Sandbox Objectivity

[BedrockBrendan]

A range of some sort, sure. Maybe large, maybe no, it depends on the hook. But its not infinite. Problem solution is linear to some degree, period. Thers a gang, deal with the gang. Thers no opening a flower shop, or finding yourself at a retreat, or getting nuanced with your watercolor technique. To be very specific, I'm balancing this against the notion that, at least to start, players in a sandbox game can do anything they desire.

There may be finite solutions (as there are going to be to lots of problems in gaming and in life). But we are not talking 8 solutions here. We are talking tens, hundreds or thousands of potential solutions (maybe more). And these are not linear solutions. Just because the players set a goal for themselves when dealing with a problem, I don't see how that suddenly makes the game have a linear core. If so, life also has a linear core. Even so, there are so many possible solutions, most of which the GM is never even going to think about. And each solution itself can be solved with a near endless variety of approaches. Plus, importantly, the NPCs respond.

In a sandbox you can try anything you want. Obviously if you try something extremely dull and boring, and it is prolonged, people won't like that. While I haven't had parties start flower shops, I have had parties engage in mercantilism. I have seen parties almost randomly go off to a city and try to start a smuggling empire there. As long as what they are doing is interesting to the them and the GM is able to handle it, it's fine.

 

[Baulderstone]

A range of some sort, sure. Maybe large, maybe no, it depends on the hook. But its not infinite. Problem solution is linear to some degree, period. Thers a gang, deal with the gang. Thers no opening a flower shop, or finding yourself at a retreat, or getting nuanced with your watercolor technique. To be very specific, I'm balancing this against the notion that, at least to start, players in a sandbox game can do anything they desire.

I lived in Chicago for ten years, and gang wars were a thing that happened. People still opened flower shops and I don't recall the School of the Art Institute ever suspending classes because of one.

 

[Black Vulmea]

If you wanted to interrogate that idea, we could look at, for example, preparedness mechanics and abstract wealth mechanics: In both cases, the players make a mechanical check to see if their character has a particular resource which has not been explicitly established to either exist or not exist. To be honest, it seems ridiculous to me that such mechanics would be seen as precluding sandbox play, but CRKrueger explicitly said they did and Black Vulmea implied it.

I played using abstracted wealth in MSH RPG and d20 Modern, and in my experience, travelling back in time to change the present isn't the same as abstracting a checkbook and a couple of credit cards.

 

[hawkeyefan]

"Retconning" means changing established events, not filling in unestablished deatils. Literally "Retroactive continuity".

Yeah I know.

I used the term as BV did since a Flashback similarly doesn’t retcon anything, it simply establishes things that were previously unknown.

 

[TJS]

Yeah I know.

I used the term as BV did since a Flashback similarly doesn’t retcon anything, it simply establishes things that were previously unknown.

Yeah. It basically works the same way as Load. Which is perhaps a simpler concept.

You decide you are carrying four things. What four things? You decide when you need a thing. From this point one of the things you need has been determined. If you pull a pistol out of your coat and threaten someone then you were always carrying a pistol - it's just that it was only determined just now.

Of course if at some point you are searched for weapons during a job the GM may ask "what if any weapons are you carrying?" If you say none then you cannot later use one of your item picks to pull out a pistol as it has already been determined you are not carrying one.

Flashbacks are basically just another version of the same thing.

These mechanics only work so long as you don't know if the cat is alive or dead. If the cat is definitely dead it cannot be brought back to life.

Flashbacks can perhaps go a little further than most mechanics of this sort as they can potentially reframe an entire scene. I used one flashback to declare that a contact of ours had been positioned where she could potentially have overheard an entire conversation that had just taken place - but thats an unusual use of a flashback (and I was surprised the GM let me get away with it). In practice it doesn't usually work that way. (And for obvious reasons - if flashbacks were able to recontextualise things to the extent that previous character actions became ridiculous or nonsensical then the whole game would quickly fall apart).

 

[TristramEvans]

Some people are very against abstracted considerations in RPGs that are defined later. This is a point where I'm a bit more flexible than CRK or, apparently, Rob Connely, in my approach. While I have limits, I don't mind a situation where specific details are defined in the course of play rather than up front. In Phaserip I use an abstracted attribute called Contacts to represent the various sources, helpers, and agents a Hero might have access to in the course of a game, ala The Shadow. It's initially represented by a rating that Heroes can roll against to see if they know anyone that could aid them in a specific pursuit, and the rating is reduced as individual contacts are defined over the course of the game. I also like the Unknown Aptitudes in Paul Mason's Outlaws of the Water Margin, where characters beneath a certain age posses talents they do not know about yet, that they can define over the course of a game.

