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

[JConstantine]

More fun for the folks demanding ever-more specific answers to their questions than for the questioned, I suspect. I really just want to have a casual conversation about gaming, but some folks seem to really want this to feel like an interrogation.

Confirmed: ENWorld is actually an elaborate CIA black site and Morrus is actually a directorate.

 

[robertsconley]

But I do think when one puts that much work into these things before play, they are going to come up in play.

That really depends on the campaign context. To get at the heart of this question, I'd first suggest thinking about how you arrived at that observation. What kind of campaigns were they? What was the dynamic between prep and player direction? You don’t have to answer me, but it’s worth reflecting on the pattern.

As for me, yes, I’ve always been willing to let players “trash” the setting, whether that means blowing something up or simply going in a completely different direction than expected. I’ve spent many sessions scrambling to prep something new because the players veered away from the detailed area I had ready. Last week's Majestic Fantasy Realm session was exactly just that.

One reason I’m comfortable with that is because I reuse my setting, like the Majestic Wilderlands, for most of my fantasy campaigns. That means unused prep is rarely wasted. If it doesn’t come up in this campaign, there’s a good chance it will in the next. I’ve even reused content decades later; for example, I prepped an area with reptile men in the Queen’s Waste back in the ’90s and ended up using it twenty years later in another Majestic Wilderlands campaign using a completely different system.

That’s my situation. For others it may be different, if a setting is only going to be used once, the incentive to make sure everything you prepared shows up during play is much stronger.

That’s why it helps to go beyond the observation and ask: what were the circumstances that led to it? And do those apply to what’s being discussed here? If they don’t, it doesn’t mean the observation is wrong, but it may mean there’s more to add. You can use the new information to deepen or refine the original insight.

 

[JConstantine]

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.

This is what I'm doing in V:TM, where those flags are chronicle tenets and character convictions (as opposed to background, heritage, vice, trauma in BitD). Now, I do think that makes it a little less naturalistic, and perhaps a little less sandbox-y as a result, because that's actually GM-created.

 

[zakael19]

This is what I'm doing in V:TM, where those flags are chronicle tenets and character convictions (as opposed to background, heritage, vice, trauma in BitD). Now, I do think that makes it a little less naturalistic, and perhaps a little less sandbox-y as a result, because that's actually GM-created.

Ah, now we get to be recursive on how “everything in a sandbox is GM created” again

 

[Umbran]

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.

So, appeal to authority now? Really? That's your play?

I'm not going to engage with that.

 

[thefutilist]

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.

I think a lot depends on what you mean by the bolded text. How and when is stuff being created or used to challenge the players and in what sense challenge. That's where I think you'd find fairly significant differences.

 

[AlViking]

So, appeal to authority now? Really? That's your play?

I'm not going to engage with that.

You stated ...

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

Then he explained that he was talking about an aggregate of many groups, not individual actual play. So now you change that into appealing to authority? I don't even know what your question/issue is any more.

 

[robertsconley]

So, appeal to authority now? Really? That's your play?

I'm not going to engage with that.

Let me make sure I’m following.

• You said individual actual play isn’t a reliable testbed, that we only get useful information in aggregate across many groups.
• So I responded with four decades of experience running campaigns across dozens of groups in home games, stores, conventions, and live-action events, clearly qualifying as aggregate experience.
• And your response to that is to call it an “appeal to authority” and bow out?

That feels like moving the goalposts. Either practical, repeated play across many groups counts as meaningful evidence, or it doesn’t. But if you’re going to set that standard and then refuse to engage when it’s met, we’re not really discussing ideas anymore.

I understand if you don’t want to discuss this further.

 

[JConstantine]

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?

That depends on what precisely you mean by "awareness of gameplay". If you've elaborated on it previously, I've missed it. This thread moves faster than I type.

I can say for certain I got attached to many of the things I created more than I would have things created by others.

This is an area we differ. I end up with the same amount of attachment/detachment whether I created it or not. Either way, I might end up liking one NPC more than another the way one might a character in a TV show, but I treat them like a spoilt kid with no appreciate for other people's property. "Treat your character like a stolen car", while perhaps associated with BitD PCs these days, originated as advice for the GM about NPCs in Monsterhearts.

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.

I don't think that's a fair assumption to make. None of us can see what's going on inside another's head, so I can't say for sure one way or another, but speaking for myself, this isn't how it plays out.
For BitD, I collated all the setting material into a pseudo-wiki on onenote. Between, the core book, the reference sheets and now Deep Cuts, there's around 300 NPCs and about 50 factions, many with an established place in the setting and some with "plots" (situations). Meanwhile, I have around 100 NPCs in my Vampire game with desires. In both, they're getting introduced or left by the wayside, as a result of player action.
But then, even in Blades, the GM is encouraged to introduce elements that they personally want to see to play.

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.

That's specifically the "living world" aspect, which is separate from sandbox. It's also true of BitD, to an extent.

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.

My prep for Blades mostly consists of obstacles and complications. It should go without saying, but obviously that means taking players actions into consideration once play has begun, and consequences spiral, but I also look at more generic ones that I can slot in, because I find improvising easier when I have some sort of scaffold to build off. So, for example, I'll have ones related to specific districts, like a labour strike in Coalridge or carnival in Silkshore, say, that I can use if they do a score there (and if it makes sense, of course).

 

[Pedantic]

I think a lot depends on what you mean by the bolded text. How and when is stuff being created or used to challenge the players and in what sense challenge. That's where I think you'd find fairly significant differences.

If I was interested in fighting the semantic battle for the appropriate use of language, I'd probably take the most umbrage at this use of "challenge." I'm not actually interested in trying to set a monopoly on any particular meaning, but there's real danger of conflating the sense I'd use the word in and the narrativist understanding of "challenging a character's beliefs" or similar.

Challenges are things to be overcome with good decision making, they are questions games ask you to present strategies to overcome. Do you have a plan for AoE attacks? Have you accounted for a political angle? What if the thing you need is underwater and guarded by blood sharks?

A challenge requires interaction and complexity, it shouldn't be a single act of resolution and failure should be eminently and obviously my fault, with scope to see what I could have done differently. This isn't Star Trek, if a thing is a challenge, then it cannot be possible to do everything right and still fail; failure is evidence you did something wrong, and an opportunity to learn. You either didn't understand the question being asked correctly, or provided an incomplete answer.