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

[pemerton]

• Play to watch the world unfold

<snip>

I can't really think of a better phrase for why folks choose to play such a style beyond wanting to see the changing state of the fictional space. In theory, that's the part the GM relinquishes some amount of control over, in order to permit player agency--they don't actually know what will unfold. They know the processes, but their knowledge of the inputs is merely vast, not 100% complete, as player choices are also inputs. The issue comes down, more or less, to the GM simply choosing to refrain from exerting more than a certain degree of control, control up to a point and no further

The GM doesn't know, in advance, what actions the players will declare for their PCs.

This is where the variable input comes from, as you say. But what is the heuristic that processes those inputs? It does seem to be hard to pin it down!

I just...don't really see much in the way of tools or techniques to help with doing that beyond the nigh-useless "don't be a jerk/don't play with jerks"

Part of "not being a jerk" seems to be to not gratuitously muck the players about - which seems to mean having some regard to what the players are looking for out of the game - which would seem to be "meta agency" as that has been characterised.

But "meta agency" also seems to be renounced by those who coined and have embraced the phrase. So it's confusing.

This is part of why I think that "meta agency" is a pseudo-concept. Everyone has to have some minimal regard to the fact that they are GMing for a game. A system like BW sharpens that up and focuses it to a much greater degree, and we can talk about that matter of degree; we can also talk about the extent to which having that sort of regard reduces the capacity of the GM to simply give effect to their view of the world.

Introducing ostensible taxonomic categories, like "meta agency", just gets in the way of the practical analysis.

Robertsconley has spent, quite clearly, a lot of effort on trying to work out such techniques, but unfortunately it really does seem like a lot of the end result is "I have to pass my intuitions on to you through direct teaching; they cannot be discussed in any meaningful way" which is...well, it just loops back around to the difficulties with vague handwavy terms and the idea that the only useful techniques are ones which can never be spoken about separately, nor examined afterward, only demonstrated in the moment, fleeting and ineffable, until the acolyte acquires the same intuition seemingly by revelation.

I think a big (or at least not small) component of the decision-making process is intuition.

 

[AlViking]

Back a bunch of pages, I got told in no uncertain terms that one of the strengths of sandbox games is how it can so easily adopt player input. Players want X in the game, it's easy peasy to add it in and not a problem. That was touted as one of the biggest strengths of sandbox play - how adaptable it is.

Yet, here we have a perfect test case - the player chooses "orc" as a favored enemy. Adding orcs into the setting isn't exactly a huge thing. If you goblinoids, orcs aren't really all that different. Yet, what happens in play? The player's choice is completely ignored. Straight up told, "nope".

This is the problem with all this conversation. The massively shifting goalposts any time anyone brings up anything. Sandboxing is apparently the quantum game, capable of being anything at any time to anyone.

Different people have different approaches with benefits and drawbacks to all of them. I don't build my world around the characters, other GMs may choose to do that or build a new setting for each campaign. For my campaigns I typically use one main setting that has existed for a long time because I want the players to feel like what they do can have a lasting impact because players in previous campaigns have also left their mark. That means I maintain a world that had a starting point I sketched out long ago that changed with time, a living world. Since I've never had any events that introduced orcs into the region the campaign I mentioned there were not added. Meanwhile the player had as much influence as anyone else in the party to choose what options to pursue whatever tangent they wanted. If they had convinced the group to abandon the region they started in to travel a couple thousand miles to the north to where orcs would be more likely enemies then that's the direction the campaign would have taken.

Let's suppose an alternative, that the player had chosen fiends as a favored enemy and it fit into the broad themes of the campaign we had discussed in our session 0. The campaign starts in a peaceful kingdom but there there is some kind of enemy threatening to shatter the peace. I was originally been thinking aberrations but an invasion by demons would serve a very similar purpose. I may have done that because I only have a vague outline of what's happening since it's a sandbox. I can switch from aberrations to fiends because it's the introduction of an enemy that has never existed in that region. But that wasn't the case here, there just wasn't any way I could think of that would introduce a significant number of orcs in a region.

There's more than one approach to sandbox games.

 

[AlViking]

I see what you're saying.

What I would prefer, in a conversation, would be for people to talk about the approaches they use, rather than trying to establish somewhat unhelpful abstract taxonomies of RPGing that their play falls under.

For instance, it's obvious in this thread that the posters who all describe themselves as doing "living world" sandboxing actually are quite diverse in the techniques they use. Some would do your "include Orcs" thing and others wouldn't. Some us GM hooks/prompts to make things "go", and some don't. Some think it's OK to use "that would be fun/interesting" as part of a decision-making heuristic, and some don't.

Etc.

I, and others, have said time and time again that our sandboxes are not built around the desires of specific characters. There is no contradiction even if different people will have different approaches. I see diversity as a strength not a flaw.

 

[thefutilist]

Again I don’t think there is one answer here but things like striving for impartiality, pinning down details before choices are made, letting players ‘trash the scenery’ as Rob says, playing NPCs as live players on the board with their own goals and agency,

Striving for impartiality - play to find out what happens

Pinning down details before choices are made - clocks

Letting players trash the scenery - there are no status quo's in Apocalypse World

Playing NPC's with their own goals and agency - clocks and pass decision making to NPC's

Are you sure you guys aren't playing PbtA games?

