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

[mamba]

Yeah, that's what I was meaning by saying they have no economy: no agriculture or other means of obtaining the basics of their subsistence.

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.

that bothered me back in the 80s already and made me not run it because it made no sense to me

 

[mamba]

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.

this module tripped me up enough on a casual glance to dismiss it outright in my teens, it was painfully obvious at a glance

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

or even a base level of realism / plausibility, I have the same issue with funhouse dungeons

 

[AlViking]

Well, you're the one who said it's important that sometimes declared actions be futile (as in, it not be possible for the PCs to succeed although the players don't know that).

As I said in my post, I'm responding to what you said, taken literally. If you mean "occasionally but not frequently", OK, that's a type of process or heuristic that constrains a good GM. Isn't it?

I don't need explicit rules telling me what I can and cannot do to run an interesting and challenging game that my player enjoy. Are you so oblivious to your player's reactions that you do?

 

[robertsconley]

How is this a mischaracterization. You have repeatedly stated that virtually all information comes from the DM. The players cannot know anything without it being created and passed to them from the DM. The only way to "hear things" is for the DM to tell the players. And everything they hear is 100% generated by the DM.

At that point, railroading becomes very easy. When I control all the information AND I control when and how you learn any information, getting a group onto rails is simple. Not that it has to be mind you. It doesn't have to end in railroading at all. But, this idea that the way you've set up your sandbox somehow makes it difficult to railroad isn't true.

If one person at the table controls all information and all sources of information, then that person can very, very easily railroad the group.


But all of those responses are 100% sourced from the DM. There is no impartiality, other than whatever the DM considers to be impartial. Those "naturally emerging outcomes" are completely coming from the DM. They aren't natural at all. They are 100% dependent on the DM to create them. That's neither natural nor impartial.

True, the DM can strive to be impartial. Absolutely. But, there's no check on that. There's no way to know that the DM is being impartial or not. We can hope that the DM is being impartial. And, I suppose, so long as the players are happy, questions of impartiality are largely moot. But, at no point is this process impartial or natural.

What you said about the referee controlling information and their capabilities is correct, but it needs to be explained why the structures and techniques I’ve described are inadequate to prevent railroading in practice.

Why does @pemerton's post mischaracterize my points? Using your question above as one example, he doesn't address why Consistency, Setting Logic, transparent communication, and how I implement being impartial fail to prevent railroads. His responses to me and others consistently highlight specific phrases while omitting the broader context of the original poster's arguments. This selective focus constitutes mischaracterization.

The more productive way is what happened between you and I when we discussed your sandbox campaigns. At first, things were not clear between the two of us. But as the exchange went on I gained an understanding of the techniques you used and just as important why you used them and how they suited your creative goals.

While I am always happy to answer specific questions, I am also using this as an opportunity to help you understand why my methods don't lead to railroading and later how impartiality is maintained. Illustrating why they are suited for my creative goals.

You raise two issues about impartiality.

• That there is no check.
• That there is no way to know whether the referee is being impartial.

The check is that the group is free to discuss the referee's impartiality at any point. This may seem an obvious point that is not special. However, it is not apparent to many how to create an atmosphere in a small group where people feel comfortable doing this. I have held many leadership positions over the years and participated in leadership training courses. One of the significant points focused on is this issue. And it takes work and using various specific techniques.

Which leads to the second issue: "How do you know?" If you read about the small group leadership and the techniques I talk about above. Then think about what happens when those techniques are not used, and the atmosphere that is created within the group. You will see it that it is very distinct. That is how you tell. Within a short amount of time, based on how the referee conducts themselves, you can see what kind of leadership is being exhibited.

Now with referee's rulings and roleplaying, often you need the benefit of hindsight to make an accurate determination of impartiality. So that takes longer, often much longer. But in my experience, if the referee is exhibiting signs of poor leadership, it's a good bet they are not impartial with their rulings and role-playing. If they are exhibiting signs of good leadership, there is a good chance they are being impartial.

And this is a worst-case scenario. In most cases, when the referee is not impartial, problems with ruling and role-playing crop up within a few sessions.

That's how you know when using my methods for running sandbox campaigns.

Some additional comments

The sense of impartiality isn't an off and on switch. You can't, in any situation, whether it is tabletop roleplaying, politics, etc., go in and say that you are impartial. You have to demonstrate that you are impartial.

Doing this takes work, often hard work, but the effort is worth it. The most critical side effect isn't what it does for the referee's reputation, but rather its impact on the players. Everybody starts to relax more. Enjoy the campaign more and are willing to do more interesting things with their characters that involve more risk because they trust that the referee will be fair. That their impartiality means that when they come up with a novel plan, it has a chance of success based on the merits, not fiat.

