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

[robertsconley]

there is a very gray area here though. If my players start really pushing to explore a city I haven’t given much though to, and then start pushing for details about something rather specific like jade comb smugglers, it is becoming very likely I will start introducing NPCs related to jade comb smuggling (or at the very least give them more definitive answers on whether there are jade comb smugglers operating in the area).

Just in time Worldbuilding.

 

[JConstantine]

Yeah, we're not going to agree and I think you are missing a very key piece in terms of the degree of control over fiction that trad relies on, which is radically different from, and recontextualizes basically all of this other stuff.

I'm not missing anything. I'm just not as dogmatic as you seem to be.

if you start at the nar end, and then incorporate a bunch of things that people can see as trad, you don't end up at the same place as someone going from trad to vanilla nar.

All of this is precisely the problem. Each game should be taken at face value, without preconceived notions from any other game.

 

[JConstantine]

Those exploratory situations happened quite a bit in our play. Do you go up the stairs or down the hall? BitD isn't a game that is built around a lot of exploration as a core activity, but it is very present.

I didn't say exploration wasn't present. That comment was about BitD relying on hard framing vs soft.

 

[JConstantine]

No, it's not. The examples of play provided do not look much like Narrativist play I am familiar with.

You really cannot help misrepresenting people, can you? I didn't claim it looked like Narrativist play. I'm saying sandboxes equally ask players to essentially come up with their own "quest".

Your analysis of BitD seems a little off.

Nah, it's just taking what's written at face value without a dogmatic Narrativist view.

 

[zakael19]

To be clear here, I am not saying that sandbox play is like BiTD. What most of us are doing is rejecting what seems like a false dichotomy of BitD being player driven and sandbox being GM driven. There just seems to be too much weigh being applied by people to the GM as storyteller in a sandbox campaign (when that is the very thing sandbox GMs are striving to avoid)

Oh, I agree with @JConstantine that there's a lot of GM driving play in all games that apportion a role to a "GM." The question is largely "what's your primary heuristic for making the decisions" and "are there explicit restrictions on how you do so" and we've mostly beaten that to absolute death.

Eg: in Blades the GM frames out the scene when we kick a score off using the Approach/Detail and Engagement Roll outcome, using what they interpreted Gather Info rolls to reveal (the player asks the question, but the GM still provides the answer), and poses the first obstacle. That's a ton of authority and direction. But I'm doing it given explicit directions of the course of play, and tying back to challenging the players via their character flags directly.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I agree. Forgotten Realms, it is not. It's very much wide as an ocean lake, deep as a puddle, but I've seen Blades players claim it was a detailed setting.

Well, it has enough detail to get things going. I mean, to me, it certainly feels much more coherent than most of the Forgotten Realms and similar settings.

But it's designed to be rife with potential conflict to support play. I think Harper was very aware of both the fiction and the gameplay when designing the setting.

Awareness of gameplay is one of the things I was advocating for earlier in the thread and many seemed to push back against that idea. What are your thoughts on it?

Frankly, it seems this is where the barrier to understanding is.

Perhaps! Having GMed tons of trad games, I can say for certain I got attached to many of the things I created more than I would have things created by others. I don't think it's universal by any means... it wasn't even a trap I'd always fall into... but I think it is a factor to be considered. As with most things, I don't expect I'm unique.

No, I quoted you verbatim. I'm not going to complain about people misrepresenting me and then do exactly that myself.

Yes, but you also snipped it and left what I feel were relevant bits that gave the one sentence you quoted more context.

There are different posters advocating different approaches to sandboxes. And it's clear you see it as a vehicle for GM material because you think it's meaningfully different from material provided by an author, which I don't. It just requires the GM to not be precious about their creations or as BitD puts it "don’t hold back on what they earn".

That's not the sole reason, though. I don't think @robertsconley is precious about his setting in that way... he talks about players "trashing his setting" all the time. I imagine @Bedrockgames has similar views. But I do think when one puts that much work into these things before play, they are going to come up in play. Not just a quickly sketched NPC, but one with plots and connections and other elements that give him a specific place in the setting which will inform anything he is used for. The same with organizations and nations or cities and so on.

