Why we like plot: Our Job as DMs

[Hussar]

Hussar - The Shaman pretty much said in his reply above what I was thinking. I do agree that what you said is another valid and entertaining way to play. I do think it is important to note that character depth can and often does exist in sandbox play.

Thank you for getting it.

I'm left wondering though, if the setting you are playing in does not in any way actually relate to the character or its goals, how do you achieve depth? Isn't depth achieved by the relationships the character builds and his impact on the setting?

I think Hussar there was referring to his method.

I got the impression that he thought those observations were revelations, though, rather than points we had noted before and repeatedly (especially considering previous threads with Hussar).

Par for the course, he is likely to turn (on a dime) and retroactively justify that particular dismay, but in the given context ... I think you simply misread.

Well, I must admit Ariosto, that's the second time you've rightly corrected Raven Crowking on his misreading of what I've said.

Now, if we could just do it without the antagonism and snark, we'd be getting somewhere.

 

[Hussar]

If

(1) when you use the word "plot" you mean "things the NPCs are doing", "things happening in the world" and/or "things the PCs decide to do, and if

(2) when you use the word "story" you mean "things that happened in the game", both opposed to meaning

"game events that I decided the PCs will experience in the way I decided the PCs would experience them"

then I would agree.




RC

RC, would you have a problem if story instead was defined as:

"Game events that everyone at the table decided the PC's will experience although the exact details are undecided."

---------------

Oh, and since you asked:

Things you either cannot do or are damnably difficult to do with a sandbox campaign:

• Survival horror.
• High fantasy, particularly quest fantasy.
• Campaigns where the PC's are integral to the campaign. For example, if you wanted to play Battlestar Galactica with the players taking the roles of the positions (not necessarily the characters) of Admiral, CAG, President etc.
• Campaigns where you have a present chain of command.
• Spy campaigns (after all, Bond doesn't wander around looking for bad guys, he goes on missions)
• Campaigns focused on single (or very small numbers) of themes.

Before the wailing and gnashing of teeth. Yes, I know you can work around those campaigns in some fashion. But, it's going to be very difficult and possibly not worth the effort.

 

[Janx]

RC, would you have a problem if story instead was defined as:

"Game events that everyone at the table decided the PC's will experience although the exact details are undecided."

---------------

Oh, and since you asked:

Things you either cannot do or are damnably difficult to do with a sandbox campaign:

• Survival horror.
• High fantasy, particularly quest fantasy.
• Campaigns where the PC's are integral to the campaign. For example, if you wanted to play Battlestar Galactica with the players taking the roles of the positions (not necessarily the characters) of Admiral, CAG, President etc.
• Campaigns where you have a present chain of command.
• Spy campaigns (after all, Bond doesn't wander around looking for bad guys, he goes on missions)
• Campaigns focused on single (or very small numbers) of themes.

Before the wailing and gnashing of teeth. Yes, I know you can work around those campaigns in some fashion. But, it's going to be very difficult and possibly not worth the effort.

I'd hate to be the one defending a sandbox, but some of these don't look like they could NOT be done that way.

Survival horror, seems like a perfect fit for a sandbox. The sandbox = the land is full of zombies. Go survive. Unless I'm misreading survival horror...

BSG: that could be done. Everybody gets assigned roles, and then the sandbox opens with 31 thousand and some change colonists to take care of. Go. The fact that some of them have secrets, no big deal, or that some of them have secrets that they don't even know about, is even less a big deal, more a plot twist...

The BSG brings up a good example, and I've done this with Babylon5, which is to take a story, and turn it into a D&D game. The key thing to making it work, is to take the ideas, not the literal order of events. If you're looking to recreate the show in D&D, you're on a track to railroad hell. If you're looking to set a scenario where the players are the leaders of the last survivors from an major enemy attack, then go to town. Hearing the initial statement from your players of "Oh cool, it's like Battlestar Galactica" is one thing. At the end, the sequence of events should not be just like Battlestar Galactica.

 

[Raven Crowking]

RC, would you have a problem if story instead was defined as:

"Game events that everyone at the table decided the PC's will experience although the exact details are undecided."

I would not qualify that as a good working definition of a sandbox.

Things you either cannot do or are damnably difficult to do with a sandbox campaign:

Survival horror. Why not? Set the sandbox after the collapse of civilization. Sprinkle with infectious zombies. The best treasure you can find are a few shotgun shells or a flashlight.

High fantasy, particularly quest fantasy. Why not? As has already been noted, LotR could have been played as a sandbox. If the players opt in to the quest, there is your quest fantasy.

