What is the point of GM's notes?

[Bedrockgames]

About 1 million pages upthread I offered to instead use the phrase GM's conception. But you didn't like that either. Yet here you use exactly the same phrase with sense substituted for conception in a context in which the two are absolutely synonymous.

Again, I think if I objected we probably got our lines crossed. But the point I have been trying to make is this still falls short of describing sandbox as living world: which is the language most sandbox GMs use (and if they don't say living world, they say world in motion). The reason the distinction is important is 'playing to discover the GMs' notes and/or 'playing to discover the GM's conception' misses the motion part (which matters). If we are just focused on the notes or the conception, then that can easily describe how I might have run a game prior to encountering the 'majoring wandering encounter/they live!' advice in Feast of Goblyns. It can easily stop at: GM has map, things are marked on the map, the players effectively move through and discover things on the map, possibly having a random encounter here or there. The point of a living world is one of the things on the map can decide it doesn't like what the party is doing, go to another area, ally with creatures in that area, and work against he players, perhaps setting an ambush-----or the thing on the map could be somewhere else entirely because the map was a snapshot of 8 months ago. Again, we have language already that helps describe the campaign. Kevin Crawford speaks very clearly about the concept in Stars without Number. Other GMs have done so. I don't see why we need to relabel it 'playing to discover GM's notes'. If you want to call it 'the GM's conception' I certainly wouldn't object the same way I do to but I still think it falls short of capturing what a living world is (and if you reject living world, that is fair, I can't convince you-----but this is how many of us play and conceive of the game).

 

[Bedrockgames]

It started with you rejecting that as a description of another poster's play who - it turns out, unsurprisingly - may or may not play the same as you do.

It started out with me rejecting your language of playing to discover the GM's notes and me posting out the flaw of that language as the foundation for this thread. If you want to point to an individual post where someone who may or may not play my style agreed with you, feel free, but just because someone also plays sandbox, or even uses the living world as a description, that doesn't mean we are going to be in agreement on everything (I disagree with many sandbox GMs for example on the problem of out of character mechanics: I see that as a matter of personal preference, not a matter of something that makes it not a sandbox or not an RPG: a lot of sandbox GMs would disagree with me on that point). But most use language like living world and world in motion to describe the life that takes place in the sandbox. Most talk about the synergy that Justin Alexander mentioned in his video.

 

[Bedrockgames]

No one in the history of mainstream RPGing has ever set out to create an unbelievable world. The "our side"/"your side" phrasing is nonsense, both in this case and in general (see my previous paragraph in this post).

There are plenty of people who don't care as much about a world's internal consistency. I am not saying you don't. I am saying there is a spectrum of play where you have people who are perfectly happy to overlook believability in favor of other things, and people who are deeply invested in realism.

There are clearly two camps in this discussion (with some posters falling in a range in between). That is just obvious

 

[TwoSix]

There are plenty of people who don't care as much about a world's internal consistency. I am not saying you don't. I am saying there is a spectrum of play where you have people who are perfectly happy to overlook believability in favor of other things, and people who are deeply invested in realism.

There are clearly two camps in this discussion (with some posters falling in a range in between). That is just obvious

I think one division here is how much an individual believes that pre-prep assists in creating internal consistency. Personally, I don't think it helps much, but I've always been better at improv and weaker at prep.

 

[Maxperson]

I'll bypass Manbearcat's humour, because that's the sort of person I am, and cut to the issue of adjudication.

I'm sure the GM who made the call about duration of oxygen supply in my sci-fi convention game hadn't set out to make the game feel less real. When I had unrealistically slow planes on Byron, that wasn't deliberate either. I just didn't know much about the speed of military prop planes! (Or even civilian ones - I've just Googled and learned that a Focker Friendship goes faster than what I called in our game.) Surprisingly, but also helpfully insofar as it avoided any issues, apparently none of my players did either, not even the military history guy.

Okay, but that doesn't in any way refute what I said. You didn't know about those planes. Doesn't really matter unless you're playing with people who do. If you are, then you made it feel less realistic to them. If you aren't, it's no harm, no foul. If the DM who made the call about the oxygen was correct or more correct about the timing and it made it feel less realistic to you, that would be very strange. If he just made some sort of random call, then it has nothing to do with what I am talking about.

This drives home my point that we're not talking about "thought experiments" here. We're talking about the GM making stuff up, by reference to his/her conception of the thing which may include some stuff that's written down (ie notes). It's needless obscurantism to overlay this with metaphor such as "exploring a world" or "really existing in thought". It's stuff that someone is authoring based on whatever considerations inform those authorship decisions.

EDIT: An author extrapolating from his/her description of something to something else "that feels right" isn't a thought experiment. It's just more writing. It's not constrained by "reality" in any way beyond being constrained by the other ideas and beliefs and expectations and aspirations of the author.

Um. I wasn't talking about "thought experiments" or engaging in one. This is yet another of your Strawmen for this discussion. Please stop doing that to me.

 

[Bedrockgames]

There are complexities, though. Do you think X2 is a believable world? White Plume Mountain? Keep on the Borderlands? And of course Toon players do want a cartoony world, but I don't think anyone posting in this thread is a Toon player, and I seem to be the only poster who has played The Dying Earth and only for one session.

