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

[Bedrockgames]

What does "Dollhouse Play" mean here? That's a new one on me.

I think it is a companion term to magic tea party

 

[hawkeyefan]

Personally don't find this if you are prepping locations, factions, people and situations. I think if you have something like a mystery adventure ready to go, there might be more tension but even that really isn't a big deal. I do think people sometimes walk around with an idea that "I prepped it and I don't want it to go to waste" but the whole point of sandbox is to not think that way (at least in my view). And this can also happen without prep. A gm who is ad libbing is developing ideas as the game unfolds and when you are ad libbing in a sandbox you need to be willing to put those aside too because it is about what the players want to do

Sure... like I said, it's not a certainty. It can be avoided. But I think there's a tension between GM prep and player-driven play that every GM should be aware of, and should consider.

 

[hawkeyefan]

You know, this comment resonated with me. I joined a game that was running the Dungeons of Drakkenheim uhh, campaign? Somebody cited it in one of the other sandbox threads floating around, and I was going to push back on that a bit but shrugged. However it was the "DM preps a bunch of stuff with a deep set of crap behind it and then I just couldn't get into it" of your post that really got me! Like, I just didn't care much about their Mordheim redux setting or any of the factions; or the central conceit of play.

Also turns out that DoD is actually a series of lakes (in Bioware CRPG design terms) with a fairly linear narrative expected to be followed despite being presented as a sandboxy city thing. Yeah, you can choose the faction you like, I guess; but there's expected Quest events you've gotta hit to progress (literally teh sort of "if you go in without XYZ you'll just die" type of thing), overarching plot lines the story is expected to follow; and a degree of climax. And like, with all that "prep" out there, how are you going to avoid pushing it on the players?

Right! I think that's the nature of prep. It's like that bit of the Odyssey about "the blade itself inspires violence". If you have a thing, then you will use the thing for what it is for.

Now, not all prep is about forcing things a certain way or negating player choice... but it's certainly about determining what play will potentially involve.

I've GMed al manner of heavy prep games... from novel-as-campaign through GM sandbox to adventure path and so on. I have railroaded and negated player choice and I have used illusionism to make things go in some preferred way. I've done it all at one point or another.

Like, when I was doing all of that... those weren't the things on my mind. What was on my mind was providing engaging play experiences and to tell a cool story and to present a living world.

No one preps stuff that they think is going to be boring. Few people set out to deny player choice or meaningful decision points for them. Those are just things that wind up sometimes getting sacrificed in the name of some other priority... most of which involves prep, in my experience.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think it is a companion term to magic tea party

And what does that mean. Both sound derogatory to my ears.

 

[pemerton]

games like chess and backgammon have basically one way to play. Sure, you can bring in variations, but it's still the same game. There's a set of rules you follow. You may change the rules a bit, but presumably, and it's possible that one player may not realize what house rules you have, but in general, you all know what's going on.

But RPGs don't have one specific set of rules.

This is the point of @Campbell's post not too far upthread:

At the end of day we cannot say anything definitive about what roleplaying games are or how their designers are allowed to define their play procedures because roleplaying games aren't one defined thing. It's just a broad category for games that share similar characteristics

<snip>

There's no platonic form. No set GM role. Sometimes you have a referee and other times you have other structures.
The GM as Referee paradigm that defines most of the more mainstream games in our hobby for instance is not consistent with GM as invested Master of Ceremonies or Scene Framer. The structures do not match up.

We can't talk about the rules of classic board games - we can note that each of chess, backgammon, draughts and go has elements of a logic puzzle to it, but also involves creative recognition and development of patterns; and we can note that backgammon (i) involves chance, and (ii) is the lowest in skill of any of the four. But each is a different game with its own rules.

The same is true of RPGs. Even RPGs that carry the same brand or overlap in respect of some particular techniques - the rules and procedures of the game that Gygax describes in his PHB (under the heading Successful Adventures; and this is the same game as is described in Moldvay Basic and - less clearly - in the original D&D rulebooks) are not the same as the rules and procedures that govern the DL modules, or that are set out in the 2nd ed AD&D PHB.

I don't mean how to make a character or make a check or something. I mean there's no one way to actually be a player or be a GM. Because RPGs, even the most tactical-combat-oriented ones, are social events centered around a conversation and people have very different ideas of what that means. So even if every agrees on the mechanics on how a game works, people are still going to approach the game in very different ways. You can have a player who always talks in character and roleplays breakfast in the same party as someone only talks in third person and prefers combat to talking, and everything in between.

Different things seem to be being run together here.

