D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[AlViking]

- nm -

 

[pemerton]

something designed for a particular purpose, that fulfills that design goal, should be better in at least some measurable ways than something that was not. That's literally what it means for something to be designed for a purpose (again, assuming that it is not outright badly designed.)

Because of the influence of classic D&D on so much subsequent RPG design, a large number of RPGs emulate the map-and-key elements of its design. What makes them potentially less well-suited than classic D&D for sandbox play isn't their lack of map-and-key resolution, but there attempt to overlay other approaches to play (eg storytelling) that don't sit well with map-and-key resolution.

 

[robertsconley]

Surely there is a vast difference between discovering a useful but unintended application in something like a drug, and (as my previous analogy used) saying that a Volkswagen Beetle isn't designed for towing but a Ford F-150 is.

If we use the ridiculously loose standard of "can be used as", we're right back at 52 Pickup. Anything CAN be used for anything when it comes to game design. Anything CAN function as anything.

But something designed for a particular purpose, that fulfills that design goal, should be better in at least some measurable ways than something that was not. That's literally what it means for something to be designed for a purpose (again, assuming that it is not outright badly designed.)

Starting with the first refereed wargames, the fundamental mechanic that all tabletop role-playing games share is the player describe, referee adjudicate loop

Eventually this got refined to be a integral part of campaigns focused on players pretending to have adventures as their characters.

After the release of OD&D, RPGs diversified into the myriad forms we see today. However the changes and additions they made were layered on top of this fundamental mechanic.

Because of that it relatively straightforward to omit these elements for a particular system to get.to the point it where it is useful for a sandbox campaign.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Starting with the first refereed wargames, the fundamental mechanic that all tabletop role-playing games share is the player describe, referee adjudicate loop

Eventually this got refined to be a integral part of campaigns focused on players pretending to have adventures as their characters.

After the release of OD&D, RPGs diversified into the myriad forms we see today. However the changes and additions they made were layered on top of this fundamental mechanic.

Because of that it relatively straightforward to omit these elements for a particular system to get.to the point it where it is useful for a sandbox campaign.

I don't think omission gets you all the way there, though. That's...sort of the point?

Omission only eliminates (presumptively) accidental roadblocks. "The system hasn't actively interfered" is far from "the system is actively helping". It's certainly helpful for task X if the system in question doesn't actively interfere with doing X. But it is--I should think objectively!--better for task X if the system actively helps with doing X.

To use a more contemporary example, things like X-card and O-card mechanics actively help players who want to do relatively "risky", pushing-the-envelope play-experiences. Having no mechanics at all for such things, neither interfering nor helping, is pretty clearly not enough, otherwise folks would never have developed the concept in the first place.

"The system doesn't get in my way, so it's better than a system that does get in my way" is a perfectly valid argument, but it is inapplicable as a rebuttal to the claim that a system actively helps with some specific task.

 

[pemerton]

@EzekielRaiden

Are you trying to argue that map-and-key, together with random encounter tables, used to resolve journeying by application of travel rates and the GM tracking the PCs' location on the map, isn't useful or suitable for sandbox RPGing?

 

[The Firebird]

But something designed for a particular purpose, that fulfills that design goal, should be better in at least some measurable ways than something that was not. That's literally what it means for something to be designed for a purpose (again, assuming that it is not outright badly designed.)

We can't even agree on what a sandbox is. So something being designed to support a particular type of sandbox game is not going to be better in measureable ways for all of our different ideas of sandboxes.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

@EzekielRaiden

Are you trying to argue that map-and-key, together with random encounter tables, used to resolve journeying by application of travel rates and the GM tracking the PCs' location on the map, isn't useful or suitable for sandbox RPGing?

No. But I am saying that this process was designed for dungeon-exploration, and that applying it outside its original scope reveals some of the ways that it is not necessarily the best for the strictest definition of "a sandbox". It is perfectly capable with many of the things that are a mix between the two extremes of railroad vs sandbox, even those which are mostly sandbox, but I don't think it is as effective a process for a maximally sandbox-y experience. If you like, the DM's control of the "map" is a potential sticking point for the most maximal forms of sandbox experience.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

We can't even agree on what a sandbox is. So something being designed to support a particular type of sandbox game is not going to be better in measureable ways all of our different ideas of sandboxes.

I mean, we keep circling around back to something I said literally hundreds of posts ago, where I laid out that pure-railroad is at one end of a spectrum, pure-sandbox at the other, and the vast majority of games lie somewhere in the middle. People ignored or disputed it...and then kept trying to skewer me for having an absolutist view of what "sandbox" is (when I was one of the first people to note it's a spectrum in the first place). Was particularly irritating because lots of people kept taking an absolutist view of what railroad meant!

