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

[Lanefan]

And similarly, I find your approach to be railroad-y, because decision-making is predominantly in the hands of the GM, who makes decisions without any particular regard to player goals.

Railroad-y.
Decision-making predominantly in the hands of the DM.
Decisions made without regard to player goals.

These three things are not the same, nor are they even connected.

"Player goals" in particular. It's on the players to chase their goals within the game and force them to be relevant through the actions of their characters, and a decent DM will allow them to steer the campaign in that direction. For example, if someone has as an in-game goal to overthrow the Barony and that PC is able to convince the rest of the PCs to a) go along with this and b) help her try to recruit an army from the Karnos Duchy then the DM should in theory react to this by first determining (via whatever unbiased methods) how the Duchy might respond to such a request and then playing out that response as amended by anything the PCs manage to do (for better or worse!) to change it.

What the DM here should not be doing is forcing the PCs into working for the Baron or into some unrelated adventure, though she should be open to running something unrelated if the PCs manage to distract themselves into it along the way (wouldn't be the first time!).

The DM - in part to avoid potential railroading or bias - should make neutral decisions without regard for (or, ideally, in complete ignorance of) player goals, and let the chips fall where they may.

 

[Lanefan]

Well, yes, this is the basic thing that players do when playing a RPG.

Exactly. What more needs be said?

But it's not as if there is nothing more to be said about how RPG play works.

Then again.....

 

[pemerton]

"Player goals" in particular. It's on the players to chase their goals within the game and force them to be relevant through the actions of their characters

The key notion here is force them to be relevant. What does that mean? How does it relate to the GM's world-building (you say "a decent DM will allow them to steer the campaign in that direction", but what establishes the limits of what is possible in the campaign?)?

The DM - in part to avoid potential railroading or bias - should make neutral decisions without regard for (or, ideally, in complete ignorance of) player goals

Why? I mean, other than that that's what you prefer?

Railroad-y.
Decision-making predominantly in the hands of the DM.
Decisions made without regard to player goals.

These three things are not the same, nor are they even connected.

I don't think I've said they're the same. But I regard them as intimately connected.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't know where this thread is going but the GM deciding something, doesn't seem like a functional definition of railroad to me. I get not feeling like it gives you agency over the game if the GM has this power, but

The GM has to make a decision. They do that by thinking about some stuff - the base. This will include:

*Whatever it is that the player described their PCs as doing;​

​

*Whatever the GM has prepared about the setting:​

​

*What the GM thinks about the interaction between the above two things;​

​

*Probably other stuff too, like a general sense of "vibes" or "genre" (eg @Bedrockgames often references a film genre), plus general assumptions about how things 'work".​

Because my style came up here, I think it is important to keep in mind my approach is something of an outlier in this style of play. @robertsconley and were engaged in many of the same conversations over the years around sandbox play and ways to avoid railroading in RPGs. But his style is more in line with what is the norm in that style. And I would say the norm gravitates more towards a grounded and realistic approach to GMing the world. But I wouldn't describe his or my approach as a railroad simply because the GM can do something like decide the trait of an NPC. Also it is important not to gloss over the use of other tools. The GM has ultimate say in order to maintain the sense of believability and adapt the flow of the game to the things the players are trying to do. But we're always drawing on random tables, rolls, and other procedures. I don't think either of us are doing a purely "GM decides" game. We are just doing a very rulings based game

 

[zakael19]

Maybe. The main RPGs that I play that include the idea of automatic success are Burning Wheel and Torchbearer 2e, and they don't use automatic success in the sort of way you've described. Off the top of my head I don't know of any approach to RPGing that does - maybe some neo-Trad/OC approaches? @zakael19 will know that better than me.

I'm not sure I understand the prior question TBH. If the rails are so straight that the GM is just waiving any obstacles to keep you on them, seems like we'd be "novel audience" territory?

