D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Micah Sweet]

Does this then not explain why I find the "TRUST TRUST TRUST TRUST" response so infuriating, especially when it's presented in the "sucks to be a socially stunted weirdo!" form?

Because I'm really not much interested in playing Mao. But if I'm to take this response seriously, that's what you're telling me I need to do in order to play in a game like this!

Like I said, I think a lot of GMs make decisions based on what makes sense to them and what the social contract at their table will allow, and that's about it. No more specific and "hard line" heuristic, just their own judgement at the time.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Bolded bit: Uh....no?

It can also be a different thing.

A thing where the GM gives the players a platform in which to tell THEIR story, not by the grossly insulting phrase people around here love to use (the whole "willing a tower into existence" thing or other base canards), but by putting the PC in the protagonism hot seat, throwing a threat at them, and finding out what the player chooses to do about it.

The thing you describe is only true if you presume that all story is fully prewritten. That is not true. There are two other kinds of story: that which arises purely from retrospective analysis (which is very very much what old-school D&D is about--your story is never preplanned and never experienced in-the-moment, it is only a story when you reflect back upon it), or that which arises in the moment of play.

These three things are referred to as Story Before (fully prewritten), Story After (fully post-mortem, as it were), and Story Now (story happening in the moment) in Forge circles and the like. I know some people are really hostile to any form of jargon, but this jargon is quite useful in this specific context, because it emphasizes that there are multiple different ways that "story" can come about--and two of those ways have nothing to do with the GM enforcing their unpublished novel on the players.


Nor does a storytelling game require that the GM is "telling the players a story".

It can, instead, be that the GM and the players are collectively telling a story, through the act of play. Hence: play to find out what happens. The story arrives as we play it, not before, not after. (Though obviously you can still record and remember a story that arrived as you played it.)

I'm good with Story After, but I prefer not to muck around with the other two if I can help it.

 

[robertsconley]

Everyone is the hero of their own story. Every location is the place where stories play out. And when you are making these things with thought to the things that are relevant to the PCs and their interests, you are most definitely considering those PCs' stories, and what would interact with that story.

Always viewed it more as acting as my players’ travel agent, with the wrinkle that if a location isn’t detailed in my notes, I flesh it out as needed.

The test, in my view, is this: can your style support running a campaign where the players tell you nothing about their goals, motivations, or backstories? The only information they provide is, “We want to start here,” such as London or the City State, along with what their class or skillset is.

I can run a campaign that way. I don’t usually recommend it, because in my experience, if players don’t have an initial context or a meaningful background, they often flounder. Not always, but often. They may not know what to do or what to care about.

That said, there are a fair number of players who are proactive and want to engage with the world as a complete unknown. For them, a general overview of London or the City State is enough to get started.

For example in the Zakhar City State campaign, one of my players, Joe, created a character named Max. He didn’t give me any background, just said Max was a thug (a rogue class) with a few particular skills and that he liked hanging out in bars. That was it. He said and I quote “I don’t do backstories I like to just start and discover things for myself”. So that how it started with him in the campaign

And to be very clear: the fact that I can run a campaign like this doesn’t make my Living World sandbox inherently better. It may be more flexible, but I’ve also seen huge benefits from even a minimal initial context. So I don’t see this flexibility as a compelling advantage. But it does allow me to accommodate players like Joe.

This also highlight a fundamental difference with my Living World sandbox campaign. It is to their benefit that many RPGs are designed specifically to build around characters’ backstories, beliefs, and arcs from the outset. Because of that design, they naturally avoid the problems that can arise when players lack direction early on. It’s a different strength, and one that works well when that kind of collaboration is the point.

 

[AlViking]

I was not. I was referring to the DM. I usually use "she" for that (since DMs "traditionally" are men, this makes it stand out), but I chose to use the completely gender-neutral term instead.


Okay. Then to clarify: How did you establish NPCs and factions and history of the world? How did you "have a general knowledge" of these things? How do you make these things up on the fly? I am only asking three questions to point to the "okay, you have this knowledge. How do you have it?" I don't expect individual answers to each question.

For my main campaign setting the history of the world has grown over time. Long ago in a century far, far away I came up with a basic structure. A lost golden age, long age of darkness, the "modern" period of about a thousand years. That way I had forgotten gods, artifacts that can't be recreated, the occasional truly ancient dungeon. I have a calendar that covers big events for the past thousand or so years with major events, I occasionally add to this. Then comes the history of campaigns which I make note of major events. I also have a list of regions, major events, cities, anything from a few lines about the region to a few paragraphs.

After reviewing notes on the history of the region I came up with factions and ideas I thought would be interesting and give me options for games at different levels of play. Political structures vary but there will always be power brokers with some good, some evil, most pretty neutral. I develop a very high level list of important people with more detail added to NPCs that will be in the sphere of influence of the characters. Same with obstacles and opportunities. I sketch out a few very high level things, mostly focus on options for the character's current sphere of influence.

