Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Correct, for my part.
What I don't understand is why anyone would have a problem with this.
What is the point of GM's notes?
What I don't understand is why anyone would have a problem with this.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Yet when the player does give input, one assumes that imput has the potential to change what happens next, and-or redefine some of the parameters the algorithm is using - right? (I've never played these games, which is why I'm asking)
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Not quite true.
A player, once given enough said information, can always use that as a jumping-off point for conceiving elements of that world inside their own head; and how their PC might interact with said elements. Example: GM has mentioned a town name in passing; and between sessions you-as-player find yourself thinking about this town and in your own head filling in what's there.
This might not agree with what the GM has in mind, of course, and the GM's word is final; but to say that only the GM gets to solo-imagine things about the fictional world isn't right.
innerdude
Legend
@Bedrockgames --- I'd say there are 2 very distinct events as an RPG participant that formed my eventual dissatisfaction with "living world" play.
The most recent was in 2018, when a very good friend of mine made a valiant attempt at running a "living world" campaign using the Shaintar campaign setting for Savage Worlds. Unfortunately, his efforts were thwarted in a number of ways.
One, he didn't seem to trust himself to improv or create elements on the fly, nor adapt well. To the point where he wouldn't even create names for things himself; he literally looked up a name generator online to create names of anything that wasn't locked down by the campaign setting.
Two, while he was clearly doing some GM prep, it was all very "wrote," or generic, with almost all of his ideas based on things provided in the campaign setting. There was no imagination, no attempts to connect the characters to the greater setting, nothing.
Third, there were just general gaps in his knowledge/experience as a GM that could have improved the experience. I made a few very casual attempts to suggest some things, carefully trying to couch the language as something I was interested in seeing and doing, rather than something he wasn't doing---"Hey, I've been thinking, I think it would be cool if my character and Player X's character maybe had a connection to this guild, I think it would create some cool synergy for the group." "Hey, I really like way you framed the situation with the Kalimar Empire, what do you think about giving us some way to change how they're oppressing their people?" But he was obviously swamped just trying to keep up with all of the normal "operational overhead" of GM-ing, because he'd nod and say all the right things, but you could just see he was suffering from deer-in-the-headlights-itis trying to process it all.
And none of this is due to lack of ability. He's a senior software engineer, who largely self-taught all of this coding knowledge. He's more than capable of digesting large, complex bits of data.
The result was one of the more frustrating games I've experienced as a player. Not because it was entirely unfun, but because it had the potential to be so much more. It was very emblematic of what I suspect most "average" RPG players experience with an "average" GM, participating in an "average" fantasy campaign setting. There were bits of fun, some occasional hijinks and laughs, and while I don't regret doing it, by the end you could basically see every piece of the facade he was throwing up. You almost had to force yourself to not look behind the curtain. And it was all the more frustrating because I personally was invested in my character's backstory, and felt like there were so many hooks just waiting for him to use that just got left dangling.
Equally formative was a game I ran myself back in 2014. It was again Savage Worlds, this time in a homebrew fantasy campaign of my invention. This was a campaign I had lovingly detailed. I created my own world map in Photoshop. I outlined factions, leaders of factions, rulers of the various nation-states. Key NPCs, key organizations.
At this point in my GM career I had already started to implement "best practices" for sandboxes as I understood them --- create scenes and situations, not plots. Be open to player input. As much as possible, say yes or roll the dice. Be fans of your players, but don't let them off easy.
And for the first 8 months of the 15-month campaign, the whole group, players and myself included, were having too much fun to really worry about more than the next session ahead. It was going great. It was everything you hope a campaign to be.
But somewhere around the 9-month mark, I began noticing something that bothered me. The magic of the "living world" started to wear thin. The thrill of the players "exploring the world" wore off. Despite all my hard work, the artificiality of the construct was starting to show through the seams.
It started to feel like that challenges were ultimately being solved in one of two ways---either I had prefabricated 2-4 solutions, and the players were just supposed to figure out how to get to one of them, or I was saying "yes" to as many player suggestions as possible, and then just letting their solution stand. And it's not as if I was trying to actively thwart them, or use "secret backstory" to cut off avenues of success. Perhaps I simply wasn't giving them the right kinds of challenges, or at the right difficulty level.