Making decisions that are not based on goals, either the player's or the GM's, is what makes a game a sandbox to me. Whether the GM is making decisions based on their goals or the goals of the player, they are no longer being impartial. If a GM is railroading and the players make an attempt to overcome an obstacle that follows the rails and the GM decides that it automatically succeeds, is that not still a railroad? It doesn't matter that the GM decided it would be successful, they decided it would be successful because it keeps the narrative on the track they had predetermined.

"Impartiality" has no bearing on play being a sandbox or not, especially since that's something you aspire to not really something that's truly achievable except by strict mechanics handling everything. When used in referee guidelines, I understand it to mean that you should neither favor nor hinder the players - but instead present your prep or act in accordance with the procedures of the game as much as possible. "Blorb" style play is probably the best example of the principles it takes to maximize impartiality as a ref.

When we say "Make decisions based on goals" it's not like, "oh, you want to do this thus I waive anything standing in your way." It's "the player is driving towards their goals, and thus my obstacles are in response to that in accordance with the specific procedures and guidelines for play." Likewise, my GM goals in stonetop were articulated previously and are given by the game's agenda: "Portray a rich, mysterious world, Punctuate the PCs’ lives with adventure, Play to find out what happens." So long as what I do ties back to those three items, I'm running the game correctly; conversely the GM guidance tells me very specifically if you cannot tie what you do back to these, you've done something wrong and should fix yourself.

Same thing for the Blorb principle, if you dont have a procedure or prep set to give the players meaningful decision making, that style of play says "do the best you can, and then patch that hole for the future."

 

[The Firebird]

The DM - in part to avoid potential railroading or bias - should make neutral decisions without regard for (or, ideally, in complete ignorance of) player goals, and let the chips fall where they may.

Why? I mean, other than that that's what you prefer?

Because this causes player actions to feel like they have more weight. This makes those actions feel more meaningful. If the DM is actively changing their decisions in order to further, to suppress, or otherwise to change the players goals, then the world no longer feels as objective. This changes the game from "how can I succeed in this universe" to "how can I convince the GM to further (or not suppress) my goals"?

Just my view.

 

[robertsconley]

What do you mean by "narrative authority". It's not a phrase I've used in this thread. And I don't believe that it's something that I have "centred".

Nor have I said anything about "storytelling" as part of my own play. I have said that I'm not interested in GM storytelling, either as GM or player.

What I have said is that there is a difference between GM decision-making that prioritises "a world with internal logic" and GM decision-making that also has regard to players' goals for their PCs. And you seem to agree that there is a difference!

I don't "evade" points. I engage fully with the idea of the game world operating independently of character beliefs - by which I think you mean player priorities for their PCs.

First, I point out that the gameworld has no autonomous existence. It is a fictional creation, authored and curated by the GM.

Second, I point out that making decisions by reference to the gameworld, without regard to player priorities, therefore centres the GM's view about the fiction and how it should unfold. @hawkeyefan made exactly this same point quite a way upthread.

I understand it perfectly well - including that the "neural world model" is an act of creation by the GM.

My engagement with it consists mostly in pointing out why I regard it as overly GM-driven and GM-centred for my taste.

Narrative authority wasn’t a quote of your language but describing a consistent framing in your posts: that agency must include player goals influencing the fiction, and that referee decisions should be responsive to those goals. That’s a narrative-centered view of agency, even if you reject referee storytelling.

Where we differ is not just in preference but in how we define fairness. The sandbox campaign, as Micah and AIViking have described, imposes constraints on the referee: world prep, procedural systems, and consistent extrapolation. It doesn't claim the world is objectively real, only that it is treated as if it were, so outcomes aren’t shaped by authorial intent but by consistent logic.

Your replies so far describe why you don’t like this model, but not whether it succeeds on its own terms. You’ve said it centers the referee, but haven’t addressed whether its internal procedures actually mitigate that through impartiality. That’s the engagement that still missing.

 

[pemerton]

I think these statements could be clarified. In sandbox play, decision-making is not in the hands of the GM.

I take you to mean here, not exclusively in the hands of the GM.

The players determine the goals, they determine the approach, they determine where to go, they determine what plotlines to explore.

