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

[zakael19]

So when it comes to me as a player, I will look at Doug and talk to him in-game the same way I would talk to you in-game, except I know that your character’s personality and goals are distinct from your own. Doug is still Doug with a fantasy (or sci-fi) veneer. And like your character is interested in certain things in-game, so will Doug be interested in certain things in-game. And that will factor into how I choose to roleplay as my character.

As a player and GM, I'll ask leading/provocative/trivial questions to that character. If I'm asking as a player, they might be more in-character; if it's as the GM - I'm just asking. I may toss out a handful of crystallization ideas based on whatever they've espoused as their character already (hey Paul, when you see X happen how are you feeling? Is it bringing back memories of Y?), or frame something really provocative. Or just like, trivial - color - "as you walk down the street of shops, what smell of baked goods wafts out that flashes you back to home?"

I've found that the level of group inquiry this creates, and excitement of answers as we all build on each other leads people to push further on their own. I think a lot of players have maybe just not had a DM or table that was genuinely interested in what they had to offer creatively.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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?

I'll just provide my observations on this when we played. Yes, the game can be very 'immediate' in character, when you are on a score. But remember, there's a whole Down Time, with Entanglements, possibly Incarceration, the question of managing your Vice, and then the biggie, the dozen ticking clocks you gotta consider. Beyond that, you're planning for retirement, trying to deal with reputation, heat, etc. as well as your actual character's training and projects. So there's a big strategic aspect to the game as well. You cannot survive in Doskvol simply by crashing from one scene to the next in crisis mode. You'll have 4 wars and a bajillion enemies and be crushed.

As for the long-term... I think it would be pretty feasible to do this using Troupe Play. That is, don't consider the current crop of PCs as the entirety of the crew forever. Eventually (I'd say roughly 30-40 sessions in) the PCs are going to be hitting tier 5. The game kinda stops really working well after that point. Your resources are serious, you are getting really hard to kill, you've got half the attribute tracks at 5 pips, and a dozen special abilities, powerful equipment, etc. You CAN still be offed, there are things that you simply cannot really fight, like the Army.

But, your crew has assets and minions and gangs, etc. Many of these will, IME, be pretty well fleshed out NPCs. In our game, had we been minded to continue, it would have been easy to simply assume that the Orphanage and the Sister who ran it, just went on about their business, and all the little blind orphans that Takeo trained, plus some other NPCs, would have just carried on when the main characters literally rode off into the sunset (well, Takeo did anyway). At that point you just assume that a lot of the assets are seized by the Bluecoats, other gangs, etc. The crew is back at tier 1, maybe with a few extra resources and definitely a history in the setting. You could do this almost indefinitely.

As for 'leaving the home base', the game does provide a moderate amount of detail about some other areas of the islands. There are other towns, etc. Some of it is part of the 'Empire', you can go there by ferry and/or lightning rail. Our characters did go out into the death lands a bit. There's plenty of ways to do that, and some reasons you might want to are given. None of the other towns/cities are really detailed though. One presumes, due to the conditions in the world at large, that there's not a ton of difference between cities. They are all points of dirty flickering light in a vast dark ruined world. Obviously that's open to being discovered though.

 

[Hussar]

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

None.

A GM is always a story teller. I just don't understand the resistance to calling what we do as DM/GM's story telling. Well, that's not true. I do understand. It's an attempt to try to differentiate different play styles by claiming differences that don't actually exist. To me, sandbox=player freedom to choose the direction of the campaign. Nothing else really matters. The rest is all just trying to mystify the procedure.

The degree to which a campaign might be considered sandboxing will vary on the degree of freedom the players have. And there are all sorts of different sandboxes and approaches to creating them.

But at no point are DM's, particularly in any sort of traditional RPG, not a storyteller. You cannot avoid it. When the DM/GM is creating virtually every single thing in the game world, plus motivations, conflicts and whatnot, there is no way for a DM not to be a story teller.

 

[Hussar]

Think of it the way Tolkien wrote the appendices for The Return of the King: lore, not plot.

Lore IS plot. There is no difference here.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This seems like a significant distinction between the different styles of play.

To be clear, it is not a downside. To me, it looks to be a consequence of focusing on player-first,, and the fact that many of these RPGs go for a prep-light build, it's a you-go character-centric approach.

On the traditional side,, Shadowdark is well known for its prep-light approach.

