What is the point of GM's notes?

[Aldarc]

To a certain extent I think sometimes making exploration a central goal of play can harm the sense of being there in the moment. Mostly because I want my characters to feel like they live in the world rather than like they are exploring it. Things that are part of their everyday lives should not feel new to their player.

Playing to explore a living world with characters vs. playing to explore a living character in a world?

 

[Fenris-77]

@Campbell - What you describe is an interesting dichotomy. There is indeed a particular style of sandbox wherein the players tend to rebel at anything that constrains what they see as their agency. This is usually in service of the common wandering band of adventurers trope, where the PCs have no initial connection to the setting at all. Things like relationships and obligations are very much constraints the way that kind of player sees them. However, I also find that lack of connection a negative in terms of my immersion into a story (I'm stopping short of immersion in character there on purpose). I find that connections to the setting in terms of groups, people, experience, whatever, tend on increase my immersion rather than decrease it.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Sry BRG, I've modified your post somewhat for this

(a) the big challenges of sandbox is getting players to feel connected to the world they live in initially
(b) "eventually the sandbox should run itself because the players are finding their own hooks".
(c) It takes time to get the point where the players know enough about the setting to do that and where their characters have enough connections in the world to feel like they truly inhabit it. In my experience the first couple of months of play are sort of like movies where an out of town character shows up in the big city for the first time and they need to get their footing.
(e) The more sandboxes I've run, the more I've tried to establish with players what their family background is and who their living relatives are (and I often let them have a lot of creative control here, though I will push back simply to avoid it being wish fulfillment----since I think their family members need to have goals, secrets and desires of their own). This has really helped make my sandboxes work much better. When characters are rooted to family it definitely makes them behave differently. That is also why I think characters getting married and having children can really be beneficial in a campaign.

My thoughts are the other side jump-starts this with a lot of initial player creative control to arrive at (b) faster because THAT is where the magic is both for the GM and for the players in whatever system you're playing.

One can also release this creative control to the players as bursts during a campaign to accelerate the process, to build hooks both for the PCs and the GM. And this is something I have experienced DMing in traditional D&D games.

The above, as always, depends on your players. I've had a player who never took advantage of the creativity granted her.

 

[Maxperson]

I actually agree with a lot of this. I might quibble over specific phrasing in instances, but I agree that one of the big challenges of sandbox is getting players to feel connected to the world they live in initially (this is why I think in most of the advice and even in the Justin Alexander video there is usually a phrase like "eventually the sandbox should run itself because the players are finding their own hooks". It takes time to get the point where the players know enough about the setting to do that and where their characters have enough connections in the world to feel like they truly inhabit it. In my experience the first couple of months of play are sort of like movies where an out of town character shows up in the big city for the first time and they need to get their footing.

This is one reason that I run the Forgotten Realms almost exclusively. My players know it well, since I've been running it or so long, but even if a new player shows up, there's lots that he can learn just from looking around the internet. It doesn't take as long to get to know the setting.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Hey, kumbaya everybody!

I feel this post is worth unpacking.
Lots of good material to work from here.

I agree it was a great post. I think that it highlights some of the breakdown earlier in the thread, about terms and how they are used.

To me, the idea of a "Living World" is a goal. That's the result you want. There are different means of getting there, and they can be quite different, and so I think that's part of why the term is a bit fraught. However, there are plenty of people who use it not as a goal, but as a quick descriptor of how they play, based on many elements commonly found to produce that goal.

They've essentially taken a noun and turned it into a verb.

And I think that's fine in a casual way. But I think in a discussion like this, it creates more problems than it's worth because you can have two radically different games both aimed at portraying a Living World, that use entirely different techniques.

It would be like taking the goal of "Fun" and then referencing it as the technique. "I tend to take a Fun approach to GMing". Hey, awesome.....but to anyone who is trying to understand how you make a game fun, it does nothing.

The living world stuff is a bit of a cultural thing for me, largely because I have heard overly romantic depictions of it sold to me for years when I was struggling as a young GM. They made it sound so easy, like it just happens naturally. There was no road map. No procedures. Just throw yourself to the fire repeatedly. It led to years of frustration for me personally.