 

[AlViking]

I'm not belittling anyone's processes. I'd just like people to describe them, instead of using ellipsis and metaphor like "the world responds to what the players have their PCs do".

I mean, "simulating a realistic world" seems to just be another way of saying "making things up about a world and trying to ensure those things are realistic". Like, no one is running models of the sort that engineers, economists and other natural and social scientists use when they run actual simulations - are they?

When I create a world map I take into consideration real world weather patterns and base in on real world conditions assuming my fantasy world is close to Earth's climatic systems unless it's a purely supernatural realm. I don't put a desert in because I want a desert campaign, I put a desert in because the mountains block moisture or because the region is around the 30 degrees north or south of the equator. As far as economies and whatnot, I do try to base local economies on what would make sense which includes things like thinking about how much farmland would be needed to support a population (even if we assume magic increases crop output) something many fantasy maps ignore.

Nobody is claiming 100% realistic or completely impartial worlds. Doesn't mean we can't make that a goal and starting assumption.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

What's the statue of limitations on "let it ride"?

Contextual. But, to be more specific than that, even though it requires me to speak in generalities that may not be perfectly ironclad 100% true all of the time at every table forever? Generally "let it ride" means that no meaningful difference in the conflict occurs. Classic example: the Rogue/Thief/etc. sneaking into a guarded place, like an enemy-controlled castle.

Traditionally in D&D, this is handled in a way that tends to suck a lot. Specifically, the DM forces the Rogue(/etc.) to roll a Stealth(/etc.) check repeatedly, for every action. Often they think it necessary and reasonable, but it's truly a near-guaranteed fail. E.g. even if you have 75% chance of success, you only have about a 1 in 6 chance of passing six consecutive checks.

"Let it ride" nixes that, and helps streamline play. So: Rogue's broken into the castle, and succeeds at a Stealth check to avoid guards and scout the halls. Long as she's still doing that thing, let it ride. Don't make her roll over and over. But if she does something different, or goes somewhere with higher security, or someone else changes the situation, then you might need to roll again. (Maybe, maybe not--depends on what she does, or where she goes, or how the situation changes.)

In the end...it's context. Has the context changed, in a big enough way that what you were doing before wouldn't be enough anymore? Then a new roll may be needed. If it hasn't changed meaningfully, don't force a roll just because you think more rolls are needed--regardless of why you might feel so. And, of course, different people will think different changes are meaningful--but you should be able to express and explain what changed in a way that other reasonable people could see it as reasonable too.

 

[AlViking]

Striving for impartiality - play to find out what happens

Pinning down details before choices are made - clocks

Letting players trash the scenery - there are no status quo's in Apocalypse World

Playing NPC's with their own goals and agency - clocks and pass decision making to NPC's

Are you sure you guys aren't playing PbtA games?

There are similarities but I don't think anyone is going to confuse a roast with meatloaf just because they both have similar source inputs and are baked in an oven.

 

[SableWyvern]

Striving for impartiality - play to find out what happens

Pinning down details before choices are made - clocks

Letting players trash the scenery - there are no status quo's in Apocalypse World

Playing NPC's with their own goals and agency - clocks and pass decision making to NPC's

Are you sure you guys aren't playing PbtA games?

While some of the specific terminology comes from PbtA, most of the concepts predate Apocalypse World by a long way.

The play to find out concept was certainly seeing a lot of support in the early OSR, around the same time Apocalypse World was released, the OSR was just more likely to talk about it in the context of "emergent story". When I first read through Blades in the Dark there were plenty of concepts it took me a while to grasp, but the general idea of "play to find out" in a sandbox was a concept I was already very familiar and comfortable with.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Nobody is claiming 100% realistic or completely impartial worlds. Doesn't mean we can't make that a goal and starting assumption.

I agree that it is something you can strive for, but that striving is the cause, not anything external to yourself. There is no world. There are no mountains. There is no rain shadow. There simply isn't anything here causing your choices. Your choices are yours. It is good--excellent, even--to have principles which you try to adhere to. It is good--excellent, even--to aim for a world that is well-considered, that is self-consistent, that accounts for many questions, even those well beyond what a player might consider asking.

But not one of those things causes your decision to include or not include something in the world. You do. You cause it--you and your beliefs.

E.g., the orc thing mentioned above. I only skimmed it, so I only have the gist. But the notion I got was that you had decided it wasn't possible to integrate an idea with the decisions you had already made. But another easily could have done so--and you yourself gave an example of a way a similar thing could be done. Doesn't that show that there isn't a causative factor outside yourself? You aren't somehow bound and gagged. This is why I've said, so may times, that "realism" and "impartiality" are not and cannot be the things that motivate one choice over another, because there are many (perhaps infinitely many) options that are "realistic" and "impartial" that can be radically different from one another.

The causative factor which chooses one realistic, impartial, plausible path over another is you.

 

[Maxperson]

Great. Now I feel compelled to write up stats for the monster under the bed. My players will not be happy.
View attachment 405614

If you do that, you'll also have to write up the stats for the one in the closet and in your head. Oh, and don't forget to grip your pillow tight.