"Railroading" is just a pejorative term for...

[The Shaman]

I've been thinking about this and it finally struck me why I was having a problem.

How is this not describing Celebrim's Rowboat Campaign?

Because the adventurers are not adrift in a featureless void without meaningful options.

In my game-world they are surrounded by the incessant buzz of activity, the players are encouraged to proactively involve their characters in those activities, and from time to time that activity may spill onto the characters unexpectedly, in the form of random encounters.

I mean, you're saying that the players can go anywhere and do anything, but, they are not guaranteed to find adventure everywhere they go. Instead, they proactively decide to head cross country and come across a Roman Ruin. And their reward for being proactive is to meet ... a snake.

The example of the ruined villa and the viper is a reference to the on-going discussion about whether or not encounters and events in the game are created to specifically challenge an adventurer or adventurers based on backstory - I introduced the example of Indiana Jones in a post upthread to explain my understanding of pemerton's approach to doing this in his game. My point with respect to the villa and the viper was, I don't introduce encounters to play on the adventurers' fears or backstory elements, so if they were to encounter a snake, this would be a likely instance when they would do so - I'm not throwing snakes at characters just to play on their phobias.

Since my game doesn't include 'dungeons' and 'monsters,' encounters tend to be a bit less over-the-top than is standard in D&D, so hazards associated with a ruined villa or temple might consist of a nest of vipers, a dangerous crumbling wall, a collapsing floor over a cistern, a hive of hornets, and so on. Roman ruins feature in a number of the random encounters I generated; frex, if an encounter with 'bandits' appears in Languedoc or Provence, one of the possibilities is that the adventurers stumble upon a bandit lair in a ruined temple.

(As an aside, one of the reasons I include ruined villas, castles, chuches, and so on throughout my random encounters is that they makes such great swashbuckling environments. Steps, piles of rubble, rows of columns, shifting slabs - a Roman ruin is a great place to stage a sword fight, should the encounter go that way.)

But just for the sake of argument, let's suppose for a moment that in my game there is such a thing as random encounter with a Roman ruin and one viper, and nothing else, as you suggest. You've written about "pacing" several times on this forum: given the limited time which gamers have to play, 'shopping trips,' 'empty rooms,' and the like are a waste of those precious game-night minutes of adventure.

I see a couple of problems with this approach. First, rising action isn't rising action without falling action, in my opinion - a well-paced game, in my experience, features peaks and valleys. I have this problem with movies quite often - Indiana Jones at the Temple of Doom ("Indiana Jones at the Tempo of ZOOM!") and Van Helsing come to mind, where the actions simply becomes mind-numbing and I stop caring at all about the characters or their world.

'Exploring the world' in a 'sandbox'-y setting isn't just about 'filling in blank hexes on the map.' One 'explores' a world by interacting with its denizens and visiting its features, even denizens known to many and features which appear on a map readily available to anyone. Our last game night included a trip to the theatre - there was the possibility of a random encounter which might involve the adventurer, but nothing came up, so the five or ten minutes of real-time we spent on the show focused on the adventurer learning more about a couple of the npcs he met earlier on (including a woman he may be thinking about pursuing as a mistress) and the experience of visiting the theatre in 1625 Paris.

This leads to the second point: part of running a 'sandbox'-y game is providing the adventurers with resources which they may or may not choose to use. The musketeer-adventurer in my game now has the theatre as a resource; he can look for someone he knows there, arrange a rendezvous there, and so on. A ruined villa discovered by the adventurers in the pays of Provence offers the same benefit - frex, should they need a place to stash Princess Pinkflower after rescuing her from the baron de Bauchery, this becomes one of the resources available to them.

To use a more D&D-friendly example, that empty room the adventurers discover in the dungeon right now may become the Alamo where they make their last stand later in the game.

How is this not telling the players, "Sure you can go anywhere you want to go, but, if you head to places I didn't really anticipate, you are now in a "no-adventure zone" and be prepared for boredom?"

Because my prep is intended to avoid exactly that.

I'd much prefer that adventure seems to lurk under every rock and for some bizarre reason, trouble just seems to find the group, regardless of what we do.

And I prefer the adventurers to be the ones making trouble, not waiting for someone to spring it on them over and over again.

 

[Ariosto]

How is this not telling the players, "Sure you can go anywhere you want to go, but, if you head to places I didn't really anticipate, you are now in a "no-adventure zone" and be prepared for boredom?"

