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

[Micah Sweet]

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.

So what? I don't control 99.9% of what happens in the real world, but my decisions still matter to me and make a difference in mine and other's lives.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, we're all just players, who strut and fret a time in the setting through our PCs and then, barring resurrection magic, are heard no more.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

And by the language you're using to describe this, that's bad right? The portion that the players contribute to the game doesn't matter?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Some of this stuff seems to come back to @AbdulAlhazred's assumption that if the GM creates something, they'll make sure the players encounter it, but that is simply not the case if the GM is actually following the principles we're talking about.

Plenty of stuff I've put work into simply gets ignored by my players when I'm running a sandbox. Sometimes I'm even disappointed by that (yes, I have my own feelings and interests). But I don't let my disappointment dictate what happens; if the players aren't interested, then it is what it is. I focus instead on the things the PCs are interested in, the things they have decided to do and the places they have decided to go. And, because I do so, when I look back on the game, I am likely to be much happier when I see the ways in which my expectations were subverted and the strange and unexpected places the players chose to take the game. Forcing specific directions on the players wouldn't just be a derogation of my duty, it would result in less overall fun for me.

100%. I've created a pretty detailed campaign setting with an extensive history, and I don't expect any players I ever run through it to interact with more than a small portion of it (although that portion will almost certainly end up with the most detail).

 

[Micah Sweet]

As created by the DM...

Again, so what? Does it not make sense to you that someone would deal with a problem situation, especially if the on-camera party doesn't?

 

[Micah Sweet]

In both instances examples (yours and Lanefan's) interesting events occurred with a supposedly innocuous RE.
- who are these heroes who took care of the bandits? Lanefan could potentially use them into the future, just as he used the bandits to expand the setting.
- which town did they take over or which trade route did they disrupt? how many bandits were they? do they have expansionist plans or was an act of vengeance? what trade goods were targeted? ...etc

i.e. they usually become the focus/important if you start building more story around them

Only if the PCs choose to interact with that part of the world, although I admit it's possible that knock-on effects could affect the PCs without their direct knowledge. That's how the world works. I didn't increase tariffs, but I still have to pay more for some stuff.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If one chooses to flesh out things P, Q, and R, and chooses not to flesh out things J, K, and L, and only fleshes out things X, Y, and Z in response to player prompting, how is one not determining which things are capable of being interacted with? How is one not putting in the information so that only some choices are worthwhile and others aren't worthwhile?

How is one not, through setting-creation, creating story?

To flesh out the world without intersection with whether the PCs have expressed interest in it IS telling story. You're telling the story of the places the party has never been and might never go. There's already a story to be had before they even arrive.

So all setting creation is story creation? The two words are synonyms?

 

[bloodtide]

I don't belive in invisible railroads.

As a Railroad Tycoon I can say they do not exist

In my youth I ran an adventure where the PCs got on a ship. The ship was basically a railroad, it was meant to do nothing more than get the PCs from point A to point B (another continent). Then the PCs decided to mutiny. They took control of the ship, killed everyone and turned to cannibalism. This was a sandbox move.

A sandbox move is players acting like jerks. I can agree here.

No matter what the GM decide to prepare or not, the PCs actions are what form the story. That's the thing. Sure, sometimes you hear GMs say that "if you don't want to pick up on my adventure hooks the door's over there," but even then it's still the PCs/players actions that brings that conclusion. A GM has all the power in the world, apart from controlling the players and the PCs, and with that, all that power is worth naught.

Tell a story. Tell the PCs story.

An analogue in Gygax's AD&D would be that if a dragon breathes on a PC, the GM is not at liberty to just say what happens. Rather, there is a rule for specifying the threat posed by the breath in terms of hit points of damage, and the player of the character is entitled to roll a saving throw (albeit subject to any circumstance-based modifier that the GM imposes, as per p 81 of the DMG).

Though in AD&D a DM can just do whatever they want. After all, all the "not like D&D" games would have never been made if that was not true. A DM can just say anything happens.

Though the really big problem is simple vs complex. To some players everything is a game action because they are stuck in the game loop. So when they are told "a dragon breathes fire on a character" they immediately go to "Datum: official breath fire game action page 11" and "Datum: save vs breath weapon page 22" and "Datum: All Hail the Rules". That is the whole game for such players, the rules by-the-book and everything is simple.

But what if the dragon (assuming it is a dragon) was not using it's breath weapon, even though it "looked" like it was to the clueless player? This is where it get complex. No rulebook can list the infinate things that the dragon was doing when it "looked" like it was using it's breath weapon.

This is what makes RPGs unique.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

Did they say the mutinous, cannibalistic party ended up encountering the same stuff the GM had originally set up for them?

 

[Micah Sweet]

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).

To be fair, there's probably a lot of caricature going on for both sides.

 

[Enrahim]

You think that honoring rolls should just be a suggestion?

Okay, I guess.

This is actually not as obvious as it might seem on face value. I have three times as a GM been heavily criticised for abiding to the constraints of a prewritten scenario and rules. Two of them was critical hit rolls in the first round of combat against enemy with outsized damage potential than the average foe they had met so far in the adventure. This outright killed the characters.

It was very clear that my insistence in letting the dice results stay was breaking the player expectation on how the game should work. They were aware that the game and tradition granted me as the GM the privilege to with a handwave declare the roll uncool. Not only that, they appeared to consider it a duty given that power.

So my insistence of honoring these rolls was actually a breach of the implied social contract. I made an unilateral and egoistic decission to not wield the powers bestowed me in order to get an experience I was the only one at the table really seeking. I was the only one putting the constraint of honoring rolls on myself.

I do not consider the activity my players wanted to have in any way a "wrong" way to play the game. Indeed I would rather think it a superior activity for most players over the one I forced them into.

I hope this can bring some new perspective to the debate.