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

[Bedrockgames]

That is 100% not true.

You know, with a fair degree of certainty, what will happen when the players interact with those caravan raiders. Or, at the very least, you have a couple of pretty good ideas.

Some things you can anticipate. If I have bandits on an encounter table, it is very likely they will try to rob a party that encounters them. Even then, I don't know how it is going to go. I've had players get robbed and then try to join organizations. And I have seen players negotiate. Either way, a bandit encounter from a table, doesn't strike me as particularly planning anything in advance. But when it comes to other groups, I literally have no idea how the players are going to interact with them. I am completely uninterested in predicting what the players are going to do, and what they are going to do.

This idea that the DM is somehow wandering completely blind to possibility and is constantly surprised by the players over and over again, is just another case of trying to mystify the process. DMing is rarely all that surprising. Sure, we can all point to times where it was. But, those are the exceptions. Most of the time? The PC's put paid to the bandits and drive them off. They solve the murder in the inn. They banish the ghost in the outhouse.

I would encourage you to look at how other people GM sometimes. I don't even know if my players are going to be good or bad guys when play start. You saw the example I gave of the player who joined up with bandits. That wasn't a bandit campaign to begin with. They were a bunch of nobodies. And then he went from working with the bandit to turning him in and working with a magistrate. I think you are operating under the assumption of a group of players who are being pretty typical D&D party characters. My wuxia sandboxes aren't even typical wuxia. Typical wuxia is martial heroes using their powers to defend the weak from the strong. For me it is more about the world of eccentric characters, and you never really know how that is going to go. It is a campaign of shifting alliances and characters who often go against the grain

"Oh, I have no idea what the players will do" is put to rest by the absolute MOUNTAIN of modules out there that accurately predict what the players will do over and over and over again. Is it 100% accurate? Nope. But, it's not exactly a high risk bet to guess what your players will do.

But that is the challenge of modules. Because they are writing for anyone, not just their campaign.And there is nothing wrong with modules. I've even had some that were clear scenarios. But I have had others that are just places and people (and things in between). But there are plenty of sandbox adventures out there that aren't written predicting what players will do. Possibly you don't find these fun, and that is fair. I don't really understand your hostility though to the concept itself

 

[Bedrockgames]

"Oh, I have no idea what the players will do" is put to rest by the absolute MOUNTAIN of modules out there that accurately predict what the players will do over and over and over again. Is it 100% accurate? Nope. But, it's not exactly a high risk bet to guess what your players will do.

Even linear adventures often don't predict what the players will do. I remember I had a Ravenloft module that listed off the things the players were likely to do, in what order, and it rarely played that way for me. But you can definitely write a module that makes zero predictions of what players will do and instead simply supplies locations, people, etc

 

[JConstantine]

Please learn what logical fallacies are before involving them!

You invoked your length of participation in the hobby to imply that you were more experienced and thus your view holds more weight. That's literally a variant of the appeal to authority. Perhaps you should take your own advice.

 

[AlViking]

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?

Most surveys only cover a small fraction of the target audience. You can check out this site How many survey responses do I need to be statistically valid? | SurveyMonkey for details on accuracy but, for example if your target audience is 10,000,000 people and you want accuracy to +/- 10% you only need 100 people. Doesn't really directly correlate to what's being discussed but it's also shows that you don't need thousands of people to be a reasonable sample size for the claims being made. On the other hand I'm still not 100% sure what the argument is about or what the issue is.

 

[Hussar]

I've literally never seen the Incredibles

And yet you use the quote - If everything is X, then nothing is. So, you're using it without understanding that the whole point was it was NOT TRUE. There's a reason that the line comes from the villain of the story. Of course, that hasn't stopped geek circles from misusing the quote for years and years now.

I do talk about drama in my campaigns

Ahhh, ok. Story by any other name. But, of course, we wouldn't want to mystify the process by using confusing terminology for commonly used words, now would we?

You ask why I get up in arms about what you are doing. I'm not. What you are doing is perfectly fine and it would make for very fun games. What I get up in arms about is this constant attempt to hide what you are doing. "Oh, the events of the setting are from the logical consequences" "I don't have story, I have drama" and so forth.

No. The story of the game is sourced primarily from the DM. There's no escaping that. If there is never a murder, then there cannot be a murder mystery. If there are no bandits, then there are no bandits to oppose. The NPC's are set up for conflict with the PC's. ((Of course, not all of them, but, you understand what I mean)) Those conflicts are the plots of stories. And those stories are authored primarily by the DM because even though the players are reacting to the plots that the DM puts in front of them, the reactions to their reactions are always guided by the DM. The players might be adding to the story, but, at the end of the day, the DM is the story teller.

 

[Faolyn]

The more I follow these various posts where I can, and the differing ways people play different systems , and as Umbran says with such a limited pool doesn't give good guidance on how any table one may come across may play a sandbox vs railroad, or dnd, or BitD or PbTA, it gives me a lot of sympathy towards @EzekielRaiden position/ query, which is dont see so much as a question of trust, as much as how do I know what sort of a game I'm going to be playing with a table? If they say sandbox, what level of agency will I actually have? If playing DnD or BitD, how are they interpreting / using some of the rules? Yes session zero should help, but I begin to think one session wouldn't give enough of a steer with a new group / DM, as some things will be taken as geared, and only after playing for some time will you really know, and by then could be too late.

Can’t you ask the GM and possibly the other players these questions?

 

[Bedrockgames]

And yet you use the quote - If everything is X, then nothing is. So, you're using it without understanding that the whole point was it was NOT TRUE. There's a reason that the line comes from the villain of the story. Of course, that hasn't stopped geek circles from misusing the quote for years and years now.

Like I said I have zero interest in the incredibles. And I haven't even heard the original quote before. I've probably picked up this phrasing because I heard it applied to other things (or the incredibles are quoting something). I am not going to debate the incredibles with you because I haven't seen it and I have desire to. But I think what I said is true, if the definition of story is so expansive that anything the GM makes is a story, then the term becomes very meaningless

 

[JConstantine]

My wuxia sandboxes aren't even typical wuxia. Typical wuxia is martial heroes using their powers to defend the weak from the strong. For me it is more about the world of eccentric characters, and you never really know how that is going to go. It is a campaign of shifting alliances and characters who often go against the grain

Hey, the jianghu needs villains for the martial heroes to defeat, nothing said the players couldn't be those villains.

 

[Hussar]

If I have bandits on an encounter table, it is very likely they will try to rob a party that encounters them.

This is what is so frustrating about these conversations. Please stop rewriting the example. I wasn't talking about a random encounter. I was talking about the DM having a group of bandits in the area attacking a caravan.

 

[JConstantine]

You have created a setting, characters and plot (NPC X has Y motivations and Z will occur unless the PC's do something to change that) is, to me, acting like a story teller.

What sort of prep and how much would acceptable for you to not consider the GM a storyteller?