Yes. As @Hussar posted about way upthread, in a sandbox of the sort that is based around a GM-authored and curated/adjudicated setting, they make these choices within a framework/context presented to them by the GM. The metaphor used was "menu", although I don't think that's a perfect metaphor.

Some posters have talked about the GM having regard to player preferences in setting up the initial framework (eg @robertsconley and @Micah Sweet). Others have expressly rejected such an approach (especially @Lanefan). @AlViking referred to the GM "set[ting] up obstacles and opportunities that are based on world building and what they think makes for interesting and engaging playground for the players" - this isn't as strict as Lanefan, but doesn't sound as consultative as some other posters.

The GM adjudicates without regard to player goals. But imo that doesn't mean "the GM's vision of how things should unfold predominates over the player"--the entire agenda, what to go and where to explore, is player directed.

Here we have a difference of opinion. I don't think that the "entire agenda" is player-directed. The agenda is extremely heavily shaped by what the GM presents to the players as part of the initial framework/context. And the unfolding of the framework, by way of adjudication and also the operation of the "world in motion" also continues to be very heavily shaped by the GM's decision-making.

All this sounds to me like you see "the GM adjudicates the rules" and "the GM adjudicates the world" as railroading. Right? The factors here amount to what I'll call "the state of the world".

Would "railroading occurs when the GM builds the world and adjudicates outcomes without regard to player goals" be an accurate rephrasing? I think that gets at the point more precisely than saying decision making in general.

I think that your suggested phrasing entails that Gygaxian dungeon-crawling is railroading, which I don't think it is.

I am concerned with the details of the manner of the GM's adjudication; my focus is on the degree of control being exercised over how the shared fiction unfolds.. in this vein, and not too far upthread (post 3451), I made a post that unpacked in some detail how Gygaxian dungeon-crawling works, and how it permits player agency. That post also identified what seem to me to be some clear limits to that approach, pertaining both to the limits of planning, and the limits of shared heuristics that permit players to anticipate GM responses to the actions they declare.

E.g., if a priest follows a religion that forbids drinking, that is the state of the world. The GM then adjudicates the priest does not take a drink. They feel this to be natural.

The guard has a good salary, and so the GM feels they would not be susceptible to bribery. This is the state of the world before the players arrive. Therefore, the GM extrapolates that the bribery attempt does not work.

You see both of these rulings as railroading.

Without more context, I can't tell. What do the players know? What is at stake? How was the state of the world arrived at?

Here's an example to try and illustrate:

The PCs' goal was to persuade Lareth that Fea-bella is, indeed, his sister, and hence that he should offer them hospitality; Lareth wanted to persuade them to assist him in his cult's mission.

At the start of this conflict Golin decided to sweat out his fever; he recovered from Sick and his Manipulator skill dropped a rank. The PCs won the conflict, with a strong roll (with multiple sixes opened up with Fate) on the second volley, which meant I didn't get to play Lareth's third volley Feint against Fea-bella's Defend! The players nevertheless owed a significant compromise: Lareth accepted the PCs' claim about his relationship to Fea-bella, but the PCs agreed that they would go to Nulb to persuade the pirates there - who raid the river vessels of the Theocracy of the Pale - to tithe to Lareth's cult.

They then set off in Tolub's galley.

<snip>

They arrived at the moathouse, and with a successful test (Manipulator or Orator - I can't recall now) called their friendly Dire Wolf to them. Golin (as spoken by his player) was very coy about the relationship of the Wolf to the PCs vs Lareth (the Wolf is their secret ally in the Moathouse), but Fea-bella was far less subtle and so I did call for a Manipulator test to maintain the secret; it succeeded.

Golin and Fea-bella then travelled with Tolub and Fori through the Moathouse and dungeons to Lareth's well-appointed chamber. I described the rich furnishings, and the players were suitably impressed by the many dice worth of tapestries, silver plate, etc. They then excused themselves to rest (= camp) in the adjoining guardroom while Tolub and Lareth discussed the matter of the tithe.

