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

[AlViking]

Genre matters here too. I do mostly wuxia campaigns these days and that is a genre where characters are often very strong willed (like willing to cut off their own face in the right circumstances strong willed). So a lot of this depends on whether you are operating in a genre setting, in a realistic setting, and then what a particular GMs sensibilities might be there

There is also magic to consider, everything from pacts to a monthly Zone of Truth session may not be uncommon. I've also had players try to bribe someone who would have to skip town after giving them info. They we're shocked that 10 GP was not an adequate amount.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Gotcha. That's actually interesting, because a) that's kinda the opposite of what you said in the previous post and b) prepping the sort of "corruptibility of the guard" or similar characteristics of an NPC means that there's stuff the players can absolutely like figure out, right?

Which aspect feels opposite? I think I know but I want to be sure before giving a response (I dont' think I am contracting, probably just not giving you a complete picture of my feelings in two posts).

b) Possibly. It depends on the guard and his details. My point wasn't this stuff should never be discoverable. Just that it doesn't always have to be discoverable. For some this information might be something the players could learn, for others it might be something they can only figure out by trying to bribe the guy. If this is a guy who is known about town as an incorruptible person, sure. If it is someone who has never really been tested, or who is extremely cagey with people, it might be less discernible.

 

[Bedrockgames]

There is also magic to consider, everything from pacts to a monthly Zone of Truth session may not be uncommon. I've also had players try to bribe someone who would have to skip town after giving them info. They we're shocked that 10 GP was not an adequate amount.

Sure, and I think part of running a sandbox is being willing to let magic solutions take their natural course. Tif the players find a magical solution to a problem that effectively circumvents a whole adventure, cool. That is less work for me

 

[Thomas Shey]

Or you just aren't comfortable with these things being codified.

Most "rulings not rules" fans are excluding so much I find it hard to be charitable in assuming its just a subset of areas they don't like being codified. Especially since they usually make it clear they just don't want to be restrained in general.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think most players are also "merely adequate" so I don't understand the double standard.

If someone has more power, we expect more of them. As I said, when a player has the routine ability to make things bad for one or more others that a GM does, then I'll expect more of them (and more constraints on them) too.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Not sure what that means, sorry. To me, either I trust my GM or I don't. If I trust them to do the best they can and I'm enjoying the game it doesn't matter. If I don't trust them or I'm not enjoying the game we have a different issue and I'm probably not going to continue playing with them.

As I've said before, if I had to trust the judgment of my GMs unlimitedly, I'd never play at all. I don't trust anyone's judgement that much, including my own.

 

[pemerton]

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.

Huh? Pulsipher is contrasting the "living novel" style - which he dislikes, but tries to faithfully describe - with what he calls the "wargame" style, which is a style that today would be described as a sandbox.

The key thing that differentiates them, for Pulsipher, is the capacity of the players to make informed, and hence meaningful, game play choices. In the living novel game, because the GM responds to action declarations just as the GM thinks makes sense in the moment, the players can't know what the results will be until the results are narrated.

Whereas the wargame style uses all the techniques that were well-known in that period (ie late 70s/early 80s) to try and ensure that players can reasonably know what the likely prospects are of their action declarations.

What counts as reasonable knowability seems to me obviously context-sensitive. But if, to learn what the results of some action declaration will be, the players have to follow extensive GM breadcrumb trails of clues, then I think the play experience is no longer a sandbox one. Because play has become GM-driven, not player-driven.

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.

I don't know what you mean by "procedural restraint", and so don't know whether or not the various approaches I've talked about do or don't use them.

And if you're agreeing with me that the GM making things up as takes their fancy is at odds with sandboxing, then I don't know why you're posting as if you disagree with me!

 

[pemerton]

there have been many people throughout history and to this day that are willing to die for their beliefs.

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

Sure. History is also replete with people whose minds were changed - by reason, by fear, by love, by chance.

Now, how do we make all these possibilities a part of our verisimilitudinous RPGing? One way is for the GM to decide it all. The idea that that is at odds with railroading, though - that it ceases to be railroading simply because the GM is convinced that they have authored a realistic character is bizarre to me.

And here's a concrete illustration from another well-known domain of play: I, as GM, can also conceive of an Orc captain so puissant that no character who is not a peer and champion could possibly defeat him. So when any PC fighter less than 7th level confronts this Orc, I just declare that the Orc wins. It's realistic, after all - that's how good this Orc captain is!

Would anyone agree that my reason for not using the game's combat resolution rules, because the possibility of the 5th level PC winning is unrealistic (given my conception of the NPC) guarantees that the game is not a railroad? I don't think I've ever met that person.

 

[pemerton]

It's also one aspect of what makes the game enjoyable to me as both GM and player. As a player I don't want to know enough about every NPC I encounter to know why they make their decision. Do you really want to know everything about every NPC you encounter in a game?

No. But I do want the GM to stick to the action resolution rules.

I'm saying that I don't want complete transparency of NPC motives and goals at all times. It wouldn't be fun for me or my players.

No one in this thread has argued for that. So I don't know who you think you're disagreeing with.

What I said, upthread, which generated this particular strand of conversation, is:

if the players are trying (via the play of their PCs) to persuade a NPC to do something, and the GM has decided in advance, and secretly, that the NPC will never do that thing, that can clearly be an instance of railroading. I've experienced it, and I imagine so have others posting in this thread.

See how I said nothing about transparency of the fiction.

What I did say something about was the method for determining the outcomes of a player's declared action for their PC.

So what I am inferring is that you can't imagine a way of having outcomes of action declarations be potentially knowable by the players, that doesn't involve the GM just telling them in advance all the fiction that the GM has authored and will be extrapolating from.

But I'm familiar with several such ways.

EDIT:

Okay and I said it is perfectly fine to want something else. My only point is this might be an issue for you: it isn't for me. I see it as a good thing when a GM has this much governance over NPC motivations

See, this is another case of non-sequitur. I said nothing in any of my posts about who gets to author NPC motivations - in fact, all my posts have assumed that it is the GM who is doing that.

My post talked about how a declared action is resolved.

 

[pemerton]

You've already caused a problem just in the jump between sentence 2 and sentence 3.

The first is "know enough...to know why [any given NPC] make their decision". The second is "know everything about every NPC you encounter". The two are not the same, and pretending they are the same is blatant equivocation.

I don't think @AlViking is equivocating. As I just posted, I don't think AlViking is familiar with other possible ways of resolving declared actions - other than in combat, and probably some other physical endeavours like forcing open stuck doors, where I'm confident that AlViking doesn't rely on GM pre-authorship of what is or isn't possible to determine what happens.