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

[robertsconley]

But, I guarantee that if you had two plausible outcomes, one of which you think the players will enjoy playing out and one that they wouldn't enjoy, or you think will be boring or not personally interesting to play through, virtually every single time, you will choose the former and not the latter.

Claims of "world logic" fall flat in the face of actual play.

You’re admitting both outcomes are plausible, so picking one doesn’t break world logic, it follows from it. That’s the contradiction: you say the logic holds, then claim it doesn’t the moment I make a choice.

 

[Hussar]

And Rob is just using logic to extrapolate in the setting what’s seems most plausible to him.

See my above response, but, just to point out - what logic? Where does this logic come from? Oh, right, it's his chain of logic. Whic his based entirely own his own biases and whatnot. Again, there is no objectivity here.

Look, to be frank, I have very little dog in this race. From what I'm seeing, most of what constitutes a "sandbox" is just good DM practices. "Listen to your players." "Be mindful of your decisions." "Don't railroad." All perfectly cromulent DMing advice. I'm not really seeing anything here that separates sandbox from any other well run game.

The big difference is allowing the players to have the options to choose their own path. Which is a great way to run a game. I still believe that the traditional sandbox practice requires far, far too much upfront work for me to ever try it. I'll stick to my approach which requires a lot less up front work. The downside of my approach is that I'm not quite sure how durable it is over the long term. I'm not very confident that I could play an 18 month campaign using Ironsworn. I don't think so, but, I haven't tried, so, I don't know. That's the upside to the traditional approach. You have so much material that it's pretty much guaranteed to be a lengthy campaign. Great. I mean, my Out of the Abyss game is pretty sandboxy (although fairly limited) and I'm pretty sure it's going to last for quite a while.

But this notion of "objectivity" or "setting logic" just doesn't really work. It's not like my Candlekeep Mysteries campaign didn't have tons of setting logic. But, since it absolutely wasn't a sandbox, it's not really a priority. But, the setting logic was there. My point always has been though that "setting logic" is a misleading term. There is no "setting logic" when the person who creates the setting, runs that setting and makes every single decision about the setting is the same person who is not subject to any sort of double checking.

 

[Bedrockgames]

See my above response, but, just to point out - what logic? Where does this logic come from? Oh, right, it's his chain of logic. Whic his based entirely own his own biases and whatnot. Again, there is no objectivity here.

I mean logic is something people can use. Thinking through what the most likely outcome of something or a chain of causation is something people can do. And the whole point of arriving for objectivity would be keep his own biases as much in check as possible, not use them as a foundation for making his decisions. See my earlier responses on impartiality: it is a goal you strive for. There are GMs who are more impartial and objective and GMs who are less impartial and objective

Look, to be frank, I have very little dog in this race. From what I'm seeing, most of what constitutes a "sandbox" is just good DM practices. "Listen to your players." "Be mindful of your decisions." "Don't railroad." All perfectly cromulent DMing advice. I'm not really seeing anything here that separates sandbox from any other well run game.

There isn’t much beyond the promise of an open campaign setting where the players can do what they will. Generally there is an area of map planned out, factions, NPCs, etc. the reason sandbox spills so much ink on the kinds of advice you list, is it’s open nature makes it a bit harder to commit to

 

[pemerton]

I think it might be fair to say that "my collection of tables and oracles are an organizational model that help me keep my setting in motion and consistent" maybe?

I dunno - to me they look my like prompts, aides-memoire, etc. But there's not necessarily a lot at stake here, except that the language of model/simulation gets used to deny authorial decision-making.

And I guess there's also just the issue of accurate description - a model or a simulation is subject to correctness conditions (ie does it produce outputs/results that are accurate in the respects that we care about). This has come up in the past in discussions of freeform adjudication - free kriegsspiel referees are experts, and their decisions are subject to correctness conditions (eg are they actually correct about how some exchange between units would play out). But a referee deciding how the king will react to the PCs' request for a favour is not modelling or simulating. Because there's not truth, independent of their decision, about what the king will do.

