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

[robertsconley]

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

This is correct. If folks weren't clear, my living world approach is only one type of sandbox campaign. There are others like Ben Robbins West Marches, Hexcrawl, etc.

 

[JConstantine]

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.

To my mind, this is unrelated to whether something is a sandbox or not. It's a pacing mechanism that is subjective preference.

 

[JConstantine]

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

But I consider it less sandbox-y precisely because it's GM-driven. I - as the GM - am injecting it into the game so that tenets and convictions are tested, rather than relying on them occurring naturalistically. Which then goes back to both my view of it as a spectrum and what @Bedrockgames was saying about finding some approaches too naturalistic.

 

[JConstantine]

This is correct. If folks weren't clear, my living world approach is only one type of sandbox campaign. There are others like Ben Robbins West Marches, Hexcrawl, etc.

You know, I could have sworn I addressed this in my very first post.

 

[SableWyvern]

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

I'm not going to engage with that.

Impressive.

This is probably the most disingenuous comment in the entire thread.

 

[thefutilist]

Sounds just like what sandboxers are advocating.

There are similarities. One of the big differences is the distinction between setting and situation.

A situation is a network of relationships within the setting and play is the process of resolving the situation.


It's been 25 years since I last played V:TM so this is a bit rusty.


The setting would be the larger world of darkness and I'd do up one of those city sheets that was in the story tellers guide or wherever it was. Who the Prince is, who controls the police that type of thing. That would also be setting.

Then I'd create a situation. So start with something like, you all want to kill the Venture Justicar, go and create characters. Say I have three players.

Player one wants to do this for revenge. The justicar ‘rightfully’ killed this players lover for a masquerade breach.

Player two want to do this to install his npc ally as Justicar.

Plater three wants to do this because they’re in love with player one.


Then I'd take the PC backgrounds and the city stuff and pull/invent a load of npcs from them as the cast. Then for each cast member I'd create a conflicting network of interests.

So the Sire of player three has actually been helped out by the Justicar and considers him righteous and good.

The justicar is investigating a group of diabolists or sabbat or whatever it is now, who plan on doing something messed up, preferably something that effects the player characters.

A famous mortal rock singer has fallen in love with player three and is trying to pursue him. Maybe she’s learnt about vampires and wants to become one and live in immortal love with player three.

Then if during play I need to pull from the larger setting because the situation demands it, I can do so by grabbing something from the city sheet or creating somebody new.

So similar to a sandbox in some ways, totally different in others.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't think anyone is advocating that players be punished passive aggressively for playing non-human characters.

Sure. I pretty much recognized that from the beginning. My point was not to say "HAHA LOOK AT THESE JERKS DOING JERK THINGS". It was to say: We can, genuinely objectively, see that some of the stuff from "the GM's traditional role" was bad, all of us agree that it was bad and ought not be included in that role going forward. (At least, I presume we all agree that passive-aggressive dickery to manipulate player behavior is bad? God I hope so...) That makes things a hell of a lot more complicated, because it isn't and cannot be just a reversion to past form, unchanged. We can't dodge all change. But that means I cannot know what "the GM's traditional role" means unless it's explained. Because it isn't 100% identical to what the books say, I know that, I expect that. But it also is different from that role today.

That means it's incumbent on Micah, or on you, or on whomever is using the term, to tell us what it means. Otherwise, it's a vague term with no real meaning, but which can be mined for any meaning the user might desire. It can be used in different senses without the interlocutor knowing what those senses are, meaning discussion is impossible and the person using the term can always declare victory--simply by flexing the vagueness to include or exclude whatever is inconvenient in the moment.

that something being old, didn't make it bad for gaming.

I do not need to be taught the value of the idea of chronological snobbery, I promise you. What is out of fashion is not necessarily bad; what is in fashion is not necessarily good. An idea being old has no direct bearing on whether it is good, right, useful, or wise. We must argue much more carefully than that.

With reading 1E, I realized there was a lot there that had been missing in my gaming both in the 90s but especially in the 2000s. And a lot of it had to do with how much more open to exploration the game was. When I ran 2E, this time for Ravenloft, so I wasnt' running it for a sandbox or anything, just a moody horror sessions, I instantly realized that 3E, which I liked and still like, had been holding back the atmosphere for me. The game felt completely different. I had never been able to capture the feel of Ravenloft with 3E and I chalked it up to nostalgia. But once I ran it with 2E again, I realized it was the system, because suddenly the feeling came flooding back. It was due to a number of things, but one of the major reasons was you didn't have skills like Bluff, Gather Information, etc. The existing NWPs (which were optional anyways) didn't trod on roleplaying or interaction with the setting. So my monster hunts once again felt like the players were really interacting with scenario in a deep way.

I cannot argue with your feelings. I want to stress that in advance, because I know some will try to use that to dismiss whatever else I have to say. Your feelings are yours, and I can't question nor challenge them; they are what you felt.