But eventually it started to feel very dissatisfying. It felt like I was just pulling strings, or play was devolving into "Mother-may-I?" Occasionally I started wondering, "Would it be better to just railroad them to Scene 24, because that's what's interesting and connects to all of these other super cool things they've somehow managed to avoid or ignore?"
Looking back, I still recall the campaign fondly, but there's still this shred of unease when I reflect on it, like somehow I failed my players in getting the second half of the campaign to live up to all it could have been. And it's not that there weren't threads for the players to pull on. My goodness, there were so . . . many . . . threads. So many things they could have tugged on and ran with if they'd straight up told me, "We want to do this."
And here's the final kicker --- one of the players in the campaign was and is my undisputed best friend on planet earth. We've known each other since high school, and have maintained that friendship ever since.
He and I both share a love of theater; we both acted in plays in college. He has all the chops and know how to really dig in to a character and make it his. But yet oddly, his character was the weakest characterization in the campaign. Despite having every tool in the toolbox to really "immerse" in his character, he was by far the biggest pawn-stance player in the game. So whatever merit my "living world" sandbox had, it didn't even rise to the level of getting my best friend, who's a talented stage performer, to have an "immersive character experience."
So despite everything---all my preparation, all my loving intent, all of my best effort to run a player-facing sandbox---the experience fell short in some ways. There were many, many moments of tremendous fun and energy, but there were enough missteps, gaps, and holes in the experience that I couldn't say it was an unqualified success. A success, yes, but not an unqualified one.
Truthfully, I began to question, "What exactly am I expecting from my RPG play in the first place?" Part of me felt I roleplayed because eventually it would lead to some truly satisfying character exploration (as I outlined in this EnWorld thread early last year). But that wasn't happening. And despite the fun and early energy my "living world" had produced, by itself it wasn't able to sustain engagement in the way I was looking for.
So when I poke and prod at the construct of a "living world," it's partially coming from a perspective of dramatic tragedy---it's an ideal that simply cannot live up to the expectations I have for it. "Living world" play feels like it should be the perfect cure for making roleplaying exactly what I want it to be, but my own experience demonstrated that it was insufficient by itself.
The most recent was in 2018, when a very good friend of mine made a valiant attempt at running a "living world" campaign using the Shaintar campaign setting for Savage Worlds. Unfortunately, his efforts were thwarted in a number of ways.
One, he didn't seem to trust himself to improv or create elements on the fly, nor adapt well. To the point where he wouldn't even create names for things himself; he literally looked up a name generator online to create names of anything that wasn't locked down by the campaign setting.
Two, while he was clearly doing some GM prep, it was all very "wrote," or generic, with almost all of his ideas based on things provided in the campaign setting. There was no imagination, no attempts to connect the characters to the greater setting, nothing.
Third, there were just general gaps in his knowledge/experience as a GM that could have improved the experience. I made a few very casual attempts to suggest some things, carefully trying to couch the language as something I was interested in seeing and doing, rather than something he wasn't doing---"Hey, I've been thinking, I think it would be cool if my character and Player X's character maybe had a connection to this guild, I think it would create some cool synergy for the group." "Hey, I really like way you framed the situation with the Kalimar Empire, what do you think about giving us some way to change how they're oppressing their people?" But he was obviously swamped just trying to keep up with all of the normal "operational overhead" of GM-ing, because he'd nod and say all the right things, but you could just see he was suffering from deer-in-the-headlights-itis trying to process it all.
And none of this is due to lack of ability. He's a senior software engineer, who largely self-taught all of this coding knowledge. He's more than capable of digesting large, complex bits of data.
The result was one of the more frustrating games I've experienced as a player. Not because it was entirely unfun, but because it had the potential to be so much more. It was very emblematic of what I suspect most "average" RPG players experience with an "average" GM, participating in an "average" fantasy campaign setting. There were bits of fun, some occasional hijinks and laughs, and while I don't regret doing it, by the end you could basically see every piece of the facade he was throwing up. You almost had to force yourself to not look behind the curtain. And it was all the more frustrating because I personally was invested in my character's backstory, and felt like there were so many hooks just waiting for him to use that just got left dangling.
