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

[Manbearcat]

The genesis of my comment to @AbdulAlhazred begins with this comment you made in post #2409:



Then you outlined a list of elements:

• A prepped and keyed map with crucial sites, where novel qualities of locales, spatial dimensions, and spatial relationships are nailed down and are actionable for the players' and GM's respective decision-spaces.
• A fairly sizable number of factions with clear and provocative motivations, enough at-odds with each other to generate momentous conflict that compels players to declare a side.
• A coherently constrained space.

These are excellent techniques for managing a sandbox campaign. But they are not what constitutes a sandbox campaign. Which led to my comments about defining a sandbox campaign.

To evaluate techniques for managing sandbox campaigns, it is crucial to first consider the overall creative goal, what distinguishes sandbox campaigns from other types of tabletop roleplaying.

My view is that goal is very specific:
A campaign where players are free to trash the setting through their characters.

To expand:

• A campaign where players pretend to be characters having adventures.
• A setting that can be altered or destroyed through player action.
• Crucially, players are free to trash the setting in any way within their characters' capabilities.

I use the word "trash" deliberately because of its negative connotation, to highlight, with a bit of humor, that managing a sandbox campaign requires the referee to let go of any preconceived notion that events must unfold in a particular way, beyond what is plausible for the circumstances.

"Letting players trash the setting as their characters" is the answer to your question of "what is a game trying to do." Your comments in post #2409 didn't fully address this foundational question.

With that answer, we can move on to discussing "how does it go about that", along with "is it successful?".

Those 3 x bullet points that I put forth aren't things I would put forth as techniques. I meant them as principled constraints and requirements.

For instance, engineers (including those in charge of aesthetics) and brand fans might say a Lotus coupe must have the following benchmarks:

• Be uniquely lightweight and possessed of x power to weight ratio.
• Produce unparalleled driver connectivity to steering and handling responsiveness.
• Strip away "cockpit cruft" and anything that distracts from or detracts from an exclusive driver-experience.
• Look (roughly) like this.

Those are the principled constraints and requirements. How the engineers and those in charge of aesthetics implement those principled constraints and requirements are the techniques.

Same goes for TTRPGing.

So, for instance, Duskvol is a coherently constrained space. The techniques employed in making it so are (a) generation of fictional architecture featuring a supernatural apocalypse that has rendered the outside world nigh uninhabitable, (b) thereby going outside is overwhelmingly "juice ain't worth the squeeze" (except in specific scenarios that may or may not see the light of day...typically depending upon whether the Crew takes on a Smuggling job into The Deathlands and/or some character premise becomes tied to that haunted wasteland), (c) and this situation-state is reflected by several transparent gamestate-impactors implemented in concert (rare gear requirements that are difficult to get and are heavy cost on Loadout, Volatile consequences for the Deathlands, high Magnitude dangers and an attendant higher proportion of Master Tier Threat NPCs, Ghosts everywhere which trigger inherent mechanical effect when exposed to, high Magnitude supernatural pestilence, an enormously high Magnitude desolate expanse that must be endured and traversed to get anywhere of consequence).

In another thread, I wrote about a technique I have developed that will render my first bullet point (a principled constraint and requirement) above more effective and efficient:

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This was actually one of the more productive exchanges, to be honest. If we're struggling to land in the same place on the differences between principled constraints and requirements and techniques employed to implement the former, that is certainly going to have some explanatory power for other issues. Particularly the "actionable gamestate" impacts of "black-box resolution."

I'm just going to screen snip the below exchange between @soviet and @Bedrockgames , because it is relevant.

This is a back-and-forth around "black-box GM decision-making" and its impact on either actual railroads or players becoming oriented to play as if they are experience a railroad. The way I see it, these two states have so little daylight between the two of them that they are useless to even distinguish (except in terms of diagnoses and overt, transparent measures taken to rectify). If the play itself feels like a railroad to players, it doesn't matter whether the GM is authentically aiming at railroading or not...the play is consequentially a railroad. Something "wrong" is happening. Whether that something wrong is at the concept-level or at implementation level or even player-side (sometimes players don't know system as well as they should, therefore the proverbial "black box" is actually of their own making...and they should take accountability for that and rectify the situation by learning the system)...doesn't matter. The table needs to recognize it, admit it, understand it, and resolve it.

