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

[thefutilist]

This example is helpful. But I'm afraid it feels a bit like the blind men circling the elephant; a lot of examples, but not a statement. Is there a straightforward definition for color? Is it "things that are incidental to the situation, and are therefore fair game for the players to define"?

Yeah exactly that. Incidental stuff is how I often describe it.

 

[The Firebird]

The shared fiction is (by definition) imaginary stuff. Being imaginary, it has to be made up.

Who gets to control what is made up? (Which isn't the same as who actually authors it - for the same reason that controlling the play in a game of chess, or bridge, is not the same thing as moving a piece or playing a card - games have rules which means that participants can control, to a greater or less degree, what moves other participants can make.)

Ok, so let's consider a fixed world sandbox in which the GM defines and adjudicates the world and the rules and the players act within it.

One context for making up shared fiction is scene framing. Who controls what sorts of scenes are framed - what elements they contain, what themes they address, what possibilities they open up or foreclose, etc?

In this case, I'd say the players have a very meaningful role because they decide where the PCs go. If they go to the Forest of Tears, they will have different scenes than the Glacier of the Worm. I think you would say they are not exercising a meaningful role because only the GM determines the content of those scenes.

Another is establishing consequences of declared actions Who controls what these are - what elements they contain, what themes they address or resolve, what possibilities they open up or foreclose, etc?

Again, I'd say the players have a meaningful role, because they decide what the declared actions are. The consequences for walking a tightrope over a 1 foot drop are different than doing so over the Canyon of Sorrow. I think you would say they are not playing a meaningful role because the GM still adjudicates.

I think those examples should show why I think the players are still exercising meaningful control over the shared fiction in situations you consider railroads. Unless I've misread you.

 

[zakael19]

I don’t think it is worth continuing to debate but I think breaking all activity to these two steps and using that to deny agency if there aren’t restraints isn’t a useful way to understand what is happening. For example folding in things like Q&A to I, almost makes it sound like Q&A isn’t part of it. It also glosses over philosophy by emphasizing the use of constraints.

Fundamentally sandbox isn’t reinventing the wheel so the core of it should function like a standard RPG. What is different about it is the expectation of the amount of material the GM prepares (which I think you can still do in other ways) and how willing GMs are expects to be around the accommodation to different actions and goals. But the breaking down of everything into this two step process is just not something I think we are ever going to agree on (especially if it is being used to deny agency in sandbox, or only allowing it in the most rigidly designed sandboxes with prescriptive approaches to play)

As you note, I don't think that significant GM prep is required at all for a sandbox even apart from what @pemerton has posted wrt running Torchbearer out of old school D&D stuff. For instance, Blades is a sandbox in that the players are dropped in and told "make of it what you can." Blades demands 0 prep from the GM (although some do), and during play at most some degree of faction clock rolling and decisions about what comes next based on their priorities and what the players have done to mess the world up.

Stonetop may or may not take prep, but rarely about the world itself (249 pages of actionable content about The World's End are provided inclusive of tons of random tables to generate everything from a Discovery through entire dungeons as needed). The only time I've sat down to do more then jot out a handful of lines is when I want to sketch out a couple of thematic rooms for a "site" (dungeon/exploration area). The world itself and most top level details is set and ready for the players to grab.

I think the more that the game system relies on the GM for authority around actionable elements of play, the more prep you need to do to give the players that pre-available set of decisions to minimize "railroading." If you have a big map and you can have a discussion about the town to start in, and then ask around and get rumors of what's really in that old woods and the abandoned ruin therein, and then start driving towards "hey that seems cool" you're in what I see as pretty classic sandbox play. That I think does require the GM having player-facing maps with a good set of details on what it means.

 

[pemerton]

the players are meaningfully exercising control because they are interacting with a fixed world. The players being able to predict the outcomes precisely beforehand seems like an idiosyncratic standard.

The word "precisely" is yours, not mine.

