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

[The Firebird]

I don't know if you're talking about my actual play experience, or @Lanefan's example that I quoted.

If the latter, I think the example speaks for itself.

If the former, the players (as their PCs) knew that the NPCs belonged to a powerful faction. But they chose to have their PCs deal with them, because they had turned up to play an adventure-oriented FRPG.

I referred to both separately in that post.

So in the case of the PCs angering the powerful faction, they knew the faction was quite powerful, messed with them anyway, and then were disappointed when the faction reprisal was more than they could handle?

In the carousers become accomplices to attempted murder case, you think it is unreasonable for the players to expect some unintended consequences from a night of debauchery?

If both of those are how you see it, then I think our ideas of reasonable consequences are wildly divergent.

 

[pemerton]

@pemerton's definition is fatally flawed as it simply doesn't exist in any game where the DM is acting in good faith. If the players arrive in a city and tell me that they find a tavern

Does "find" here mean "look for"? Or are you talking about the players specifying the outcome of their declared action?

they've taken control of the fiction and the fiction moves towards a tavern. If the players instead decide to insult the gate guards, they've taken control of the fiction and moved it in a very different direction.

As the DM I am reacting to what the players do 99.999% of the time.

Perhaps I've been unclear: I don't regard the players getting to choose what bit of the stuff the GM has presented to them to further focus on (say, to focus on accommodations, by looking for some, as opposed to focusing on guards, by insulting them) to be more than modest control over the shared fiction.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No.

This is like saying that a novel which doesn't contain boring bits must be boring - "If everything is interesting, nothing is."

Yeah.

"When everything is X, nothing is" is a hugely flawed premise that almost always actually falls down. Syndrome's use of it in particular ("when everyone is super, no one will be") is specifically exploiting a hard-to-spot equivocation in order to make something sound profound when it's really either so banal as to be irrelevant, or outright gibberish. That is, the first makes the equivocation clear: "when everyone <has powers allowing them to affect the world>, then no one <will be special or unique because of having powers allowing them to affect the world>", which is trivial to the point of inanity. The second tries to eliminate the equivocation and produces nonsense: "when everyone >is special or unique in some way> then nobody <will be special nor unique in any way>".

And if you apply it to nearly any other descriptive term, it likewise produces the gibberish version. "When every meal is tasty, no meal will be tasty". "When every person is employed, no one will be". "When every problem is solved, no problems will be". "When everything is visible, nothing is visible". Etc.

 

[pemerton]

I referred to both separately in that post.

So in the case of the PCs angering the powerful faction, they knew the faction was quite powerful, messed with them anyway, and then were disappointed when the faction reprisal was more than they could handle?

In the carousers become accomplices to murder case, you think it is unreasonable for the players to expect some unintended consequences from a night of debauchery?

If both of those are how you see it, then I think our ideas of reasonable consequences are wildly divergent.

I'm not talking about whether or not the consequence is reasonable in some sense of can be presented as a logical outcome of in-fiction events.

I'm talking about who exercised control over the shared fiction when that consequence was established.

 

[robertsconley]

Not all description is reduction. I'm trying to explain - based on what I've read in this thread, which includes more than your accounts of your play (eg it includes @Hussar's accounts of Ironsworn play, and also his adaptation of the Ironsworn journey rules into 5e D&D) - what strikes me as characteristic of sandbox play.

At this point, I think we’ve reached the limits of a productive exchange. I’ve done my best to explain how I run living world sandbox campaigns, how sandbox campaigns function in general, how the world reacts independently, how player choice drives the action, and how the referee adjudicates outcomes based on prior state and consistent logic, not narrative priorities.

But I’ve come to see that your focus remains rooted in the question of who holds authority, whether over the shared fiction, as you phrase it, or the narrative, as others do, alongside the assumption that all RPG adjudication is ultimately a form of shared fiction/narrative control. That framing, which treats every technique as a variation of story authorship, means there’s nothing further for you to learn from what I’ve laid out, because you continue to translate it into terms I’m explicitly not using.

I’m not angry. But I am disappointed that you persist in collapsing these distinctions despite repeated clarification. I don’t believe continuing this conversation will yield anything new. Best of luck with your games.

 

[AlViking]

Sure, but the 2024 DMG doesn't even mention it as a play style any more. I think that if you're prioritizing classic sandbox style play in the current edition of D&D you're in the minority, although I see it recommended constantly over on Reddit to new DMs who are flailing trying to "pre-write" an entire campaign, poor souls.

I would say it falls under the general distinction of what they call Episodes and Serials. If you're doing an episodic campaign you aren't planning out long term story arcs ... sounds an awful lot like sandbox to me if you follow the advice on in the getting players invested section. No, it doesn't go into detailed categories or break it down by categories, I'm not sure they ever did. About the only people who get caught up on "What is a sandbox" are those weirdos who contribute to long threads discussing them.

In any case there's a ton of advice out there and I figured out how to run a sandbox game all on my lonesome a long time ago.

