Bill Zebub
“It’s probably Matt Mercer’s fault.”
This thread has strayed way too far into "that depends on what the definition of 'is' is" territory.
NPC Deception/Persuasion and player agency
- Thread starter cranberry
- Start date
KYRON45
Hero
It seems like what you are trying to do is take an existing language and reconstruct it so that your version makes you right.
It's a very common practice.
Play the way you want but don't put so much effort into trying describe how the way you play is the right way and the rest of us don't understand you.
Celebrim
Legend
Yes, we agree.
Celebrim
Legend
I get what the poster is saying. But some people act as if what the poster said was literally true, and I think it's an important point that it isn't.
And my point is that this is harder than it might first seem, and really almost impossible. What's important isn't that you never force what you want to happen, but that you also allow what you didn't want to happen. And there is some portion of those two things that goes into making every successful play style.
Celebrim
Legend
I have seen plenty of people argue that what he said was literally true.
The GM is continually engaged in this process.
Agreed, but it's that "open to their efforts" that I'm talking about. The GM is also rooting for the players. It's not really all that fun if the players can't resolve the issue. So GMs are all the time subtly putting their finger on "the story so far is" and rigging what is likely to happen next. If my party of 2nd level characters decide to go into the boot legging business, it's one story if I have J.C. Wilhelm a 7th level fighter and quite another if he's a 20th level fighter. What's the right answer there? What story should I be planning for? I think most GMs would err on the side of making J.C. Wilhelm potent enough to make a great threat, but not so potent that he can crush the PC's like a grape. But which ever one I decide on is setting not just the backstory but the fore story. And in fact, to avoid giving GMs this dilemma, some game systems that want to empower this sort of play very much take these sorts of choices out of the GMs hands.
I am very hard to insult or offend. So far I haven't seen any sign that you are the sort of person that would do any of the things I'd actually find offensive. Be as frank as you want and disagree as strongly as you like.
It's almost certainly the later, since I have a lot more experience with sandboxes than I have with you.
I'm greatly mollified by this explanation; however I'm not fully convinced. Sandbox work is extremely heavy and intense up front but I agree it can because you've done all that work ahead of time become light week to week. But it can take years of work to prep a sandbox well, and I'm not as convinced as you seem to be that it becomes low prep just because you did all that up front.
The key feature of a sandbox is that you do much more prep than you ever intend to use and you are content to have prepped a great many locations and characters that you will never use. If it doesn't have this feature, it's not a sandbox. It's an entirely different situation that is often confused for a sandbox. Let me try to explain why.
Suppose I make a castle and draw maps for it and populate it with personalities. It's just a location where events might happen and where the players might go if the story turns particular ways. I don't yet have any exact purpose for the players being there as I might in an adventure path. Now at some point in the story the PC's are perhaps contracted by the leader of the thieves guild to steal an emerald necklace from the castle and in exchange he'll give them something they want whatever that happens to be. When that happens I already know what defenses the castle has, where the guards are, what the personalities of the inhabitants were and so forth. I created all that before I knew that one of the purposes of the castle was to be the setting for a heist. So it's already possible to then steal the necklace in any of ways by forging relationships with the inhabitants of the castle, sneaking about it, or even slaughtering the inhabitants. Everything I've created was created before the plot about the necklace came into existence and before I was aware that the Baronesses love for fine jewelry would become a plot point, or perhaps at most when I created the master of thieves I noted in his biography that among his goals was stealing some of the Baronesses valuable jewelry.
Now suppose however that I'm running a campaign using player created plots but I haven't created a castle. If then in the player driven story the PC's are contracted by the leader of the thieves' guild to steal an emerald necklace from the castle, then that castle comes into being as the focus of a heist and it is now impossible for me to not think of it primarily in those terms. If I wait to prep any portion of this castle until the PCs begin discussing plans, then it is now impossible for me to not think of the castle in the terms of the PCs plans. In this case, even though on the surface the story is driven by the players, only the GM has any meaningful agency. The only agency the players have is what I decide to allow for, to either validate or not validate their ideas as they are presented to me. A linear adventure path probably affords more agency to the players than the actual process of play I have created. The longer I delay in reifying the castle, the worse the situation gets. This second situation is not a sand box. It's an open world but not a sandbox, and I have become over the years quite sensitive to the difference.