The camp event was "Dust. You disturb a thick layer of dust while making camp: +1 Ob to all tests during this camp phase." Given the PCs were in a guardroom, I described this as smoke from the fire instead. This was also a basis for saying that the guards in the room left the PCs alone, joining their comrades in the outer guardroom. The players had accumulated three checks (at least I think that was it: a -1D penalty on Fea-bella's part, and a tie-break in Tolub's favour during the negotiation on the docks). Fea-bella's Song of Serenity was able to give Golin a free recovery test; but her Exhaustion meant she couldn't use her instinct to brew potions and salves during camp. Both recovered from Angry, but tests to recover from Afraid failed.

At the end of the camp stuff, I told the players that they could hear raised voices from Lareth's chamber - in particular, Lareth sounded either angry or upset. They re-entered, to find that discussions had become heated - Lareth was standing with staff raised, and Tolub was fingering his battle-axe. The PCs decided to intervene. I said that, given their rag-tag appearance (no shoes, sooty faces, etc) they would suffer a -1s on social actions in this context. Golin decided to try and even the odds a bit by letting the smoke in from the guardroom, to cause the NPCs to be distracted and/or annoyed by something other than the PCs. A Manipulator vs Manipulator meant that Tolub was affected, and so I said that the PCs wouldn't suffer the penalty against him - which suited the players, as they then proceeded to Convince Tolub to pay the tithe to Lareth; whereas Tolub was trying to persuade Lareth to let his well-armed guards join the pirates in return for a share of the spoils.

The players allocated a point of disposition to Lareth so that he could help the PCs (if he liked what they said) - this had the effect of encouraging action declarations that would attract Lareth's support. And the upshot was that the PCs succeeded against Tolub with no loss of disposition, and so he agreed to play the tithe rather than bringing Lareth's guards into his piracy operation. He gave Lareth 1D of coin as an initial payment.

Telemere's player filled us all in on what had happened to him since he was last seen: he had been captured by the Gnolls (everyone knows that Gnolls hate Elves!) and put in a barrel, to be sold as cured meat! But the pickling process had not taken (Elves require more salt than that to be pickled!) and so he was still alive when the Dwarves in the Dwarven Hall opened the barrel - and out he stepped!

He took a failed test in Health for his troubles, which resulted in his Health increasing to 5.

Having no conditions, Telemere opted to stay in the tavern (for 1 Lifestyle) and pick up a rumour on the Tavern Rumours Table. I rolled a 7:

Your friend, bedraggled and disheveled from the road, bursts into the tavern with an incredible tale to tell.​

The complicating factor, for this result, is that Telemere has no friends - he is a loner with an enemy (his brother) and no friends either as part of initial build, or established in play. At first I decided that a mostly innocuous rival - the bandit Turner - had turned up, and I said as much. And then, as I was thinking it through a bit more and trying to decide on some incredible tale for Turner to tell, I announced that I was changing that - in fact the bedraggled and dishevelled friend who came into the tavern was Korvin, the fourth PC, whose player was not present.

This change worked better, both because Korvin is something of a friend of Telemere, and because I knew what tale Korvin would tell: a tale about the river pirates getting ready to assault the Moathouse, in violation of their arrangement with Lareth the Beautiful.

In the initial interaction with Lareth, the PCs agree to persuade the river pirates to tithe to him. In a subsequent session, I frame the PCs into a scene with Tolub, one of the leaders of the river pirates, and the PCs do as they were asked - they bring Tolub to the Moathouse to negotiate with Lareth, and they help get him to agree to tithe.

But then what is going on when - a couple of sessions later - I as GM decree that pact violated? This is an example of the GM making a judgement. The event that I rolled required me to present an incredible tale. So that is a degree of instruction to mix up the status quo. And the key element of what had happened so far, from the point of view of player priorities and what the players had achieved, was not the agreement. Rather, it was keeping faith with Lareth. And I didn't disturb that, in my narration.

