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

[Lanefan]

They don't produce anything. Including food. So they should all be dead, of starvation. It's also utterly unclear where they get their material goods from.

See previous post - I added an edit while you were typing this.

As for their material goods, I'd think they were stolen over the long run from woodsmen, loggers, travellers, and any other commoner-types dumb enough or unlucky enough to cross their path.

 

[Hussar]

Hunter-gatherer settlements of 100 people aren't/weren't uncommon in reality,

A hunter gatherer settlement of 100 people - virtually all of which are adults, is HUGE. That's 100 gallons of water plus about 300 pounds of food per day. There's absolutely no way that this area could support a population that large. Look, I get that people hold KotB as this fantastic adventure and great example of a module, but, the truth is, it's not actually thought out. Like. At all.

I just checked. In Area B, the Orc Lair, there are 38 adult orcs in this cave alone. There are another 30 adult orcs in the next cave. There are 44 adult goblins in Area D. There are 44 adult hobgoblins in Area F. I'm going to stop counting now. There something like 200 adult humanoids in the caves. That's FAR too large for a hunter/gatherer location. There's just no way.

It's a tower of orcs. There is zero thought given to anything resembling realism or world building. It's a random collection of humanoids, most of which hate each other just as much as they hate humans, all living cheek to jowl, side by side in harmony.

The PC's don't actually have to do anything. The humanoids would all be dead in a month.

 

[mamba]

Yes, because only one person has said about how much work they do to get their sandbox off the ground. No one else has ever talked about how the DM/GM is the sole source of information about the setting.

being the sole source is not the same as preparing a 500 page setting document ahead of the first session

 

[Bedrockgames]

Sorry, was responding as I was reading as different things caught my eye.

It was specifically the point of, "a sandbox is going to have concrete details", which is a normative statement that is pretty clearly stating what a sandbox is. I was reacting to that, specifically because this point makes it sound like all sandboxes are going to have concrete details. A point that has been repeated rather a lot in this thread as a means to narrowly define sandboxes to exclude anything that isn't a traditional sandbox.

I do realize you've been pretty open in this thread about what consists of a sandbox.

I was just speaking casually, I wasn't saying it as a universal for all sandboxes

 

[Bedrockgames]

Here's a thread that discussed the reason for using a mechanic: Why do RPGs have rules?

That reason may not move you. But you'll see that it has nothing to do with replacing "role play" or fiction with a dice roll.

I am not really interested in getting in a side debate or conversation on this. Like I said, I don't think my experience is everyone's experience. And like I said, eve the 3E social skill rules aren't mean to replace roleplaying (if you follow them to the letter, that isn't really their function). I only mention 3E rules because I noticed it a lot with them. I am talking about the impact it has on my and my general preference for freeform RP

 

[Bedrockgames]

A hunter gatherer settlement of 100 people - virtually all of which are adults, is HUGE. That's 100 gallons of water plus about 300 pounds of food per day. There's absolutely no way that this area could support a population that large. Look, I get that people hold KotB as this fantastic adventure and great example of a module, but, the truth is, it's not actually thought out. Like. At all.

I just checked. In Area B, the Orc Lair, there are 38 adult orcs in this cave alone. There are another 30 adult orcs in the next cave. There are 44 adult goblins in Area D. There are 44 adult hobgoblins in Area F. I'm going to stop counting now. There something like 200 adult humanoids in the caves. That's FAR too large for a hunter/gatherer location. There's just no way.

It's a tower of orcs. There is zero thought given to anything resembling realism or world building. It's a random collection of humanoids, most of which hate each other just as much as they hate humans, all living cheek to jowl, side by side in harmony.

The PC's don't actually have to do anything. The humanoids would all be dead in a month.

I feel like we have come very far afield of what @Lanefan was originally saying. He wasn’t saying it is realistic, he just seemed to be saying you could run it more with realism in mind, and seemed to be focusing on things like how the monsters behave. With questions of realism you often have to drill down to find out what someone means and what they are focused on. I also think very few groups are going to know or care off hand how many orcs are plausible for a hunter we gatherer group living in caves (I had to take courses on early human settlements and I would still need to look this stuff up because I wouldn’t know off hand, and I would have no idea how well that information translates to orcs). Plenty of later modules get into things like ecology, as do plenty of sandbox GMs. But I also think ecology is one of the least likely things to trip up most players sense of plausibility, unless it is painfully obvious.