Yeah, it's tricky.....because really, ultimately it's all artifice. And I've found this resistance to that idea, at times, where people can be reluctant to admit the mundane process in place of the effect it may have on them. And I know I've done this myself, for sure.

I think a lot of long time gamers (and this is probably true of any hobby, though not universally so for any of them) have just internalized so many things about gaming and the processes involved that it can be hard to step back and examine things in a step by step manner, breaking things down into their most basic components.

This is one of the reasons I've become really drawn to games that clearly describe a process or play loop with the expectation that it is to be applied as described. I just like that as a GM, and I like that it makes things so clear for players.

To a certain extent I think sometimes making exploration a central goal of play can harm the sense of being there in the moment. Mostly because I want my characters to feel like they live in the world rather than like they are exploring it. Things that are part of their everyday lives should not feel new to their player.

So that's exactly the kind of thing I had in mind at the start of the post. One GM can be preparing an OSR style sandbox hexcrawl, with a mix of prepared locations and procedural generation using tables and the like. The PCs are to be newcomers to this area, with the goal to explore and maybe report back to some employer or patron. Maybe they've been tasked with mapping a frontier or similar. This GM wants to portray a living world for his players to explore through their PCs.

Another GM could be preparing a no-myth game set in an industrial city, with factions competing for power and influence. The PCs are to be citizens of this city, and so they will have connections and obligations and goals based on that. The PCs will be working together to further their own goals while dealing with the other factions in the city. This GM also wants to portray a living world for the players to interact with.

They both want a living world. The scenarios are different, the methods of GMing are different, perhaps the player input will be different....my examples are mostly absent mechanics, but even so, we can see there would be things that need to be handled differently. The biggest in my mind is the fact that the setting doesn't need to be discovered by both the players AND the characters....the characters will already have a good deal of knowledge about the setting. Perhaps the players will, too, but perhaps not. How to handle that seems to me to be one of the biggest factors to consider.

These games will play differently, for sure, but the goal is largely the same.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I actually agree with a lot of this. I might quibble over specific phrasing in instances, but I agree that one of the big challenges of sandbox is getting players to feel connected to the world they live in initially (this is why I think in most of the advice and even in the Justin Alexander video there is usually a phrase like "eventually the sandbox should run itself because the players are finding their own hooks". It takes time to get the point where the players know enough about the setting to do that and where their characters have enough connections in the world to feel like they truly inhabit it. In my experience the first couple of months of play are sort of like movies where an out of town character shows up in the big city for the first time and they need to get their footing.

Jumping into this discussion because this paragraph reminded me of something I learned about recently: Kishotenketsu.

Here's a brief article introducing the concept. Kishōtenketsu for Beginners - An Introduction to Four Act Story Structure This reddit post talks about it in reference to DnD:
Short short version: it's a type of story structure, an alternative to three-act or five-act structures. It has four parts: Introduction, development, complication, and resolution. The big difference is that the main conflict (so to speak, it's not a one-to-one correlation of concepts) doesn't come at or near the beginning - it comes after the development of characters and setting.

And now my own thought to add: in a sandbox game, you need to do a lot of introduction before the players are really exploring the setting, and you need to do a lot of exploration before you can introduce conflicts/twists/fronts. It takes a while before the players are confident enough in who their characters are and where they are, both physically and narratively, before they can really explore. If they set out to early, they're just wandering around lost.

This is why it's best to keep them in a smallish area at first - they need to define themselves before they can explore the world.

The second phase, if entered correctly, is where the real OSR exploration can take place: they're mapping and learning and growing as characters. The relationships, between the pc's and between them and the world, are developing (and developing meaning). But things happen at their own pace - new places are explored, one after another, in whatever order seems the most fun.

The twist shouldn't come until you're running low on stuff to do in the existing setting. Then, you can throw a wrench at the whole thing and the players can use what they have learned to resolve the issue.

Resolution would either be denouement and/or opening up a new place to explore (ie planar travel), which brings us back to phase 2.

 

[Lanefan]

It’s not a job. It’s a hobby and people can and should engage with it in whatever manner they like. But wanting to improve isn’t a bad thing. It’s actually a good thing.