But I will challenge the non-feeling conclusions you drew from those feelings. These older systems are not "much more open to exploration" than newer ones. The exploration is different, and you flow better with the older system way than the contemporary system way. I am so bloody sick of people claiming that an absence of rules is automatically "more open to exploration" than any amount of rules no matter what, because that's simply false. FOR SOME PEOPLE, a total absence of rules is better, because they're already overflowing with ideas and the sight of rules, even helpful ones, causes them to shut down. I, personally, don't understand that, and never have. I don't understand why the idea that there are rules of any kind, no matter what they might be, destroys creativity. I just don't. It has never once made sense to me.

Now, I'll certainly agree that rules which are: heavily interfering, heavily exclusionary, and in particular unknown or unfamiliar to the user are rules that produce that kind of experience! And I'll 100% grant you that that's how 3e's rules often worked in practice: if an action wasn't defined in the rules, it was expected to be genuinely impossible, not just "we have to figure it out". 3e is the edition of "anything not permitted is forbidden". But that isn't the only form rules can take! Rules can be abstracted, open-ended, supportive, rather than denying. In 3e, the existence of a feat which...say...lets you use Knowledge(Religion) in place of Spellcraft checks means people who don't have that feat cannot do that. But that isn't true in 4e. The whole point of exception-based design is that exceptions are, relatively, self-contained--and that big rules are expected to have many exceptions. 3e's absolute top-down rules design is interfering and exclusionary in ways that do, IME, shut down creativity. That simply isn't the case for other editions, to say nothing of other systems.

I also found features of the system we used to make fun of (like the fact that it has all these subsystems and no real central mechanic like d20), actually made different parts of the game feel different (in a good way). I needed up vastly preferring things like how initiative worked, the roll under for attribute and NWP rolls, etc).

And this is where we get into the most deeply subjective part of all.

Personally, I really dislike having too many parts that feel too different. Instead of making the game feel rich, it makes the game feel forbidding. I have to keep so much more of the system in my head, I cannot focus on the experience anymore. I have to be constantly re-remembering "oh, right, this spell is for some reason a death save, not a wand save...even though I'm casting it from a wand...", or the absolutely horrible nature of THAC0, or that roll-under is better in this case and roll-over is better in that case, or which dice I need for this specific subtype of skill check, etc., etc. The system becomes a never-ending distraction from play, rather than a rich and textured supplement to it.

And I know, since you literally just said so, that some people love this sort of thing. Personally, I think there's room for something somewhere in the middle. Something that isn't the extreme and overwhelming number of bewilderingly ad hoc subsystems of 2e, but also isn't quite "essentially everything is the same" either. Something where different parts can still feel different to use, without needing to front-load "okay, now remember these 17 subsystems, each of which has five variants". I don't know what form that would take, but I have to believe that something could do it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Assuming "they" refers to players

I was not. I was referring to the DM. I usually use "she" for that (since DMs "traditionally" are men, this makes it stand out), but I chose to use the completely gender-neutral term instead.

I have established NPCs and factions, a history of the world. So I have a general knowledge of the NPCs goals, morality, approach. When it's an NPC made up on the fly I consider if they're aligned to a specific faction and what their role is such as gopher flunky, enforcer, bureaucrat, high ranking member. If they aren't aligned to a faction then what role they are in the scenario, bartender, random thief or so on.

Okay. Then to clarify: How did you establish NPCs and factions and history of the world? How did you "have a general knowledge" of these things? How do you make these things up on the fly? I am only asking three questions to point to the "okay, you have this knowledge. How do you have it?" I don't expect individual answers to each question.

It's up to the GM to breath life into these individuals so I try to make what I consider likely decisions from their point of view, including rolling the dice if I'm unsure. I'm probably not as organized as some people but improvising NPCs and their reactions is a skill you learn by doing. Main thing is to represent them in a way that is consistent with who they represent.

Okay. How do you make those decisions? What makes some decisions more likely and others less likely, beyond just "context"--e.g., what is your decision-process for taking inputs from context and turning them into behavior outputs?

For a region I have general high level ideas of factions, their conflicting goals and methodology. There's also potential goals for the characters, those change depending on what the players are interested in, what impact the characters have had on the world. The players can have major impact on how events play out based on what they do. Cities have fallen, enemies turned into allies, emperors installed because of player decisions.

How do you generate such "high-level ideas of" various things?

Whim means that it's random and capricious. I'm not just making decisions based on some generic table that has nothing to do with what has been established in the fiction of the world, tone of the game, what the characters have said or done. I do not make decisions based on a whim, if I thought a GM was I wouldn't stick with the group.

Okay. This now leads to an incredibly important distinction: How would you know whether a GM was doing that or not? If vast, vast swathes of the world are hidden in the black box--the history of the world is mostly unknown to the players, the factions are only superficially known, locations, emotions, politics, etc., etc., etc., so much is kept inside the black box of your notes--how can you tell the difference between someone who's really good at improvising on the fly, and someone who's simply pretty decent at having notes and not wildly breaking from them?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Have you played D&D(rhetorical question)? What is known of the setting, the PCs, and the circumstances around the decision have a near infinite amount of variables. There's no way to answer this, because it's always going to be different.

Not at all. Before you make any decisions about what is in the world, there is not and cannot be any context. You have to be choosing what goes in, before you can start working within constraints that you defined yourself. How do you define those constraints?