The issue of in-character vs third person roleplay seems to be comparable in its place in the analysis of play to other conventions and preferences, in other games, about seriousness and degree of precision expected. Not identical - it's not quite the same as an expectation, at a table playing bridge, about whether or not we gossip while playing a hand, or only in between hands - but in the same neighbourhood. It shapes the quality and nature of the experience of the shared fiction - but it doesn't affect that fiction's content, and so doesn't bear directly upon the resolution of moves that are made.

The core process or method for determining what happens next, on the other hand; or for determining what is a permissible move for players to make; is at the very heart of game play. The parallel would be someone who turned up to a chess club, and who insisted on rolling a die to determine which piece they move on their turn: that is someone playing a different game from everyone else, even though they are using the same pieces on the same board with the same rules for capturing.

To go back to "how to be a refereee," as one example, some games tell the GM to have players roll the dice whenever they need to use a skill, while others say to have players check skills only if failure would have really interesting or dire circumstances and to otherwise let the PCs succeed, but neither game can force the GM to actually follow those suggestions.

No game rules force anyone to do anything. This is not an interesting or distinctive feature of RPGs compared to board games or parlour games.

But the nature of the game actually being played will be different, if fundamentally different rules are being used to determine what moves are permitted, and how they are resolved. Among the most important things, in this respect, is who gets to decide what the outcome of a player' move is, and how do they do that? When I think of a sandbox approach to RPGing, I think of an answer to those questions which is different from the GM as takes the fancy at the moment of action declaration.

To me, that depends on two things: the setting, and how much the players actually want to deal with traveling. Obviously, traveling in a setting that has fast transport and long-distance communication is going to look very different than traveling in a setting where you have to walk or ride a horse.

But for a journey to be meaningful by your definition, you then have to go into resource management

Not necessarily. Journeying can have heft in resolution, without resource management. Classic Traveller isn't itself an example, but it shows how it might be done: if tracking of credits was replaced by a wealth or resources mechanic (Burning Wheel is the best example I know, but there are plenty of others), then the only resource that would have to be tracked for interstellar travel would be fuel. Which (i) is very simple, and (ii) could itself probably be replaced by some sort of straightforward toggle.

plenty of people are fine with having the scenery described by the GM, maybe RPing whatever activities they're taking when traveling, and breaking it up with an encounter or two, and then getting to their destination of choice. And I don't think I'd want to say those aren't sandboxes.

Until I know how the encounters were decided and what significance they had, and how the destination was chosen, and what sort of play is expected to be enlivened by the players having their PCs arrive at the destination, I can't tell.

I'm having a hard time seeing how a GM making the map up as they go won't be interesting.

I'm sure it could be very interesting. But that's not the threshold for being a sandbox. That's just the threshold for not wasting everyone's time when they turn up to play!

 

[hawkeyefan]

When I set up a sandbox, I usually have a starting point and I ask the players if they have anything they want to focus on. But sometimes I just drop them in a random spot. We might try to establish why they are there, some background information. But the point is they can leave that area and do whatever they want. This isnt' true of every single sandbox. Sometimes there is a premise. Or sometimes I am play testing something and I have to ask teh party to stay in a given area so I can playtest it (when I did the Sons of Lady 87 book, for some of the playtests I made that request, but for others I didn't because I wanted to see how that material connected to the rest of the setting in play).

What did you do for your last game?

I agree there is usually some parameter. I mean if the players want to go to mars, that is probably not an option in Ogre Gate campaign. But they can go to heavenly realms, they can go all over the continent (even places I haven't mapped out as much: in fact that can be helpful to get me to map things). And I agree theme, genre, etc can all be important. The GM has a role here of keeping things on theme or true to setting.

Yeah, for me, the idea that a sandbox is without limit just seems wrong. That's kind of where the metaphor came from... a contained space, but lots of freedom within that space.

Like for my Spire game, we didn't even use the entire city. There are about 12 to 15 districts in the city, and we started in one, spent about 75% if our time there, about 20% of time in a neighboring district, and then about 5% in a total of 4 other districts. Leaving the city was not really an option... that's not what the game is about. I don't think that restriction disqualifies the game from being a sandbox.

But this is because sandboxes, especially OSR ones, tend to vary and tend to treat things as tools. Now I do know people who adhere more rigidly to some procedures, and some tools, but I know more who view them as means to achieve a living world for the players. This is why rulings are so important for example. That involves embracing a certain amount of uncertainty and being comfortable with ambiguity. Not everyone likes that. But if I seem vague, it is because I am not as into prescriptively following procedures as someone like Manbearcat was asking about. But if you do look at our exchange on the Good Sandbox + thread, you will see I lay out exactly how I do overland travel and encounters. His issue seemed to be around how I allow for the checks to be scaled to danger and traffic (i.e. the default might be one survival check per day of travel, but the GM can increase that according to things like passing through a dangerous forest; and the GM can scale it down to say a city, and start rolling each time they pass from one quarter to another, then scale it further so they are rolling every ten minutes if the players are breaking into a house or castle). I find that kind of flexibility extremely useful in practice. I was under the impression he wanted something that was maybe more player facing or gave the players a more consistent way to interact with the mechanic in their decision process. Which is fine, but I do think I was at least specific in my example of overland travel

I don't know. I look at Prospero's Dream, the space station sandbox from Mothership's "A Pound of Flesh" module and I see specific ways to do things. Travel from area to area on the station works per a specific map which is divided into areas, and it takes X amount of time to make your way through an area, and you check for encounters for each unit of time. It's a set thing. The rest of the book largely follows suit. Are there some areas where there are multiple approaches a GM could take? Sure. But it's not nothing but that.