Imo, the worst way to do this is the passive expectation that offloading this onto social contract (amongst a group of people that are possessed of one or more conflict-averse people) will just do this heavy lifting and it will all magically go away.

Imo, the best way to do this is all member parties being active, transparent, responsible for their part, and accountable to themselves and each other. All member parties here includes "system" because this is the all-important layer where (a) actual gameplay (where gamestate movement from here to there is facilitated) becomes coherently decipherable to all parties and (b) therefore actionable. And when it comes to gameplay being coherently decipherable and therefore actionable, players who "don't know what is happening when we (GMs) make these kinds of choices" have their actual gameplay come undone precisely because of the associated absence of coherently decipherable and therefore actionable. Hence, black-box GMing isn't just a problem for the perception/implementation of a railroad...it is a problem for coherently decipherable and actionable gameplay for players.

And this, of course is where we circle back to "high trust." "Just trust your GM." Trust doesn't always do the work when concerns around railroading are made manifest. And trust definitely doesn't do the work when actual gameplay ceases to become coherently decipherable and actionable...in that case you're left "trusting the GM will basically play the game for you in such a way that your desired outcome comes to pass." But gameplay isn't about desired outcomes. Gameplay is about actually doing the things and experiencing your doing of the things which may or may not lead to desired outcomes. If someone else is doing the things in your stead, the actual gameplay loop becomes absent for the player.

 

[pemerton]

This seems such an expansive definition of railroading as to not be useful.

Well, it's pretty useful to me!

 

[pemerton]

But the world often does constrain our choices to a large extent. So a game aiming for verisimilitude should also do this. In these cases, "not railroading" by your definition results in a game world that seems less real. It constantly bends to the players whims in the name of agency, in a way that imo feels artificial.

Have you played much Burning Wheel? Or Torchbearer? I can tell you from experience that what you say here is simply not true - those games avoid the railroading that @EzekielRaiden is talking about, but the world does not "constantly bend to the players' whims". Both RPGs have quite high rates of failure on tests (in my experience, probably around 50%).

 

[pemerton]

as the DMG states you can't hit the moon with an arrow so sometimes there is no chance of success. It does not mean that the GM making judgement calls on what is possible makes it a railroad.

Would you agree that you can't shoot the moon with an arrow (assuming you're not Artemis or similar) doesn't actually require the GM to make a judgement call? Everyone knows that - it verges on the self-evident, for anyone who knows what the moon is and what archery is.

Whereas this NPC can't be persuaded to do <this salient thing> is often not self-evident at all. As a constraint on the results of action declaration, it is completely unlike the example of the obviously impossible thing.

 

[AlViking]

It is pretty DM dependent. And tone dependent. Tolkien might have been fine with some northern barbarian clans, but adding Tortles to the setting is a no go.

There are a lot of views on the earth. Many of them may strike others as ridiculous.

Sure, the whole family is a bit far. I'm gonna pivot from this example because it is getting a bit close to real world religion. I'll just say in general that there are a lot of different viewpoints on the earth, and a lot of people feel very strongly about them and are not willing to compromise.

It was a bit hyperbolic, a more likely scenario is a cultist that worships a fiend for promised reward. They expect to have a cushy spot in hell after they die but if they betray their patron there will be hell to pay. On the other hand there have been many people throughout history and to this day that are willing to die for their beliefs. There may be many reasons an NPC will not agree to cooperate. There may be other cases when the players come up with an unexpected or particularly persuasive argument I had not anticipated.

It's funny. It's a railroad if the player doesn't always have a chance to succeed while a player would never try to convince a king to hand over a kingdom. Why not? If anything is possible, why wouldn't you attempt such a bold ask? If they work towards a goal over multiple sessions to achieve a goal I originally thought impossible? That's a different and something that has happened occasionally.

 

[AlViking]

All RPGing involves this. It's not unique to, or distinctive of, sandbox RPGing.