All the lore is set before play begins and it will almost undoubtedly shape play. That's actively what many people are saying... that the world exists independently of the characters, and events will move on with or without them.

This is why I think the GM's ideas are so front and center. Nothing is being shaped or tailored to the players... and some are saying that doing so is actively harmful to play.

Not at all. I've contemplated going through the book and doing a compare and contrast, though it'd take bloody ages through text. I'm actually starting to wonder if anyone besides @zakael19 and myself have actually read the book.

Wonder no more... I've read it a couple times at least! Most recently, I thumbed through the section you quoted from last night after reading your post.

That's what led me to think you've done a pretty convincing job of cherry-picking certain words and phrases and leaving out others to present your case. But I don't think it's a very accurate assessment.

I see both "no prep" and "low/light prep" in roughly equal amounts these days, but it was heavily tilted toward the former previously.

I think many elements of the design lend themselves to light or no prep. You certainly need a lot less formal prep like stat blocks and gridded maps and the like. But I don't think it's ever a bad thing to think about a game and brainstorm some ideas for it. To think about what's happened previously and imagine what that may mean for the setting and the characters.

 

[Bedrockgames]

That's not the sole reason, though. I don't think @robertsconley is precious about his setting in that way... he talks about players "trashing his setting" all the time. I imagine @Bedrockgames has similar views. But I do think when one puts that much work into these things before play, they are going to come up in play. Not just a quickly sketched NPC, but one with plots and connections and other elements that give him a specific place in the setting which will inform anything he is used for. The same with organizations and nations or cities and so on.

The whole point though is to let things fall by the wayside the players have no interest in. I mean if something comes up, then sure, relevant details might be there. But it isn't like I have an adventure idea connected to an NPC. I just have an NPC, an organization, things like ongoing conflicts. I can take or leave them. What matters to me is what the players are trying to do. If I spend five hours making a sect, and a player decides to send that sect a gift of poisoned wine, I don't care if they kill them all. What you learn, when you are willing to let this stuff go, is it can lead in much more interesting directions than you imagined, if you just let the players drive things.

 

[JConstantine]

- In most FITD games, you have a strong core premise of the game itself, what the macro "playing to find out" is

This can actually be applied to trad-ish sandboxes though. So, for my V:TM sandbox, it could be seen as "play to find out: what will the coterie do to survive the night-to-night unlife of the World of Darkness? And will they maintain their humanity?". Bedrock's wuxia game might be something like "play to find out: what effect will the martial heroes have on the Jianghu". It's broader, sure, but that's just because PbtA and FitD games are tightly focussed.

To clarify, I'm not saying that is necessarily the case in other people's games, but it can apply.

These two alone start directing the overall thrust of play, before you even truly begin in a way that I think "we pick a spot on the map" doesnt quite do;

That's fair, but not all sandboxes are map-driven exploration. And people need to stop treating it as if Robert's is representative of everyone's.

A good chunk of this thread has been people stridently saying that even though there's some core "sandbox-equivalent" to stuff like Blades I'm assured it doesnt look like "actual sandbox play" at all

Well, then I fundamentally disagree with that notion, and this ties back into what I wrote about it being a complex spectrum like colour. Certainly, the proceduralism and tight focus means BitD is less sandbox-y than a broader game, but I consider it a sandbox.

 

[robertsconley]

Individual behavior is anecdote, not data. Individual actual play is not a meaningful testbed or metric. Only in aggregate over many groups do we get anything reliable.

Your contention is that one home game is not meaningful, that is reasonable

However, my experience isn’t limited to a single group or a narrow context. Over the past four decades, I’ve run sandbox campaigns across home groups, virtual tables, store games, and convention events. I’ve coordinated and run live-action events and managed a LARP chapter where players joined and left constantly. True, my experiences doesn't come from evaluating survey spreadsheets, but far more extensive than one gained from a single home campaign.

I have done thing that are adjacent to methods like surveys, I’ve run my published sandbox Scourge of the Demon Wolf fifteen times with entirely different groups, all using my Living World techniques. Deceits of the Russet has seen seven iterations so far. Those aren’t isolated anecdotes, they’re stress tests. Sandbox adventures are notoriously hard to write about but by running so many session I can spot patterns of choices that give me a framework on which I can write an adventure useful to others.

