I think this reveals a fundamental difference in how we each manage our campaigns. Earlier in the thread, I explained how influential my experience running LARP events was on my tabletop refereeing. Reading your post clarified what might be a core difference in how we approach player autonomy and information.
While my elements of my living worlds sandbox campaigns include things I learned from wargaming and early D&D, my current approach came together through years of organizing and running live-action events, especially NERO-style boffer LARPs.
At a LARP, you aren’t blindfolded, muffled, or restricted. You see what you see, hear what you hear, and act accordingly. As the event director, I’d set the adventure up, terrain, NPCs, props, then step back. I might have staff playing NPCs enter on a trigger or schedule, but control past that point was non-existent. Crucially, player situational awareness was based on what they observed directly.
In those events, we had Marshals, rule referees independent of the event plot staff. They ensured adjudication was consistent and impartial. When I ran events as director, I had no special authority to override the rules as written in live action.
That experience directly shaped my Living World Sandbox style. I don’t tell players what’s going on, I show them.
That certainly helps--and does mean there is information the players can just see, rather than pretty much only information they get secondhand. I would still argue there is, and indeed must be, a massive quantity of information the players can
only get if you choose to speak it aloud. But at the very least, the "shopping at the store" analogy is no longer
totally incongruous with the experience. My issue, then, remains with the remaining incongruous portion, and the degree to which that part shapes player choices.
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Everything from faction actions to NPC motivations is driven by showing not telling the players the situation they are in. In-game, I use first-person roleplaying for NPCs and rely heavily on visual representation to communicate their circumstance. This isn't just for flavor, it’s a method to reduce second-hand interpretation and reinforce agency. To use pen, paper, & dice, to give the players the same situational awareness they would have at a LARP event.
I don't understand how the players can
see NPC motivation. That depends on several things that can only be known
if you tell them: actions other than motion/position (which is...the vast majority of action!), spoken words, facial expressions, etc. Those things still need to be told/described. Likewise, plenty of sight-based information cannot be conveyed by these dioramas, though I certainly need to compliment your ability to rapidly construct such things on the fly.
This is why your metaphor of the blindfolded shopper doesn’t apply to my campaigns. My players aren’t limited to what I choose to narrate; I immerse them visually and interactively. As a result they observe for themselves what their character is experiencing.
I agree they are not completely limited to it. That is correct. I disagree that they aren't still overwhelmingly dependent on it. This
definitely helps, no question! But essential information remains that can only be pulled out of the black box by what you choose to express, and whether the players can interpret it correctly.
My players can, and do, track what they were shown against what was in my notes. This creates accountability. They can compare what they were shown, and to what I was suppose to have shown.
I understand my approach will raise additional questions and I will be happy to answer them.
Wait...you actually DO show your GM notes to your players????
Yes, that would be a dramatic--indeed, outright
radical--departure from what literally everyone else in this thread has said.
Is this a common practice? Do other GMs share their unredacted GM notes with players? Hell, do they share
redacted notes at any point, ever? I am genuinely shocked to hear that this is something anyone does. I was under the impression that functionally nobody ever did this, at all.
Everything is organized to deploy as fast as I could describe it in words:
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An impressive degree of organization. Speaking as GM rather than player, I'm not sure I would be up to the task for this, so good on you for that!
To sum up: in my campaigns, you’re not shopping blindfolded with earplugs and gloves. You’re walking the aisles with your own eyes, hearing the world around you, and sometimes are even able to actually touch the goods. If you miss something, it’s not because I hid it, it’s because you didn’t take notice of what I laid out before you.
When you say "hearing the world around you", does this mean you involve/invoke sound effects? That would be surprising, but very cool. (I used to use music in my DW game, to help set a tone, but then the Discord bot I used got DMCA'd because playing youtube videos over Discord is THE WORST THING EVER™, and the new "watch together" thing isn't anywhere near as useful as the bot was.)
That said, there's still a lot of information the characters cannot get without asking. If I may modify the analogy--you can now look around, but you aren't allowed to touch anything nor read anything. You have to ask your Guide Merchant to tell you what the ingredients are, or the price of each item, or whether the melons feel ripe, etc.
I hope this reply makes clear that in my sandbox, player situational awareness is structured with a strong bias toward direct presentation rather than mediated fiat, avoiding many of the issues being raised. Because I rely heavily on first-person roleplaying and visual tools to reinforce what the players perceive, this leads to greater player confidence. They’re more willing to take risks and act proactively because they can trust that their understanding of the situation is grounded and reasonable.
It definitely addresses some of the concern, yes. I still think the majority of it remains, but I completely grant that this is a significant improvement. I doubt very many people do what you do, but this is objectively a set of procedures and processes, which you can detail and instruct others in the use of, and which can be improved through identifying best-practices, not just through intuitionist trial-and-error.
And yes, I know I haven’t responded to your earlier post yet. I’m in the middle of writing my reply, but when I saw this exchange, I realized it raises an important point that may help clarify the response I’m drafting. I’ll be revising that reply to reflect this post.
Absolutely no worries. If it's even half the quality of the previous reply, it will be worth at least twice the wait.
Lastly, the way I developed this approach was partially due to circumstance, good luck or bad, depending on how you see it. I have significant partial deafness. While hearing aids help, they’re far from perfect in noisy environments, like a table full of excited kids playing D&D. So when I refereed, I often relied on dry-erase boards, tiles, and minis to let players physically show me what their characters were doing. There were just too many misunderstandings otherwise, and this method resolved the issue over the long term.
Because of that, I learned how to use maps and minis quickly and effectively, what works, what doesn’t. That experience laid the groundwork for applying what I’d learned from running LARP events to the tabletop.
Then my hat is off to you, sir, for doing more or less as the Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon said, specifically, the Nameless One's summary of the Second Circle: "I learned that not
knowing something can be a tool, just like flesh and steel, if upon encountering it, you attempt to
know its nature and how it came to be." Not a limitation--a
motivation.
