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Respect Mah Authoritah: Thoughts on DM and Player Authority in 5e
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8437573" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>By "backstory" I am meaning background, setting, "the world" - your factions and lizardfolk in hex 23 and the like.</p><p></p><p>And when I talk about <em>prioritising</em> backstory, which I think is pretty much the essence of a sandbox, I am referring to two things:</p><p></p><p>(1) The canonical way of establishing <em>situation </em>is that the players declare an action - like moving to hex 23 - which "activates" a situation latent in the pre-authored backstory.</p><p></p><p>(2) Backstory is a significant constraint on framing and on action resolution - (1) can't work without this (2). Eg if the PCs use divination to scry on hex 23, the answer to what they find is worked out by checking the backstory; or if the PCs ask a NPC what might be found in hex 23, and persuade the NPC to tell the truth, then (i) either the pre-authored notes or some random gen method is used to work out what the NPC knows, and then that is used to provide the response that the PCs (and hence players) receive.</p><p></p><p>Ron Edwards gives an account <a href="http://adept-press.com/wordpress/wp-content/media/setting_dissection.pdf" target="_blank">here</a> of how to integrate this sort of setting with "story now" play; but it looks pretty different from typical sandboxing. I think it could be used in Apocalypse World play if all the PCs were in the same hardhold. One interesting thing he says is this: </p><p></p><p style="margin-left: 20px">embrace the fullest and most extreme rules-driven consequences of every single resolved conflict, no matter what they are. Show those consequences and treat them as the material of the moment in the very next scenes, every time. . . .</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">Games vary a lot regarding the formal consequences upon a setting, which I’ll discuss a bit later. For now, merely keep in mind that your immediate location for play was “made to be broken,” and be willing to display the stages of its breaking with every game session. If the game doesn’t have any mechanical way to express this, then do it anyway based on what’s happened so far.</p><p></p><p>I think a game played in this way is going to look different from what would normally be presented as a "living sandbox".</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 8437573, member: 42582"] By "backstory" I am meaning background, setting, "the world" - your factions and lizardfolk in hex 23 and the like. And when I talk about [I]prioritising[/I] backstory, which I think is pretty much the essence of a sandbox, I am referring to two things: (1) The canonical way of establishing [I]situation [/I]is that the players declare an action - like moving to hex 23 - which "activates" a situation latent in the pre-authored backstory. (2) Backstory is a significant constraint on framing and on action resolution - (1) can't work without this (2). Eg if the PCs use divination to scry on hex 23, the answer to what they find is worked out by checking the backstory; or if the PCs ask a NPC what might be found in hex 23, and persuade the NPC to tell the truth, then (i) either the pre-authored notes or some random gen method is used to work out what the NPC knows, and then that is used to provide the response that the PCs (and hence players) receive. Ron Edwards gives an account [url=http://adept-press.com/wordpress/wp-content/media/setting_dissection.pdf]here[/url] of how to integrate this sort of setting with "story now" play; but it looks pretty different from typical sandboxing. I think it could be used in Apocalypse World play if all the PCs were in the same hardhold. One interesting thing he says is this: [indent]embrace the fullest and most extreme rules-driven consequences of every single resolved conflict, no matter what they are. Show those consequences and treat them as the material of the moment in the very next scenes, every time. . . . Games vary a lot regarding the formal consequences upon a setting, which I’ll discuss a bit later. For now, merely keep in mind that your immediate location for play was “made to be broken,” and be willing to display the stages of its breaking with every game session. If the game doesn’t have any mechanical way to express this, then do it anyway based on what’s happened so far.[/indent] I think a game played in this way is going to look different from what would normally be presented as a "living sandbox". [/QUOTE]
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