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

[The Firebird]

Will there be some slight differences between Group A who plays through this scenario and Group B? Sure, probably. Will those differences be meaningful? Probably not.

I'm sure what you're saying is in line with your experiences. However, I think you are seriously underestimating how differently these adventures can play out at the table.

The possibility of bribery being up to the dice instead of GM fiat means that I can exercise my agency as a player in engaging with this guard. Assuming D&D, the GM will tell me a DC, and I'll look at my Persuade skill and see I have a +5 or what have you, and that gives me a sense of my chances. Then I can decide to proceed or try something else. That's agency... my fate is in my hands. There is a randomizer, yes, but I understand the odds. Whether I pass or fail is up to me and the result of the roll, not up to the GM's whim.

Don't want to stick on this too much. But between "the players construct the world" and "the players act in a fixed world", having fixed DCs that the players interact with seems much more like the latter to me.

But, I'd point out that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how player driven play works.

It's not a question of the player knowing more than his or her character. It's that there isn't anyone who knows the answer until the action is taken. It's something I really struggle with when introducing players to player driven games. "Can I" questions are pretty much pointless in this context because, frankly, no one at the table knows. Maybe this guard is a shining bastion of truth and integrity. Maybe this guard will sell his own grandmother for a copper. No one knows. But, once it's established at the table, now everyone knows and everyone then works off of that new information equally.

Really at this point the entire discussion seems semantic. The "players construct aspects of the narrative" crowd is calling what they do "player driven play". I get why they use the term, but then it's deployed to suggest that sandbox games aren't player driven. That rubs me, and other sandbox fans, the wrong way because it doesn't accurately reflect how we play.

Yet multiple posters in this thread have posited White Plume Mountain as consistent with sandboxing. Now maybe @The Firebird was just reaching for an easy example; but @Lanefan didn't seem to be. And Lanefan has told us that he has used Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth in a game that is described as a sandbox.

Almost nothing can be less realistic than either of those modules!

EDIT:
Right, so "realism" doesn't actually mean realism. It's a type of clique-y jargon.

Yeah by realism I mean verisimilitude. The appearance of reality, self-consistency within the logic of the game world.

I think there's two very different framings of what "player-driven" might mean.

One is about the DM designing a very large setting without a lot of pre-set scenes, like an adventure path/module does. This is what I tend to the think of as the Elder Scrolls model; where the focus of play is on "discovery" of the pre-generated lore and story hooks. The player agency and freedom is the ability to discover that lore, and accept or reject hooks in any particular order the players like. I don't tend to think of that as "player-driven", but it does offer more apparent agency than your classic Dragonlance style AP.

The other is more of what you and I a few others here would generally mean, where the contours of the setting are established in play in order to frame challenges and conflicts to the PC-engendered goals.

Agree.

I think if we could all agree that both styles are sandboxes and both are player driven then like 90% of the disagreement would disappear.

 

[AlViking]

Note, that is one version of sandbox and not one that I ascribe to. The idea that in order to have a sandbox, the DM must be the sole source of details is a particularly idiosyncratic version of sandbox that only supports one, fairly narrow playstyle and insists that anyone doing anything different isn't actually playing a sandbox. Thus my disagreements with @robertsconley

I don't know that anyone said can't do sandbox with other types, but then again there have been a ton of posts so I could have missed it. On the other hand there are people who insist I'm not really running a sandbox in D&D.

Which in a way I find funny. It's not like we have some RPG standards board that defines what a sandbox means. There isn't just one way to play.

 

[The Firebird]

@The Firebird, I'm not 100% sure how to interpret your "Wow" response to this post.

I think Bedrock has shown a pretty broad knowledge of social resolution systems so your assumption they had not was unmerited.

 

[pemerton]

I'm temperamentally conservative about all sorts of things, RPGs just happens to be one of the few things I'm not.

I had always assumed that I was a pretty conservative RPGer - certainly compared to (say) Paul Czege or Vincent Baker or Robin Laws or Jonathan Tweet, or other leading proponents of the game form.

It was only posting on ENworld that made me have to confront the possibility that I may not be.

