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

[Kromanjon]

Is it, though?

Is it?

Because this (as has been the case so many times in this thread) ignores the possibility of the invisible railroad.

I don't belive in invisible railroads.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Whatever can be a contributor to the decision...is still relevant. Because guess who gets to decide what things DO contribute to the decision?

That's right, THE GM. AGAIN.

You cannot exculpate yourself for making decisions "based on context" when the one, and ONLY, person who gets to decide what counts as context and what doesn't....IS YOU. YOU decided what the context was. You decided whether or not to admit X as a contributing factor or not. The setting literally can't make you do anything.

We all acknowledge the power the GM has to decide in these campaigns. The problem is people are reducing everything in such games to the GMs decision power. Yes, the GM can introduce a goblin, that is one of the things GMs are supposed to do in trad play (it isn't a problem for the GM to introduce something like that). But the GM doesn't decide how the players respond. And the GM doesn't decide if the players went to the part on the map where goblins are common in the first place. Much of the context is determined by the players and their actions. I think we are all pretty comfortable with the level of authority a GM has in a sandbox. But I think others are minimizing how much power players have too (because they keep throwing it back to GM fiat power as if that is the only thing that matters in a trad game: which to me sounds much more like a caricature than how they actually play).

 

[Bedrockgames]

Is it, though?

Is it?

Because this (as has been the case so many times in this thread) ignores the possibility of the invisible railroad.

What invisible railroad is leading to muting and cannibalism? The example he gave was a railroad being trashed by players and turned from a railroad into the players steering the direction of the game.

 

[zakael19]

You have shorn off the context which makes clear that the GM is in fact part of the process of determining what the fictional situation is, and thus made it sound as though the PbtA GM is merely the slave of the players, bullied by their shouted declarations, unable to act in any way except to robotically execute moves.

This got a genuine chuckle from me.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The convo which I picked up began with @AbdulAlhazred (but likely earlier) where they mentioned how much of everything is GM decided, even the bandits in @Bedrockgames RE tables. A conversation about how much content is GM decided was then argued between @Maxperson and @EzekielRaiden, with Maxperson adamantly saying that the GM content is much lower than others in the thread purport. @SableWyvern and then jumped into the convo regarding the bandits where it is often the case where content is created but doesn't see the light of day only for you and Sable to then make that content see the light of day even though the PCs never engaged with it.
i.e. Content sees the light of day one way or another in Storyteller fashion (pinging @Hussar).

Queue "But na-ah!"

That is just one example. I have definitely prepped material, whether it be NPCs, places, etc that never come up in play. That is just part of running a sandbox, you make stuff knowing it might never come up. As to fallout from players not involving themselves in a bandit situation, I would tend tend to resolve that through random rolls. It is entirely possible unchecked bandits become a local power group or even a water margin situation, so I like deferring to random results because that is an outcome I want some amount of surprise with. But, it means the players decision not to involve themselves, matters. If they don’t stop the bandits, it is possible no one does.

Again this is a two sided equation, but folks are making it into a one sided ‘the GM just decides’. None of us deny the power the Gm has, but the GM is not expected to just declare everything and anything, and the players can act on the setting through their characters: which matters a great deal in shaping how things go

 

[Bedrockgames]

It absolutely is not, when all the stuff in that black box is LITERALLY what people are using to justify their GM decision-making. Which is what has been said in the thread. Repeatedly.


Doesn't matter if it "will be silent" or not. It's the overwhelming majority of the context for what the GM will decide to do. Even in cases where we aren't talking about the whole setting, this kind of GM always--100% guaranteed always--knows far, far, far more than the players ever could. The players only "know" (with quotes, because sometimes the GM will deceive them, not because they're being a jerk, but because, say, a Wizard casts an illusion spell and they fail their save to realize it's an illusion) what the GM speaks aloud. All the myriad things they never speak aloud cannot possibly be known to the players, not even in principle--but continue to be context for the GM's decisions.