One last thing on impartiality, one technique I use is that if needed, I am willing to walk players or the group through my reasoning. Take out my notes, start at the beginning, and trace the chain of events and how my decisions and their decisions interacted to produce what was experienced. I am not always right, but most of the time when I am called out, I can show why things worked out impartially and in according to the setting's logic and why it doesn't reflect my bias.

Returning to the issue of @permerton's mischaracterizations the fact you included your questions of impartiality after you talked about the issues regarding the referee's control of information and railroading meant that you engaged both with my central premise on why railroads are prevented in my methods. But also addresses one of the specific elements I said prevented that.

While you didn't address the others, you did more than what @permeton usually does. As a result, I felt the conversation was continued in a productive way and responded accordingly. I appreciated that.

I hope this answered all of the points you raised.

 

[mamba]

I don't need explicit rules telling me what I can and cannot do to run an interesting and challenging game that my player enjoy. Are you so oblivious to your player's reactions that you do?

to be fair, if an algorithm can reliably produce that, why would you not consider that useful / helpful? To me the main question then is what do I have to give up as a consequence of / in order to follow that algorithm, and is that worth it

 

[AlViking]

See, this is where I think a lot of people have a problem with this idea that a DM driven sandbox is actually quite as free with player choice as is presented.

For example, if your "living world" is so important that you are constantly advancing various events into the world as time moves forward, and none of those events are initiated by the players, at some point, it starts looking a lot more like a linear campaign. After all, when the ravening hordes of zombies come to town, there aren't a lot of choices. And it's not like the players created that horde. It's not like the players initiated this event. It's 100% DM driven.

Which means, most of the time, the players are simply reacting to whatever events the DM has presented to them. They can't really ignore them (because zombie hordes are rather hard to ignore). Effectively, the DM has wheeled up the plot wagon and is doling out the plot to the players.

Which is perfectly fine. But, it is difficult, IMO, to reconcile the idea of total player freedom and DM generated events.

I can't speak for anyone else but if the players don't follow up on a particular hook, the impact will generally just be status quo or I'll determine some resolution that isn't completely catastrophic. Yes, the county of Kroy was overrun by the zombie horde but it's been contained. If it was an attack directed at the town the people may question where the heroes were and several city blocks had to be burned to the ground but it was resolved. The group may lose a bit of reputation and some potential allies but if the horde is small enough that the characters could deal with it, it likely wasn't enough to overcome the town in the first place.

Some plot threads do just vanish into the ether, some are handled by someone else, some aren't all that earth shattering and have minimal impact in the scope of the ongoing or future campaigns. Turns out that the ghost of Widowburrow was really just old man McGray pretending to be a ghost to distract people and rob a jewelry store. A different group of young adventurers thwarted him, he would have gotten away with it if not for those darn kids. On the other hand a lot of things go on in our world that could have been stopped but aren't, things keep moving on.

It's not perfect, I don't pretend that there is any perfect method, doesn't mean we can't get a little closer to a living world.

 

[AlViking]

I made a pretty big mistake the other night in the opposite direction: I was far too generous to a PC in a situation where I shouldn't have been. One of the other players (who is also a DM) quite rightly called me on it after the fact; I'm not going to undo what happened this time (that'd just be cruel) but I'm certainly going to remember and learn for future reference.

Truly shocking that our players can simply talk to us and let us know we screwed up and we can change our behavior. There have been times when I've told the DM much the same thing - they were being overly generous with treasure so I told them about Monty Haul syndrome.

This kind of correction being necessary is incredibly, incredibly rare in my experience over decades of play. The handful of GMs that wouldn't listen to it would have ignored any rules anyway.

 

[AlViking]

A "deity of alcohol"? No. The wine cult predates Dionysus. I know this is a religious thing.

But a "deity of alcohol" who would damn someone, this part is very important, AND THEIR ENTIRE FAMILY TO ETERNAL TORMENT, solely because this particular person refused one single alcoholic drink ever, for any reason? Yes, I would find that offensive, because it portrays religious people as irrational dupes, and gods as predatory monsters. Even the Greek gods, as petty and spiteful and hurtful as they could be, only very rarely punished families for the deeds of a single person (and even then, almost never as a result of just one single guilty act when the rest of the family is totally innocent; the only example I can think of that even remotely approaches that is Hera driving Herakles crazy, which resulted in him killing his first wife and children, thus necessitating the Ten-Plus-Two Labors of Herakles.)

