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

[Bedrockgames]

I've got a longer reply I can make but if I add: Situation play

So we have: adventure based, scene based, sandbox, situation, does that distinction make sense?

Situation play would massively reduce the open world exploration aspect but retain the open ended emergent consequences of such play. In effect we're all here for a specific scenario but how that scenario plays out, no one knows. Or would you place that within the scene based category?

Yeah, so think that is another. I usually call that’s. Scenario or even ‘contained sandbox’ (Simply because I use situational adventure to describe something else)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Here's a little story I just wrote:

The child walked through the park, and came to an embankment. She thought it would be fun to roll down it, and so she lay on her back at the top of the slope, and gave herself a push. Off she went, rolling down the hill!​

​

As she tumbled down, it was the sounds that excited her the most - the swish of the grass, the wind, the noise of other children and her own delighted screaming, all rendered with a curious rhythm by the rotation of her head, her ears being covered on the left, then exposed, then covered on the right, then both exposed again, all the way to the bottom.​

​

When she stood up, swaying dizzily, all the could think of was racing back up to the top, so that she could have another go! But her father insisted it was time to go home. Rotation, rhythm and joy were soon forgotten, replaced by a sense of tiredness in her legs, and the boredom of the humdrum evening routine.​

​

The sun rose the next morning nevertheless.​

So did my story model: gravity, body shape, hearing, wind, walking, balance and dizziness, muscle fatigue, parent-child relationships, bathtime, and the rotation of the earth about the sun?

If yes, then your threshold for modelling is lower than mine.

If not, then that's why I don't see any modelling in the typical RPG.

Cromulent prose, nicely evocative. Anyway, this is a good point. I make another point that goes with it but is slightly different. That is the 'paucity' or 'insufficiency' one. There's just not enough detail in any practical fantasy world description to create any significant constraints. Most elements of these milieu strike me as similar to the weather. Yes, we can posit many plausible states for the weather in the Town of Ladh on the 4th day of Crackrock. Choosing between them has nothing to do with simulating weather, however. It could be snowing, sunny, raining, windy, fair but biting cold, etc. So, we have basically a choice, random tables or similar, or someone at the table decides, or maybe we just don't bother and figure the weather isn't that significant. None of these is a simulation. They are ways to generate plausible imagined facts. But there's no reason why those facts cannot or should not, all things being equal, serve other purposes. I contend that is exactly what they do! Inevitably!

 

[thefutilist]

There are a number of misunderstandings that you seem to be laboring under about Narrativist play.

Eh, as far as I can make out @SableWyvern and @Bedrockgames are Narrativists. They like the drama stuff and play is emergent. That's my bar anyway.

 

[clearstream]

I agree that a description of the unfolding of events often would need to include the creation of a plan as a part of a process. I'm less impressed with the idea that a plan causes things to happen... This becomes akin to ascribing agency to tools.

If our plans couldn't cause us to take consequent actions, what use would they be?

Unless one rules out the whole class of "I imagined X so I did Y" from causality... which produces a rather strange account of human behaviour. "I imagined X, but unrelatedly I did Y" where Y just happens to bear connection with X. Repeatedly.

 

[Faolyn]

But it doesn't say that!

 

[hawkeyefan]

It has nothing to do with diminishing the role of the GM exactly, it's just an explanation of one option for how the GM decides what is happening in the wider world. It's about thinking about how the world will respond to the action or inaction of the characters. Sometimes that may be in response to the PCs kill the emperor and adopting his dog. Sometimes it may be that they didn't investigate the rumors of icky things from the swamp because they didn't want to get their new boots dirty and now there's an invasion of icky things from the swamp that could have been nipped in the bud.

The PCs have impact on the world around them, large and small. The DM does their best to decide logical chain of events from their actions.

Is there an RPG where that’s not the case?

I think most RPGs and most GMs are going to try and maintain plausibility. Unless perhaps if the setting is meant to be absurd… something like Alice in Wonderland or similar.

When we consider that, this idea of plausibility seems less important. Less distinctive. So then it makes sense to look at other distinctions.

Personally, I have no qualms about admitting to making decisions based on what’s the most interesting of the plausible options. Or the most fun. Or, perhaps most importantly, which speaks to one or more of the player characters in a meaningful way.

I’m honestly not sure why people would actively eschew these factors, as if they’re in some way bad or unwanted.

Also, if a GM is always deciding based on what is “most plausible” then I think before long, plausibility begins to break down… everything can be predicted based on what’s most obvious. That’s not the way the world works.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Eh, as far as I can make out @SableWyvern and @Bedrockgames are Narrativists. They like the drama stuff and play is emergent. That's my bar anyway.

