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

[pemerton]

Now you've really got me wondering where I saw written Gygax words to the effect of bypassing or avoiding a known threat (e.g. sneaking past some guards rather than fighting them) brings equal xp that defeating that threat would bring. I know for sure we didn't make that up ourselves. A Draogn article or sage advice, maybe? Unearthed Arcana, maybe?

Unearthed Arcana doesn't have XP rules. (Other than the half-baked "negative" XP for MUs and cavaliers of levels below 1st.)

 

[pemerton]

You keep trying to bring things back to map-and-key prep but the same can be true even if there is no prep involved.

If there's no prep, then how does the GM know that there is a "set encounter" at point X, which point the PCs have not visited?

The way I see it (and I might be alone in this, no-one else has mentioned it) it's not an encounter until both parties are aware of it. Before that, when only one party is aware, it's a potential encounter; and potential encounters can be avoided or bypassed. I usually just leave off typing the word "potential" every time.

This is not how Gygax uses the term in AD&D, as I already indicated. For instance, suppose the GM rolls a wandering monster, calls for surprise rolls, and then the PCs gains surprise. This permits automatic avoidance (see the DMG pp 63, 69). This is called "avoiding", "evasion" and "flee[ing] from on undesired confrontation". But there was already an encounter: as p 103 of the PHB says,

At prescribed intervals, your DM will generate a random number to find if any meeting with a wandering monster occurs. Avoiding or fleeing such encounters is often wise . . .​

There is no notion that an encounter fled, even before the other party worked out was going on (because surprised), is not an encounter at all.

 

[CellarHeroes]

But used in this sense - which is more like how I would think about encounters - it makes no sense to talk about a bypassed encounter. Because the players didn't bypass their PCs doing something and thus changing/progressing the fiction.

Okay...I think I see where you're coming from.

I was driving to work this morning and saw a few deer roaming around in the street. I took a different route to avoid the deer. I still made it to work and my story progressed. You would say that I still encountered the deer, because I did. Others would say that I bypassed that encounter, because I avoided any potential harm.

Is this closer to what we're thinking?

 

[Guest 85555]

I agree, but I still think it is good to have a sense of how it could impact agency. Introducing example: I have prepared a cool ranger character. I have also prepared a tavern, and know the ranger sits in a dark corner of the common room. How do I describe the scene when the PCs enter the tavern in an optimal way from a player agency perspective?

If I mention the ranger in my first brief overview he sticks out as a sore thumb, hence likely providing a strong incentive for the players to engage with that. This is limiting player agency as it strongly points toward one spesific path of interest, and is particularly problematic as "realistically" the ranger might be where he is thinking it lowers his chances of being noticed.

On the other hand if you do not mention the ranger, you deprive the players of valuable information to make a decission. It might be that they would like to interact with the ranger, but not being aware of its existence they do not know that would be an option. Hence this approach also limits player agency in a way.

Delegating the decission to the dice by for instance doing a perception check also do not help with regard to player agency, it just provides more "agency" to the dice.

Describing everyone in the crowded tavern in a neutral maner like a "spot the hidden object" game is also a possibility, but it is impractical (and to most players boring) if you to describe everything in excruciating detail all the time - so the players would understand this is a hidden object game where something interesting is to be found, and again be lead to spend more time trying to find the interesting thing than they would otherwise have done.

I think an awareness of such interactions can be important. To call it an inherent "conflict" between player agency and prep might be a bit problematicly inflammatory language, but I do not think it is a completely unreasonable term to describe this phenomenom.

But that is less of a matter of prepped material and more about the GM steering players through their descriptions, which I think they can do. But to my other point, that can happen in improv as well if the GM gets a strong idea for where he wants things to go. Also I don't think this is an issue of agency as much as artifice like I mentioned before. The GM pointing to something interesting has an artificial feel, because it is like a sign pointing towards adventure, but agency is about player choice. As long as the players know they don't have to engage the ranger and can ask follow up questions about different kind of people in the tavern, I think it is fine. I do think if it were a mystery and the players are trying to solve it, pointing to the range might undermine their ability to solve it as players. But that is another topic

 

[Enrahim]

I just want to scrible down some thoughts here that are somewhat raw still. I have reached conclusion that prefect player "freedom of choice" fully independent on DM biases are theoretically impossible in a living world sandbox. However the prep and nature of it is not fundamental to this. Rather the bias that is impossible to get rid of lies in the limitation that the DM need to select what information to convey.

With this limit in place there might be a framework where it makes full sense to say that the prep itself do not in any way affect the player choice. As long as the would be effect of the prep given "perfect" information is lower than the limits set by the DM information limitation, then the prep itself cannot be said to introduce a relevant bias.

Might some of the claims about how prepping a living world is not introducing any issues with regard to player agency be better understood if viewed trough such a lense? What are the properties of prep that manage to avoid this threshold? How is the "ideal" interaction between prep and what is being told in a sandbox game that strives for minimal DM bias? So many exiting questions to think about!

 

[Umbran]

I guess I have a hard time wrapping my simulationist head around social combat.

Well, as I noted, for a world where social positioning and politics matter, this IS a simulation of that.

