You decide to go to the store. But before you enter, the store has you blindfolded, puts noise-cancelling earphones over your ears, and puts mandatory boxing gloves on your hands... (snip)
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.
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.
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.
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.
One that comes up often is how I do this without bogging down play. I’ve solved that with a modular toolkit of terrain, props, and fallback materials:
Pre-built sets are rare; most setups are improvised on the fly:
For wilderness I use tiles:
Everything is organized to deploy as fast as I could describe it in words:
When traveling, I use dry-erase boards and tokens.
On VTTs, I apply another suite of visual techniques.
Admittedly, the actual play with
@Bedrockgames doesn’t show this well, we had to rely on voice-only. But there’s a video of me running a Shadowdark demo that shows how I apply this visually online. It’s a simple three-hour demo, but it captures the principle.
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.
So, no, I don't accept that there's an analogy here... (snip)
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.
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.
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.
