Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
They do, however, appear to foreground specific mechanical processes explicitly designed to produce specific kinds of results.
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NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.
D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.
- Thread starter Reynard
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Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Sounds like we're back to: different people like different things.
robertsconley
Hero
You think this thread is long, you see the debate over whether SeeLowe the German invasion of Great Britian, can be successful over on the alt history forums.
Short Story: It has been analyzed to death, and yes, there is an overall consensus, but it still crops up repeatedly. It's bad enough that out of all the possible alt history that could have been talked about, they made a pinned thread about it.
Glossary of Sealion Threads
I'm not here to discuss anything about the Unspeakable seamammal. I decided to make this thread as a source for new members to go to for all of their sealion fantasies, flaming, etc so that we don't have to constantly see new Sealion threads. So post links to any thread about Sealion here and...
www.alternatehistory.com
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I agree in principle, but I think folks feel differently about it based on what is being resolved, and how well it interfaces with what they are comfortable offloading to a mechanical process.
TwoSix
Everyone's literal second-favorite poster
Let me caveat this with that I am not an expert in BW; I own it and have read it, but not played it. This is just my observations, @pemerton and @Old Fezziwig are free to yell at me if I'm way off-base.
I agree with you 100% that there is definitely a different feel to BW, and I can understand where it causes some aesthetic discomfort. And that difference is that you, as a player, do not have full ownership of your character. You share your character with the fiction that is created and imposed during play, often by rolls.
If you have a concept of your character as a badass, and subsequent rolls reveal that when pressed, the character is hesitant and fearful, the rolls are right and your concept isn't. The point of play is to adapt your concept of the character and subsequent decision making taking into account these revealed truths.
How you accept this truth is up to the player; maybe the character subsequently dedicate themselves to training so they don't freeze in the next hard situation, maybe they cover their insecurity with bluster, or maybe their one-time weakness becomes a more craven streak. Maybe through the course of play they will eventually prove themselves a brave badass, with the moment of weakness being something to overcome. But you as a player don't get to pick if the character's conception of themselves is true.
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
Just to be clear because it came up, none of are saying sandbox or living world sandbox is a new innovation. The conversations we point to occurred in largely OSR circles where people were looking back to earlier days of the hobby to find solutions to problems they were encountering in more current forms of play. Is it is very much about going back and seeing if there are approaches that were used that might have become less popular or fallen by the wayside but prove useful today. This is why for example when I talk about NPCs as living, I refer back to the description of Strahd in the original Ravenloft module and then to the elaboration of the concept in the Feast of Goblyns adventure (these books are like over 30 and 40 years old)
I think the degree/scale of potential moving pieces within @robertsconley ’s sandbox work is probably fairly distinctive, along with established procedures for evolving the world state while maintaining broad consistency. That’s years of creative vision and effort.
Like, Dolmenwood is a fairly huge sandbox (from a hex/content/detail perspective), but it doesn’t have a lot of set guidelines for putting things “in motion” beyond the random encounter tables and whatever the GM brings.
That’s why I keep returning to the like, actual outcome of play from a “living world” perspective being most analogous to Blades, because the latter is the first broadly used product I’ve seen that sets up and executes a city in motion around the players once the game goes.
I do wish the 2024 rules didn’t foreground “fun” so much in their guidelines for how to make decisions. Ah well.
Old Fezziwig
Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin.
Right, this is in line with my feelings more or less. I'm always approaching it from the stance of You say your little dude believes this. Does he believe it now?Let me caveat this with that I am not an expert in BW; I own it and have read it, but not played it. This is just my observations, @pemerton and @Old Fezziwig are free to yell at me if I'm way off-base.
I agree with you 100% that there is definitely a different feel to BW, and I can understand where it causes some aesthetic discomfort. And that difference is that you, as a player, do not have full ownership of your character. You share your character with the fiction that is created and imposed during play, often by rolls.
If you have a concept of your character as a badass, and subsequent rolls reveal that when pressed, the character is hesitant and fearful, the rolls are right and your concept isn't. The point of play is to adapt your concept of the character and subsequent decision making taking into account these revealed truths.
How you accept this truth is up to the player; maybe the character subsequently dedicate themselves to training so they don't freeze in the next hard situation, maybe they cover their insecurity with bluster, or maybe their one-time weakness becomes a more craven streak. Maybe through the course of play they will eventually prove themselves a brave badass, with the moment of weakness being something to overcome. But you as a player don't get to pick if the character's conception of themselves is true.
There's something that you suggest in your last paragraph, and I think is worth repeating: the revelations don't necessarily need to be negating; they can just be complicating. if you create a character that's supposed to be tough as nails that freezes in a hard situation, the character can still be tough as nails. But now we've got this thing to deal with and work with and explore.
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