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

[Paul Farquhar]

I am not going all the way back to square one to rehash the previous hundred-or-so pages of arguments about whether or not it is possible to run a sandbox with the intent of doing so in an impartial manner.

Running a sandbox and creating a sandbox are not the same things.

 

[SableWyvern]

But are explicitly described as "rare" in almost all settings, with the exception of "Points of Light".

Where are you getting this?

• My next sandbox will most likely be setting the 1e Forgotten Realms Savage Frontier. There are plenty of monsters in that area. A wilderness area beyond civilisation is a pretty standard setting for a fantasy, exploration sandbox.
• Dark Sun has all sorts of monsters everywhere.
• Al Qadim has genies and other creatures from Persian mythology all over the place.
• Warhammer has orcs, skaven, chaos cults and more inside the Empire and without.
• WH40K has xenos everywhere.
• Buffy has vampires and other demons popping up constantly.
• Planescape has a vast array of planar creatures all over the place.
• Latter Earth from WWN has monsters and adversaries all over the place.
• The Godbound setting is full of strange and terrible threats, from angels to demons to automatons and more.

What are these settings that are in the majority and actually have few monsters? I would expect that any that do fit that category have some kind of alternative threat or challenges that mean monsters aren't required.

Running a sandbox and creating a sandbox are not the same things.

I often create my sandboxes long (like, literally years) before players are designing characters for them. In any case, I stand by my statement that I'm not going back over the entire argument again, even if you think it's a new one.

 

[pemerton]

This is what you said. Stop trying to play at it being about something else.

"Whereas in the "sandboxes" being talked about here, the players don't move things"

The players do move things. They move the narrative.

I was speaking literally. I'm not familiar with the phrase "move the narrative" as an idiom, it makes littles sense to me as a metaphor, and is not a sensible interpretation of what I was saying.

Perhaps you should have retorted "They move their tongues, throats and soft palates", because I did talk about the players saying things.

 

[Lanefan]

Sorry, was snipping for brevity.

EXCELLENT stuff. And, frankly, probably how most people approach creating sandboxes. Yeah, that's matches up pretty well with how I've done it in the past as well.

Like I said before, tradition works. It absolutely does. It just does require a fair bit of heavy lifting before play starts. To me, that's the weak point of sandboxing this way. The strong point is that once you've done the work, running the game gets really easy because you've got so much to draw on.

Indeed. In my eyes, the best session is the session that runs itself because I've done all my homework right, meaning I can just sit back and enjoy the fun.

 

[Lanefan]

Sure… it guides him to different areas of his prep. Go to one, the GM reads these paragraphs, go to the other, the GM reads those paragraphs.

There’s a difference between a GM referencing his prep as the primary contribution to what he says to the players, and a GM referencing the players’ stated priorities as the primary contribution to what he says to the players.

My question is how do you do the latter on any sort of ongoing basis without having it come across in play that the setting or game world revolves around the PCs?

You know those moments of play where things come together in just such a way that makes you smile? Where you’re like wow what an interesting way for things to have worked out, I really didn’t see that coming?

Those don’t need to be only occasional interruptions of monotonous or bland play. That can literally be what you’re striving for almost all the time.

Disagree. Part of what makes those moments special is that they're somewhat uncommon, and thus stick in the memory for a while. If they happened all the time they'd soon be forgotten, buried under the avalanche of more recent such moments and eventually becoming the ho-hum norm rather than the memorable exception.

Put another way, if you're running along at a 5-out-of-10 average, a 10-out-of-10 moment is special; but if you're running along at a 9-out-of-10 average anyway a 10-out-of-10 moment is no big deal; never mind that 9-out-of-10 is unsustainable for anything longer than the fairly short term.

And this dial doesn't go to 11.

 

[AnotherGuy]

A given conflict will be given a rating (basically from 1-5, although they do have specific names, but, like usual, the actual names escape me right now). That number will basically determine how difficult it is to end this conflict (number of successes needed) and how much "damage" you will receive due to failed (or partially failed in some cases) checks. Note, I'm putting "damage" in quotes because you, as the player, narrate your own failures and dictate what kind of penalty you suffer, which might also be ameliorated by your Assets (for example, having the Asset: War Band means that you can approach combat differently than normal and can divert damage into your troopies.)