It seems to me quite obvious that two factors are relevant for degree-of-sandboxiness: degree of player agency, and degree of player-driven experience. The former is about having the freedom to do more-or-less as the player likes (within the bounds of the fiction), subject to reasonable consequences for said actions. E.g. if the players elect to charter a ship to a new land, they can do that so long as they have the money to do so, since it's reasonable that it costs money to sail on someone else's ship. The latter is about whether any game-running person ("DM" in D&D terms) is the person causing the party to act, or whether the players are the cause of the action, whatever form it may take.

Something which has maximal sandboxiness needs both things about as high as possible while still having a system and respecting the boundaries of the fiction. The players need to be pretty much purely driving the experience, with as little GM intervention as one can get away with--preferably none at all. Further, the players need to have enough agency to be able to do almost anything they feel like doing, so long as those actions are sensible given the situation at hand.

The structures and systems, even of the lightest versions of D&D, were made with the expectation of--to paraphrase Gygax--functionally a renaissance man curating and controlling a mapped world. That DM needs to be deploying hooks to push the action forward whenever it stalls, and unfortunately stalling out is not as rare as it ideally should be (hence why "don't make points of failure that just block progress if they do fail" is one of the most common bits of advice for new DMs). This requires a great deal of preparation, indeed ongoing preparation, but much of that preparation will be wasted, because so few of the hooks will actually be needed.

 

[The Firebird]

I mean, we keep circling around back to something I said literally hundreds of posts ago, where I laid out that pure-railroad is at one end of a spectrum, pure-sandbox at the other, and the vast majority of games lie somewhere in the middle.

I think this is right to a point. But the endpoints of the spectrum are not well defined and differ subjectively. It seems like there are multiple spectra. I don't consider Ironsworn a sandbox (for me) because it doesn't have enough fixed. For me, it doesn't lie on the sandbox/railroad spectrum at all; it's in a separate category, on the "narrative game" line.

So asserting that it must be more of a sandbox than D&D because it doesn't need as much DM control doesn't land with me. That statement is false, for my understanding of sandbox.

This does not mean I'm asserting anyone is wrong if they do consider it a sandbox. Sandbox isn't well defined.

 

[pemerton]

No. But I am saying that this process was designed for dungeon-exploration, and that applying it outside its original scope reveals some of the ways that it is not necessarily the best for the strictest definition of "a sandbox". It is perfectly capable with many of the things that are a mix between the two extremes of railroad vs sandbox, even those which are mostly sandbox, but I don't think it is as effective a process for a maximally sandbox-y experience. If you like, the DM's control of the "map" is a potential sticking point for the most maximal forms of sandbox experience.

It seems to me quite obvious that two factors are relevant for degree-of-sandboxiness: degree of player agency, and degree of player-driven experience. The former is about having the freedom to do more-or-less as the player likes (within the bounds of the fiction), subject to reasonable consequences for said actions. E.g. if the players elect to charter a ship to a new land, they can do that so long as they have the money to do so, since it's reasonable that it costs money to sail on someone else's ship. The latter is about whether any game-running person ("DM" in D&D terms) is the person causing the party to act, or whether the players are the cause of the action, whatever form it may take.

Something which has maximal sandboxiness needs both things about as high as possible while still having a system and respecting the boundaries of the fiction. The players need to be pretty much purely driving the experience, with as little GM intervention as one can get away with--preferably none at all. Further, the players need to have enough agency to be able to do almost anything they feel like doing, so long as those actions are sensible given the situation at hand.

You seem to be agreeing with something I posted upthread:

the core idea, of the players saying where their PCs go; the GM then (subject to the getting lost roll) tracking their movement on a map; and the GM using a combination of random rolls and the map key to tell the players what their PCs discover/encounter/experience; in my view are pretty solid.

I think there are further questions that can be asked about the degree of player agency in this sort of "hexcrawl" play - I think that classic D&D relies, for player agency, on methods and approaches that don't work very well outside of a dungeon. But that doesn't mean that the resolution process, in itself, is not workable.

In particular, you seem to be agreeing with my comment about the issue map-and-key play can raise for player agency, when the map is (some approximation to) a whole world.

But even if one allows that these issues for agency undermine the sandbox character of play - and I think that is a contestable usage of "sandbox" - this doesn't show that classic D&D is not designed for sandbox play, nor that it doesn't provide support for it.