I didn't see any examples you may have posted in the Good Sandbox thread... I haven't really been following that one.

But I do think that this lack of specificity in process is a bit why the term sandbox isn't always understood. It seems it could mean a lot of things.

 

[Bedrockgames]

And what does that mean. Both sound derogatory to my ears.

I am not a fan of it myself but from RPG Geek:

Magical Tea Party or MTP - a derogatory term for play dominated heavily by GM Fiat or use of non-codified abilities. Very occasionally considered a bad thing in itself, but far more often objected to because no rulebook should be needed to do it, so a game system that depends on it too heavily delivers limited value for money.

 

[pemerton]

@pemerton can correct me if I misinterpret him but he believes that if the GM decides whether or not something is uncertain, automatically successful, potentially successful or not possible it is not a sandbox. That there must be some predefined procedure to determine response to declarations.

I didn't say the first thing. And the first thing is a procedure, as described in the second sentence.

If the procedure permits the GM to just act as they fancy, though, then I think we've moved out sandbox territory and into a "living novel" approach.

It's only an invisible railroad if the GM has already determined direction before the declaration of actions by the players. When I'm DMing and running an NPC I base reactions on what I know about the NPC while taking into account what the characters have done and said.

Here, the relevant constraint seems to be "what I know about the NPC". You haven't said where that comes from.

In the classic D&D sandbox, if the NPC is a newly-introduced character (eg via a random encounter), then the first thing that the GM will know about the NPC is whatever it says about that sort of person in the Monster Manual; and the second thing will be the outcome of the reaction dice.

It's not the GM making stuff up as takes their fancy, it's the GM responding to player declarations taking into consideration the world that's been envisioned. I prefer that to relying on some predefined table of constraints.

<snip>

That's far different from you belittling my preference by calling it "making it up as takes their fancy". If I'm improvising a situation, I'm doing it based on an understanding of my world's history, current events and logic.

I didn't say anything about your preference.

I responded to this thing that you posted: "As long as the GM is not forcing a direction I don't care if the location, obstacles or opportunities are predetermined, procedurally determined, made up on the spot. All that matters is the entertainment value". Now it turns out that your preference includes other things, like taking into consideration the world that has been envisioned.

I still can't tell whether or not you're advocating for "living novel", because you haven't said much about when and how the GM's envisioning of the world takes place. In my view, what characterises sandbox-y play is that the player can make choices about what is at stake for their PCs - information and context aren't always perfectly known, but aren't blind either. The GM taking into consideration the world that has been envisioned (by them) is consistent with both informed and blind choice on the player side.

EDIT:

I'm saying that his definition of only one and only true way of running a sandbox is not widely accepted.

I've not said anything about "one true way". I've identified at least three ways: map-and-key based, classic D&D-style, sandboxing; the sort of "total player freedom" sandboxing that @Hussar has described in the context of Ironsworn (and that Dungeon World would also support, I think); and Torchbearer 2e, which integrates some elements of both those approaches.

And I'm sure that there are others too, either invented but unknown to me, or yet to be invented. RPG design continues to be a fertile field for innovation!

 

[pemerton]

Personally I am fine with calling it a sandbox if the GM is maintaining consistency of setting, if the GMs on the fly material is coming out of an existing foundation so everything feels concrete. If all he is doing is improv, then perhaps another label would be better.

If all that is required for a sandbox is consistency of setting and a feeling of concreteness, than any skilled "living novel" GM is now running a sandbox!

That doesn't seem right to me.

 

[pemerton]

I have to amit that I agree with @AlViking here. Sandbox, to me, is a setting where the action of the game is largely driven by the player interactions with each other and the elements of the setting - whether that setting is 100% authored by the GM or 0% or some value in between.

IOW, a sandbox where there isn't "map and key" is no less of a sandbox.

The last sentence is true, if there is some other method of centring the player's choices and decisions for their PCs.

If the GM is just making it up as they go along - in effect, riffing in response to what the players say - then I don't see a sandbox anymore. I see a "living novel" (Lew Pulsipher's term from the late 70s/early 80s).