Personally I wouldn't use this language (I am not sure it is fully accurate and I just generally am not a big fan of the G-N-S thing). I would probably use more language like genre emulation or character driven campaigns. I also think based on my understanding of narrativism this isn't quite what is going on in my campaigns. My approach is more like the living world sandbox Rob describes but I include elements that allow for conflict (and this comes more out of the situational adventure concept I mentioned earlier and the living adventure concept I mentioned). I am sure it my have cross-over with what narrativists do, but when I hear people talking about narrativist play, it is pretty clear to me they are shooting for something different from what I am.

So elements that I often engage with that I can see also being at home in what people would call narrativism are things like establishing connections to family int he setting in a session zero. This is something not unlike what you see in say Hillfolk (where you form dramatic conflicts with other characters) except these are not pre-loaded with anything that would lead to drama. If it is there, then we can explore that in play, but it doesnt have to be. Sometimes I do family randomly. Sometimes I look at a character's abilities then find all the NPCs in the setting who have some of those abilities (kung fu technique transmission is very important in the setting) and let them choose from among those NPCs to be their parents. There isn't one method, but it can be important for drama. Something I also do around that at times is create a 20 year backstory and this can be a dramatic element (but this is usually something that connects to a larger context).

But it is still drama+sandbox, not just 'drama'. And the drama here can refer to the chemical reaction that unfolds in play from conflict between characters (I would say 90 percent of it is all grudges like you have in a wuxia movie, so it is not like this stuff usually gets deep into internal worlds like people were describing), but also it is a way of giving the GM permission to introduce dramatic elements (see my comments in other posts about how one of the things sandbox play was reacting against was this 90s storyteller approach)

I think my wuxia sandbox post covers much of this in more detail. The appendix for my Sons of Lady 87 book probably has my most current thinking on the subject (though do keep in mind even this was published a few years ago now, and it was with a very specific campaign in mind). Here are is that section of the appendix:

Because they are important to how I run things, I am posting the grudge table section here again from the rulebook:

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sure, I get that. I’ve never said that sandbox play is dissatisfying. It may be so to someone looking for a different type of play, but the same could be said for any game. Whatever game we’re talking about… from the most open to the strictest railroad… is fine if everyone’s on board with it.

Right. I personally, not to harsh on it, just find the sort of endless long-winded setting exploration play that is my experience with living world as TEDIOUS. It also tends to be pretty restricting, as the 'plausibility' thing tends to come down on the heads of any players who aspire to have their characters do anything substantive. Prepare for endless hours of being showered with details about a setting that, frankly, is pretty indistinguishable from 1000 others and is not the part of play that I have the slightest interest in. I have no interest whatsoever in learning the history of the Linguini Empire! MAYBE if the story is extremely engaging to me personally, and my character has real substance, MAYBE it will be interesting to learn some factoid that has bearing on me.

But give me an Apocalypse World where I can play to see if my character is really able to stick to his beliefs (or whatever) and THAT IS IN DOUBT BECAUSE I DON'T JUST MAKE THAT UP FOR MYSELF, then it is fun! I find the sort of characterization in totally free-form RP that the traditionalists demand as being the equivalent of combat where the players just describe what happens without any dice. It might be amusing, at times, but it lacks any sort of TEETH.

 

[thefutilist]

Personally I wouldn't use this language (I am not sure it is fully accurate and I just generally am not a big fan of the G-N-S thing). I would probably use more language like genre emulation

I still have a post coming where I lay out my thoughts and address some of your previous responses but this is interesting.

I think there's a potential conflict between genre play and emergent drama play. In genre play a npc (or pc) decision will hew along genre lines. It is in effect emulating a genre story. In more emergent drama play, you're always giving the NPC their due. So yeah given the fictional circumstances it may well end up being the type of stuff that happens in the genre but at the moment of decision you're treating them as a real character rather than as a genre piece. If that distinction makes sense. Is it fun because of drama stuff or is it fun because it emulates wuxia movies.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I still have a post coming where I lay out my thoughts and address some of your previous responses but this is interesting.

I think there's a potential conflict between genre play and emergent drama play. In genre play a npc (or pc) decision will hew along genre lines. It is in effect emulating a genre story. In more emergent drama play, you're always giving the NPC their due. So yeah given the fictional circumstances it may well end up being the type of stuff that happens in the genre but at the moment of decision you're treating them as a real character rather than as a genre piece. If that distinction makes sense. Is it fun because of drama stuff or is it fun because it emulates wuxia movies.

When I say genre emulation, I don't mean you emulate storylines, though those can emerge naturally. What I mean is the characters are genre appropriate, the tools I use aim to bring in something from the genre (grudge tables for example), and it is modeled after a world in the mold of the genre (i.e. a martial world is a crucial component of the setting, sects are crucial to the setting, conflict between sects is crucial).

I think some of the difficulty in communication is people like Rob and I were having these conversations in different quarters with people using different vocabularies (so that even the same terms sometimes have slightly different meaning or very different meaning)