So, a pack of goblins (presuming a small pack) would be a challenge of 2 (1 for base goblin+1 for it being a pack), while the earth elemental might be a challenge 3 or 4 depending on various factors. I can't remember if the Ironsworn book has an actual Earth elemental... lemmee check a sec... no, there's no specific Earth Elemental, but, a Challenge of 3 is probably about right. Meaning that a lone PC vs this is most likely going to be in WORLD of hurt. You'd be very lucky to survive this encounter and if you do, you're going to be chewed on seriously. In a group? Yeah, I'm probably going to smack the characters around a bit, but, it should be pretty reasonable as an encounter. Note, Ironsworn doesn't really have a "level" system per se, so, there's no real need for an extensive stat block listing to challenge characters of different levels. Basically, mechanically, there would be virtually no difference between, say, an Earth Elemental and what they call a Haunt (essentially a ghost). You would obviously narrate them differently, but, at the base mechanical level, there isn't any difference.

Really cool idea!!! I can see why you like the system.

 

[Lanefan]

Well, if I may, an example loosely inspired by (part of) the journey we took to get something done in that Ironsworn game. Might goof up some details, it's been a hot minute.

Abraxus (my char), Magnus, Alvis (pronounced "all-vis"!), and Harald are Ironsworn--Viking-inspired, oath-swearing iron-age adventurers--trekking to prove our sincerity to a nearby Elf circle (=village). Elves and humans had become allies when the humans first arrived, three generations ago, but those connections lapsed, the Elves kept to themselves, and other than the one exiled elf in our circle, none have been seen for a full generation. But bad stuff is going down, the necromantic dragon Dunstaad has returned from his banishment/flight, and the winters have been unusually harsh, so we could really benefit from rebuilding our connection to the Elves. Hence, we trekked out to see them, talked with them about some stuff, and each Swore an Iron Vow (slightly different oaths each, rather than one single group Oath)--but we got lots of middling successes, which means we had to prove our intentions or the like.

The elves asked us to go deal with some corrupting influences, more or less, to prove our sincerity for the bigger tasks ahead. This included, eventually, dealing with some powerful, probably at least part-supernatural bears that were making it harder for the elves to forage, hunt, farm, etc. and generally disrupting nature in the area. But we got some bad/middling rolls along the way, which bumped up the challenge. At first, we thought it would be just one bear, but we learned no--it was two bears. And then we learned, even worse, it's a mated pair...and they have cubs. Not quite full-grown, but getting there. Between all those things, that meant when battle was finally joined, the two sides were much closer to evenly matched--and thus the difficulty was (IIRC) 3 or 4 rather than the 1 it would've been to hunt just a single bear.

Up to here, this sounds like a cool sequence.

Over the course of the fight, we took various hits, mitigated in one way or another, but an unlucky roll late in the fight resulted in my Young Wyvern companion biting the dust. (This came from asking the "Oracles"--random-roll tables and yes/no questions with various specific chances of yes vs no--what specific bad consequence happened, since it wasn't clear to us what the obvious negative consequences would be.)

Up to here, ditto.

Having fulfilled my Oath, and lost a companion (and thus a partial refund of XP spent on him), I elected to say Orfrydd burst into golden flames after the battle was won--and a fresh, new wyvern body took its place, still regaining his strength from the fiery rebirth (spent XP to get the asset back, but without bonuses).

But this - the ability to choose in the metagame to spend a metacurrency (xp, this time) to turn a negative consequence into what appears to be a no-net-change outcome, i.e. in this case you still have a Young Wyvern companion even though the game just told you you lost it - isn't something I want to see in any game I'm involved in.

Far preferable to me would be that this loss forces you to choose in-character between a) going on a side adventure* (or doing something else significant and-or time-consuming) to potentially acquire another companion or b) carrying on without a companion.

* - side benefit: if you can convince the rest of the party to come along, the DM has more game to run and thus the campaign goes on longer.

Alvis, meanwhile, who is somewhere between "ranger" and "druid" in D&D terms, took a cub remaining at the end of the fight and bonded with it, gaining a new animal companion himself.

Nice.

 

[Lanefan]

Can someone be in the driver's seat when the only positions on the map are those the GM creates for them to go to?

Just because the DM built the car doesn't mean others can't take it for a spin.

 

[Lanefan]

Cartographers don't place things on maps.

They draw maps which correspond to a literal, physical location. Presuming they aren't intentionally making bad maps, I mean.

Which means we are right back at the problem of "objectivity" allegedly not being about any physical reality....and yet as soon as you push on it, physical reality is where the argument goes!

With apologies for my amateur mapmaking, are you trying to tell me the maps linked from this page...

Decast maps

...aren't real?

'Cause that's how this line of argument comes across: that because the game-world being depicted isn't real, nothing written or drawn about it can be real either; and that ain't gonna fly.

 

[Lanefan]

The only thing I can think of would be some sort of "Yes, and" scenario. One player might narrate that the group sees the body of X on the ground. It was not stated that X is dead, though, so someone could "yes, and" X to be pretending to be dead. That change alters the feel of what is happening.

"You're damn right it does!" says me - who has been playing a character named X since 2001.