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

[The Shaman]

. . . [O]ne thing that I often do that I forgot to mention upthread is to cite my inspirations for my games.

Same here.

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. . . .)

 

[The Shaman]

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.

I simply 'feed' information to the players that their characters are likely to know; frex, a titled noble may have some knowledge of the king's typical schedule - "The vicomte remembers that the king is normally in chapel during this hour" - or a sailor may know the reputation of a ship or its crew - "You remember that La Vierge once belonged to the duc de Nevers but was captured by the Huguenot duc de Soubise."

 

[Doug McCrae]

Talking about old school games, and reviews thereof, there was a review of the post-apocalyptic game The Morrow Project in White Dwarf in which it was praised for solving the problem of how PCs can be both capable and ignorant of their surroundings. In TMP the PCs awake from cryogenic suspension, part of a project to rebuild society after a nuclear war, but they have overslept. They are highly skilled and well equipped. This also gives them a strong motivation. Central control of the Morrow Project organisation has, of course, broken down, leaving the PCs on their own.

I've never run/played the game but I always liked this setup. It's very focused, character types would be fairly limited, not so much in terms of skills, but in motivation, competence and mental stability, and also very sandbox-y.

It's often a weird feature of rpgs that the players begin knowing nothing about a campaign world, but their PCs are supposedly embedded in the setting, with knowledge, friends, family, responsibilities, etc. Traditional D&D solves this problem by making the PCs rootless wanderers, Conan-types. Well-armed drifters who have just rode into town. They don't care about anything except gold and power ups, and solve all their problems with violence. My problem with this setup is I find it very difficult to care about such people on account of them being total dicks.

One of the local GMs often starts his campaigns with the PCs, like the players, having no knowledge of the campaign world. In one, we woke up with no memory, in another we were pirates from different worlds who died and found ourselves in 'Pirate Heaven/Hell'. On the one hand, this is good because player knowledge = character knowledge, the two can go on the journey of the game together. But on the other, the PCs don't really care about the world (just like players in most rpgs) and have no strong reason to stick together.

This issue of the players not caring about the game world seems common on message boards. Again and again one will read about GMs who put a lot of effort, a lot of love, into their game universes, and are disappointed that the players just care about power ups and winning fights.

Perhaps this is unavoidable, a creator is always going to care more, be more invested. It works better with published fiction, because that is cast wide, and only those who are interested will read it, whereas rpgs are typically written for a much smaller audience. Perhaps it's also realistic. Lots of people in real life are very pragmatic, and only want to know what they need to in order to succeed.

I myself, playing crpgs, almost always skip the quest and world info, I'm much more interested in the game element. Though in ftf rpgs, I'm more interested in the world, probably because it's been created by a friend and I'm interested in seeing what my talented friends have built.

 

[Ariosto]

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.

That much is true. In the "clanless barbarians in Jakalla" scenario, you will be dependent on employment by Tsolyani patrons to get out of the Foreigners' Quarter.

As to the rest, not only does The Man With No Name manage to find his way into plenty of adventures in parts of the Spaghetti West where he's a stranger... not only have many people gone through computer adventure games that leave them to find their ways through even stranger worlds ...but there are some operations of gray cells that most people are taught as "life skills".

There is, for instance, the ancient and powerful technique of Crouching Tiger, Asking Questions.

If you are totally ignorant of 17th-century France, then I do not see how it would be a help to expect you to act like a 17th-century Frenchman.

Neither do I think that many apart from you expect to go into a game with nothing but total ignorance. Certainly one of the historical strengths of D&D was its drawing on ancient and perennial traditions, with very popular recent manifestations (Hobbit, Conan) as well. I do not recall anyone being totally at sea in the land of fable and fairy tales that was D&D!

Then again, the general public went mad for Pac-Man (which is essentially a lot like D&D, only way more bizarre).

] I'm
---- not
0> lost
-c I'm
= just
\| aimlessly
wandering

 

[Ariosto]

Traditional D&D solves this problem by making the PCs rootless wanderers, Conan-types. Well-armed drifters who have just rode into town. They don't care about anything except gold and power ups, and solve all their problems with violence.