I'm not seeing where The Shaman even told that to you, so how you figure is surely a puzzle.

 

[Ariosto]

And thats why he's the only person in my Ignore list.

Because I'm fed up with Hussar's arguing over definitions? Because (as he demonstrates right there) he won't take "yes" -- literally, "It's whatever you say it is." -- for an answer?

Oh, well. Unreasonable is as unreasonable does.

 

[pemerton]

Double post deleted.

 

[pemerton]

The rowboat is a degenerate form of a sandbox that allows the players infinite choice but strips that choice of meaning by requiring those choices to be made without context of a situation or in response to the environment.

A sandbox allows the player to make meaningful choices. Meaning implies decisions made with knowledge/context of the environment and the environment reacting in plausible and understandable ways.

Deciding to strike out into the wilds chasing nothing in particular is a choice. It is the players gambling that the choice will lead to something unexpected or that the expected ressult is preferable to their other current choices (for example, they are being hunted in town and don't want to confront the hunters). Sometimes such gambles pay off othertimes they don't. Always having the gamble pay off strips the choice of a lot of meaning for me.

What I would want to add to this, is that I prefer every choice by the players nevertheless to produce interesting game play. I don't think that this robs those choices of meaning, because interesting game play can nevertheless be producing meaningfully different outcomes for the PCs (eg they may be more likely to achieve or fail in their goals, depending on choices made).

 

[pemerton]

GMs in non-sandboxes don't literally make every encounter and every entity level appropriate.

<snip>

Basically, nobody has a campaign world where every encounter, every NPC, every place is literally level appropriate. Its a style choice of whether the GM gives a hoot if the PCs go into too dangerous parts or parts he hasnt planned on.

I come pretty close to being a counter-example. When I prepare encounters they are - whether combat or non-combat - level appropriate (within the 4e encounter design parameters). If the PCs head in a direction I hadn't anticipated/prepared, the encounters will likewise be level-appropriate.

Part of what facilitates this is that in my game the gameworld entities (NPCs, traps, mountain-climbing DCs etc) don't have mechanical expression until I build the encounter, and I'm happy to mechanically revise encounters up until I actually run them.

Not all games can be GMed like this (eg in Rolemaster, entities clearly do have a pre-encounter mechanical expression, because their mechanical expression is part of what defines their nature and capabilities within the gameworld). The fact that 4e can be run in this way is part of what I like about it.

 

[Nagol]

What I would want to add to this, is that I prefer every choice by the players nevertheless to produce interesting game play. I don't think that this robs those choices of meaning, because interesting game play can nevertheless be producing meaningfully different outcomes for the PCs (eg they may be more likely to achieve or fail in their goals, depending on choices made).

I prefer the player choices to have consequence as well, but if the players want a quiet vacation and make the effort to achieve it, so be it. Sometimes a quiet time is just a quiet time.

Other times the choices the group didn't follow will have consequence. They may not find anything during their outing, but their absence from other scenes can allow forces to advance their agendas.

 

[Hussar]

What I would want to add to this, is that I prefer every choice by the players nevertheless to produce interesting game play. I don't think that this robs those choices of meaning, because interesting game play can nevertheless be producing meaningfully different outcomes for the PCs (eg they may be more likely to achieve or fail in their goals, depending on choices made).

This is the point I was trying to make, but Pemerton made it better than I could. I really need to refresh my writing skills.

The Shaman - I do entirely agree that pacing is important, and you do need peaks and valleys. But, I've seen way, way too many games where a valley becomes this vast plain of nothing interspersed by all too infrequent hillocks of action.

And, really, this is why I tend to be leery of sandboxes. When the players have very large numbers of choices, it can lead to analysis paralysis or, possibly worse, campaign by committee where the group always does the choice that is least resisted by the players as a group. Then again, if Celebrim is correct, and you're only dealing with two players, this is a non-issue. In a larger group, say five or six players, this can become problematic.

Not that you can't overcome the problem - splitting the party comes to mind immediately - but it's still a problem.

So, yes, if the player chooses to do X and X leads to three hours of stomping around empty rooms, then the DM needs to get it in gear and have something blow up.

 

[Janx]

I come pretty close to being a counter-example. When I prepare encounters they are - whether combat or non-combat - level appropriate (within the 4e encounter design parameters). If the PCs head in a direction I hadn't anticipated/prepared, the encounters will likewise be level-appropriate.

