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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6751844" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] - I noticed you've been reading a sandboxing/railroading/sdcene-framing thread and thought you might be interested in the post above. The stuff from 1982's The Traveller Book about the centrality of encounters, together with the uncertainty over whether its the function of encounters to let the players drive things or instead let the GM manipulate the players, could easily be found in any mainstream roleplaying book from the last decade.As part of my friend's RPG cull I also got a copy of Best of White Dwarf Scenarios 3, which includes "Irilian", the city and adventure published over 6 episodes from no. 42 to no. 47. In the first episode (WD 42, 1983), the action commences with the PCs witnessing an orcish ambush of a dwarven caravan.The writing assumes without comment that the PCs will aid the dwarves. After statting out the dwarves and orcs and giving some tactical commentary, it has the following:If the party successfully aids the dwarfs, they will be thanked . . . and asked to act as guards . . . for a (negotiable) percentage of the value of the goods in the caravan . . . The percentage should be enough to convince the party that honesty is the best policy . . . The party should accept the offer.I haven't read the next five parts yet, but I'm not expecting the foot to come off the railroaded "story" accelerator. The first part, for instance, concludes with the city gates being locked so the caravan can't get in, a group of undead pursuing the caravan, anda figure beckoning the party . . . dressed in a black shroud, the cowl of which is thrown back to reveal a death's head. The wind, whipping madly at the shroud, will show beneath, black armour emblazoned with a skull.Naturally this sinister-looking figure is a NG cleric of the local undead-hating death god! The adventure clearly wants to trick the players, or at least generate doubt as to this NPC's intentions, but also proceeds on the assumption that the caravan and PCs will take shelter in this NPC's graveyard redoubt.This scenario combines the "hook" which the players are assumed to accept with an assumption that the PCs are rootless wanderers who have no knowledge of the local environment (at another point the writer says that "From conversations with the dwarfs and the owners of the Trading Post, the party will be able to learn the following about Irilian"), and have no other reason for being or for acting outside of these quasi-mercenary yet quasi-heroic hooks that come their way.The "hook" could be straight from any WoTC adventure module, and I imagine wouldn't be out of place in at least some of Paizo's APs. The idea that the PCs are essentially strangers in the gameworld, such that they no know more than the players do, as doled out by the GM, but need that knowledge to succeed in the adventure, is another aspect of play that I think remains pretty common. Though the particular style of "trick" with the death cleric I think belongs more to the 90s style of adventure, that takes some pleasure in making the players (and PCs) look like incompetent dolts, than to the more recent WotC-style; I don't know if Paizo uses that sort of device in its APs or not.Of course this sort of stuff is a million miles from classic dungeon crawling, but that distance had already been traversed by the early 1980s.</blockquote>

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