Gaming in an open enviroment

[Bastoche]

Not true. In BG2, if you just "sit there" NPCs will run at you. You can play the game for MANY hours without even bothering to meet Bodhi or that shadow theif guy once you reach 15000po. You can make ALL the "side quest" before ever meeting with either Alan or Bodhi. The only differenc between BG2 and the other suggestions (like yours) is that in yours there's either no main plot or alternative main plots. And all the "sidequests" are completly unrelated to the main plot so there's no such thing as "plot merge" unless you jump on the main plot which could be considered as a "more important" side quest.

While agree playing BG2 vs tabletop is widely different in general, relatively to "open-endedness" it is the same. A quote from your post: They can follow a plot they have found, they can abandon it, or just let it rest for a while and come back later and take it back off (while dealing with the consequences of having it dropped back then). When I read this, I don't see any contradictions with the BG2 form of play. And then, BG2 it is a bit more open ended since there's no (negative) conscequences for letting fall a plot hook since "magically" the NPCs are just waiting for the PC to do something and nothing ever happens until the PC is involved. And among each plot hooks you can still choose between the "good", the "neutral" and the "evil" way to finish each quest (no matter the "actualy" alignement of the character )

 

[Jupp]

The only differenc between BG2 and the other suggestions (like yours) is that in yours there's either no main plot or alternative main plots. And all the "sidequests" are completly unrelated to the main plot so there's no such thing as "plot merge" unless you jump on the main plot which could be considered as a "more important" side quest.

I do not consider the lack of a "main plot" in a game world / campaign as a negative thing. Well there is always a main plot if I think about it: If we talk about a "No Plan" world then the only main plot is the one where the players are currently playing in and it doesn not really matter how far reaching and important that plot really is. Because if the players in an open game world choose to follow a certain plot then they deem it as important, however big or small that plot actually is. To me that is the difference between a plot driven world and an Open Campaign. in a plot driven world the DM decides which plot is important and worthy to follow. In the No Plan world the players decide what they think is important.

I give you that in the end it's always the DM who creates the environment. It's just that in the one scenario the players follow the DM and in the other one the DM follows the players (more or less).

And then, BG2 it is a bit more open ended since there's no (negative) conscequences for letting fall a plot hook since "magically" the NPCs are just waiting for the PC to do something and nothing ever happens until the PC is involved.

Now is that a feature for you or a bug? To me thats a big bug and has nothing to do with an open ended game. In a pnp game I wouldnt call it open-ended, it's just destroys the feeling of consistency in the game world. But its a computer game where there is no real A.I. and no DM that could really continue the plot depending on the actions of the PCs, so I dont blame BG2 for behaving like that

 

[Justin Bacon]

What if the players don't have any interest whatsoever in your story? They could care less about the demonic forces that they unleashed. What they really want to do is deal with the dwarf PC's long-lost clanhome, return the elves to their ancestral forest, and restore the human PC to the throne.

Then more power to them. But that doesn't mean that their previous actions are suddenly without consequence.

If you start throwing things that are not related to this at all, and penalize them if they ignore it, you're saying: "Sure, play the game you want. But if you don't play my game I will hurt your PCs, and through the hurting we'll still be playing my story."

You don't get to assasinate the President and then bitch-and-moan because the Secret Service keeps trying to hunt you down. If you don't want the Secret Service trying to hunt you down, don't decide to assassinate the President.

For some reason there are people who think "let the players pursue their own goals" means "the players can do whatever they want to and you should change the gameworld so that they're always right and everything is lollipops and roses for them".

Those things are not synonymous. If you want to run the latter type of game, more power to you. But I'd be bored out of my skull as a player or a DM in such a campaign.

Player: Okay, I finish performing the demonic ritual we found in the cult's Black Book of Bad, Bad Things.
DM: Okay, you open a portal to hell. Demons start pouring through.
Players: Hang on, I don't want to play in a game where demons are invading the world.
DM: Oh, okay. Well, in that case, you opened a portal to Candyland. Free chocolate for everyone!
Players: Yay!