That's not to say that their decision is unconstrained. There are all sorts of ways a decision can be constrained other than being true by some external/objective measure. As I'm sure you know from your non-RPGing life experiences!

When I roll on my TB2e weather tables, I get excited and the players groan, because they worry about bad weather that will burden their PCs with toll. Part of what makes it fun is that it is a constrained decision where I have an element of disclaimer available - "Don't blame me, it's the game and its events tables!" But those weather tables aren't models. And if the game ends up being a terrible experience I still have to wear a fair bit of the responsibility!

 

[pemerton]

The one person who seems unwilling to accept this is @pemerton.

This is another example of you attributing stuff to me that is just not true.

 

[pemerton]

What’s really odd about is that it’s gone from “I don’t like the ways these rules work” to “I don’t think you GMed this right, because of my personal view of how psychology works”.

I'm still waiting to be told that Luke Crane is doing BW wrong.

 

[robertsconley]

This is no different from Burning Wheel. (And "intent and task* is not even a mechanic. It's a framework for understanding and resolving action declarations.)

We’ve gone over this before—my earlier posts lay out the procedural differences clearly enough for anyone interested. No need to repackage it again under a new framing.

In the meantime, this post covers what I do, with links for anyone who wants to dive deeper:

R

D&D General Post in thread '[rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.'

Saturday at 9:09 PM

@BedrockBrendan and I have both explained at length how we arrive at our decisions. I was asked for an actual play account and provided one upthread.
The Golden Pass and Yonk's Place
I get that @thefutilist's question wasn’t exactly the same, so if you have follow-ups, fair enough.

As I said waaaay back, the GM should own their decisions.

And I’ve said multiple times now that a referee in a living world sandbox needs to develop and practice good leadership skills. That includes owning their decisions. If that wasn’t clear, I’m pointing it out again now. I also think...

• robertsconley

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[pemerton]

My wife says that she thinks it's cool that people do it though! If world-building is your hobby and it makes you happy, why not model what you want I guess!

Sure, I mean people can do what they like.

I remember a conversation I had with a friend, who is also a RPGer, about 30 years ago. He is now the head of the humanities and social science school at the same university where I work. Back then, we were talking about forms of government, and social organisation more generally, and how these could be depicted more realistically in RPGs.

I personally find it curious, and perhaps indicative of the general tendencies in the hobby, that plate tectonics and climatology turn up much more than history (cf antiquarianism) and sociology. The obvious and brilliant exception is Glorantha, which to me seems more "fantasy realistic" - of course physical processes don't behave as they do on earth, given that it is all being done and overseen by spirits and deities; but human processes are very similar to actual earthly ones, because without realistic human processes spirits and deities don't even make sense!

 

[pemerton]

I believe @pemerton can pass his Steel test to drop the line of conversation!

I dunno . . . have you looked at my post count?

 

[robertsconley]

See my above response, but, just to point out - what logic? Where does this logic come from? Oh, right, it's his chain of logic. Which his based entirely own his own biases and whatnot. Again, there is no objectivity here.

You’re basically saying that because I made the setting, everything I do is just my opinion, that nothing I decide can be fair or logical. That’s a view called constructivism. It means you think all the “logic” in a world is just whatever the referee feels like.

But that’s not how I run things.

Yes, I created the world, but once it’s built, I treat it like a working machine. The people in it, the places, the factions. they all follow logic based on what’s already been established. I don’t decide what happens based on taste or drama; I decide based on what would reasonably follow. That approach is called internal realism, it says that once a system is in place, you can still apply consistent logic and make fair judgments inside it, even if the system itself is fictional.

This kind of debate actually goes back decades in philosophy and science. Constructivists say knowledge is always shaped by personal or cultural views, while internal realists argue that truth still exists within a system once it’s been built. Who’s right? They’re still debating that today. But in practice, the answer is usually some blend of both, and that’s what I do with my living world and what the other posters here, like @Bedrockgames and @AlViking, and others do with their sandbox approach

That debate continues to the present and remains unresolved. And we are not going to resolve it today. We can, however, understand where each is coming from.