Equally formative was a game I ran myself back in 2014. It was again Savage Worlds, this time in a homebrew fantasy campaign of my invention. This was a campaign I had lovingly detailed. I created my own world map in Photoshop. I outlined factions, leaders of factions, rulers of the various nation-states. Key NPCs, key organizations.
At this point in my GM career I had already started to implement "best practices" for sandboxes as I understood them --- create scenes and situations, not plots. Be open to player input. As much as possible, say yes or roll the dice. Be fans of your players, but don't let them off easy.
And for the first 8 months of the 15-month campaign, the whole group, players and myself included, were having too much fun to really worry about more than the next session ahead. It was going great. It was everything you hope a campaign to be.
But somewhere around the 9-month mark, I began noticing something that bothered me. The magic of the "living world" started to wear thin. The thrill of the players "exploring the world" wore off. Despite all my hard work, the artificiality of the construct was starting to show through the seams.
It started to feel like that challenges were ultimately being solved in one of two ways---either I had prefabricated 2-4 solutions, and the players were just supposed to figure out how to get to one of them, or I was saying "yes" to as many player suggestions as possible, and then just letting their solution stand. And it's not as if I was trying to actively thwart them, or use "secret backstory" to cut off avenues of success. Perhaps I simply wasn't giving them the right kinds of challenges, or at the right difficulty level.
But eventually it started to feel very dissatisfying. It felt like I was just pulling strings, or play was devolving into "Mother-may-I?" Occasionally I started wondering, "Would it be better to just railroad them to Scene 24, because that's what's interesting and connects to all of these other super cool things they've somehow managed to avoid or ignore?"
Looking back, I still recall the campaign fondly, but there's still this shred of unease when I reflect on it, like somehow I failed my players in getting the second half of the campaign to live up to all it could have been. And it's not that there weren't threads for the players to pull on. My goodness, there were so . . . many . . . threads. So many things they could have tugged on and ran with if they'd straight up told me, "We want to do this."
And here's the final kicker --- one of the players in the campaign was and is my undisputed best friend on planet earth. We've known each other since high school, and have maintained that friendship ever since.
He and I both share a love of theater; we both acted in plays in college. He has all the chops and know how to really dig in to a character and make it his. But yet oddly, his character was the weakest characterization in the campaign. Despite having every tool in the toolbox to really "immerse" in his character, he was by far the biggest pawn-stance player in the game. So whatever merit my "living world" sandbox had, it didn't even rise to the level of getting my best friend, who's a talented stage performer, to have an "immersive character experience."
So despite everything---all my preparation, all my loving intent, all of my best effort to run a player-facing sandbox---the experience fell short in some ways. There were many, many moments of tremendous fun and energy, but there were enough missteps, gaps, and holes in the experience that I couldn't say it was an unqualified success. A success, yes, but not an unqualified one.
Truthfully, I began to question, "What exactly am I expecting from my RPG play in the first place?" Part of me felt I roleplayed because eventually it would lead to some truly satisfying character exploration (as I outlined in this EnWorld thread early last year). But that wasn't happening. And despite the fun and early energy my "living world" had produced, by itself it wasn't able to sustain engagement in the way I was looking for.
So when I poke and prod at the construct of a "living world," it's partially coming from a perspective of dramatic tragedy---it's an ideal that simply cannot live up to the expectations I have for it. "Living world" play feels like it should be the perfect cure for making roleplaying exactly what I want it to be, but my own experience demonstrated that it was insufficient by itself.
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hawkeyefan
Legend
So I think some of the confusion, or perhaps friction, in this conversation is due to the idea of a “playstyle”.