 

[clearstream]

Again, I refer you to the example that I was explicitly given by others who favored an old-school sandbox experience: the "you didn't talk to the one-eyed [or one-armed, or various other maimings] man, so you never heard that the slimes in the mines are weak to lightning but divide when struck by regular weapons, which means your death at their hands/pseudopods is entirely on your head." That's not an exact quote, of course, but it covers the core points: (1) the players were just supposed to know that some NPCs in the tavern were necessary sources of information; (2) failure to interact with the one and only source of that information is construed as the players' mistake; and (3) any deaths/losses that result from failure to interact with that source are thus earned by having made that mistake.

Can you reference any posts that I can read by putative sandbox aficionados that lay out this case?

This isn't just a hypothetical. I genuinely would have been caught by surprise by such a thing, in a game self-professed to be a sandbox, which would have gone completely beneath my notice if it weren't for these GMs (more than one!) explicitly saying that this is supposed to be an obvious prompt. Inadequate prompting, and resulting problems, were one of the earliest things I ever encountered when discussing this style with its own proponents, on this forum specifically.

As I wrote above, I suspect that "inadequate prompting" in sandbox is masked by the result that players simply go in another direction. Seeing as GM had no particular direction in mind, it's never noticed that they inadequately prompted.

The problem of "what if players miss Q, when Q is needed to pass test Z" isn't sandbox-specific, so I wouldn't necessarily look to sandbox to answer it. If (i) I want to or must get through the blue door, and (ii) only the blue key can open the blue door, while (iii) nothing tells me that I need the blue key or where to find it, then (iv) I'm not getting through the blue door. Many game designers have offered solutions to that problem. Sandbox mitigates it somewhat by avoiding imposing any strict requirement on players to get through the blue door.

So I wonder why the players decided to go into the mines? and once there, why their first strike didn't reveal that the slimes would divide? Why was the danger they were in not clear to them: inadequate prompting seems to have continued into the encounter. Again, that isn't a sandbox-specific problem.

That reminds though of another principle I assume applies to sandbox, which is that the player characters aren't bound to stick around. They might have something at stake on getting through the mine, but it's up to them what price they're willing to pay (there's no adventure path that says "you must get through the mine".) It's important not to overlook players as upholders of these principles, too.

 

[Enrahim]

But that is less of a matter of prepped material and more about the GM steering players through their descriptions, which I think they can do. But to my other point, that can happen in improv as well if the GM gets a strong idea for where he wants things to go. Also I don't think this is an issue of agency as much as artifice like I mentioned before. The GM pointing to something interesting has an artificial feel, because it is like a sign pointing towards adventure, but agency is about player choice. As long as the players know they don't have to engage the ranger and can ask follow up questions about different kind of people in the tavern, I think it is fine. I do think if it were a mystery and the players are trying to solve it, pointing to the range might undermine their ability to solve it as players. But that is another topic

Seem like we are coming to similar conclusions
But I think I should point out that I think a central observation is that there are at least two different ways of thinking about sandbox going on here.

The first is the soft sandbox ideal where the DM is freely throwing in interesting stuff, and can advertise it within reason, but that if the players chose to do something else then they are fully free to do so. I get the impression that it is this ideal you are assuming in this reply.

However there has from my understanding been people inn this thread that has made claims that this soft sandbox ideal is not enough to describe what they are doing, but rather make claim to a hard sandbox ideal where they not just do accept any player action. Exactly what this harder ideal entails, and if this is even possible I believe is the key part a portion of this thread has been revolving around, and my post you replied to was assuming this to be the topic.

 

[clearstream]

I just want to scrible down some thoughts here that are somewhat raw still. I have reached conclusion that prefect player "freedom of choice" fully independent on DM biases are theoretically impossible in a living world sandbox. However the prep and nature of it is not fundamental to this. Rather the bias that is impossible to get rid of lies in the limitation that the DM need to select what information to convey.

With this limit in place there might be a framework where it makes full sense to say that the prep itself do not in any way affect the player choice. As long as the would be effect of the prep given "perfect" information is lower than the limits set by the DM information limitation, then the prep itself cannot be said to introduce a relevant bias.

Are you saying (or alternatively, would you concur) that problems of that kind then aren't sandbox-specific? They apply to many modes of TTRPG play.

 

[Guest 85555]

I just want to scrible down some thoughts here that are somewhat raw still. I have reached conclusion that prefect player "freedom of choice" fully independent on DM biases are theoretically impossible in a living world sandbox. However the prep and nature of it is not fundamental to this. Rather the bias that is impossible to get rid of lies in the limitation that the DM need to select what information to convey.

With this limit in place there might be a framework where it makes full sense to say that the prep itself do not in any way affect the player choice. As long as the would be effect of the prep given "perfect" information is lower than the limits set by the DM information limitation, then the prep itself cannot be said to introduce a relevant bias.

Might some of the claims about how prepping a living world is not introducing any issues with regard to player agency be better understood if viewed trough such a lense? What are the properties of prep that manage to avoid this threshold? How is the "ideal" interaction brtween prep and what is being told in a sandbox game that strives for minimal DM bias? So many exiting questions to think about!

I think concerns about choice, is why most living world sandboxes tend to provide information based on POV to the best of the GMs ability, with Q&A as part of the equation. I don't think anyone here would ever say it is perfect. Nothing is perfect. But it is a very sound place to begin if you want the players to feel like they are actually there, inhabiting a world and freely exploring.