Campaigns where the PC's are integral to the campaign. This is a bizarre thing to think you cannot do in a sandbox. Whyever couldn't you play a fighter who has control of the lands all about? After all, isn't that what the original game was pointed toward? If you wanted to play Battlestar Galactica with the players taking the roles of the positions (not necessarily the characters) of Admiral, CAG, President etc., why not? Sandbox doesn't affect who you are -- merely what you can do.

Campaigns where you have a present chain of command. Why not? I have played in a sandbox based off Star Trek TOS. The chain of command is part of the sandbox. You can go against the chain of command. Kirk did.

Spy campaigns (after all, Bond doesn't wander around looking for bad guys, he goes on missions). Again, so? And, your knowledge of Bond is weak, my friend. He does indeed wander around looking for bad guys, both in the movies and books.

Campaigns focused on single (or very small numbers) of themes. Why not? All one has to do is devise areas, characters, and other game elements based on those themes.

Before the wailing and gnashing of teeth. Yes, I know you can work around those campaigns in some fashion. But, it's going to be very difficult and possibly not worth the effort.

It will not be difficult at all. Not even remotely.

Any halfway decent GM could pull off any of these sandboxes with no more effort than a typical D&D sandbox -- in some cases, quite a bit less -- and could do so with very satisfying results. Are you claiming that you would find any of these difficult?

----

I do admit that, near the end there, I was just skimming your posts. Once you started telling me what I was saying (without any apparent comprehension on your part) and started quoting me saying X when what you quoted said Y, I began to think I was wasting my time giving your posts any real consideration.

That being true, I should simply have ignored them.

My apologies.


RC


EDIT: Going back and re-reading your post, though, I can see why I misunderstood. Because you didn't identify which style you were talking about clearly in the bit I quoted, I thought you were saying more of what you were saying upthread.....i.e., how one cannot have any depth, etc., etc. with a sandbox.

And you still haven't answered many of the questions asked of you.

The idea that the players choose the world when they create their characters begs the question, "What happens when a PC dies?" Must the players also be given plot protection, further eroding the meaningfulness of their choices, or must the world be changed with each new PC? What if Cousin Susie joins the group? Do we change the world again? If not, how, oh how, is she going to achieve any depth in her play experience?

How many players do you have?

How many players did you have while running the WLD (which is, essentially, a limited sandbox)? How did you keep them engaged? Are you ever going to answer any of these questions?

 

[Raven Crowking]

all I get are insults about abusing my wife

Just so you are aware: "Did you stop abusing your wife yet?" is a classic example of a question that is worded so that the answer, regardless of what it is, can be read as damning. This is because, implicit in the question itself, is the idea that the person being asked is, or was, abusing his (or her) wife.

This was brought up (and not by me) because of the implicit ideas in the questions you asked.

You keep saying things like "the setting you are playing in does not in any way actually relate to the character or its goals" and this is absurd. I can create an adventure path that does not in any way actually relate to the character or its goals, and I can create a character in a sandbox who does not in any way relate to the world, or relate his goals to the world.

But both are examples of crappy playing, not the normal experiences of people who are good at RPGs.

At least IMHO and IME. YMM(obviously)V.




RC

 

[The Ghost]

Thank you for getting it.

I'm left wondering though, if the setting you are playing in does not in any way actually relate to the character or its goals, how do you achieve depth? Isn't depth achieved by the relationships the character builds and his impact on the setting?

Yes. This comes about by the very nature of playing the game. Over time I will develop relationships with NPCs and the actions (or inactions) I take will impact the setting and, ultimately, the story.

Over time...

I wonder how much these words mean to the disagreement you and I have over character depth in sandboxes? Most of the campaigns I play in last for years at a time.

 

[Ariosto]

Things you either cannot do or are damnably difficult to do with a sandbox campaign:

Setting aside "sandbox" as too vague and substituting the original D&D campaign model (which is also, e.g., the original Traveller model), I think you are wrong and I think I see where you made the wrong turn.

If you are in a chain of command, then that is part of your character role. It is a subset of the situations possible in the world. It does not suddenly change the nature of the world!

In an open campaign, you can get yourself out of the chain of command -- and disobeying orders is one way to do that! You're not forced to keep doing whatever your boss says just because "that's the story".

I'm left wondering though, if the setting you are playing in does not in any way actually relate to the character or its goals, how do you achieve depth? Isn't depth achieved by the relationships the character builds and his impact on the setting?

The part in bold is plain "beating your wife" style rhetoric. The next sentence is slightly veiled, but the implication is that, in games played differently from yours, characters do not build relationships or have impact on the setting. Your "questions" are sheer nonsense unless one gives assent to your predicate claims.

The real answer is that those claims are simply false. There is no need to "justify" with a "how" a state of affairs that is nonexistent in the first place.

The rest of us just don't share your additional stipulation that the world must be "made to order" for my player-character, a projection of the persona. We are less interested in that kind of wish fulfillment than in building relationships with people and places and phenomena having their own identities. That is more like the relationships we have in our lives, and more like the relationships that fictional characters are usually portrayed as having with the people and places in their worlds.

