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

[Enrahim]

That the conflict may be addressed in different ways does not mean there is no conflict.

But if you think I am talking about ways to address a conflict, you are misreading me.

I will try to bring in another illustration to clarify my point. Imagine you are playing a complete railroad. The DM has prepared an chain of combat encounters and just narrates what is happening in between before calling "roll initiative". Suddenly one week that DM has excessive amounts of time for prep, so not knowing what else to do with it the DM prepares a branch! At game night the DM at the end of a combat lays out two options for the players to pursue.

In this backdrop the added preperation has clearly increased player agency. It would not be right to say we have adressed the conflict, as it is the preperation itself that lead to the increased agency.

This is why I say the baseline situation matters. You cannot run a living world sandbox without a living world. So with this established, is there prep that can be done that do not just not conflict with player agency but actually enhance it? If so I do not see how you in general can claim a conflict between prep and player agency in this context. If you do not think there is any such prep, that is clearly a quite extraordinary claim given the number of people that have tried to provide examples of what they think qualifies as such prep.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I agree that having to prep maps is annoying, I almost never have predrawn maps for encounters because I don't know when, where or how combat will start much of the time. After a while I had enough generic maps to just drop people in whichever one was close helped. I just don't see how that relates to the discussion.

Well, what if you needed far more specific maps? What if you or your players were not satisfied seeing the same maps again and again? How do you come up with a very specific map if the need for it came from the players going off in a direction you didn't expect and so haven't prepared for?

That's the conflict right there.

That you settle for generic maps, or someone else may just run the game in theater of the mind is a way of addressing the conflict.

A sandbox just means the players make decisions that can change the direction of the game, that there's no predetermined outcome. If they've told me that next session they intend to raid Castle Doom, I'll figure out some details for it. How they get past the guards, if they find an alternate way in, if they decide that Castle Doom was too scary and they decide to go to Castle Funtimes instead, it's up to them. If they do the latter I'll likely be doing a lot of improv and the game may not be as smooth

Just highlighting this as well because this speaks to the conflict between prep and agency.

but I'll deal with it. Depending on the potential encounters I had planned for Castle Doom and if Castle Funtimes is inhabited by similar monsters/NPCs I may be able to reuse some planned encounters while modifying descriptions, motivations and a few names here and there. For example both could have guards but in Castle Doom they're typical henchmen in black and in Castle Funtimes they're clowns that instead of using javelins are throwing acid-laced pies. But in both cases the stats are close enough so with a minor tweak I reuse the planned combat encounter. Doesn't happen often but it is something I've done in the past.

Pretty quantum-castle to me. I know a lot of folks who would flip out about this.

So I see no conflict, I can't help it if you do but then you're not speaking for everyone.

Your examples pointed out several areas of potential conflict.

 

[Umbran]

The question always comes to (for me): what happens when you run out of social hit points?

In Dresden Files, if you cannot absorb Stress from a Social source, you are Taken Out, just like any other stress. And, whoever took you out gets to narrate what that means.

In general, it should narratively mean that you lose all social standing - it can be no friends, no money, no support structure. The local cops want to arrest you, and everyone else thinks you are such a scumbag that they won't intervene on your behalf. Getting Taken Out by Social stress can mean you die alone and ignored on a cold winter's night in a back alley somewhere, or the like.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Read the bits I quoted from the 5e DMG from 2014. Those to me define Encounter in the way I think is relevant to the discussion, and they also very much support the idea of GM as storyteller.

Would you disagree with that assessment of the bits from the DMG I quoted?

Before I answer that are you saying all encounters or just planned encounters ?

 

[AnotherGuy]

As for Apocalypse World it's not a single path to proper play. It's a different structure of play than what you are used to but there are tons of stylistic differences when it comes to stuff like which principles are prioritized in what order, do we walk or run towards conflict, sorts of conflicts, our approach to periphery moves, etc. My approach to running the game is very different from my best friend's. Both fit within the conventions of play.

You are free to feel that play that is built off of premise is highly specific, but the inside baseball of this stuff goes pretty damn deep.

That's interesting. Can you please give us a quick example of any one of those (bolded areas) in terms of how you would run a situation and what your friend would do so we get an idea of the depth you're speaking of?

 

[Micah Sweet]

What?

Aren't divided as such, not are. Mistyped.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well yes... I have a hard time believing that living on any other planet would be better than Earth.

Please clarify whatever kind of so clever point you're trying to make here, and please support it.

 

[hawkeyefan]

But if you think I am talking about ways to address a conflict, you are misreading me.

I was explaining that I am not insisting that prep always takes away agency. Just that there's a conflict there.

I'm not saying that improv always results in agency. That's not a comment I made. Though I think you equating no prep to a featureless desert doesn't really work, because a GM could improvise whatever they wanted about the desert. And a GM who prepped could literally prepare a featureless desert.

I will try to bring in another illustration to clarify my point. Imagine you are playing a complete railroad. The DM has prepared an chain of combat encounters and just narrates what is happening in between before calling "roll initiative". Suddenly one week that DM has excessive amounts of time for prep, so not knowing what else to do with it the DM prepares a branch! At game night the DM at the end of a combat lays out two options for the players to pursue.

In this backdrop the added preperation has clearly increased player agency. It would not be right to say we have adressed the conflict, as it is the preperation itself that lead to the increased agency.

Maybe! Depending on if the options are actually legitimate and that the choice is not blind.

This is why I say the baseline situation matters. You cannot run a living world sandbox without a living world. So with this established, is there prep that can be done that do not just not conflict with player agency but actually enhance it? If so I do not see how you in general can claim a conflict between prep and player agency in this context. If you do not think there is any such prep, that is clearly a quite extraordinary claim given the number of people that have tried to provide examples of what they think qualifies as such prep.

Yes... again, I'm not saying that ALL PREP IS BAD or anything so extreme. I'm saying that prep and player agency are, by their very nature, somewhat at odds, and so they can conflict with one another. I would say that GMs should be aware of this and consider it when they design their games or settings... not just deny it as a possible pitfall.

 

[JConstantine]

So why does this matter? Well it means that there is a limit to your improv skill. Reseach shows us that as you approach this limit, under high cognitive load, your creativity declines. This is because the additional mental effort required for a task can overwhelm working memory, making it harder to generate or process novel ideas.

I've always found I'm able to improvise far more readily when I've done some form of prep as a scaffolding, even if none of it got touched. That research seems to explain why.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Before I answer that are you saying all encounters or just planned encounters ?

I'm not saying either of those things.

Just read the bits in italics and you have all the info you need. There's no trick here.