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

[zakael19]

Some questions.

Your examples here, along with numerous others I've seen re BitD and similar, seem fairly solidly rooted to the immediate "what happens next" question rather than anything longer-term.

What about the long term? Or very long term? How long can a BitD or FitD campaign reasonably expect to last, given weekly play? Is the provided setting enough to support a multi-year campaign with persistent or semi-persistent PCs? Failing that, is it on the GM to provide extra setting should the PCs decide to leave the base (which would be Duskvol in Blades) and seek their fortunes elsewhere?

While some people do play long, most games of this ilk are meant for 10-25 session play, tied to "arc" style outcomes. They are explicitly not intended for endless forever play, and tell you that directly in the guidelines.

If you want to draw your BITD game out, you focus on the Crew as the primary agent of growth and you tell the story of how it grows; rotating PCs around via troupe play or per arc (eg: maybe arc 1 is getting to Tier 2, scrappy enough to go at it with other established gangs; Arc 2 is moving beyond that; Arc 3 is pushing to T4 and ruling the underground or whatever).

 

[Lanefan]

So, appeal to authority now? Really? That's your play?

I'm not going to engage with that.

You don't answer my question about how a DM is supposed to acquire the aggregate data you say is required to draw conclusions, then when someone who has to some extent actually acquired that data points out how that data was built you dismiss it like this?

So what counts as acceptable data?

 

[zakael19]

Coming back to this, I'm curious: does this extend to, say, John Harper running BitD? For example, if both he and I were to run BitD in the exact same manner, and one that appealed to your sensibilities, and all else was equal, does Harper being the creator actually impact it significantly enough in your view?

I think it's pretty clear that even the designer of the game can take what they built and run it off in various directions as they desire, and tweaks things for the specific table they're running with (the players/character driving a lot of the setting details and goals of play after all). Baker refers to a game of Apocalypse World where the Psychic Maelstorm is something like "the power of love." Harper has run games of all sorts, from a very core-crew focus through to the weird alternate-dimension hoppers thing he eventually took into the Deep Cuts changes.

 

[Lanefan]

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?

Ideally, you'd never be able to tell the difference because there wouldn't be any. IMO a great DM is one who can seamlessly move from improvising to notes and back without missing a beat, with the players never knowing what was notes and what was improv.

It's a standard I've been trying (and nearly always failing) to meet since 1984.

 

[robertsconley]

Disregarding what it means to be player driven or not I would say that play where we are spending substantial amounts of time exploring and learning about the setting and engaged with conflicts that are external to the characters' concerns so that we can get to the points where our characters concerns are central is more focused on the GM's setting and less focused on the players' characters' concerns. That sort of play, while enjoyable for its own sake, can feel like jumping through hoops if your concerns are those sorts of personal stakes.

What if you don’t have to spend a substantial amount of time exploring or learning about the setting, yet the campaign is still managed using my Living World sandbox approach? Would that partially address the concern you're raising?

As for "conflicts that are external to the characters’ concerns," the idea that the setting has a life of its own is central to the appeal of a living world. And I think that's where we may have an irreconcilable difference in approach. However, within my own style, there’s the principle of proportionality. Yes, there are larger currents in the setting, and yes, they can eventually impact what the players want to do. But those changes usually take time to play out, often unfolding in gradual stages rather than all at once.

Meanwhile, life goes on, including for the player characters.

For example, in my Blackmarsh setting, there's a historical event called The Mountain That Fell, an asteroid rich in magic that slammed into the region, forming Smoking Bay and fracturing the surrounding land into swamps and marshes. If that had occurred during play, it would have overshadowed everything. But that’s rare.

In contrast, the City State of the Invincible Overlord civil war played out over three decades of in-game time. It had real impact, of course, but the immediate effects were sporadic and localized. Some groups of PCs chose to get involved. Others wanted no part of it, and they were able to avoid it without undermining the campaign’s integrity.