But anyway, the players aren't "interacting with a fixed world". That's metaphor. What they're actually doing is prompting the GM to say things. The GM is, obviously, the author of what they say. So if the players are controlling it, they must in some fashion be constraining or guiding what the GM says.

One way to do that, that I know of, is to have determined priorities for their PCs that the GM then responds to.

Another way is to have sufficient knowledge of what it is that the GM will refer to when deciding what to say that they can trade on that knowledge to prompt particular responses.

Maybe there are further ways, but I don't recall them having been suggested in this thread.

Consider the simple example that @TwoSix posted upthread: "You start in a room. There are doors to the north, east, and west. What do you do?" In this situation, the players know that, depending on which door they open, they can prompt the GM to say some or other thing. But they don't know what that will be; so opening a door would not involve the player exercising any control over the shared fiction.

This is why Gygax emphasises information and planning. If the players listen at a door, or use an ESP ability, or similar, then they can prompt the GM to tell them things about what is on the other side of the door. Now they are in a position to exercise control, because they can exploit that knowledge to control or guide what the GM says.

In D&D the default is that the players have agency through and limited to their characters.

This doesn't stop the players, in Gygaxian play, from guiding or controlling what the GM says. That's the whole point of play! It's what Gygax talks about in Successful Adventuring - planning your expedition to first gather information, and then again to exploit that information by declaring actions whose outcomes, as much as possible, are known to the players (and hence can't catch them by surprise or derail their plans).

 

[The Firebird]

The word "precisely" is yours, not mine.

But anyway, the players aren't "interacting with a fixed world". That's metaphor. What they're actually doing is prompting the GM to say things. The GM is, obviously, the author of what they say. So if the players are controlling it, they must in some fashion be constraining or guiding what the GM says.

Declaring certain actions rather than others seems like guiding what the GM says to me.

Consider the simple example that @TwoSix posted upthread: "You start in a room. There are doors to the north, east, and west. What do you do?" In this situation, the players know that, depending on which door they open, they can prompt the GM to say some or other thing. But they don't know what that will be; so opening a door would not involve the player exercising any control over the shared fiction.

This is why Gygax emphasises information and planning. If the players listen at a door, or use an ESP ability, or similar, then they can prompt the GM to tell them things about what is on the other side of the door. Now they are in a position to exercise control, because they can exploit that knowledge to control or guide what the GM says.

But this seems trivially possible in a fixed world sandbox, as I described. The players can learn what the Forest of Tears is like or the Glacier of the Worm is like. Then they can make meaningful choices.

I'm confused at how you're imagining a fixed world where the players don't have access to any relevant information, and indeed no way to learn relevant information. I thought previously you meant they had to have all the information, which is why I used 'precisely'. But if you mean just knowing some information about the world...that seems trivial?

 

[zakael19]

The word "precisely" is yours, not mine.

But anyway, the players aren't "interacting with a fixed world". That's metaphor. What they're actually doing is prompting the GM to say things. The GM is, obviously, the author of what they say. So if the players are controlling it, they must in some fashion be constraining or guiding what the GM says.

One way to do that, that I know of, is to have determined priorities for their PCs that the GM then responds to.

Another way is to have sufficient knowledge of what it is that the GM will refer to when deciding what to say that they can trade on that knowledge to prompt particular responses.

Maybe there are further ways, but I don't recall them having been suggested in this thread.

Consider the simple example that @TwoSix posted upthread: "You start in a room. There are doors to the north, east, and west. What do you do?" In this situation, the players know that, depending on which door they open, they can prompt the GM to say some or other thing. But they don't know what that will be; so opening a door would not involve the player exercising any control over the shared fiction.

This is why Gygax emphasises information and planning. If the players listen at a door, or use an ESP ability, or similar, then they can prompt the GM to tell them things about what is on the other side of the door. Now they are in a position to exercise control, because they can exploit that knowledge to control or guide what the GM says.

