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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5414814" data-attributes="member: 26473">A richly-developed game-world also offers a variety of encounters for which the adventurers may or may not have appropriate skills.If you let the players decide the direction of the game, indeed put it on their shoulders to move the game forward by their in-character actions, then every game can be about the adventrers.Aren't "potentially exploitable vulnerabilities" exactly the reason you end up with this?Maybe if referees would stop going out of their way to <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> with a character's "exploitable vulnerabilities," there would be fewer orphan monks living in poverty.Okay.The snakes are present BECAUSE the screenwriter used it to set up the scene with the snakes in the temple later in the script.Again, what I like about roleplaying games are the ways in which they are not like this.This presumes that there is a "right direction" to which the adventurers must be kept.If the players decide to spend four hours hat shopping, I'm guessing it's because they find hat shopping to be a pleasureable way to play the game for four hours, because it's not something they are driven to do in any syle of gaming with which I'm familiar.An example of how a shopping trip played out during our last game-night: an adventurer wanted to purchase a small favor to give to one of two ladies who caught his eye - which one wasn't important at that moment. The player asked me, "I want to find something which would make a good gift." "How about a small satchel made of fine Flemish lace? It costs two livres," I replied. "That sounds good," he answered, and jotted it on his character sheet.Are you suggesting that in 'sandbox' play that every interaction with every person an adventurer meets must be roleplayed out as an actual conversation?Giving the players freedom to drive the action means giving the players the freedom to make mistakes, and to suffer consequences for them, such as wandering down blind alleys, or barking up the wrong tree.My feeling is that rising action isn't rising action without falling action, and that success isn't success without the possibility of failure.The players need to use all the tools at their disposal to avoid logjams of their own creation - if they feel like they're getting nowhere with something, there's probably a good reason for that, and that's a good time for them to rethink their approach. The referee needs to create a game-world in which features existing in isolation are the exception and not the rule, that a web of interconnections join people and places so that the adventurers are not forced to follow a single tenuous line of clues to find adventure. The adventurers should be surrounded by information, though that by no means suggests that all of that information is accurate, that nothing is misleading.In terms of practical, over-the-tabletop running the game, there's nothing wrong with the referee asking the players something like, "Tell me what it is you want to accomplish," instead of asking for single, discrete steps - "We need to find out if Baron de Bauchery was in town, so first we'll talk to the innkeeper at the Black Swan, and after that we'll take to the innkeeper at the Roe Deer, then . . . " becomes, "So you want to make the rounds of the local inns to find out if the Baron de Bauchery was staying in town when Princess Pinkflower disappeared? Tell me how you plan to approach this." Do they offer bribes? Do they attempt to intimidate the innkeepers? Do they present themselves as allies of the baron? Then resolve the action.This wasn't at all uncommon in roleplaying games back in the day. Searching for rumors or a patron is a week-long activity in Traveller. OD&D uses the week as the basic scale of time-keeping, with one day devoted to dungeon exploration and the rest to rest and refitting. En Garde! turns are one week long, which also uses the month and the season as units of time in resolving game-play; the month carried over from En Garde! to Flashing Blades as a standard measure for resolving campaign-level action as well. A campaign turn in Boot Hill is a week or a month at the referee's discretion. The knights in Pendragon typically have one adventure per year.When we meet next month, I'm going to ask one of the players in my game if there was anything on which he wished to follow up immediately from our last game-night; depending on what he chooses to do and how he chooses to pursue it, the action may resume where we left off, or it may jump forward a month.Shifting time-scales and action resolution is normal and expected in status quo, 'sandbox'-y settings. In my experience, 'pixel-bitching' is more common in badly-designed linear adventures.Btw, Janx, status quo doesn't mean 'nothing changes in the setting until the adventurers interact with it' - it means that the challenges in the game-world aren't scaled to the adventurers, so that if a party of first-level adventurers set off across the desert for the lair of an anicent blue dragon, the challenges of the desert environment and the dragon don't suddenly become CR 1-3.</blockquote>

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