But they also given me data on how different types of players react, adapt, and learn within my framework.

Lots of GMs hide setting logic from players... so we can’t really assume players are aware of the probabilities coming out of setting logic.

That’s true in some games, but in mine, how I present things during the campaign is designed to teach players how the world behaves. My background in boffer LARPs taught me a lot about how people learn from incomplete information. LARP players don’t get a rulebook, they get a character sheet and an in-world situation. Yet they adapt, succeed, and often become highly proficient. As an event director, I watched this process unfold over years, and I applied the lessons directly to tabletop.

It’s about creating the right level of situational awareness. Through consistent roleplay, environmental cues, and verbal descriptions, players can infer risk, read context, and make informed decisions, without needing probability charts in front of them.

That’s not unique to my game, it’s a learnable, transferable skill in any immersive, responsive setting.

I’m not asking you to meet a standard. You don’t need my validation.

I know you didn't ask me, but you did set a standard in your opening: that only broad aggregate evidence is valid.

I don’t need validation, but I do seek useful critique. That means weighing opinions from people with different assumptions, and not dismissing working procedures as anecdotal.

 

[zakael19]

In sandbox play " the players to come up with a “quest” that may or may not exist at all yet; and then helping nudge play along if they don’t have anything in mind (or dangle some hooks)" is pretty close to how it plays out. I would imagine it looks very different in say a BitD game, but the whole point is for the players to come up with quests for themselves and to drive the campaign by pushing in whatever direction interests them

Sure, I guess my question would be how much does the latter bit rely on established elements or like "content." My personal exposure to Sandboxes tends to be from the OSR / Hexcrawl side, so stuff that's very dependent on rumor tables -> adventure/dungeon hooks etc and heavy GM prep of an entire series of content once players decide on a direction to go (or I guess a handful of random tables?). If you're coming at it from a different style of Sandbox play I probably don't have the context for that! But I was kinda using "quests" as a generic form of "scores" in that BITD/FITD tend tie all that back very explicitly to the premise -> sub-premise, and constantly reinforce that in a fairly relentless manner.

You can still have focus within a sandbox if you want.

Play to find out is very much the aim of a sandbox, though I suspect you guys are trying to do it in different ways than we would

Sure, what I'm trying to say is that a game like Blades has a set of focuses that are both built in (and reinforced by the progression mechanics etc), and then steered by teh players to a degree as well in a way that I just don't see in many other system. Eg: the explicit "crew" playbook that centers play (and sometimes in very different ways; a Cult is going to look a lot different then Bravos).

Can you elaborate on this. I just want to make sure I understand.

The game says you're a fledging crew of criminals, the actual Crew Type says a lot more. It tells you what your claims look like (fictional and mechanical progression elements), what your focus of Crime is, the factions you are likely to start in contact/conflict with, and the overall vibe of play. In Girl by Moonlight, it's instead Playsets that are "Heroic magical girls fight to reclaim a corrupted world" vs "mecha pilots struggling against extinction at the hands of the Leviathans" vs "dreams, desire, mass culture, and ideas developing a life of their own."

Basically almost all FITD games have sub-sets of the overarching premise that will drastically alter the thrust and themes of play just by picking them, and flag to the GM a lot of what you want to see right up front before you even start picking playbooks / world building / etc. (eg: Scum and Villainy has 3 different ship types that lead to pretty fundamentally different games).

Because the players pick this, and are given a set of concrete objectives they can always return to - the game itself is providing a lot of direction before the GM even gets involved.

Does that make sense? I just contrast it in my head with Dolmenwood, which as an OSR sandbox doesnt really have this sort of really core player-picked immediate thrust of play.

And then the framing mechanics come in, where like we had the yelling about "wow dumping people at the dungeon is railroading" but in FITD you just cut to the score, then cut to framed downtime, and zoom out to talk meta or third person flow of time and newpaper outcomes or factional results, and then zoom back in to a Gather Info, etc.