The players will never know the vast majority of information about the places they actually do go and see and touch and act within.

And yet those things remain THE context, far and away moreso than anything the players could possibly do. Because, again, the GM has the world in THEIR head. The players only get the drip-feed of what few things pass out of the GM's lips.

One thing about sandboxes people are overlooking is they are usually long form campaigns. The challenge in a sandbox when they start is giving players enough information that they have agency in the world but not giving them so much that their sense of PoV is disrupted (and players often want that first experience of being exposed to the setting to be ground level). But after weeks, months or years of play, they become familiar with it and are able to navigate it more based on what they know. If it is an internally consistent setting, that makes this aspect of play work even better

 

[Campbell]

So, I do not think D&D would benefit from additional constraints on the DM, but it already has some - they are just constraints that most of us are used to.

Take for example the play loop described on p. 5 of the 2014 Player's Handbook

1. The DM describes the environment. The DM tells the players where their adventurers are and what’s around them, presenting the basic scope of options that present themselves (how many doors lead out of a room, what’s on a table, who’s in the tavern, and so on).

2. The players describe what they want to do. Sometimes one player speaks for the whole party, saying,

“We’ll take the east door,” for example. Other times, different adventurers do different things: one adventurer might search a treasure chest while a second examines an esoteric symbol engraved on a wall and a third keeps watch for monsters. The players don’t need to take turns, but the DM listens to every player and decides how to resolve those actions.

Sometimes, resolving a task is easy. If an adventurer wants to walk across a room and open a door, the DM might just say that the door opens and describe what lies beyond. But the door might be locked, the floor might hide a deadly trap, or some other circumstance might make it challenging for an adventurer to complete a task. In those cases, the DM decides what happens, often relying on the roll of a die to determine the results of an action.

3. The DM narrates the results of the adventurers’ actions. Describing the results often leads to another decision point, which brings the flow of the game right back to step 1.

This pattern holds whether the adventurers are cautiously exploring a ruin, talking to a devious prince, or locked in mortal com bat against a mighty dragon. In certain situations, particularly combat, the action is more structured and the players (and DM) do take turns choosing and resolving actions. But most of the time, play is fluid and flexible, adapting to the circumstances of the adventure.

This sets out that it is the DM's responsibility to describe the environment and decide what happens as a result of player actions. They cannot engage in hard scene framing that makes assumptions about what player characters have done, they cannot describe how player characters feel or think. The DM must listen to every player and ask what they are doing concurrently. They must act as a referee. These are all constraints that define the role's purpose within the game it's designed for.

This play loop for Daggerheart establishes some very different constraints for the GM:

STEP 1:
THE GM NARRATES DETAILS
The GM lays out a scene, describing the surroundings, dangers, NPCs, and any important elements the characters would notice immediately.

STEP 2:
THE PLAYERS AND GM ASK QUESTIONS
The players ask questions to explore the scene in more depth, gathering information to help them decide their characters’
actions. When appropriate, the GM can ask the players to describe elements of a scene, leaving their own influence on the world.

STEP 3:
THE PLAYERS AND GM ANSWER QUESTIONS
The GM responds to these questions by giving the players information their characters can easily obtain. The players also respond to any questions the GM poses to them. If they want more insight than what is readily available, the GM informs players what dice roll or action they must make to obtain more information.

STEP 4:
CHOOSE AND RESOLVE ACTIONS
As the GM describes the scene and provides information, they lead the players to opportunities to take action—problems
to solve, obstacles to overcome, mysteries to investigate, and so on. As the players pursue these opportunities, the GM helps facilitate their characters’ actions, and everyone works together to move the fiction forward based on the outcome.

If the players aren’t compelled into action right away, the GM continues to provide more details, conflict, or consequences until they are.

STEP 5:
REPEAT THE CYCLE
Because the scene has changed in some way, this process repeats from the beginning.

This play loop establishes very different responsibilities and constraints for the GM. They narrate the details of the scene, not describe the environment. They lead players to opportunities to take action. They compel them to take action by providing more detail, conflicts, consequences.