I personally thought it was a fun module though when I played through it. I found the dungeon aspect to be very engaging. I generally don’t think Gygax was aiming for hyper realism though

 

[Bedrockgames]

Here's my question though.

Why are they trying to discover these things? Why are they exploring physical geography or a town's social network? These aren't goals in and of themselves. These are means to an end. The point of exploring physical geography, for example, is to find stuff that's interesting to do. The player's don't care about the town's social network in and of itself. They are discovering these things so they can then go do something they actually want to do.

IOW, limited knowledge is simply a means of stalling the players from doing whatever it is they actually want to do while they spend time uncovering information that leads them to the stuff that's of actual interest. The players don't really care if the Dungeon of Nasty Badness is in Hex 1211 or Hex 1213. They want to go to the Dungeon of Nasty Badness.

This is conflating means and goals AFAIC. If this is the "ideal" of sandbox campaigns, then, well, to me, that means that much of the time in the "ideal" of the campaign is spent doing stuff just to get to the stuff that the players actually want to do. I believe the term for this is a "rowboat campaign" where the party just kind of wanders around aimlessly until they have achieved a sufficient amount of DM prepared information and then they actually get to do the stuff they want to do.

Look if this stuff isn’t for you it isn’t for you. But am not sure this is accurate and even if it were based on an accurate understanding, you are just building up an argument against a given play style. I just don’t even think that is worth debating because I can see how a conversation like that would go here. We could do this with your approach if we wanted to as well. Pretty much every approach to play could be painted in a way that would make it seem pointless. Do you honestly think people are coming back to a style they find utterly pointless?

After a while these kinds of posts move from being differences of opinion about game play to people just bullying styles and posters who engage in those styles.

Now I get people were overly hostile to your position, which I also think wasn’t fair because it was clear to me you were being dragged for words you had said, but they didn’t reflect what you were trying to say. But this thread is so hostile towards people whose only crime is liking somewhat trad gameplay, sandbox and favoring their idea of realism. And the level of ridicule being directed at them (and I am not saying you are doing this but it is present in the thread) is making the conversation extraordinarily unpleasant. I am totally down for play style debates. I don’t think this thread is that at all. This just feels like a space for making fun of a particular style for some reason

 

[Umbran]

Do you deny, then, that the near-absolute levels of power within the game permit the D&D-alike DM to do harm, even by accident, even while fully and absolutely intending to do the right thing for the right reasons?

I don't think the power has much to do with it.

I deny that rules-based process-of-play constraints on who has authorial control over what will do anything to reduce what I consider the potential harm. The harm I think likely is just about as easily inflicted by the player next to me as by the GM.

If you want to talk about things to include in a game that could serve the problems I expect to see, we can start talking about safety tools and what goes into a session zero to help keep everyone at the table safe from harm.

 

[Umbran]

If you make someone's experience worse, that's harm.

As I said, think there are some alternate definitions of "harm" that I'm not on board with.

I find what you give there to be overstepping, and much like abuse of the concept of "triggers", that definition of "harm" actually makes people less safe at the table.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I think we all know that when it comes to gaming, there's realistic and there's realistic.

Almost nothing in a typical fantasy setting is actually realistic in any way, shape, or form, but they usually have enough verisimilitude that only an actual medieval scholar would be upset at them. As I said, we can allow for dragons, but we also require there to be enough things around for them to eat.

The problem isn’t that fantasy realistic doesn’t track actual reality. The problem is two-fold:
1. GMs that claim their actions are constrained by realism, when the broad nature of fantasy realism means that it isn’t a meaningful constraint on their actions; and

2. GMs that point to fantasy realism as a justification for actions they have taken, when it is essentially a non-falsifiable position, since anything can be justified in fantasy realism.

A good example of the second point is the NPC with the conviction that they refuse to drink alcohol. It started out as an example of an unshakeable conviction an NPC might have. When @soviet tested the conviction, pointing out that it would mean that the NPC would refuse to drink alcohol even if he or his family were tortured that’s when fantasy realism was invoked, creating lore to justify why an NPC would refuse to drink alcohol even if his family were tortured. This is the opposite of what traditional play is claimed to be: the trait is supposed to follow from the lore, the lore isn’t supposed to be created to justify the trait.