I think the real reason for it is simply that you begin to tap out a specific character concept at a certain point. You don't NEED or WANT 100 incidents of various issues surrounding your character's relationship with his parents to play out. LONG before that, you will have come to conclusions on all of that. Yeah, you can play the equivalent of a Soap Opera and go on forever, but I'd also point out that Soap Opera characters are notoriously shallow and wishy-washy. It is better to just cut to the chase. It is nice to build up and flesh things out enough for it to come to life, and that can take a while. But fundamentally a single PC is not THAT durable. D&D can get away with it through the nature of its leveling mechanisms and the fact that the game is all about amassing power and doing stuff with it, which can be drawn out as much as you want.

 

[Hussar]

But the kind of prep we're talking about here isn't, "These bandits will be attacking this caravan when the PCs arrive on scene."

It is instead, "This is a caravan route, and there are bandits that prey on some of the caravans." One of the most likely way this will actually impact play is via a random encounter with bandits.

Ok. Let's walk through this.

Who created the caravan route?

Who creates the caravans that ply this route?

Who created the bandits on this route?

Who decided that the bandits are attacking caravans on this route?

EVERY single element is created by the DM. Plot, setting and character. Every single element. Now, where this is a sandbox is that the players have the choice to interact with this particular story or not. They could choose to walk away. What makes it non-linear (which is different from sandbox) is that the players can choose how they interact with the bandits. They could choose to oppose them, join them, or perhaps something else entirely.

But, again, at no point in this is the DM not the story teller here. When the players inform the DM how they choose to interact, the DM then authors the next chapter - how do the bandits react to whatever it is the players chose to do? That's 100% defined by the DM. And that choice will always be colored by the fact that we're playing a game and the DM will want to make the game interesting. It would be an extremely rare DM who would decide that the bandits just leave quietly because the PC's show up and ask them to after all. So, the DM brings the challenge based on whatever the players decide that their goals are. That's what DM's are supposed to do. Players then react to that challenge and the DM creates the next challenge. So on and so forth.

Your insistence on a "random encounter" is a red herring. It doesn't matter how the story is brought to the table.

 

[robertsconley]

So, once I was dragged off on an adventure related to the other characters, that was that, it was decreed that my henchmen, acting with monumental foolishness, released a terrible monster which immediately took over all my stuff and undid all of that work.

I ran a modified Phandelver adventure myself, and it sounds like the castle in question is Cragmaw Castle.

But I am going to disagree. It's not a problem of plausibility and logic. Why?

Because even with only your side of the story, there are too many butterflies who were flapping their wings just so for the chain of events to occur as they did. If it were a plausible outcome, you would have felt the breeze of one or more of them before you left adventuring and thus have been able to account for it in your preparation before you left.

This was a case of simple bad refereeing. And based on my experience with organized gaming, it probably started with an idea for a "cool plot" involving your castle, which was retroactively justified to make sense.

One of the hard and fast rules I follow in my campaigns is no retroactive justification on my part. Once the campaign starts, I will work with the framework I have. If there are any issues, I will fix them after the campaign ends, before starting a new one in the same setting.

 

[Hussar]

Let me push back a bit. I’d like to know if this would be considered a story.

View attachment 406439
/snip I'm a setting designer and referee. What happens next? That’s what the players decide. And maybe that becomes the story.

Sorry, but that timeline is 100% a story. It's the barebones story of the history of the land.

Referee=story teller. Again, obfuscation and trying to mystify the process. Call it what it is. You,me, and every single person who sits behind a DM's screen is a story teller.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Sorry, but that timeline is 100% a story. It's the barebones story of the history of the land.

Referee=story teller. Again, obfuscation and trying to mystify the process. Call it what it is. You,me, and every single person who sits behind a DM's screen is a story teller.

All you are doing is in insisting and not really responding to peoples points, then accusing people of obfuscation. Look you can disagree on story. That is no problem. But can you stop with the accusations?

 

[Hussar]

Yeah I don't find it mystifying at all. I get some people don't like the kind of language we use, but for me the language is very clear and it is how I come to understand the style of play.

Of course the language is clear to you. You're the one getting to define all the terms and then shoot down any terminology that might call into question your assumptions. Hey, I'd love to be able to do that too.

You get to claim that you're doing something that is different. You're sandboxing. Not just running a game, but, a special and unique kind of game that only those privileged enough to comprehend the beauty of the process can truly perform. The fact that what you're doing is pretty much exactly the same as what every other DM out there does must be challenged with obfuscation and jargon. We're not creating stories, we writing "drama". We're not deciding events based on anything so plebeian or crass as whatever the table might enjoy. No. We are basing events on the "logic of the setting". On and on and on.