What I am not doing is planning out specific story arcs or exactly what faction will do what when. I know what their goals are but things change as the campaign proceeds things change and are adjusted based on player decisions and interests.

As far as making things up on the fly, I know where the NPC's heads are at. While I've never really analyzed it, there are only so many NPC tropes. There's the scoundrel who's deep down a decent fellow, the idealistic kid who's a bit delusional, the aging wise man perhaps a bit tired of it all but can act as mentor/sponsor. Then there's the villains, the obedient lackey the heroes run from early on, the mysterious evil politician lurking in the background. Throw in some comic relief like the cowardly non combatant and his sidekick who secretly knows more than they let on and can only speak in whistles and beeps but everybody still understands them. Typical stuff.

Okay. How do you make those decisions? What makes some decisions more likely and others less likely, beyond just "context"--e.g., what is your decision-process for taking inputs from context and turning them into behavior outputs?

It's always my decisions, sometimes I roll dice if I'm uncertain. It's grounded in lore that's been established and follows from faction or individual goals and morality. Quite frequently I'll review high level notes that haven't been established as fact and think about how things may have to be adjusted based on campaign events. I try to make NPCs as consistent as possible, even if that means that the secret spy continues to pretend to be an ally and some behavior may seem to be erratic because of things the players don't know yet.

How do you generate such "high-level ideas of" various things?


Okay. This now leads to an incredibly important distinction: How would you know whether a GM was doing that or not? If vast, vast swathes of the world are hidden in the black box--the history of the world is mostly unknown to the players, the factions are only superficially known, locations, emotions, politics, etc., etc., etc., so much is kept inside the black box of your notes--how can you tell the difference between someone who's really good at improvising on the fly, and someone who's simply pretty decent at having notes and not wildly breaking from them?

Sometimes you can tell, sometimes you can't. When I can tell that people are just making things up on the fly it shows up as every single NPC being incredibly shallow, there being inconsistencies in story or NPCs do things simply to move the plot along. My wife and I occasionally complain about decisions made by characters on TV shows that make no sense for the established characteristics previously portrayed, things that happen because the plot demands it. If NPCs do things because the plot demands it, it's usually pretty obvious.

Long term though I don't see why it matters. If the world feels like it's responding to our actions, if NPCs are consistently portrayed (or when they aren't consistent there's a good reason), if the world is interesting and engaging I don't care how the sausage was made. The real world is a black box and all I see is the results so I don't see why I would expect anything different in a fantasy world.

 

[zakael19]

I don't think anybody in this thread has stood up and said "I consider myself to be a storyteller as GM," with the exception of "I have run AP style railroads in the past/present aware of what that style of play requires or expects." I pretty much figured this entire thread for ~500 pages or more has been people arguing about just how much their specific preferred style of play does not allow for GM Storytime.

 

[Campbell]

From a practical standpoint, I don't really start play not knowing much about the characters. Most of the trad games I play/run tend to fall more into elaborate backgrounds where you need a session just to create characters together.

A lot of the Narrativist games I have run in the past do start with very little character level premise. Dogs in the Vineyard, Blades in the Dark, Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts do not do much in the way of setting things up. So, during the early portions of the game it's on the GM to frame scenes that help us discover the characters' individual premises. It's part of an ongoing process in all Narrativist play to have scenes where we first establish stakes and then to have scenes where we resolve those. The way this often looks are in character conversations with people close to the characters, situations that invite characters to take a moral stand or not to, it's putting NPCs between different player characters. The whole process is about getting to the questions and then answering them. If there is no initial premise to a character, then we find out what it is.

That's the essential difference. There is no free exploration. Even when it looks like that, we are approaching play with the intention of establishing a question to be answered. We are proceeding with intention.

But yeah, in Apocalypse World or Monsterhearts we don't really know what the characters' intentions are until we explore it in play. But the character is never a vehicle for exploration of setting. Setting is always a vehicle for exploration of these player characters. Because that is the intention which we approach play from.

 

[AlViking]

Always viewed it more as acting as my players’ travel agent, with the wrinkle that if a location isn’t detailed in my notes, I flesh it out as needed.

The test, in my view, is this: can your style support running a campaign where the players tell you nothing about their goals, motivations, or backstories? The only information they provide is, “We want to start here,” such as London or the City State, along with what their class or skillset is.

I can run a campaign that way. I don’t usually recommend it, because in my experience, if players don’t have an initial context or a meaningful background, they often flounder. Not always, but often. They may not know what to do or what to care about.

That said, there are a fair number of players who are proactive and want to engage with the world as a complete unknown. For them, a general overview of London or the City State is enough to get started.