Again, the thing that is the MASSIVE over-extension isn't a god of abstinence or alcohol. It isn't a person having strong beliefs about what they, personally, are allowed to consume. It is, very specifically, that this person refuses to be persuaded for any reason whatsoever BECAUSE they believe that if they do this mundane, not-particularly-offensive act (we're not talking something violent or sexual etc. etc.), they AND THEIR ENTIRE FAMILY will suffer eternal torment.

I cannot stress enough that it is the "I will suffer, and so will everyone I love" thing. Inflicting eternal damnation on numerous totally innocent people solely because one single person did a single act that this deity disapproves of is, patently, ridiculous.

I see you're still harping on the unserious response to an unserious scenario. One that has never and would never come up in a real game. Maybe you should look for some new material because there aren't even any bones left of this horse you keep beating on.

 

[AlViking]

As with far, far too many things, I find that the issue isn't the approach itself. It is the unfamiliarity of the approach.

You are used to doing all of these things exclusively through freeform. So anything that isn't freeform automatically feels weird, because it is unfamiliar.

The problem is the unfamiliarity, not the approach itself. And that, that exact thing, "I don't like it because I'm not familiar with it"...

is the exhausting conservatism of D&D fans, per the thread topic.

Or maybe, just maybe, we've tried or read up on the alternatives and don't care for them. What's exhausting is repeatedly being told that we're too ignorant to know better.

 

[robertsconley]

It actually creates more confusion.

First, because the details that I've snipped simply reiterate the point that I had already made, that in function and basic content it is no different from the 1977 MM.

Second, because the document doesn't say how the gangs interact with each other. For instance, it doesn't say how a village tough can fall in with a bandit or brigand gang (as opposed to, say, being thrashed within an inch of their life and then being sent on their way), or how much a merchant needs to pay a brigand lieutenant to be allowed to pass without being attacked, or other fairly typical interactions that bandits and brigands might engage in.

And suppose that there are 7 (ordinary) brigands in a group. The document tells me that, among brigands, "One lieutenant will be found for every 3 to 6 brigand in the gang." So the GM decides that this gang has two lieutenants. Now, the gang gets into a fight, and 5 of its members are killed or driven off; but both lieutenants survive. So now there are 2 ordinary brigands and 2 lieutenants. How does that fit with the specification of brigand organisation? And is a GM at liberty just to decide, when presenting a new group of brigands, that it has 4 members, 2 of whom are lieutenants?

Presumably the answer is that the ratios are guidelines, or generalisations of tendency. But are they based on demographic data? An intuition as to what makes for a good challenge? Something else? What should the GM have in mind in wondering whether to depart from them, and present the 4 member, 2 ordinary + 2 lieutenant, gang of brigands? Is this gang going to break the verisimilitude of the setting? Or just be tougher than its number would suggest to a player whose read the rules for brigand lieutenants?

From the document, and your post, it's not really clear to me.

Thanks for the review of Bandits & Brigands.

This is an good opportunity to discuss how expectations and design context influence both how a resource is written and how it is meant to be used.

The document wasn’t intended as a closed-loop faction simulator or an exhaustive procedural guide to rural criminal society. It’s a utility for referees of classic D&D campaigns, written for an audience already familiar with fantasy tropes, a layman’s grasp of medieval social structure, and familiar with the different variations of classic D&D campaigns. In that context, terseness isn’t a flaw; it’s a design goal. It’s about providing raw material and does not discuss outcomes.

Take the lieutenant ratios, for example. These are not ironclad organizational laws. They are rough expectations meant to help with encounter prep. They help the referee generate a plausible brigand or bandit gang. Not about demographic distributions. Similarly, the lack of explicit bribe values or recruitment options isn’t an oversight, it is left open for the referee to fill with their preferred methods of handling those elements.

It’s not trying to cover every detail. It’s giving you what you need to run with it. A document like this assumes the referee is already maintaining notes on local factions, reputations, conflicts, and opportunities for social exploration. It gives enough detail to support that kind of play without setting limits. That’s why I referenced it in a discussion about sandbox prep: not because it answers every question, but because it helps me ask the right ones and respond consistently to player actions.

That said, if you prefer a more structured or casually mapped-out social model, this document can be used to your advantage. Use the entries as templates and then overlay your own logic or procedures on top. For example,

• you could define your own promotion mechanics,
• codify bribe values by role,
• build a faction organization map seeded with the lieutenant/captain ratios as starting points.

The terse stat blocks and archetypes are a foundation for those kinds of extension. Rather than treating what not been said in the text as problems, treat them as opportunities for targeted customization, aligned with your preferred depth and rigor.

Different games and documents make different assumptions about who’s responsible for filling in gaps. Recognizing who the intended reader is, how the material is meant to be used, and what assumptions it operates under can help us avoid talking past each other, and lead to more productive conversations about design.