What it's not, though, is a decision on a whim. The DMs are generally not Two Face.

But how do we tell the difference? As I just said above, what is the visible-to-the-player difference between someone who chooses on whim and is just very good at improv--doubly so when complaints cannot occur during session, and thus between-session fix-'em-up time is freely available--and someone who has notes and follows them pretty well but not perfectly? Both will produce occasional inconsistencies. Both will produce situations that don't make sense at first and require "trust" from the player that they'll make sense eventually (which, again, could be "there is already info, it's just not available to you yet because it's locked in the black box", or it could be "there is no info yet, I'm still making it up, by the time you find out I'll have made up an answer").

 

[pemerton]

Can you clue the PbtA and FitD folk in on that? The amount of times I've heard/read "don't prep" is vexing.

Apocalypse World has a clear set of procedures for doing prep - beginning after the first session - and requires the GM to always say what your prep demands. Dungeon World incorporates very similar procedures. I don't know about other RPGs inspired by Apocalypse World.

But the way that prep is used in AW is, in my view, not very similar to the way that is is used in "trad" sandbox-y RPG. Mostly because it plays a completely different roll in action resolution.

Spelling out all the differences would require a lengthy post, but one key difference seems obvious to me: in a "trad" sandbox-y RPG, *the GM refers to their hitherto-unrevealed prep to work out if a declared action succeeds or fails; whereas in AW, the most straightforward prompt for a GM to bring their prep to bear is that a player rolled for a player-side move and got a result of 6 or less.

This difference in the use that is made of prep then affects the form that it takes. @robertsconley's prep, for instance, clearly involves a lot of map-and-key. Whereas map-and-key is not discussed in the AW chapter on threats and fronts.

Sounds just like what sandboxers are advocating.

This is starting to feel like banging one's head against a wall. That is exactly what is going on in people sandboxes.

I think I have a reasonable sense of what @thefutilist's play looks like, based on posts on these boards and also extrapolation from those, having regard to examples and discussions from the RPG designers who seem to have influenced @thefutilist (especially Edwards and Baker). For instance, when I read thefutilist talking about "situation-based" RPGing, and the role of character, I am reminded of this from Baker:

Imagine Thatcher's London. Imagine a person in Thatcher's London who has everything to lose.

That's a character. That's a whole, playable, complete character. If I ask you to speak in that character's voice, you can; if I present some threat or challenge, you can tell me easily how that character will react; if I describe a morning and ask you what that character will do in it, you'll know. Take ten minutes to think and that character's as real as can be.​

Upthread, thefutilist gave us this example of a character, and of how that character would respond:

Krangen is the ruler of a vast Empire that he forged himself through valour and rage. He responds to any slight with violence and his rule is cold and hard, although some do say it's just. He lost his wife a decade ago and has a young teenage daughter who is his joy, the only person he really shows compassion for.

The magicians of the Ever Dream Order need to kill an Emperor to summon the decrepit demon Thirseer. They send a magical assassin to kill Krangen. The assassin uses a huge fireball which fails to kill Krangen but does kill his daughter.

so

What does Krangen do?

Or if you need a more specific question, does Krangen take revenge?

My answer is that the Emperor falls into despair, doesn't get vengeance and neglects running his Empire. What's the point of all this stuff if what you most love can just get taken away like that? It's true that he responds to slights with violence but that's because they're an attack on his ego. His relationship with his daughter was the one thing not ego driven. Yeah his ego got him his Empire but so what.

Why do I think that? It's just what feels right

To me, this seems to be approaching character, and play, in a completely different way from what has been described by @robertsconley, @Micah Sweet, @AlViking and other self-identified "sandboxers" in this thread.

Consider, for example, the video linked to be @robertsconley:

Video

Spoiler

I've not watched the whole video, but I have watched bits and pieces of it. The play I've seen in that video doesn't resemble at all the sort of play that Baker illustrates in the "Moves Snowball" chapter of AW, or the sort of situational play that @thefutilist describes.

There are a range of reasons for that, I think, but one of them seems to me to be captured by this statement:

as the referee, I don’t care about what the personal goals or motivations are in particular. What I do care about is making sure they understand the facts of the setting necessary to realize those goals and motivation. Beyond that, as a friend, I’m interested in hearing what they’re thinking about their characters, but that isn’t relevant to my role as the referee.

There are two aspects of, or perhaps they are implications of, this statement that I see as important to the contrast with AW, and "situation-based" RPGing; they also establish a pretty significant contrast with Burning Wheel:

* The GM's indifference to the personal goals or motivations of the PCs. This is completely different from an approach where the GM is expected to respond to those aspects of the character in framing scenes, thinking about consequences and so on.

* The focus on "the facts of the setting necessary to realise those goals and motivations" - that is, a focus on the setting as a source of obstacles to be overcome, or resources to be deployed, with a resulting problem-solving or "instrumental"/"operational" orientation to play. This sort of orientation goes all the way back to classic D&D play.​

I don't know what your (@JConstantine's) Vampire play is like, so I make no comment on it. But I'm fairly confident in my grasp of @robertsconley's play, and the other D&D-esque sandbox-y play being talked about in this thread.