 

[AnotherGuy]

A lot of my players, and myself if I'm being honest, are pretty casual about our games. Challenging beliefs, deep introspection of a character? Not interested. Detailed backgrounds just aren't that motivating. Fighting the (obviously) evil guys, making bad jokes and laughing at the stupid things our characters do? That's what we're there for. Obviously different people should play what they enjoy and I'm not saying any of this like it's a negative aspect of those games. But we all play for different reasons.

What happened at my table is that I as DM created NPCs with motivations, desires and flaws and while I was attempting to build a story and characters with depth, many a time I got back shallow character concepts, 2-dimensional characters that had an inclination to favour choices which served the metagame rather than the game-in-fiction.

So 5e came out with Traits, Ideals, Bonds and Flaws making a nod to some other RPGs but it was a half-baked system.
Well it took me a few years but I believe I improved on that system and now I use that (along with the detailed backgrounds and the odd character prose a player may write between sessions) to create tension and challenge the players' core concept of their character while they're fighting the evil guys, making bad jokes and laughing etc. It encouraged players with shallow characters to develop and become far more responsible of the shared narration.

As a DM I'm more satisfied because I find myself being a fan of the characters as they are not only an emoji with resources, but they have personality, struggles and desires that are not limited to the meta.

And again, not all players are like that, but sometimes a system or a technique can help in maturing players to develop characters and not create emojis with resources.

Because all this talk about a living world, a world in motion, realism, internal consistency, verisimilitude is pretty pointless if the PCs are just a pile of numbers.

 

[The Firebird]

I'm not talking about whether or not the consequence is reasonable in some sense of can be presented as a logical outcome of in-fiction events.

I'm talking about who exercised control over the shared fiction when that consequence was established.

I'm lost again. Here was the bit I had in mind:

I gave an actual play example, upthread, from my own play: the PCs oppose NPCs who belong to a particular, powerful faction; the upshot is a scry-teleport-fry attack which is a near-TPK. The players couldn't reasonably know what sorts of consequences might flow from the (completely reasonable, from the point of view of the dynamics of play) decision to make the interesting choice to oppose those NPCs.

Your complaint is just that the GM makes the decision? In the dungeon crawling case, you said it is not railroading because the players learn enough about the world to get predictable results. You also said the results didn't have to be known precisely; so it is enough to have a reasonable idea of the results. And in this case the players seem to have a reasonable idea of the results. Their actions constrain the GM to act a certain way--to make the faction respond in accordance with their means and desire for vengeance.

 

[zakael19]

With your approach, I see the effect you’re describing, but I don’t yet have a clear picture of the process that produces it. If you’ve already laid that out and I missed it, my apologies. But if you walk me through what it is you do, I think we could pinpoint where our methods differ and what the consequences of those differences are, like I did with Torchbearer.

So, running Stonetop is probably not the best example because it has >280 pages of incredible setting details and tons of tables and bits. It does encourage the sort of constant player-directed questions I've posted numerous times here - but it's got a pretty decent regional map, so if you're in "The Flats" you have suggested Discoveries or Dangers; and tables to roll on.

I guess here's an example somewhat similar to the last play extract you posted:

Situation, two of the characters are returning from Marshedge, the only town of serious significance in The World's End (the region of play). They've gone there with a caravan of folks from their town to do some trading, some recruiting, and follow-up on some bird-messages one of the other characters has been sending.

It's a 10 day trip via the Maker's Roads to and from Marshedge back to Stonetop (the village where all the characters live and what the premise centers around). On the way back, we examined some of the stuff between the Marshal and his sister (NPC), regarding his dead brother and the legacy thereof (color, but important color around relationships - the player had even pre-written an entire dialogue he wanted to get out).

And then when we cut back to the caravan after seeing what the two characters back in Stonetop were up to, we time skipped forward a bit. I looked at my Agenda (previously mentioned, includes "Punctuate the PC's lives with adventure"), the entry for the area they were passing through (the Steplands), described a bit of the hills around them and asked a couple questions, scanned the entries for the Dangers of the area, and realized that one of them is a massive bear-sloth thing that is noted "you'll round a bend...and there one'll be...taking a nap." They're on a big magic stone road in the summer, and I figured that fits well!

So I Reveal an Unwelcome Truth, one of my GM moves, at the Ranger who is routinely scouting a little ahead of the band and tell him that he sees this house-sized lump of fur curled up in the middle of the road right where they need to go, and "what do you do?"

Things went along, and turned into nearly having to try and fight this massive creature off (it wanted to eat stuff out of their wagon, or really the well seasoned wood of the wagon itself) despite the magic of the roads; but through some use of scouting and ideas they managed to negotiate with it instead and direct it off to its favorite trees over a hill.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But I think this begs an extremely important question:

Does it in fact "exist prior to play and independently of the PCs"?

Or is this technique simply something which gives you the subjective feeling that that statement in quotes is true, even though it isn't?

You're welcome not to believe me, but refuting my claim about what I like doesn't seem like a useful avenue for conversation. When I make a setting (which I have done several times, often without a specific campaign or group of players in mind), it definitionally exists independently of the PCs. So does every published setting, by the way.