As to "impact on the setting" we are more interested in doing that by actually playing the game than in just saying, without any actual challenge in accomplishment, Oh, my character is so boss! She did that and that, and got this and this, and then she met those guys, and they went over there, and it was totally rad, and then that other thing was awesome, but not as awesome as ...

Making it future tense ("My character is going to be so awesome! He's gonna do this, and own that at level x, and then become something else) is not a big difference if it's basically an entitlement and "playing the game" is just putting in time on the track to scheduled stations.

 

[KidSnide]

In an open campaign, you can get yourself out of the chain of command -- and disobeying orders is one way to do that! You're not forced to keep doing whatever your boss says just because "that's the story".

I think one of the difficulties this discussion has been having is that a good sandbox game works in almost the same way as a good story game -- we just think about them differently.

In my mind, the biggest different between a sandbox game and a story game is whether the game is focused on situations for the PCs to explore (and then affect) or on goals for the PCs to accomplish (or fail at accomplishing). Of course a sandbox game needs goals (or it will be very dull) and a story game needs situations (or it will lack any flexibility), the question is which comes first in the mind of the GM.

In a good game of either type, (1) the PCs will work towards goals that the players (and their characters) have bought into (2) in a situation that is flexible enough to let the PCs approach the goal in a number of ways. Those aren't sandbox or story - they're just good D&D.

On a practical level, the biggest difference is who has responsibility for deciding what the PCs do on a macro level. In a sandbox, the GM responds to the PC's goals (usually built in character creation and evolving over time). In a story, the GM provides the goals and the PCs build characters who are motivated to accomplish them. (Or, the PCs and GM collaborate to figure out what the game will be about and build characters and world together.)

There are powerful merits to both approaches. Although I think of myself a story gamer, I also believe that it is absolutely and immensely vital (1) that the PCs "buy into" the goal and (2) that the story of the game be "about" the PCs in almost every meaningful way. I also admit that a sandbox approach is an almost surefire way to accomplish #2 and an excellent way to accomplish #1, at least in as much as the PCs choose their goals and, therefore, are more likely to buy into them.

But I also think it's important for the PCs to pursue goals in which the pursuit is interesting. Of course, a good situation is likely to produce an interesting adventure, but I (as a story-focused player) prefer my GM to point me towards their best material. Of course, a good sandbox GM can provide guidence concerning which situations are the most interesting ones to explore, but I don't think a sandbox GM who always points the PCs towards the next best situation is all that different from a story GM.

And, of course, I should add that this is all about personal preference (and, probably, which types of /bad/ games you've experienced). Personally, I don't care for exploration. I care about accomplishment. And, so, I like my GMs to put things to accomplish in front of me -- don't waste my time making me find them. And help me figure out which ones I should do first, because that decision is usually not interesting to me.

But I get that freedom and the ability to explore is also something that many players (and GMs!) like. So I don't think there is anything wrong with pursuing a game that is focused more on responding to player desire than pointing the player to what the GM thinks is his (or her) best material.

-KS

 

[Doug McCrae]

In my mind, the biggest different between a sandbox game and a story game is whether the game is focused on situations for the PCs to explore (and then affect) or on goals for the PCs to accomplish (or fail at accomplishing). Of course a sandbox game needs goals (or it will be very dull) and a story game needs situations (or it will lack any flexibility), the question is which comes first in the mind of the GM.

I think Ariosto and RC would say that, in a sandbox, the world (or setting or milieu) comes first in the mind of the GM.

I would say that, for a clear-cut case of story-oriented GMing, what comes first are dramatic situations. A big reveal that the BBEG is a PC's father for example, or that the Gandalf-type figure the PCs have been following is really more like the Wizard of Oz. Other story-oriented ideas might be adhering to a certain structure (such as the 3-act structure), or trying to evoke a certain mood or atmosphere.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I think Ariosto and RC would say that, in a sandbox, the world (or setting or milieu) comes first in the mind of the GM.

I would say that, for a clear-cut case of story-oriented GMing, what comes first are dramatic situations. A big reveal that the BBEG is a PC's father for example, or that the Gandalf-type figure the PCs have been following is really more like the Wizard of Oz. Other story-oriented ideas might be adhering to a certain structure (such as the 3-act structure), or trying to evoke a certain mood or atmosphere.

Nah.

Game elements come first for both. You know....settings, NPCs, the plots of NPCs, etc. The story-oriented GM then determines what should happen with those plot elements ("What would make a cool/dramatic scene is if the PCs.....") whereas the sandbox-oriented GM then says "I wonder what the PCs will do when presented with these elements?" and crafts some more elements.


RC