Players: it's your responsibility to carry a story.

[Ariosto]

It occurs to me that, so far from their being radically different, a grasp of the Western in its various forms might be a big head start to understanding old D&D and similar games.

 

[Ariosto]

It's bad in that it presumes a fair degree of setting knowledge that the player may not possess.

That's flat out backwards. It presumes less than an approach in which the character is presumed to be already familiar with the locale.

This is precisely why many people prefer to start players new to Tekumel in the "just off the boat" situation presented in the original Empire of the Petal Throne.

 

[Ariosto]

Maybe pemerton was thinking something like this?

Perhaps the biggest gripe most people have with Boot Hill was its lack of setting....

After all, who cares if you have the world's most detailed combat system if there's nothing to do but shoot one another and rob banks. It's the difference between Quake and Half-Life: both First-Person Shooters, but only one deserves to be called a Role-Playing Game by any stretch of the imagination, and that's because of the storyline.

Take, for example, one of the few adventure modules released for Boot Hill 2nd Edition, Mad Mesa. No background, no motivation, no true storyline. Just a bunch of cowboys wander into a town and have some random encounters throughout the night. Either you die or you leave town.


Compare this to something like, say, The Village of Hommlet and The Temple of Elemental Evil from D&D, modules jam-packed with motivations, betrayals, interesting situations and characters and, most importantly, tied into the larger campaign setting of Greyhawk, which means that it's easier to work into an ongoing storyline for your characters.

 

[Nameless1]

This is not perfectly in line with the conversation as it has been going recently, but to respond a little to the OP, one thing that I often do that I forgot to mention upthread is to cite my inspirations for my games. I like to use movies so that people get a more concrete and often more visceral idea of what I am getting at.

As a recent example, I had a short game that was a dungeon crawl/recover the McGuffin type game. I told my buddies that I wanted to run a fantasy themed Indiana Jones game. "Like we are sorta wizard/thief adventurers who raid ancient tombs to get artifacts?" "Yeah, think Tombraider/The Mummy/Indiana Jones, and I want Nazis as the main bad guys." "Can there be undead Nazis?" "Bitchin'!" Not as much situation generation, but it really set the tone. We all knew there would be no "meet in a tavern" and we all knew that we would be exploring some tombs. We knew that we would face some Nazi undead. We started out at the entrance to a tomb. We lost our first artifact. We spent the rest of the short campaign trying to get it back. From Nazi vampires. It was glorious. Completely unoriginal, but fun. We knew what to expect, we created characters to fit, and there was instant action. No waiting. Not a ton of real situation, and hardly a sandbox because we cared nothing for the rest of the world, but great fun. I was a very cohesive game, and was not at all linear, even though there was a "plot" (get back the Necronomicon (yeah, we ripped that off too) from the Nazi vampires), but we did not know how it would all unfold. There was no A->B->C->Win! It was A-> lots of other stuff that was improvised -> Win!

Did I mention it was a fully improvised GMless game of The Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries? No GM so no chance of railroad, but also not at all a sandbox. It was driven by a common understanding of tropes and a shared interest in the theme.

So point is, defining a set of influences for your campaign can help create a cohesive shared set of expectations, and can get players to engage with the story/world because they know the genre.

(Yeah, I am pretty well agreeing with The Shaman here. I said upthread that I often prefer a situation based game, but at times, all that is necessary is a shared understanding of a strongly defined theme. Even this might have been helped with a tighter situation though. Maybe. )

 

[Lanefan]

On the other hand, I have for some years seen old-D&D players using the term "sandbox" as I (having learned from them) use it. The "sandbox" environment most definitely changes in response to the players' moves. The moves of players, and responses to those moves by players and non-player figures alike, weave an ever richer tapestry.

I would take it even a step further - a sandbox environment (well, any setting environment, come to think of it) can and should change - using its own internal logic - whether the PCs interact with it or not.

Maybe the PCs had a chance to take down Smaug but instead went elsewhere, thinking "oh, we'll come back to that"; meanwhile someone else went in and killed him - got all the loot, too!

Maybe there's a war going on between two realms the PCs haven't ever been to - whether the PCs ever interact with it or not you still ought to figure out who wins/loses over time, if only to determine the outfall (if any) that might affect the PCs and the played game.

