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

[Campbell]

So keeping to real world for a moment, do I have 0 agency if I'm lost? What if I just pick a direction in hopes of finding something familiar? What if I have a little information and know the general direction of the nearest road? For that matter do I have agency if I'm on roads that were built by someone else?

We make decisions all the time with limited understanding, so how much is needed? If we sometimes lack knowledge does that negate other times when I did have more information to go on? Because these kind of things seem to be what we go round and round about. Most of the time people in my games will have a fair amount of information to make a decision and I'll even go out of my way to remind them or give them appropriate knowledge checks if I think it's appropriate. But sometimes? Sometimes it's little more informed than a flip of the coin because the players don't know any more than the characters do. If you're always guessing or your decisions don't really have any impact? Then you're lacking autonomy. But I don't think autonomy is binary and should not be judged by the fact that sometimes you're basically guessing even when the outcome can be critical.

I'm just trying to establish a baseline because some people have very different definitions of what I consider common terms.

Almost no one in any situation has zero agency, but someone who is not lost in the desert likely has more than someone who is. Having compass or maps on hand would mean more agency. Knowing where the road is would provide more.

We're all going to have our own thresholds for levels of agency. We might even have different thresholds for different games based on other factors. I'm a pretty big Vampire fan and that's a game with phenomenally low agency to start. In comparison I find the level of agency we have in our current Scum and Villainy game to be a bit too much. The tools at our disposal have sort of outstripped the game's threat matrix.

Of course, any game is going to have moments where we have more agency and where we have less. Often as a result of consequences of our decisions.

Most of what I ask, regardless of game, is that when designing scenarios or framing scenes the GM should think about what information will be available and the gameplay ramifications of it. To basically give a crap about the game as a game.

I'm not an agency maximalist though. I don't think more is always better. I think you need a middle ground where decisions matter, effectiveness and success are earned, and characters still struggle some. I'm also someone who likes a certain amount of baked in premise, so I don't really value full autonomy as some sort of basic good. The idea that players might without regard to anything established about their characters just screw off and become pirates or whatever would be a non-starter for me personally.

 

[zakael19]

I’m not sure… it depends on the context in which it was said. I didn’t see where that was mentioned, so I’m not sure.

I mean… I can see the idea of why someone might say that. I mean, the geography we’re dealing with is pretend. So you could probably design both a dungeon and a sandbox as like a flowchart. You get to this node along that path, and that node along the other path. So I get the idea.

But I imagine that most games that rely on sandboxes would likely wind up having many nodes and many paths to the point where it’d be hard to track them all.

Is that only a matter of scope or has it become something else at that point?



Max, I’ve been talking about a GM and how they prepare their game. What they do when they are doing that, the decisions they make, the elements they create. I think that’s very clear.

I don’t care about this semantic nonsense you’re talking about or why you mistakenly insist on bringing system into it. For someone who cries “strawman” all the time, you sure like to build them yourself.



Or perhaps there are more than two views?



No, that came from describing games without poetry.

I was the one who said IMO that if you take a step back, from a "player decision within a GM authored area POV" a sandbox ran with procedure and integrity and a well-designed classic dungeon don't look all that different. In both, you're setting up problems for the players to engage with, factions that have areas of control and problems, encounter rosters, rewards, etc. A dungeon just has a far more constrained map then a hex crawl or what have you.

I'm willing to be argued otherwise, but the core (assuming you're there to engage with the game) seems pretty similar to me!

 

[zakael19]

The problem comes when the two bolded pieces directly clash, which is inevitable sooner or later. Players in general about 99% of the time prefer rule changes that make life easier on they or their characters, while it's often in the long-term interest of the game to go the other direction and make things more difficult.

A simple example might be speed of level advancement. In 5e as written, characters advance pretty fast; and if played roughly to RAW will reach capstone level in - at about 4 sessions per level after 1st - about 18-ish months of regular play. A DM looking to run a longer-term or even perpetual campaign will obviously want to greatly slow down this advancement rate, improving the long-term game at direct cost of the "fun" of levelling up all the time.

A more in-the-moment example comes when a player discovers an exploit or loophole in the rules that breaks something. Fun for the player(s), sure, but in the interests of improving (or maintaining) the game's playability the DM has to shut the loophole down even though the players might want the loophole kept open.

Hence, I see this as poor advice as written, and would rather see the "improve the game" part emphasized with fun as a necessary but secondary consideration.

The DM guide also covers player exploits/various examples of poor play when it talks directly to players, as covered on this site and across the internet. We're now hitting directly at the OP of this thread here - 2024 has taken some big steps forward to try and place guidelines and limits for all players around the table in a way we haven't seen since the 4e DMG (in many areas it's directly paraphrasing said), and surpassing that in certain areas. It's great, even if as I've said multiple times in this thread, the emphasis on "fun" is rather subjective (but perhaps that's part of the point).

