living adventure is going to vary from GM to GM), when the GM responds to the players, is going to vary depending on how they communicate

You might check out the Alexandrian though as he is more structured in his approach and process may come up in his discussion of prepping situations