Yeah, I think this sort of "active control over the procedures the player knows exists" is probably what demarcates true classic or "OSR" play from more modern stuff? Like, the equivalent "player input" in a 2024 5e game is stuff like "hey take character backgrounds into account when you plan content/frame scenes" or "prioritize fun for all," and actively exploiting game procedures to maximize your character's positions might be seen as "metagaming."

A good contrast with "players look to GM and hope they get something useful" is probably something like the Spout Lore/Know Things Moves from Dungeon World and its descendants. When the player says "hey, this is an arcane construct right? I'm going to pop my stored books open/try and recall what Prof Zyngist said in his lectures/whatever about them..." they're triggering a Move that has explicit outcomes: on a 10+, the GM will tell them something Useful, on a 7-9 Interesting, on you to make it Useful (on a 6-, you might learn something the hard way). It's an arrow point from the Player -> GM based on a fictional action that will define or reveal something about the world they can use to make further declarations of action.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The control is to (i) say things about what their PCs do, and (ii) prompt the GM to say things.

Given that (i) is a component of all RPGing, all the action for talking about degrees of control/agency is in (ii). I've posted a lot about this upthread, including the range of principles and heuristics that a GM might use to work out what to say.

If there are no constraints on what the GM says beyond other stuff the GM has written and what the GM thinks is true to that stuff, and this is not reasonably knowable to the players, then I think it is fairly obvious that the players are not exercising control here.

Why wouldn't it be reasonably knowable to the players? They just use their PCs' capabilities to investigate and research. Just like real life. I don't understand where you're coming from.

 

[pemerton]

In this case, I'd say the players have a very meaningful role because they decide where the PCs go. If they go to the Forest of Tears, they will have different scenes than the Glacier of the Worm. I think you would say they are not exercising a meaningful role because only the GM determines the content of those scenes.

Who is authoring? I assume the GM.

How do the players constrain or guide? I guess by choosing to go to the Forest rather than the Glacier, they prompt the GM to tell them forest-y things rather than icy things. To me that seems a fairly modest degree of control or guidance. I imagine that you disagree.

I'd say the players have a meaningful role, because they decide what the declared actions are.

This is true in all RPGing, so does not shed light on degrees of player vs GM control over the shared fiction. . (Or is there a type of RPGing I don't know about, where the GM declares the PCs' actions?)

The consequences for walking a tightrope over a 1 foot drop are different than doing so over the Canyon of Sorrow. I think you would say they are not playing a meaningful role because the GM still adjudicates.

Well, this seems to be an example where the player knows what the consequence will be, and is exploiting that to guide/constrain what the GM is prompted to say.

nless I've misread you.

In part I think you have. To me, it seems that you're not taking the comparison to chess or bridge seriously, that is, are not taking seriously the idea that it is possible, in game play, for one participant to constrain or guide another participant's moves, by exploiting (i) their knowledge of the overall position, and (ii) the rules of the game.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Does it?

Or does it make one think carefully about how elements of the setting have been brought into play, and might be brought into play. Which is a pretty key GM skill, I think.

Nope. Still that first one IMO. Things are brought into play when either I think it makes sense to do using setting logic, or a player does so through their PC (either by asking me what the PC knows or literally looking into it in first person play). Feel free to think differently, but don't expect the scales to fall from my eyes any time soon.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The shared fiction is (by definition) imaginary stuff. Being imaginary, it has to be made up.

Who gets to control what is made up? (Which isn't the same as who actually authors it - for the same reason that controlling the play in a game of chess, or bridge, is not the same thing as moving a piece or playing a card - games have rules which means that participants can control, to a greater or less degree, what moves other participants can make.)

One context for making up shared fiction is scene framing. Who controls what sorts of scenes are framed - what elements they contain, what themes they address, what possibilities they open up or foreclose, etc?

Another is establishing consequences of declared actions Who controls what these are - what elements they contain, what themes they address or resolve, what possibilities they open up or foreclose, etc?

The more the GM is controlling all this stuff, the more railroad-y the game is.

Thank you. This very clearly defines what you mean by control of the fiction. And why we will never agree on it.