There's a difference between a) actively wanting to improve and b) naturally improving through simple experience without any conscious effort involved. Most people are quite happy with b) and many see a) as overkill and all too often - rightly - equate it with wanting to be "the best".

Let me ask you...do you think your skill as a GM or a player can improve? Do you think your enjoyment of RPGs can be enhanced or broadened or changed?

I’d be surprised if just about anyone here said “no” to those questions.

That's about seven questions in two. To break them out some:

-1- Do I think my skill as a player or GM can improve? Yes.
-2- Do I think my enjoyment of playing/GMing would be enhanced by such improvement? Uncertain. (see below)
-3- Do I think putting active effort into such improvement is necessary? Meh. Trial and error is good enough as long as I cop to the errors.
-4- Do I see such active effort by myself or others as a positive thing? Oftentimes no.
-5- Do I think the natural improvement that comes throguh simple experience is good enough? Yes, mostly.
-6- Do I think my enjoyment of RPGs can be enhanced in general? Maybe, but this might at times conflict with other people's enjoyment.
-7- Do I think my enjoyment of RPGs can be changed? Maybe, though I'm pretty much happy where I am.

To expand on -2- a bit: there's things I've learned through GMing that as a player I'd be much happier having never known. There's also things I've learned through these forums that my players on ine side and my GM on the other side would probably be much happier had I never known.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't have the time to digest posts, formulate my thoughts and appropriately respond to all of my pending responses.

But I'm curious about this.

This happens so often in these threads. Outside of just conveying the words you've typed out above, what is it that animates a person (in this case imaro of ENWorld, but others like BRG and Lanefan who hold this same position) to (i) go to a conversation that is engaged in technical discussion and (ii) tell the people engaging in technical level discussion that the majority of fans/hobbyists are indifferent to a technical discussion of their leisure activity/hobby?

What is the impulse here?

Its an extreme curiosity of mine because I'm this way with several hobbies of mine from (a) Baseball and Football Analytics, to (b) serious NFL game film breakdown, to (c) extensive NFL prospect film eval (and Big Board creation), to (d) BJJ conversation and analysis.

Without fail, just like here when it comes to TTRGPs, there is a certain segment of people who invariably do exactly what you're doing here. And those same people are SERIOUSLY adversarial toward both the interest in deep-dive technical evaluation of all of the above and feel inclined to do the (i) and (ii) above (actively seek out conversations to go to and tell those involved that what they're doing is extreme minority behavior and proceed to get hostile about it).

The symmetry is eerie.

What is it that makes you guys (and I'm assuming all of the other people that do this exact same things in the aforementioned (a) - (d) above) do this? Do you think myself or others like me are suddenly going to go "oh...yeah, well, hell I didn't even think of it like that...I guess I'll just stop!"

What is the impulse you're following? What realization or behavioral adjustment is it that you're trying to compel me toward?

In my case it's simple: I don't take much of it anywhere nearly as seriously as some of you and can't for the life of me understand why anyone would.

It's a game, for cryin' out loud; and while we can always try to make our games better there comes a point (which has long since been passed) where it goes beyond simple game improvement and becomes little more than theorycrafting of a sort that would never survive first contact with almost any table perhaps excepting those of the people crafting that particular theory in that moment.

Same for sports analytics. 99% of it is complete bloody overkill. It's ruining hockey, and isn't doing baseball any good.

Side question: I've seen "BJJ" mentioned a few times now, what is it?

 

[Lanefan]

One other question I'd be curious to get the answer on (this struck me a few hours ago).

Is the issue that some people have with technical analysis/demystifying GMing and TTRPGs have something to do with the idea of "taking the romance out of it?" Sort of the same complaint that gets levied at evolutionary biology/psychology and Neuroendocrinology for breaking down love and attraction to process and its constituent parts/regimes?

Yes, that's also a significant part of it.

 

[prabe]

Side question: I've seen "BJJ" mentioned a few times now, what is it?

Pretty sure it's Brazilian Jiu-jitsu (sp?). I know MBC is a practitioner, and there may be others.