Justin Alexander Bacon
http://www.thealexandrian.net

 

[barsoomcore]

Barroomscore (sic): You are basically saying that players who don't create PCs that would be built such as they would follow plot hooks (provided via background by the players to the DM so the DM can build "a" story around this). It's NOT open ended. It a close ended game where players who writes "adventurous" background admits they are willing as players to follow plot hooks willingly.

I have a lot of trouble understanding what you're saying. My PC isn't going to follow just any plot hook. If a mysterious wizard shows up and says, "Retrieve for me the Staff of Mighty Blooblah," my PC is going to say, "Um, go get it yourself, bucko. I got things to do."

Your posts are very difficult to understand, Bastoche. I still don't know if you're arguing for or against open-style gaming, for example. I don't know whether the campaign you hated so much was open or railroady. Please try to communicate a bit more clearly if you want to have a useful conversation.

No campaign is COMPLETELY open. The very idea is nonsense. If I start a campaign in Forgotten Realms, then certain possibilities are implicitly not available. You can't play a kzinti space pilot, for example. You can't decide to blow up the Empire State Building. Any campaign is closed to some degree.

Of course, no campaign is completely closed, either. So let's please stop debating about one or the other. The question is, how much power over the story of the campaign do the players want to have, and how as a DM can you facilitate that (assuming you want to)? Statements like Bastoche's "a game is either open-ended or it's not" are false and silly.

One of the key joys of gaming (as opposed to making up stories by yourself) is that you don't have control over how things will turn out. Part of this is because of the random factor of the dice, but part of it is also because the story involves the choices of OTHER people. The choices other people make will necessarily restrict the options available to you. This applies to players as well as DMs: if I as DM decide that today an earthquake will strike the city, toppling the castle and killing thousands, then that affects the choices of the players. It's not railroading them, but it DOES affect what they can do. They can't now decide to climb the highest tower of the castle to see if the Gem of Important Stuff is up there -- if that's where they think it was, they'll have to search the rubble to find it.

Likewise, if the players decide that the Gem of Important Stuff isn't all that important after all and that they can achieve their objective without it, well then, they don't have it. They can't later suddenly decide "No, it's important, so we've had it all along."

Open-ended doesn't mean "no consequences". Or at least it doesn't to me. If you decide to climb a tree and succeed, you're now at the top of the tree. If Joe the Wizard asks you to retrieve his unicorn and you don't, then Joe doesn't owe you a favour about the unicorn.

Another example: One of my players in Barsoom decided that his character had a family torn apart by accusations of treason. His father was hanged and his mother disappeared. A year or so into the campaign I decided to do something with the disappeared mother. I decided she'd been kidnapped by a rival family and was being held at some location. I further decided that there was something supernatural about his mother's family -- a sort of werewolf curse.

So our hero came across some information that his mother had turned up. The rival family was trying to lure him into a trap but he didn't take the bait. The party was engrossed in other stuff and he didn't pursue the hints. He came across an old friend who had seen his mother in (of all places) a brothel. He still did not pursue the information.

Okay, after a year or so of this I got bored so I changed things up. The curse manifested, Mother turned into a slavering beast, slaughtered her guards and escaped. News of a disaster at a home of the rival family came out. News that the PC's mother was at large came out. Still no interest from the PC.

Fair enough. Barsoom was always a pretty open-ended campaign, and the PCs had plenty to do, so it wasn't a problem.

HOWEVER. There were consequences. A woman who had been a little soft on the PC tracked down his mother and tried to take care of her. She contacted the PC and said, "Hey, I've got your mother and she's not well. I think she's dying."

STILL the PC didn't get interested. Fair enough. Nobody has to bite at any hook. But there are consequences. The woman taking care of his mother was surprised at the PC's apparent lack of concern for his own mother. She grew to despise the PC, even as she continued tending his mother's last days. The mother died. The woman, convinced that had the PC returned to the family home the mother might have recovered, became a bitter enemy of the PC. The family curse passed to the PC, as well, and he now had lost the most complete source of information on the curse.

Meanwhile, the party has gone on all sorts of adventures, culminating in the destruction of an evil goddess and the restoration of an important global organization. None of this has hindered their efforts in any way. It's just been going on in the background while they've been adventuring -- along with a zillion other things.