That’s what happened in the Majestic Wilderlands campaign I’ve linked before. After the events of Look Squirrel I Shot the Sheriff, the players decided to focus entirely on the threat posed by the dragon Pan Caulderax. They made a point of steering clear of anything related to the City State or the civil war, and the campaign supported that.

You raise a good point about creative spotlight. My campaigns do highlight the setting initially, it’s a scaffold the players climb, not a cage. Over time, most of my players end up shaping parts of the setting through their choices, and their concerns take center stage naturally.

 

[robertsconley]

I want to point out an inconsistency:

is the setting serving the game as a vehicle for us to engage with the concerns of the characters?

I agree with this. "Concerns of the characters" has a broad scope and can encompass many kinds of goals and motivations.

on exploring the setting or

But this phrasing, if interpreted narrowly, risks painting referee-first campaigns as having a limited scope. Exploration is only one way players can engage with the world.

In my Living World sandbox, interaction takes many forms: political intrigue, social obligations, faction dynamics, resource struggles, and more. Exploration is just one path among several. Both approaches, player-first and referee-first, can support a wide range of character goals and motivations. They structure the campaign differently.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes, that is how they are constrained. They are constrained to act as their character could.

Why? What purpose do those constraints serve?

Immersion in character.

Integrity of play.

Reduced metagaming.

Sense of mystery and-or exploration.

Each of those (and there's still more) is by itself complete justification for those constraints; in aggregate they're overwhelming.

 

[JConstantine]

I’m more interested in seeing how the players “trash” my setting on their terms. I don’t want to tell them how to do it through rules incentives.

I'm sure there's a way to marry the two, like an "XP for trashing the setting", without dictating how, though it would likely require some stringent phrasing.
Not that I'm suggesting you should, of course. Merely me musing a hypothetical.

 

[thefutilist]

@ the Narrativists


The posts by @pemerton and @Campbell pretty much sum up my thoughts on the living world matter. For fun though, I'm thinking what me and a group of Narrativists would have to do to get to the juice if we were in a living world campaign GM'd by someone akin to Robert.

The split group thing would be an issue. I'm thinking we'd have to have a shared goal that was local to a city (at least initially). Revolutionaries maybe. A cabal of Demonologists who want what's ours.

So we'd have to work with the GM to find somewhere we'd slot in.


I think the concerns for actual play would be:

Does this actually require player skill to manipulate the world, I think it does and so it might die on the vine straight off. (@pemerton called this out).

I suspect the above would be a huge issue for free roleplay IC resolution. The way people are interpreted and the reward pay off is so different that it's intractable. In one there's lots of shifting of priorities, in the other the Narrativists are going to feel it's like playing 'mother may I.' This is why pure ic resolution in Narrativist play is heavily supported by meta channel talk.

Gathering information, which requires exploration, is going to feel like a chore. Why can't we just play characters who know all this stuff so we can get to the good bits (@Campbell called this out). In so much as information gathering is a way to mitigate unforeseen catastrophes, we'd just have to let them happen because information gathering is so boring.

On that note. Would the baroque uncertainty of resolution be a problem? I suggest far less of a problem than pemerton, hawkeye or Abdul think it would be. I'm not saying it wouldn't happen, it would, but it could be fun.

 

[JConstantine]

What matters to me is where the agenda is (and how tightly we are holding on) - are we focusing on exploring the setting or is the setting serving the game as a vehicle for us to engage with the concerns of the characters?

I think it's pretty clear that even the designer of the game can take what they built and run it off in various directions as they desire, and tweaks things for the specific table they're running with

Neither of these really address what I was wondering. When including the original context:

It's just the GM has put all this prep into the setting and its NPCs and factions and events... those are going to be the major focus of play. The player characters are meant and expected to interact with the setting.

@hawkeyefan seemed to imply that any creator-as-GM is going to be focussed on bringing their creations to bare as the primary focus. And that's not the case, surely?