For example in the Zakhar City State campaign, one of my players, Joe, created a character named Max. He didn’t give me any background, just said Max was a thug (a rogue class) with a few particular skills and that he liked hanging out in bars. That was it. He said and I quote “I don’t do backstories I like to just start and discover things for myself”. So that how it started with him in the campaign

And to be very clear: the fact that I can run a campaign like this doesn’t make my Living World sandbox inherently better. It may be more flexible, but I’ve also seen huge benefits from even a minimal initial context. So I don’t see this flexibility as a compelling advantage. But it does allow me to accommodate players like Joe.

This also highlight a fundamental difference with my Living World sandbox campaign. It is to their benefit that many RPGs are designed specifically to build around characters’ backstories, beliefs, and arcs from the outset. Because of that design, they naturally avoid the problems that can arise when players lack direction early on. It’s a different strength, and one that works well when that kind of collaboration is the point.

I admit that sometimes I have a more in-depth background and other times it's about as deep as a mud puddle. For my players? Many of them just don't care about character development or growth. It's just not something that they value. That doesn't mean they aren't proactive, they get engaged in the story and we can have long term campaigns.

In the same way I don't have any particular preplanned story I'm not concerned as GM with character growth or development as a goal of the game. My only goal with games I run is to have interesting options for the players and for them to drive the direction of the campaign. I provide the sand, the toys and we've discussed the box it's all played in and I just let them do what they want. Doesn't mean that other approaches are bad or wrong. With some people I do see character growth and change, for others they just want to play action heroes for a few hours.

 

[robertsconley]

But yeah, in Apocalypse World or Monsterhearts we don't really know what the characters' intentions are until we explore it in play. But the character is never a vehicle for exploration of setting. Setting is always a vehicle for exploration of these player characters. Because that is the intention which we approach play from.

Looks like a good approach to me.

One further detail about Joe and his character Max is that after the campaign’s he never got into who he was and what he was about. Outside of working with the group he was always talking to NPCs and building up a web of contacts and collecting rumors. Basically exploring the social web of NPCs involved with the taverns and inns in that quarter of City State. But who was Max as a person? Nobody could say other than it was Joe in City State with the abilities of a thug taking on the name of Max

 

[JConstantine]

I am reminded of this from Baker:

Imagine Thatcher's London. Imagine a person in Thatcher's London who has everything to lose.​

​

That's a character. That's a whole, playable, complete character. If I ask you to speak in that character's voice, you can; if I present some threat or challenge, you can tell me easily how that character will react; if I describe a morning and ask you what that character will do in it, you'll know. Take ten minutes to think and that character's as real as can be.​

I realise this is besides the point of your post, but stuff like that is why I cannot take Baker seriously. That's not a character. It's an American stereotype waiting to happen. Are they working class, middle class, or nobility? Because Britain has a class system that permeates everything in a way the US cannot comprehend. A working-class black woman in Brixton "who has everything to lose" is going to have a different voice (I'm assuming "voice" here is both literal and metaphorical, i.e. identity), react differently, and have a different morning compared to a middle-class white man in Hampstead, never mind a peer. (Even that's ignoring all the little idiosyncrasies of a real person.) And "Thatcher's London" is such a gross Americanism that simply doesn't transfer across the pond. Best case scenario, Baker is woefully ignorant of London specifically, and Britain more generally; worst case, he's an absolute cretin.

* The GM's indifference to the personal goals or motivations of the PCs. This is completely different from an approach where the GM is expected to respond to those aspects of the character in framing scenes, thinking about consequences and so on.

To me, this is goes back to what I said in my very first post about simulationism. It's not strictly necessary for a campaign to be a sandbox.

* The focus on "the facts of the setting necessary to realise those goals and motivations" - that is, a focus on the setting as a source of obstacles to be overcome, or resources to be deployed, with a resulting problem-solving or "instrumental"/"operational" orientation to play. This sort of orientation goes all the way back to classic D&D play.

"Setting as a source of obstacles" seems to me to be more a result of fantasy typically being about action-adventure, so referring back to goals/priorities section of my first post, would likely fall under genre conceits as an adjudication consideration. The "problem-solving orientation" would be a gamist-leaning playstyle. Again, not really inherent of a sandbox.

 

[Faolyn]

I don't think the kind of explanations traditional GMs are likely to offer will be unsatisfying to @EzekielRaiden .

If I'm wrong about this, I am happy to discuss it.

I just think it’s weird. Even the worst GMs I’ve had in the past—the antagonistic ones, the one who was cool with sexual harassment, the one who tried to run worst railroad I’ve ever seen—none of them were “you must trust me!” Like, at all. And the people I play with now? Definitely not. I just find it hard to believe that I’ve somehow managed to snag the only GMs who don’t demand unfailing player trust without earning it.