Had he gone to look after his mother, things would have been different. The woman might have admired him and become a friend or a lover. His mother might have recovered. He might have learned enough about the curse to control it. He might not.

Long story. My point is, in any campaign, things are going on. Whether or not the PCs choose to get involved is ALWAYS up to them, but I have the most fun as a DM (and I believe that my players have the most fun as well) if I keep those things moving in their absence. If there are CONSEQUENCES to their choices.

 

[Justin Bacon]

Justin suggest something even more perverse IMO. I would hate to play one of your games unless you would say what lostsoul says "I'm going to send you on a quest for seals, who's in?" Your "happy medium" is exactly what I'm playing right now. And if I had agreed before hand that this was what I was to play in, I would be fine. But the DM wants to "pull us in his story" while giving us 100% latitude. It doesn't work. For it to work he either has to remove latitude by providing clear plot hooks (that's not open ended anymore) or by forgetting his story and letting us do whatever we want.

You're, once again, ignoring the middle-ground. In your la-la land of Candyland fantasy, if someone decides to try to hire the PCs to clear out the local goblin tribes because the PCs have earned a rep for being able to tackle humanoid raiders, then the DM is ramming a plot down their throat while pretending to give them a decision.

Bullcrap.

The PCs have a choice: They can accept the job. They can turn the job down. Either choice has consequences. The PCs may not like those consequences, but that doesn't mean that the DM is ramming a plot down their throat: It just means that actions have consequences.

Your version of "open-ended gaming" -- in which NPCs just "magically wait for the PCs to do something and nothing ever happens until the PCs are involved" is not the be-all and end-all of open-ended gaming. And, in fact, I would argue that this is the dark underbelly of open-ended gaming gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Justin Alexander Bacon
http://www.thealexandrian.net

 

[LostSoul]

Then more power to them. But that doesn't mean that their previous actions are suddenly without consequence.

You don't get to assasinate the President and then bitch-and-moan because the Secret Service keeps trying to hunt you down. If you don't want the Secret Service trying to hunt you down, don't decide to assassinate the President.

Right, I think I misunderstood what you were talking about there (or worse, bent it to prove my point).

Anyway. What I was thinking about was the PCs go and do something, and without knowing it, they open a portal to the hells (or whatever).

So suddenly they are stuck. They don't want the game to be about demons invading and chasing them around. But what they did caused that to happen without them making that choice. So the demon thing is being forced on them even though it's not what they want to focus on.

But if they do choose to open the demon portal, I totally agree that they should have to deal with the consequences of their actions. Or - not their actions, but their choices.

This also brings up a question of ownership in the game. A DM should feel free to do whatever he wants with the NPCs in his world, except when the player owns part of that world. The player's home, for instance, or an important NPC. The DM shouldn't kill that NPC out of hand without input from the player - he should offer the player a choice: do you want this, and let your NPC die, or will you choose to save your NPC and give up that/suffer the consequence of that action? Or even better: your home is going to be burnt to the ground, or your NPC is going to die. Which one is more important to you? (Although that's pretty harsh, and the player could get upset. But that's life.)

 

[LostSoul]

The PCs have a choice: They can accept the job. They can turn the job down. Either choice has consequences. The PCs may not like those consequences, but that doesn't mean that the DM is ramming a plot down their throat: It just means that actions have consequences.

Right. And these consequences arise directly from choices they made earlier in the game - they chose to do whatever they did to become well-known as humanoid hunters.

To sum up the point I'm making here and in my last post: Players should have to deal with consequences that arise from their choices (inaction also being a choice). They shouldn't have to deal with the consequences that arise from choices that they did not make (again, where inaction is also a choice).

The point as a DM is to give them interesting choices to make, choices that are hard but ones that they want to make; and then play out the natural consequences of those actions, based on the setting and NPCs.

 

[barsoomcore]

They shouldn't have to deal with the consequences that arise from choices that they did not make (again, where inaction is also a choice).

Bull puckey.