In the first example the GM plays the world and the characters play the characters. In the second everyone is responsible for moving play forward by working to establish stakes and resolving them.

The point of providing these examples is not to start a fight over play loops or which set of constraints is more restrictive or whatever (this will depend on our creative goals). It's to show that the constraints, powers and duties of the role are different in the two games. That both games place constraints on their defined roles.

I am personally somewhat hesitant to treat the D&D DM as an analog for the Daggerheart GM because they are different games with different priorities.

 

[AlViking]

As I said, constraints are essential. For instance, a GM being constrained to honor the rolls of the players is a pretty basic one. The GM, in some games, can technically override any rolls that are made in play… but they generally don’t do so. Why not? Because constraints are good.



See above and let me know of you’re still unsure.



Maybe? I do see the GM as a participant in that when I GM I want to be surprised by things that happen in play. Though my role may be different, I don’t want to be unconstrained.

So something like “yeah, there is a secret door here because the map says there is” or “there are three trolls here because that’s what my prep tells me” and so on… these are constraints that I want to hold on to. I don’t want to be able to just say “no, no secret door here” or “wow, there are 17 trolls here” just because I want to.

Constraints are present all the time in play, even if we don’t typically think of them that way.

In the sense that we are following the rules of the game, everyone is constrained by those basic rules except when the GM isn't. It's pretty common in D&D for some DMs to ignore the third crit in a row that will kill a PC or maybe drop the damage that the monster does. While I don't do that I do adjust monster stats on a regular basis, sometimes at the time of the game because I choose not to use a debilitating unfun power I had missed in prep. I don't feel constrained to use monsters as written.

But the constraints I just mentioned are not the type of constraint anyone else has been discussing. It's all been about changing the roles so that players have more influence than what their character says and does. I don't consider following the rules that define how combat is resolved a constraint in the ways others have been defining constraints.

 

[AlViking]

I don't belive in invisible railroads.

Only because you don't see them. Because they're invisible.

 

[AlViking]

But the vast
VAST
VAST

VAST​

majority of what is in that setting is something you (generic) created when you (generic) created your sandbox campaign setting.

The things the players have contributed will NEVER be a greater totality than what the GM has contributed. Period. They cannot be. You control EVERYTHING. The weather. The geography. The ecology. The politics. The institutions. The resources. The factions. The leadership. The architecture. The cities. The religions.

And if you think I'm making this up, I believe it was @AlViking who explicitly invoked geology and hydrology, talking about rain shadows and correctly designing the geography of the world. This isn't an exaggeration. This is demonstrated fact within this thread.

Even the most dynamically active group imaginable will never scratch the surface compared to that Mariana Trench.

99.99% of the "context" that goes into this GM's decisions is going to be things the GM decided.

Well, it's good to know that you think the difference is vast. That really clears things up!

Since I use homebrew worlds, when I create that continent-sized map I want it to be what I consider a logical representation of a world. What does creating a fictional world that at a high level follows real world weather patterns have to do with anything? The GM is responsible for building the world and it's inhabitants, the players are responsible for their characters. If you want a game that has collaborative world building out there, there are plenty of options.

In recent campaigns the characters have

• Bypassed encounters completely through clever decisions.
• Decided not to pursue what I thought would be a fun side-quest into the Underdark because they didn't like the NPC that would have given them access.
• Slapped a military officer (who was, admittedly baiting them on purpose) and they can no longer return to their home town.
• Decided to pursue a long term goal of recovering a lost dwarven keep because I happened to mention it's existence, changing the entire direction of the campaign.
• Rejected the help of a ghost because they didn't trust it.
• I was running two groups in a copy of another campaign. Because of different decisions the campaigns bear little resemblance to each other other than location and main NPCs.

There is no invisible railroad. The setting is just there in case they decide to see what's on the other side of the mountains. It's always up to the players what they do when they get to the other side.