Remember, one of my tests of whether there is a railroad is how much is the GM metagaming.
Open world campaigns are typically defined by a single rail car that never really moves. The players are on a large stage and as they purpose to go somewhere, the GM changes the drapes and the furniture on the stage and brings in some props and new players, but there is very little in terms of defined space. You generally cut from scene to scene based on where the players say they want to be because nothing exists until the players go there, so there is generally nothing between point A and point C save a handwave. All props are manufactured as needed according to the dictates of the story as the GM sees it in the moment. At best, you might get the GM deferring some of the time to a random table as a prompt for ideas, but at worst the GM is just listening in to the players talk and deciding what ideas he thinks is clever and wants to use. The whole game is nothing but one long metagame by the GM against or for the players, but because the GM isn't cognizant of their own process of play and because they are accepting player prompts they imagine they are empowering the players. The truth though is that you are setting on a single rail car doing nothing while the stage props are moved by the windows and the GM decides to yank your chain or not depending on what he thinks at the moment is a good story.
Back in the early 90's I played with this group that insisted as players that the get into a huddle and whisper their plans to each other so that the GM couldn't hear them. At the time I thought it extremely silly and adversarial and immature. Looking back I'm not at all convinced of that. I thought it extremely silly because my theories of how to game master well made the players planning openly how to do something irrelevant. But the GMs in that group when they GMed largely engaged in open world play where they took player input on what the players wanted to do and then let them do it, and in the years playing with them and in the years afterwards reviewing those games in my head, the players were being extremely functional in their play to not reveal to the GM their wants and plans. It was really the only way they had to claw any real agency from the almighty GMs according to the way they thought the game was to be played.
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Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
But allowing what you didn't want to happen is part of it too. If we had an involved discussion about what makes this style work, that would be way up at the top of the list
Celebrim
Legend
Fully agreed, so why start the sentence with "But"?
Celebrim
Legend
Thirty years of arguing RPG theory I've learned that some of the biggest misunderstandings come from the fact that someone heard some term of art somewhere and knew only from some context and whatever loan words were involved what the word meant and so evolved their own private definition. It's not like railroading as RPG term of art is found in a dictionary. If you look it up in a dictionary you'll find a common definition of it like: "to force somebody to do something before they have had enough time to decide whether or not they want to do it." In a tabletop RPG setting, that's not even "railroading" as the term is usually meant. That's just time pressure, and time pressure may be a perfectly valid thing for a GM to do if the player is taking too long to make a decision in a scene where the character would only have a few moments to decide what to do. If the player is dithering and losing the excitement of the game you may well need to "railroad" them according to the Oxford English dictionary version for the good of the game.
Twenty or so years ago after the upteenth argument on EnWorld as to what constituted railroading where it seemed literally no one was using the same definition and half of them couldn't even coherently articulate what they meant, I started thinking seriously about what the term actually meant and whether it meant anything at all other than "badwrongfun".
If you aren't interested in what I discovered, OK. If you have something to add to what I'm saying, or some corrective thought to introduce, then even better. But as it stands, you don't seem to be doing either one.
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
I think this is a style consideration though. Part of wanting to be surprised, is for both players and GMs to be open to catastrophic outcomes and failures. A total party kill for example. For some styles that is a nail in the coffin of a campaign, for others it just makes everything that happened a prelude to something else. I like games where you aren't thinking "is this appropriate for a 20th level fighter". I am not overly rigid about it, sometimes you have to throw threats at a party that feel appropriate for whatever reason. But I genuinely don't want to know how things are going to turn out if the players decide to take on The Iron Palm Mistress and her cult. I don't think about the power disparities when I introduce them and when things move in the direction of conflict. This isn't out of an attempt to simulate the harsh realities of a world, but simply because I honestly like not knowing will the players succeed or fail if they go that way (and if I am weighing that when I design elements of the campaign, then my finger is on the scale)
I am glad I am conveying my intentions. I don't like attacking or 'owning' people in threads. So I just wanted to be clear that me throwing that back at you was a genuine feeling of someone isn't getting something here.
