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

[pemerton]

Do you know understand what a metaphor is? I wasn't saying that sand literally moved.

Well, here is your post that I replied to:

Do you agree that what you say is metaphorical, or non-literal in some similar fashion? In that, in a literal sandbox, I actually move sand around. Whereas in the "sandboxes" being talked about here, the players don't move things: they say things. And the GM isn't actually providing anything but representations - words, maps and perhaps pictures; and in response to the players saying the things that they say, the GM provides more representations.

This is wrong. The players move plenty in a sandbox. Take the party of PCs going north to make one of their own the chief of the north. That very much moves the sand around and changes how things are done for not only the north, but very probably the entire world. Forging the tribes into one strong nation puts those barbarians on the map in a very different way.

So now are you saying that, in fact, what I posted about metaphor was right rather than wrong?

 

[Bedrockgames]

This. Precisely exactly this.

It's the GM's world. You're just getting the chance to witness it.

No they aren’t just witnesses. They are active participants.

 

[pemerton]

if the rule gives the GM the option to do that at basically any time (the starting point of ‘say yes or roll the dice’, ie every time the player asks something of declares an action, very much sounds like that to me) then it is pretty arbitrary, rule or no rule.

The option to do what?

 

[Bedrockgames]

Yes.

Which is prep based on player interest, not based on what the world "objectively" contains.

Which has been repeatedly cited as one of the most important elements here, that it is utterly and completely independent of the PCs. People have brought that up more times than I could count, that this independence is completely central to their approach. But here you specifically say it isn't independent at all--that the world IS generated in response to the players. As Max did earlier, that there wouldn't be any guards or any tower etc. etc. if the players chose to walk a different path.

It is a blend of prepared material and material that must be generated or elaborated upon in reaction to PCs. Another poster pointed out that much of the setting will not be detailed or no be in focus until the players probe it. The GM hasn’t prepared every single residents in a city for example.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Not enough to make the game a railroad game. It's hard not to know that you are forcing your vision on the players when you do it consistently. I will agree that they may not know it's called a railroad, but they know what they are doing.

It really isn't as hard as you think--especially when GMs in this very thread, self-professed "sandbox" GMs, are perfectly comfortable inserting "hooks" if they feel things have bogged down or the like.

It's much easier than you give credit for for a person to think what they are doing is right and productive when it isn't. I'm not saying you specifically, or indeed any specific person here, is doing that sort of thing. I'm just saying that it's really not that hard for a GM to fall into the mistaken set of beliefs and thus think what they're doing is the right or correct thing to do even if it isn't. Black-boxing significantly increases the risk of such a situation, because inside the black box, the only check is...yourself.

You didn't know that you were forcing your vision on them? I find that hard to believe. I do believe that you were directed to play that way. AD&D was like that. I also believe that you didn't know it was called railroading.

It is quite possible to have a too-fixed idea of what "railroading" means, and thus excuse behavior which actually is railroading as something else for a variety of reasons. Bad advice from people who meant well but who also misunderstood. Trying a technique, seeing that it seemed to work, and sticking with that technique even when maybe you shouldn't have. Excusing a technique because it's being used for the best of reasons...even though what it actually does is force a particular outcome (e.g. fudging). Leaning too heavily into something you thought was a subtle signal from your players, and thus thinking you're "following" them when you're actually leading them. Genuinely being just inexperienced with sandboxes and trying to use the skills you already have outside their domain of applicability. Etc., etc., etc. There are all sorts of ways for a well-intentioned person, with the goal of avoiding railroading, to fail to meet that goal.

Particularly when we recognize that, just as there are degrees of sandboxing, there are degrees of railroading. So, for example, a DM might actually engage in some light railroading sections here, under the belief that they aren't "truly" railroading and thus not a problem. Or having, as I've mentioned previously, some railroading baked into the setting material itself, where over time, because of how the setting is constructed, it eventually ends up pushing the players in a particular direction because a problem or need takes over until addressed (which can be 100% "objective" and purely done by extrapolation from pre-written text, whether shown or unshown!)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No they aren’t just witnesses. They are active participants.

But they only get to see things the DM has prepared, or things the DM generates when it's requested of them.

Everything comes from the DM. The players are merely getting the opportunity to find out what is going to come from them.

 

[mamba]

I have talked about degrees of control over the shared fiction. That is what I am analysing. Whether any given degree is "meaningful" or not seems to be a matter of taste.

yes, we are talking degrees, and since meaningful is a matter of taste, the degrees required for someone also are a matter of taste.

For you it is presumably not meaningful, at least I would be very surprised if it were given everything you posted in this thread. For others it is.

I don’t think anyone is arguing over which approach gives a higher degree of control to the players, at least to me that seems pretty easy to determine

 

[pemerton]

I don’t think anyone is arguing over which approach gives a higher degree of control to the players, at least to me that seems pretty easy to determine

I take a number of posters to be arguing about exactly this!

 

[Bedrockgames]

But they only get to see things the DM has prepared, or things the DM generates when it's requested of them.

Everything comes from the DM. The players are merely getting the opportunity to find out what is going to come from them.

No they can interact with those things, they can push on boundaries until new things emerge. You guys reduce everything to this one very rigid play loop and it misses so much of what is happening in a sandbox. If you guys find it to not be your cup of tea. Great. Play something else. But it isn’t our perceived gaming gonservatism that is exhausting in this thread. What is exhausting is done posters utter dismissal of sandbox or its agency claims. Now your style may not be my cup of tea but I don’t feel the need to doubt its claims or suggest you are doing something other than what you’re doing. You guys have been interrogating this approach for hundreds of posts now and we have given you clear answers on how it works and why. But you keep going back to the same old arguments to dismiss it. I don’t think anything we could say will ever persuade you

 

[mamba]

Yes.

Which is prep based on player interest, not based on what the world "objectively" contains.

Which has been repeatedly cited as one of the most important elements here, that it is utterly and completely independent of the PCs. People have brought that up more times than I could count, that this independence is completely central to their approach. But here you specifically say it isn't independent at all--that the world IS generated in response to the players. As Max did earlier, that there wouldn't be any guards or any tower etc. etc. if the players chose to walk a different path.

the town and the guards potentially (*) are still there, even if the party would never go to that location, but since the party is not going there, why would the DM describe this in the game?

*depends on the DM and how fleshed out the world already is / whether that location was previously visited during a session

I do not believe that the game world is utterly independent of the PCs, I do however believe that it is not utterly dependent on them either. The players do their thing, the DM spreads in some rumors of near and far away events, the players ignore them or not, and even events that were ignored can have results and trigger new events

I doubt anyone does more than that, certainly no one is simulating a continent one NPC at a time. If that is what you require for a world to be called independent then I do not consider that reasonable and I do not think that anyone meant that when they used the term