 

[pemerton]

But the only reason to have guardrails is to prevent someone from acting in a malevolent way, is it not? If we assume that people in the context of a game are just trying to provide the best experience possible, why do we need guardrails?

Tennis courts, basketball courts, football ovals, etc - they all have marked lines. The purpose of those lines isn't to deal with the risk of malevolence.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure. But I hope you see how that really has nothing to do with what I said?

Sure, you were appealing to the popularity of the modern game, as if a lot of people liking made it objectively more worthy.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I'm sure what you're saying is in line with your experiences. However, I think you are seriously underestimating how differently these adventures can play out at the table.

I don’t know… the conclusion is set ahead of play, so either the players solve the mystery or they fail to do so. The clues are mostly determined ahead of play, so they’ll help the players reach the conclusion. I imagine some amount of interviewing of witnesses and suspects will yield the information the GM has determined that it will. And so on.

I’m not saying there will be no differences… but I’m comfortable that my assumption is fairly accurate.

Don't want to stick on this too much. But between "the players construct the world" and "the players act in a fixed world", having fixed DCs that the players interact with seems much more like the latter to me.

Hm. Well, I’m not really sure what you mean by “the players construct the world” or why that would impact DCs. I mean, even when running D&D, I provide every DC to the players openly before the role. I don’t think these two things are all that connected.

Based on what I’m reading in this thread, it would seem that if there is such a relationship, it’s likely exactly the opposite.

 

[pemerton]

I'm going to make up a game called The Fisherman and the Fighter. This is a focused game that is about (a) the nature of these two PCs as well as (b) the fate of their hometown.

<snip>

Ok, that ran long. I didn't anticipate that. So I'm going to leave this here as an exemplar of the sort of play I'm depicting

<snip>

If you have any questions about any of the above, I'll answer those tomorrow

No questions from me at this point.

The game you describe could pretty easily be Burning Wheel - Make a stand, involving the whole town, would use the variant option for larger scale Range and Cover found in the Adventure Builder - except for you 3 unreplenishable "Deeds"-type points.

For the Fighter, I suggest Village Born - Kid - Foot Soldier (18 years old). (Or alternatively Village Born - Conscript - Foot Soldier (15 years old).) For the Fisherman I suggest Village Born - Labourer - Fisherman (21 years old).

An interesting thing about this game, as I imagine it playing out (especially in the Early Phase), is the focus on interpersonal dealings with other villagers and between the two PCs. The actual decision-making about village defences etc would probably lie elsewhere (ie with leaders in the village who are more knowledgeable and socially powerful than these two PCs). The PCs would be perhaps trying to persuade them, or responding to directions that they give, etc.

I think there would also be a lot of Beginner's Luck tests!

 

[hawkeyefan]

Sure, you were appealing to the popularity of the modern game, as if a lot of people liking made it objectively more worthy.

No, I wasn’t. Go back and read my post.

I was pointing out that the modern version of D&D has practices that no longer make sense for the game. That they’re holdovers from earlier editions, which focused on different things.

Specifically, I was talking about how mundane resource attrition (torches, rations, ammo, etc.) isn’t really that important to 5e. The idea that these things need to be tracked is a holdover from earlier editions. If a GM decided not to track them in 5e… or maybe to only do so in certain situations… they would find their game mostly unaffected. Not so in the earlier versions where this stuff mattered so much more.

No where did I appeal to the popularity of modern D&D or even make any kind of commentary on the quality of the different versions.

You’ve imagined this.

 

[Hussar]

When I build a campaign world, populate it and come up with factions I try to make it as logical and realistic as possible. Climate is based on probable ocean currents, latitude and geography of the land such as mountains. Unlike a lot of campaign maps there's not going to be a desert just because the designer wanted a desert scenario, it will be because of mountains or because they're within 15-30 degrees of the equator like on earth. I also try to take into consideration changes to behavior and culture based on the impact of magic and monsters being real.

But, I got absolutely pilloried for suggesting that this is a lot of work that the DM needs to do before starting a sandbox or indeed, even being able to consider the campaign a sandbox. Huh.