Which subsequently was reinforced in play: the PCs went back to the Moathouse, arriving not long before the pirate fleet sailed on it; and they assisted Lareth, and received help (in the form of healing) from him. They then did subsequently help the angry Bugbears pursue the retreating Lareth - and it is that decision by the players that now makes it fair for me to present Lareth as hostile rather than sympathetic to them. Although that hasn't yet come up.

 

[mamba]

Making decisions that are not based on goals, either the player's or the GM's, is what makes a game a sandbox to me.

I would agree with not the goals of the DM, the player goals should factor in

Whether the GM is making decisions based on their goals or the goals of the player, they are no longer being impartial.

A player wants to climb a wall and the DM calls for a check, how is the outcome not based on the player’s goal? The impartial part is hopefully the DC and definitely the roll

If a GM is railroading and the players make an attempt to overcome an obstacle that follows the rails and the GM decides that it automatically succeeds, is that not still a railroad?

as much as if the DM decided it would automatically fail

It doesn't matter that the GM decided it would be successful, they decided it would be successful because it keeps the narrative on the track they had predetermined.

it does matter that the DM decided either way instead of being impartial

 

[AlViking]

The GM has to make a decision. They do that by thinking about some stuff - the base. This will include:

*Whatever it is that the player described their PCs as doing;​

​

*Whatever the GM has prepared about the setting:​

​

*What the GM thinks about the interaction between the above two things;​

​

*Probably other stuff too, like a general sense of "vibes" or "genre" (eg @Bedrockgames often references a film genre), plus general assumptions about how things 'work".​

The GM then has to draw some conclusion from that base: this is the making of an inference, or extrapolation, from all the stuff the GM is considering.

The conclusion won't follow by way of entailment: we're not talking here about maths or physics or algorithmic processes. It requires judgement. The GM has to decide what makes sense, or - as I put it - what should follow, from that base.

I fully believe you when you say that you do not include, as part of the base, a desire for some outcome or other. Nevertheless, you - and any GM deciding what happens next - has to reach a conclusion on the basis of the stuff that they consider.

OK, and I would have used the term the same way until I started reading this thread, and saw some posters - eg @Hussar - using the term more broadly. That is why, as I've mentioned a few times upthread, this thread has changed the way I think about the idea of a sandbox.

I'm not saying my way of doing things is the only way they can be done. I'm not even saying that I or any GM is 100% unbiased, we just try to be as unbiased as possible. There have been many times when the players completely bypassed something I thought would be cool, nerfed my encounter through clever play, went left when I really expected them to go right. I don't take their goals into consideration when designing obstacles or determining success or failure.

If, instead of GM judgement calls, you fall back on a chart or rule (i.e. a list of how much it costs to bribe a bureaucrat for what favors), that just means that the authors of that chart decided how to present and codify the information in order to funnel the players towards certain goals. In other words if you know what it takes to bribe a bureaucrat, what the outcome is going to be, then the players' default behavior will be to make the bribe if they can afford it. It's not a railroad but it is establishing narrative goals for how the game is played.

Well, yes. I would say the same thing. It's just that I want a system that puts stuff into the base that you don't include. And vice versa.

Yes. Impartiality is not a goal in most of my GMing. @Campbell has made the same point upthread.

Maybe. The main RPGs that I play that include the idea of automatic success are Burning Wheel and Torchbearer 2e, and they don't use automatic success in the sort of way you've described. Off the top of my head I don't know of any approach to RPGing that does - maybe some neo-Trad/OC approaches? @zakael19 will know that better than me.

The point is not that the GM decides a challenge should be automatically successful because it achieves the GM's narrative goals, it's that there are narrative goals in the first place. I know it's been a while since I've said it, but I don't believe we ever really achieve a true sandbox. I do think we get closer if we don't think in terms of goals other than to give the players more free reign on setting their own goals. If you, or anyone else, has a different preference on how to achieve a sandbox that's fine as well.

What I take issue with is anyone saying that because I don't run the game like they do that I cannot be running a sandbox. Because I, and my players, would disagree.