Part of what facilitates this is that in my game the gameworld entities (NPCs, traps, mountain-climbing DCs etc) don't have mechanical expression until I build the encounter, and I'm happy to mechanically revise encounters up until I actually run them.

Not all games can be GMed like this (eg in Rolemaster, entities clearly do have a pre-encounter mechanical expression, because their mechanical expression is part of what defines their nature and capabilities within the gameworld). The fact that 4e can be run in this way is part of what I like about it.

And there's nothing wrong with your way, as I enjoy playing Oblivion when I don't meta-game it for that aspect.

However, I bet you do have level variance in your game. The BBEG is probably a few CRs higher than the party. An early encounter is probably a few CRs lighter than the party. The super powerful wizard in the tower yonder is probably much higher level than the party. So is the king. You may not have stats for them, but if the party went and talked to them, and more importantly interacted with them in a way that the stats mattered, you'd know if the NPC was higher or lower level than the party.

As opposed to the literal extreme that every encounter level equals the party level, and every NPC's level equals the party's level (how would they ever find a wizard to enchant their stuff?)

I don't give much thought to making NPCs and encounter areas that the PCs aren't supposed to find. Or to say, stuff that's way out of their league. I'll use random encounter tables to fluff out my adventure content (I pre-roll random encounters as part of my construction stage, so i don't have to pause the game to roll and look up stuff because that's how I forget to use a monster's powers that I just read the stats for). A lot of times I use the random encounter results to generate what I think the story will be about. Basically making something up to justify the results I got. Sort of like what Shaman does with his NPC thing, but I do it ahead of time.

If I name-drop something more powerful, the PCs aren't going to randomly run into it just so I get a chance to wipe them out. If the PCs actively seek out something that I had planned to be high level, I'll start dropping clues that it's too tough before they get there. I suppose when they get there, I have a choice on whether its even home, combative, or talkative. Giving the PCs one last chance to not get killed. I only recall one time long ago where a PC actually got hostile with a high level NPC, and that was a glitch of the player was an idiot, and I shouldn't have been using high level villains in a social situation.

Most of the time, my players sense the danger, keep it social, or avoid conflict (run away, there's a dragon in there). Wasn't that the point of having higher level stuff, to teach them to do that? Unless a DM is gleefully hoping the PCs don't get the hint and get themselves killed which kacks your campaign.

If your players aren't stupid, and the GM is correctly conveying danger indicators, then no over-kill TPK can occur, thus making the point about having higher level dangers in your world be a moot point and you might as well just stick to the business of building game content in the style that you and your players enjoy and not fret whether pemerton's monsters are always the same level as the party.

I think my point is, game elements like higher level areas that the PCs would get killed in, for the sake of teaching the players to avoid, ends up being unused if the players already learned the lesson. Thats not to invalidate situations where players are out of their league and THINK their way to success. But thinking that your campaign has to have high level danger areas when your campaign is currently low level, just to qualify for some golden "seal of sandbox approval" is wasted design effort. You can just as easily justify revealing higher level areas when they're more feasible to encounter, thus saving yourself some work and still have the fun and respect of your players.

 

[pemerton]

However, I bet you do have level variance in your game. The BBEG is probably a few CRs higher than the party.

Like I said, I follow the 4e guidelines - so I use encounters up to level +4.

The super powerful wizard in the tower yonder is probably much higher level than the party. So is the king. You may not have stats for them, but if the party went and talked to them, and more importantly interacted with them in a way that the stats mattered, you'd know if the NPC was higher or lower level than the party.

In 4e this would generally be a skill challenge - so the NPCs don't need stats, as the DCs are dependent on the level of the challenge, which I would set following the guidelines.

I think my point is, game elements like higher level areas that the PCs would get killed in, for the sake of teaching the players to avoid, ends up being unused if the players already learned the lesson.

I personally dislike this whole approach to play. Even when I use to run a sandbox (or much more sandboxy game) I didn't do this sort of thing. I was helped in that by using Rolemaster as my system - like 1st ed AD&D, Rolemaster is much less sensitive to level scaling than is a game like 4e.

I'll use random encounter tables to fluff out my adventure content

I don't use random encounters in this way.

you might as well just stick to the business of building game content in the style that you and your players enjoy and not fret whether pemerton's monsters are always the same level as the party.

<snip>

But thinking that your campaign has to have high level danger areas when your campaign is currently low level, just to qualify for some golden "seal of sandbox approval" is wasted design effort.

I don't have much trouble sticking to this plan!