It all depends on how these things are run. Obviously toon is going to have you fighting with mechanics (and I haven't played it recently enough to comment on it intelligently here). But even in a less realistic system, one can strive for a worlds that feels consistent and real, with characters who move around with motivations that make sense, with events arising logically from one another, etc. It is all in the execution. Take a look at a setting like Ravenloft. I run that as living adventures but not as a sandbox living world (I just personally prefer my Ravenloft horror to be less grounded, less random, less about exploration, and more about the horror, the atmosphere, the adventures, etc). I know GMs who run it as a living world sandbox. And I know GMs who run Ravenloft as non-living world sandbox (which is probably closer to 'discover what is in the GM's notes). Other GMs focus entirely on story or something else. Obviously the foundations are important. Ravenloft as presented was much more broad stroke than say HARN, and so it is either going to take more prep to set it up for a living world type situation, or take greater extrapolation (which to be honest probably fits Ravenloft well anyways).

I think an example though is a lot of genre RPGs aren't as focused on the living world that I am talking about. They can be. I like genre. But I have been in games where the focus is on scenes, on events, and not on creating a believable world. I have also been in genre games where there is a focus on creating a believable world. But in a lot of cases the focus was the adventure not the world, or the focus was some other thing like the story among the characters (and we weren't really sweating the setting details). I think a good example here is what you hadnwave. Do you hand wave ammo? Do you hand wave other resources? Do you worry about travel times? In some games you might use hexes for instance to decide if the party or their enemy arrives somewhere first. In another you might choose based on what is more dramatically appropriate. In a living world sandbox I think you are generally more beholden to the former rather than latter.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think one division here is how much an individual believes that pre-prep assists in creating internal consistency. Personally, I don't think it helps much, but I've always been better at improv and weaker at prep.

This is one of the reasons why I reject 'playing to discover the GM's notes'. Some people are really good at having a living world function with minimal notes or prep. I had a GM who didn't prep at all but still managed to have a lot of internal consistency because he focused on the characters who were active in the setting and their relationships to one another (and he was good in presenting a world that seemed to follow real world logic: I.e. if you met a bunch of terrorists, they were not like the guys from Back to the Future but more like something out of real life with goals grounded in real world beliefs, and doing things that seemed more like what you saw on the news). It wasn't a simulation or anything. It was often very light hearted actually. But he managed to focus on the synergy I was talking about and did a very good job of tracking everything in his head that was moving around

 

[Bedrockgames]

If players in WPM want to surf doors removed from hinges down the frictionless corridor to avoid the super-tetanus pits, and one of them pulls out a first year physics text to help with the velocity and momentum calculations, is that fair game?

This sort of thing totally depends on what the group is trying to do. That isn't the level of realism I normally strive for. Like I said I establish what franchise I am in, and for what I normally run, wuxia, I don't need to bring in a real world physics book (I just want a consistent believable world and characters). But I have gamed with people who get into these sorts of things in great detail. Not pulling out a physics book, but having very high expectations when it comes to things like how trade operates in a particular culture and time (even if we are using an analogue). In those instances I have always been happy to do my research to help meet that expectation. I hate sailing. I hate water. I don't normally think about boats much. But I had a player who kept asking me all kinds of details about the ships whenever they traveled in my Rome campaign (he was very particular about cargo capacity as I recall), so I boned up on ancient ships (found a great history book on the subject and some articles) and started catering more to those kinds of expectations. Normally this is not a level of detail I'd be overly concerned with, but it mattered to this player and he didn't make a stink about it (he understood I didn't know much about ancient ship cargo capacities---but I think he appreciated me taking some time to bring the campaign up to speed in that respect). That said, if he were in my wuxia campaign, there is so much more to focus on in terms of tracking martial arts manuals, techniques, etc, I would probably have said 'we can just hand wave that kind of thing or arbitrarily select something.

 

[Bedrockgames]

This is such a weird rebuttal.


Although I do think negatively about mystifying the GM's role, I don't necessarily think of my point here as negative or con-artistry; however, I do certainly believe that it's illusory. The point is that it's illustrative of how the GM operates as a medium between the players and the "world beyond."

I thought it was a perfectly valid distinction to draw. I do understand what you mean now. But one thing points to an entity that has a very debatable existence in reality (and if it does, is supposed to exist outside the GMs mind), the other points to something that exists as a thought in the GMs mind. One is the world beyond. The other the world inside.

 

[Bedrockgames]

In my Classic Traveller game we needed to decide how long it would take the PCs to drill and blast through 4 km of ice with a triple beam laser. The time mattered because it generates resource costs - especially fuel and salaries - and it also matters to what else might happen in the rest of the galaxy (the "living, breathing" world). As a group we Googled some stuff (published papers on using lasers to melt ice) and reached a consensus. Do you have any objection to that procedure? Is it is distinctive of "my side"? And what, if anything, does it tell us about the use of the GM's notes in play?

No objection to it. It is something that might happen in a living world sandbox (if that level of realism is important). I have certainly looked up things like that when running my games. I think it tells us that, in a living world at least, it isn't simply playing to discover what is in the GM's notes (as information on the internet is not GMs notes and the information was just being used to help resolve a situation---not as an end in itself). I don't know what it says about your style of running traveller. For all I know you run traveller as a living world.