That's your tradition, Doug.

 

[S'mon]

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.

Only in some weird bizarro Hussar-definition of "DM driven."

Take my City State of the Invincible Overlord campaign. There's a pre-planned city full of location-specific encounters. There are some partly-GM-determined elements such as floating plot hooks (for the adventure locales in the Wraith Overlord supplement) and prerolled random encounters, but the core game is determined by where the PCs go and what they do when they get there. It's certainly less DM-determined than linear campaign design.

Also, it includes "situation". This idea that sandbox is the opposite of situation is really weird to me. There are tons of NPCs and NPC factions with their own agendas, in some cases these will eventually trigger major events with or without PC participation. As the PCs encounter these NPCs and factions they make friends and enemies through their own actions - often contrary to my expectations, where I have any.

 

[pemerton]

S'mon, I haven't meant to suggest that sandbox is the opposite of situation. But I think it is different (or can be, for a certain sort of sandbox - I'm thinking of the very exploratory, Classic Traveller style of sandbox).

The difference is that the sandbox doesn't have an integration of the PCs into the GM's situations built in. Whereas the situation-based play that I and Nameless1 (as I understand him/her) have been talking about does presuppose that sort of integration, established at the metagame pre-play stage.

 

[pemerton]

I'll disagree with this; in that the examples you gave and how they resolved could very easily have gone exactly the same way in my old-school game...or gone completely differently; dependent almost entirely on the whims of the players at the moment.

Good stuff.

One thing about these conversations is that you only ever have a partial sense of how others are playing the game, and how typical or untypical their games are, or one's own game is.

I have seen you, in other threads, defending the legitimacy of intra-party conflict. I agree with you on that, and I feel that this fits with a readiness to be open to multiple different approaches to the resolution of an encounter.

I wonder if we are typical or not. I certainly feel that the same sorts of GMs who dislike intraparty conflict, or "evil" PCs, might be hesitant about the players resolving an encounter by paying slavers to buy the freedom of their slaves.

 

[Kerranin]

I know that some RPG rules-systems actively encourage the players to build the story, giving in-play rewards to the players. Now that I think about it, I am wondering if I couldn't give small in-game rewards even in 4e.

Perhaps just handing out cards which give the player the right to one re-roll of a die. Not a huge reward but at least acknowledging that the player helped with the story.

 

[Hussar]

Only in some weird bizarro Hussar-definition of "DM driven."

Take my City State of the Invincible Overlord campaign. There's a pre-planned city full of location-specific encounters. There are some partly-GM-determined elements such as floating plot hooks (for the adventure locales in the Wraith Overlord supplement) and prerolled random encounters, but the core game is determined by where the PCs go and what they do when they get there. It's certainly less DM-determined than linear campaign design.

Also, it includes "situation". This idea that sandbox is the opposite of situation is really weird to me. There are tons of NPCs and NPC factions with their own agendas, in some cases these will eventually trigger major events with or without PC participation. As the PCs encounter these NPCs and factions they make friends and enemies through their own actions - often contrary to my expectations, where I have any.

But, how do the PC's "encounter" these NPC's? They wander the city, dungeon crawling style, taking random turns until they "find" adventure? You, as the DM, just ask which random streets they decide to head down, describing what they see until they find something that catches their eye?

Or, do you have a couple of scenarios in the hopper at the outset, just to get the player's feet wet, introduce the setting, introduce a couple of NPC's and then sit back?

Cos, when I ran the Shelzar, City of Sin campaign, that's precisely what I did. After a couple of fairly basic scenarios, just to get the ball rolling, I pretty much let the players do whatever they felt like doing. But, I did feel that I needed those initial few adventures (the first of which included running an errand for a patron (which they started out having) by retrieving a rare text of dwarven pornography It was a fun game) just to set the stage.

I have to admit, it's been years since I've just done the, "Well, you're at the gates of the Keep, what do you do?" approach. In fact, I think the last time I did do that probably would have been Keep on the Borderland. Might be worth giving another shot.