I think I wasn't speaking very clearly when I first said that. What I meant was I do sandbox because once you prep a sandbox, they are kind of like ecosystem terrarium that become self sustaining if you do them well. You still have to maintain them, and you often have to still do heavy lifting right before each campaign even if you have a lot of material already, but I personally find them less prep week to week than when I run say a murder mystery investigation campaign that is more focused on being structured around points of investigation or set pieces (or something like an adventure path where you are carefully planning encounters and locations along an anticipated adventure).
I would agree in that this is how I tend to prep sandboxes, but I think there are lots of different ways to approach sandbox and one based on generating content through something like improv and random tools could also work and would be low prep. I find that approach a little thin myself so I like prepping more in advance, but I wouldn't label a less prep heavy approach non-sandbox.
Just to give a sense of how much prep went into my most recent sandbox:
I had already built a world and published that world. Not all of my sandboxes are based on material I published but this example gives a solid paper trail to show how much prep I effectively did (keeping in mind the core book in question had substantial sections devoted to system and abilities).
So my effective prep would include (note I am using affiliate links for these):
The broad strokes of the setting, the cultural details of the setting, major sects, NPCs, and a region in focus called the Banyan: WHOG rulebook
This had several hundred pages of setting material plus I had a binder filled with maps and notes. And that gave me enough to effectively run sandbox in one region. But as the campaign expanded I worked on more material and that became this book for this region: Ogre Gate Inn and the Strange Land of Li Fan
That gave me an additional client kingdom. And I had lots of notes on other areas of the world map but often had to develop those as the players explored or went in different directions.
Then my campaign shifted to another region of the world so I wrote another supplement, but never published it, instead putting it on my blog: War of Swarming Beggars
I also had an organization in my setting called the house of paper shadows. I really considered them more of a background threat but one of the players got pissed at them and decided to attack them. When he said that I said okay, but give me two weeks and I prepped all the material that became this book: House of Paper Shadows
Then I did more expansion with Tournament of Daolu and Sons of Lady 87 (the first one provided information on a major city in the empire, the second on a key prefecture).
So by the time I ran my most recent campaign, I think it started in October or so of 2023, I had a wealth of setting material in my binder, on my computer, and published in print. And to run this campaign I made a campaign document which sort of set the stage for things (I wanted to advance the timeline by ten years, add in some more organizations, etc), and I described that here in this blog post: State of the Martial World (which was part of a series of posts called wuxia sandbox)
Again I tend to be in agreement with this being the way I like running a sandbox, but I don't think someone generating this stuff randomly, ad hoc before the rubber hits the road (something I call 'pinning it down'), etc would make it not a sandbox. I think your sandbox is a more interesting approach for how I like to play. And as I said before the other approach can feel too thin in my opinion, but I would still regard it as a sandbox
I think this example needs a little more explanation. I think if you introduce something and you can only imagine it being used one way, therefore you railroad the players or use railroad like tactics, sure that is a railroad. But inventing something on the fly doesn't automatically lead to railroading. The way you should invent in a sandbox in my opinion is largely through extrapolation. But even if you don't and you just say "there's a castle here now", as long as you aren't telling the players what they have to do about it, it isnt' a railroad. One solution is not be fixated on hooks. In my campaigns a castle like that, one I didn't create but make during play on teh fly, is likely to arise because players are asking questions like "are there any castle lords in the area?" and I would then try to very quickly in my notes establish basic facts, that are hopefully also interesting, about the castle.
This doesn't persuade me. I mean even if you are literally inventing everything as the players say they go this way or that way, you are also in that process establishing points of interest, NPCs, power groups, conflicts, etc and the players can interface with those things how they want. They can say "hey let's go back to Dee and see if we can recruit Master Wu to help us take out the bootleggers up north".
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
Because you are saying it is almost or nearly impossible and I think that isn't the case
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