As I posted upthread, it's used by Lewis Pulsipher, writing in White Dwarf, to describe a type of play that was happening among D&D players in the late 70s/early 80s: the GM makes up situations, and consequences, as they go along, in response to the players saying what their PCs do.

I attempted to find any reference to that phrase and cannot find it. I don't see how a term from 50ish year old book adds any value when it basically describes what every definition of sandbox already describes.

I don't think I used the phrase "procedural restraints". That's your phrase, and as best I can tell you're attributing to me a view that I don't hold.

What I did say is that, if the GM's procedure is simply "make it up as takes their fancy", then the game is not a sandbox, in my view, because the players can't make choices informed by a reasonable sense of what will happen next.

You have procedural rules that restrain what the GM can do. How is what you describe any different? Again with "make it up as takes their fancy" is not a useful way to describe what people who run sandboxes do.

 

[AlViking]

Would you agree that you can't shoot the moon with an arrow (assuming you're not Artemis or similar) doesn't actually require the GM to make a judgement call? Everyone knows that - it verges on the self-evident, for anyone who knows what the moon is and what archery is.

Whereas this NPC can't be persuaded to do <this salient thing> is often not self-evident at all. As a constraint on the results of action declaration, it is completely unlike the example of the obviously impossible thing.

The reason the NPC can't be persuaded will frequently become apparent during play, in other cases we can discuss it offline if anyone is interested when it no longer has any impact on the ongoing campaign. On the other hand, I don't want to run or play a game with complete transparency. If I did I wouldn't play D&D.

 

[pemerton]

If the GM is just interested in characterization of the NPC, and isn’t doing it to railroad. It isn’t a problem.

It can be a problem for me! And I've known - and know - other RPGers for whom it can also be a problem. I don't care how compelling the GM thinks the NPC's character is - if the likely consequences and prospects of success of my action declarations aren't knowable by me as a player, then how am I supposed to play the game?

And as a more general point, I would say that secret GM decisions about what NPCs will do in certain situations is a core part of the railroader's repertoire!

 

[The Firebird]

Sure, there are some things people won't do. Although 1984, and I believe also Aristotle, present the opposite view, ie, that anyone can be broken if subjected to enough stress ("Do it to Julia!").

Just looking at history, people dying for their beliefs is not exactly rare.

What I care about, as a player, is how I am able to play the game. If I can't reasonably judge the likely prospects of my action declarations achieving <this> or <that?, then I can't really play the game. And the more salient the action declaration is to the situations that the GM is presenting to me, the bigger an issue this becomes.
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The GM secretly deciding that I will fail in some meaningful action declaration, where I don't have a reasonable chance to work out in advance of the action declaration that it will be futile, is in my view not good game play. It's classic railroading!

I don't think this is true at all. The example of the disguised dragon from earlier is a good one. That information is not going to be known by the PCs, at first, so it might not make sense to them why this individual is so recalcitrant. But that's actually a clue.

If you decide there has to be a chance of success, then you have to make the dragon act irrationally. And to show there is no chance of success, you have to give your players access to information they wouldn't have.

Have you played much Burning Wheel? Or Torchbearer? I can tell you from experience that what you say here is simply not true - those games avoid the railroading that @EzekielRaiden is talking about, but the world does not "constantly bend to the players' whims". Both RPGs have quite high rates of failure on tests (in my experience, probably around 50%).

Not those, but other narrative systems like PbtA, BitD. Sure, you can fail tests, but the players have a fundamentally different relationship to the narrative--one that, for me, prevents meaningful gameplay. Is Burning Wheel much different in this regard?

 

[pemerton]

Flip the scenario: is there ever a situation where you would force a player to roleplay his character a certain way because the NPC used a skill on them.

That depends on the RPG being played. Different RPGs have different rules.

In 4e D&D, for instance, the Deathlock Wight has a Horrific visage which can cause a PC to recoil in shock/terror/horror (if the GM rolls a hit vs the PC's Will defence). When I used a Deathlock Wight in my 4e game, one of the PCs recoiled in horror and fell down a bit! Luckily for that PC, the players had anticipated shenanigans with verticality, and had had their PCs rope themselves together.