It's almost like you need something of a newsreel - whenever the party is in town for a while, catch them up on such goings-on in the world as the town would logically have heard of. This does two things: it presents the game world as a living breathing vibrant place, and it possibly provides adventure hooks.

Lanefan

 

[pemerton]

That's flat out backwards. It presumes less than an approach in which the character is presumed to be already familiar with the locale.

Not necessarily. Games which start with an assumption that the character is already familiar with the locale will often have various techniquest - mechanical or informal - for handling this. For example, the players may be entitled to "declare" the existence of certain locations or NPCs.

 

[Hussar]

That's flat out backwards. It presumes less than an approach in which the character is presumed to be already familiar with the locale.

Ah, sorry, forgot the qualifier of "could" in there.

The problem is, the "character" doesn't know anything at all since it's a completely fictional construct. Unless the player knows that there is an X that he can go investigate, he can't even know to ask about its existence, beyond a very basic level.

In other words, if I know nothing about Eberron, and get put in a Sharn campaign, I can't possibly go looking for the nearest Dragonmarked House because I don't even know they exist. I know pretty much nothing about that era France beyond a couple of half remembered movies. I can't ask about what I want to do, because I have no frame of reference.

Remember, The Shaman insisted that all motivation must come from the player, not from the DM.

You can do the "Stranger in a Strange Land" thing, but, if you do, generally the first while of the game is going to be driven pretty strongly by the DM as the DM places options in front of the players. Tekumel is a good example. I really have no idea, beyond the fact that it's a fantasy setting from the late 70's what Empire of the Petal Throne is. If you told me that I got off the boat in Tekumel and then asked me what I did, my response would again, probably be the same as my adventures in Paris - "Uhh, is there a bar?" because I have zero knowledge of the setting.

Sandbox campaigns require the players to know a fair bit about the setting in order to make anything resembling an informed choice. Without that knowledge, it stops being a sandbox and becomes a DM driven campaign.

 

[The Shaman]

Thinking about Boot Hill and Flashing Blades, in the earlier days of the hobby was there a tendency to identify historical games with tighter situations and generic fantasy games with a greater degree of open-endedness?

My impression is less that historical roleplaying games lent themselves to tighter situations and more that those "generic fantasy games" weren't really intended to be quite so open-ended as they proved to be, or perhaps were manipulated to be.

I read a lot of essays over the years suggesting that D&D could be used to run this, that, and the other kind of adventure, but often with a caveat along the line of, ". . . if you just change this rule . . ."

There's no question that the game fed off the creativity of its players, but there was also a bit of a driving force in the form of the professional writers feeding the hopper of Dragon, White Dwarf, and the other gaming rags back in the day. Where did the DIY-vibe leave off and marketing begin?

'cause when I look back at 1e AD&D, I see a pretty tight game with very clear character conceits and rewards. Those characters could be quite versatile in their response to challenges and those rewards could take many forms, but looking at the rules of the game, there's no question to me what 1e AD&D is 'about.'

What historical games have in spades over "generic" fantasy games is a richly detailed, readily-accessible setting used in centuries of genre fiction. That's both a blessing and a curse, it would seem.

 

[The Shaman]

Gangbusters is another in which it might be easier for some people to see it -- and also a splendid description of a D&D-style "sandbox" game.

Definitely. Lakefront City is a solid example of a sandbox setting, and as with Boot Hill, the adventurers may choose to be lawmen - FBI special agents, Treasure agents, local cops - or gangsters, or pursue other careers like reporters and private investigators.

That was circa 1982.

 

[The Shaman]

Maybe pemerton was thinking something like this?

Oh lawd, I hope not.

No setting? Are these guys from friggin' Mars or something? The setting is the American West in all its historial and mythical glory. The setting, and ideas for adventures, are as far away as your library's Louis L'Amour collection.

And Mad Mesa? The adventurers wander into the middle of a CATTLE WAR! Two family factions out for blood, hired guns, a sheriff trying (and failing) to keep a lid on the violence, and various and sundry other nefariousness among the townsfolk - that's Mad Mesa.

Wow. That's just an embarassing review.