Take the earthquake example. That doesn't arise from any choice the players made but suddenly the city is in chaos, there's fires, the king is dead, the sepulchre where the undead warriors were trapped is cracked and now there's fearsome, pissed-off ghosts roaming the shattered streets.

Hey, they STILL have to deal with the consequences.

People are trying to come up with absolute rules on things that depend on human interaction.

It might be, in my earthquake example, that my players will be unhappy -- they thought the campaign was going to be a light-hearted romp with elves and centaurs, not an urban survival scenario. But because I'm a human being, and they're human beings, presumably we've communicated our expectations to each other and have some reasonably accurate picture of each other's expectations, AND intend to cooperate so that we all have fun.

We won't always succeed, and sometimes somebody will find that their expectations will not be met (keeping in mind that sometimes, getting surprised is a GOOD thing). In those cases, because we're human beings, we adapt, we communicate, and we cooperate. And if we can't, then we stop playing together and find other folks to play with.

 

[LostSoul]

Another example: One of my players in Barsoom decided that his character had a family torn apart by accusations of treason. His father was hanged and his mother disappeared.

I think that's a great example of a player making choices and the DM running with those choices and making them interesting.

The player chose, in the first case, to give the DM an NPC to play around with: "Here's my mother, she disappeared, do something with that." Then when barsoomcore had dropped the plot hook to the player, he chose not to do anything about it. That's a choice he made, and he had to suffer the consequences of those choices.

When does it go wrong, though? When the player makes no choice but has to suffer the consequences anyway. The wizard who says, "Get me the horn of the fabulous MacGuffin or perish!" when the player had no intention of ever doing anything with the wizard. Or "You can Save the World or we won't play at all" when the players just wanted to slay goblins for fun and for profit (or follow the perfectly good plot hooks they provided in their character backgrounds).

Unless, of course, the DM approaches the players with the Save the World quest before the campaign begins and they all choose to take part in it.

 

[LostSoul]

Bull puckey.

Take the earthquake example. That doesn't arise from any choice the players made but suddenly the city is in chaos, there's fires, the king is dead, the sepulchre where the undead warriors were trapped is cracked and now there's fearsome, pissed-off ghosts roaming the shattered streets.

Hey, they STILL have to deal with the consequences.

People are trying to come up with absolute rules on things that depend on human interaction.

It might be, in my earthquake example, that my players will be unhappy -- they thought the campaign was going to be a light-hearted romp with elves and centaurs, not an urban survival scenario. But because I'm a human being, and they're human beings, presumably we've communicated our expectations to each other and have some reasonably accurate picture of each other's expectations, AND intend to cooperate so that we all have fun.

Right, maybe I'm not being clear. (I'm not, I'm thinking this stuff through as I write it.)

If the players wanted a light-hearted romp with elves and centaurs, they should have told the DM that's what they wanted. That's part of coming up with a reason to have your character adventure. If the players don't tell the DM what they want, what else can they expect?

So with the earthquake example. Let's say everyone's agreed to play the urban survival scenario. Or something similar that doesn't exclude the earthquake. Are they suffering the consequences that arise from choices they didn't make? I don't really think so. Part of what they wanted when they came to the table was this sort of thing. (Like when you play Midnight, you expect to be hunted and chased all around.)

So in a sense they did say to the DM, hit us with what you got, we want to take it.

In another way, the players don't have ownership of that part of the campaign world. It's up to the DM to do what he wants with it. (As long as he isn't changing things so much from the starting point of the campaign that it's no longer something the players agreed to playing. Is that clear?)

The earthquake seems to me to be an "upping of the stakes" where you're making it more challenging to get the goodies rather than imposing arbitrary consequences on the PCs. Players: "We want to get the treasure at the top of the tower. Boy, it looks pretty tough, getting in there." DM: "You think it's tough now? Earthquake!" Players: "Holy crap. Is that treasure worth it to us now? Do we still want to get it?" And then they choose what they want to do.

But if they were still deciding to go get the treasure or not, and then the earthquake sealed the deal - the earthquake traps them so that they have no choice - that's what I call imposing consequences on the PCs when the players did not make a choice.