Some games....most notably D&D....have (for a number of reasons) developed multiple approaches to play. And I don’t mean of the Sandbox/Linear type, but even more just in how you GM the processes of the game. Some DMs always provide DCs, for instance, while other DMs will call for a roll without even telling the player what it is that’s being rolled. The actual rules and/or play advice over the years has either been vague in the exact application of rules, or things have changed from one edition to the next, and DMs have accumulated their preferred methods across editions.
So what you get is different groups playing the game with surprisingly different methods. Some may be pretty obvious, others can be quite subtle. But each DM or group of players can be seen to have their own style of play.
But this is not true of all RPGs.
Many RPGs have a very clearly defined process of play. Usually, the process has been designed to deliver a specific experience. These games really only have one style.
So the idea of “our style” and “your style” as it is often used in this thread doesn’t really make sense.
When I GM 5E D&D, I do so with a much stronger influence on the fiction as GM than in many games. My “notes” influence the game much more. I’d still describe it as a sandbox, because the players are free to go wherever they like and do whatever they want, and they can impact the fiction in any way that makes sense. So the players have a good deal of freedom, but that freedom is constrained by what I have in mind as GM. Yes, there is a good amount of back and forth....a lot of what I come up with takes the players’ ideas into consideration, probably much more so than most 5E play, but it’s still very much determined by the world I’ve created.
Mothership is even more GM driven. I don’t mean that the players can’t go anywhere and do whatever, but they have made PCs within that world. What happens is very much up to me as a GM. The system is very traditional in the authority it grants the GM, but it also suggests fewer rolls, which means the GM must apply his judgment very often.
With Blades in the Dark, it’s again very different. We have the sketched out setting as given in the book as a starting point. And then, I’d say play is framed not by GM Notes so much as by Player Notes. The world is shaped around the players’ characters. Everything I do as a GM has the PCs in mind. They have goals and desires and enemies and friends...and all of that is the focus of play.
The mechanics of each of these games are different. The GM authority level of each game is different. The style or play approach of each game is different. Yet each of them produce “living worlds” as the metaphor has been used in this thread.
This is why, to me, that phrase isn’t all that enlightening. Different games with different mechanics can yield that result. So then, to me, it seems you have to talk about what you do rather than what the goal is.
Some games....most notably D&D....have (for a number of reasons) developed multiple approaches to play. And I don’t mean of the Sandbox/Linear type, but even more just in how you GM the processes of the game. Some DMs always provide DCs, for instance, while other DMs will call for a roll without even telling the player what it is that’s being rolled. The actual rules and/or play advice over the years has either been vague in the exact application of rules, or things have changed from one edition to the next, and DMs have accumulated their preferred methods across editions.
So what you get is different groups playing the game with surprisingly different methods. Some may be pretty obvious, others can be quite subtle. But each DM or group of players can be seen to have their own style of play.
But this is not true of all RPGs.
Many RPGs have a very clearly defined process of play. Usually, the process has been designed to deliver a specific experience. These games really only have one style.
So the idea of “our style” and “your style” as it is often used in this thread doesn’t really make sense.
When I GM 5E D&D, I do so with a much stronger influence on the fiction as GM than in many games. My “notes” influence the game much more. I’d still describe it as a sandbox, because the players are free to go wherever they like and do whatever they want, and they can impact the fiction in any way that makes sense. So the players have a good deal of freedom, but that freedom is constrained by what I have in mind as GM. Yes, there is a good amount of back and forth....a lot of what I come up with takes the players’ ideas into consideration, probably much more so than most 5E play, but it’s still very much determined by the world I’ve created.
Mothership is even more GM driven. I don’t mean that the players can’t go anywhere and do whatever, but they have made PCs within that world. What happens is very much up to me as a GM. The system is very traditional in the authority it grants the GM, but it also suggests fewer rolls, which means the GM must apply his judgment very often.
With Blades in the Dark, it’s again very different. We have the sketched out setting as given in the book as a starting point. And then, I’d say play is framed not by GM Notes so much as by Player Notes. The world is shaped around the players’ characters. Everything I do as a GM has the PCs in mind. They have goals and desires and enemies and friends...and all of that is the focus of play.
The mechanics of each of these games are different. The GM authority level of each game is different. The style or play approach of each game is different. Yet each of them produce “living worlds” as the metaphor has been used in this thread.