 

[zakael19]

By contrast, the point of my Living World Sandbox campaigns is to present a setting that feels real, where players feel like they’ve been there as their characters. Everything I do flows from that. I handle the World in Motion because the players only have access to what their characters could plausibly know. Their agency comes from choosing what to pursue and how to act, not from framing scenes, asserting authorial control, or sharing the fiction.

Again, stuff like "present a setting that feels real" is the sort of thing that gets some of our hackles up. This post here suggests that Doskvol can't feel real because of the other framing you've added. I'm not sure that follows at all, considering that Doskvol is a really rich setting that is full of living factions and interests that are all spinning from the go; has more detailed and evocative descriptions then pretty much all conventional setting books within its limited scope; and then encourages each player to make it feel even more real to them individually by contributing things.

I would accept something like "lived in" or "objective" or whatever, but this sort of post is what gets many of us here rubbed the wrong way because to us there's nothing "more real" about a pre-written world the GM has reams of info that we get to slowly poke at. It's all about how much the fiction itself comes alive in our shared imagination at the table.

 

[Maxperson]

I state all evidence I've seen is its bad most of the time, and explain why. That's may not be objective by some standards, but its about as good as anyone can do assessing anything.

That would be all the evidence that you dislike. That's why it's subjective and not objective like you are portraying it.

 

[Maxperson]

I mean seriously, how long does it take to listen to a player either pointing out the actual rule (in rules adjucation) or suggesting an ad-hoc ruling has bad consequences (and in the latter case looking around the room and asking "How many agree with them?").

1 to 2 minutes, which is why I say that the player should be able to be done in that amount of time, or should wait until the game is done.

 

[zakael19]

1 to 2 minutes, which is why I say that the player should be able to be done in that amount of time, or should wait until the game is done.

The 2024 DMG agrees with you that you should establish before play the ground rules for stuff like this!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I agree, and that’s exactly why I emphasized that clarity is the responsibility of everyone involved. Redefinitions aren’t always obvious at first, and I’ve been in plenty of discussions where it takes time to realize we’re not even using the same language. That’s no one person’s fault.

But I’d add: if someone knows they’re using a term in a nonstandard or specialized way, especially on a public forum, it’s on them to flag that early. Otherwise, it’s not just a communication issue; it becomes a framing problem. People feel like they’re being critiqued for using a term in its common, hobby-wide sense, when the criticism is really coming from a different analytical model. That disconnect is what leads to long chains of posts debating definitions and people talking past each other, as we’ve seen in this thread.

@pemerton has always been pretty clear about his definitions. It is equally necessary for others to read and comprehend. I don't think you're wrong about using terms, but requiring strict adherence to your formulations (and note @Campbell not agreeing that your definition of agency is normative) precludes any easy way to discuss alternatives at all. And again, our experience has been that there's a lot of hostility to introducing new terms. It seems to be a kind of linguistic tyranny at times.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Again, stuff like "present a setting that feels real" is the sort of thing that gets some of our hackles up. This post here suggests that Doskvol can't feel real because of the other framing you've added. I'm not sure that follows at all, considering that Doskvol is a really rich setting that is full of living factions and interests that are all spinning from the go; has more detailed and evocative descriptions then pretty much all conventional setting books within its limited scope; and then encourages each player to make it feel even more real to them individually by contributing things.

I think Doskvol can feel real. I don’t think one has to be more real than the other. But Rob is saying this is one his main focuses in running a game. And I would go further saying the point is to treat the setting as if it was real. If people are using blades in the dark to achieve a sense of realness, I am fine with that. But it is a bit confusing because many on that side have made arguments that realism is impossible when we raise it as a value

I would accept something like "lived in" or "objective" or whatever, but this sort of post is what gets many of us here rubbed the wrong way because to us there's nothing "more real" about a pre-written world the GM has reams of info that we get to slowly poke at. It's all about how much the fiction itself comes alive in our shared imagination at the table.

I am sure Rob could have phrase it differently. But I think this is what he is trying to say.

The second part of this post is where I think the disagreement lies. You don’t find this ‘objective’ approach to produce a sense of realness. That is fine, because I am sure many of us would find some of the alternatives proposed to disrupt our sense of reality in a setting. That is subjective, it is a real reaction to something. Where I think we get annoyed is when we feel our description of the process is getting mischaracterized or a model we don’t agree with is forced upon us for analysis

 

[Maxperson]

My own feeling was it had advanced the design for D&D significantly, but was still hobbled by the system's excessive tendency toward one-off exception based design.

The different viewpoints on various editions of D&D(and other games) is really interesting. What you see as hobbling, I've always seen as very freeing.

The exception based design means that since I'm not bound by the rules, I am free to come up with all kinds of neat exceptions, both for the players to have and for them to find.

The players are also free to come up with all kinds of exceptions that they want to research or look for, since there's a good chance that such an exception exists out there somewhere.