This is why, to me, that phrase isn’t all that enlightening. Different games with different mechanics can yield that result. So then, to me, it seems you have to talk about what you do rather than what the goal is.
Manbearcat
Legend
So this is an interesting question:
"Can a game be considered a Sandbox if it is basically 100 % Setting Solitaire and player input is relegated entirely to color/characterization?"
That would be the Z on my continuum. The volitional force that players expect to erect upon play is entirely smoke and mirrors. In order to ensure play is funneled toward interaction with particular features of the setting, the GM is deploying Force at a 100 % rate when a question of play trajectory arises.
You have the aspect of a Setting having a model run, with a lot of different parameters considered and even authentic interactions with those parameters collide (Faction A collides with Faction B with Situation C also giving expression to the collision). However, all of the interactions are player-proof. They don't have a parameter in the model run. They think they do, but its a complete illusion.
My inclination is to say that the sort of 100 % Setting Solitaire that I've depicted above with 100 % Illusionism GMing (as it pertains to player input onto the trajectory of play) is still a Sandbox. Players can interact with all the constituent parts of the Sandbox and they perceive their influence on the trajectory...its just that their perception is mistaken...its an illusion.
They can build a house, they can do the dungeon (as the dungeon is to be done), they can order pastries from the baker, make friends with the mayor, protect the merchant caravan, slay the invading force. But its all either color/characterization that doesn't impact the trajectory of play or its Railroaded Setting Solitaire.
The second paragraph took me back to @Manbearcat's post about "setting solitaire".
Re the first paragraph: I agree about the difference between causal extrapolation and introducing an element to provide adversity, perhaps as a consequence of a failed check. What I was trying to convey that methods other than that sort of GM extrapolation can still generate the verisimilitudinous sense of a world, NPCs etc acting independently of the PCs.
Right. How can both claims be true?
I confess to only reading/skimming about the first 1/4 and last 1/4 of the thread.
Thank you very much for the description and for the offer of taking questions. I think I have two:
1) So, when the DM says the Duke is out of town for three months (as either an answer or GM unwelcome truth move), where did the particular of "the Duke is out of town for three months" come from? Presumably because the DM thinks it will fill a dramatic need of the players(and I think I understand what you mean there). But it feels like there are lots of ways that the Duke being unavailable could have been done. How much of this is it being spontaneously being drawn from the mental ether that would be common to anyone who had been listening to the game, and how much of it is influenced by the particular thoughts and musings the DM might have had about where the game was going.
2) So, after the Duke is declared to be on a three month trip, is there a mechanic in the game that lets the player postulate that he returned early with some chance of success?
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
Not @Manbearcat, but I hope he doesn't mind if I offer my answers to these -- his may differ.
1) It's up to the GM, within some constraints. Usually, this won't at all be prep, because the way these games work, by the time your here, any prep you may have had is likely way out the window (or at least that's my experience), but it might be related to some prep. The GM has the authority to narrate the consequence, but, as I said, this is constrained by the game. The failure must run counter to the intent and goal of the action declaration -- if they need the Baron before a deadline that's 2 1/2 months away, the, yes, 3 months is probably required. If it's just an immediate need, the GM is free to ad lib this within the established fiction and the genre of the game. Genre is very important to these styles of games, because it provide a framework to the logic used in success and failures. If it's a game that has tropes of medieval times, for instance, travel is usually extended for nobility, so 3 months seems appropriate, genre-wise. If none of this applies, it's just up to the GM to make as hard a move as they want to.
2) No, unless lots of effort is put into it. One of the key things to approaching games like this is that successes and failures stand. You don't let players easily walk back a failure, and the GM doesn't similarly walk back player successes. If the players put together a plan to get the Baron to return early, and put effort into it, then, sure, that's something that they can do. They cannot, however, just incorporate this ask into a follow-on action declaration and expect it to flow. That the Duke is gone for 3 months is now part of established fiction, and, as such, is not up for revision without taking direct action to revise it. And, that action should not be trivial, but painful.
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