I'm not sure where my limit is, TBH, where the concept starts to interfere with immersion for me. I know the Flashback mechanic is one step too far for my tastes, but I'm not sure I'd have an issue with "Schrodinger's bag of tools" per se.

 

[Endless Flight]

I always wondered if Blades could have been reworked into a military missions RPG.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think the point players can't do anything they desire (within the confines of the realism of the game world and events), is the point the GM is no longer running a sandbox.

I’d agree with this.

But what about when the group is torn in some way? Some want to do A, others want to do B?

That’s where things get tricky.

I always wondered if Blades could have been reworked into a military missions RPG.

It kind of has. Band of Blades is version that plays like a “Black Company” style legion of soldiers fleeing from a powerful undead overlord type. It’s a pretty specific setting, but you could likely rework it to a more mission based game.

 

[TristramEvans]

I’d agree with this.

But what about when the group is torn in some way? Some want to do A, others want to do B?

That’s where things get tricky.

It's common certainly, but players do usually, in my experience, work it out amongst themselves. If not I'm generally prepared to handle the group splitting up, but if the split is apparently permanent, that's probably something I'd discuss with the players outside of the game to see how they'd prefer to proceed. Interestingly, it isn't a situation Ive had to deal with more than once, and in that case it turned out to be one player who wasn't satisfied with the game or how it was going, and I ended up dropping him from the first group and folding him into a Warhammer game I was running with another group at the time, where he was much happier.

 

[TJS]

Some people are very against abstracted considerations in RPGs that are defined later. This is a point where I'm a bit more flexible than CRK or, apparently, Rob Connely, in my approach. While I have limits, I don't mind a situation where specific details are defined in the course of play rather than up front. In Phaserip I use an abstracted attribute called Contacts to represent the various sources, helpers, and agents a Hero might have access to in the course of a game, ala The Shadow. It's initially represented by a rating that Heroes can roll against to see if they know anyone that could aid them in a specific pursuit, and the rating is reduced as individual contacts are defined over the course of the game. I also like the Unknown Aptitudes in Paul Mason's Outlaws of the Water Margin, where characters beneath a certain age posses talents they do not know about yet, that they can define over the course of a game.

I'm not sure where my limit is, TBH, where the concept starts to interfere with immersion for me. I know the Flashback mechanic is one step too far for my tastes, but I'm not sure I'd have an issue with "Schrodinger's bag of tools" per se.

Well yes. They promote a certain distanced attitude toward the character (although I suspect not as much as you'd expect - players have a lot of leeway to keep flashbacks within bounds they're comfortable with). But they don't retcon.

I think perhaps people confuse them with mechanics that allow the pcs to declare facts about the game world. There's some similarity but they're more bounded then that. It's not like spending a hero point to declare that the security guard is your childhood friend that you used to go fishing with. This is because not only is a flashback an attempt to have prepared something, not a guarantee, but it is bounded to things you could have reasonably done in preparation for the current job, and set within a setting where you have pre-existing relations with various factions.

 

[David Johansen]

I’d agree with this.

But what about when the group is torn in some way? Some want to do A, others want to do B?

That’s where things get tricky you grit your teeth and play D&D.

Fixed that for you ;)

 

[hawkeyefan]

It's common certainly, but players do usually, in my experience, work it out amongst themselves. If not I'm generally prepared to handle the group splitting up, but if the split is apparently permanent, that's probably something I'd discuss with the players outside of the game to see how they'd prefer to proceed. Interestingly, it isn't a situation Ive had to deal with more than once, and in that case it turned out to be one player who wasn't satisfied with the game or how it was going, and I ended up dropping him from the first group and folding him into a Warhammer game I was running with another group at the time, where he was much happier.

Yeah, once or twice I had to deal with it, but it was always one player wanting to go their own way, and we always resolved it by discussing it. In one case, it was more a mismatch of character traits than anything else, so we just had the character ride off into the sunset and the player made a new one. Problem solved.

In the other instance, it was more the player not digging how the game was going and so we talked it out and he bowed out for a while.

I agree that generally players will work this kind of stuff out, but it can cause friction, as any compromise can.

But that’s more of a “this is a group activity” issue, I suppose.

 

[TJS]

This is something that I think gets glossed over in all the theoretical talk.

Two things really help to make a sandbox work
- The players know each other well and are used to working together
- The players are reasonably experienced with rpgs.

I signed up idly for a couple of online games during lockdown for something to do and it was interesting to see how hard it was for groups of people that didn't know each other to make collective decisions

It was enough to make me think (given the increasing prevalence of people signing up to play games online or in games stores) that GMing advice sections in games really need to have a section about how to help makes groups of people who don't know each other feel more comfortable around each other - given that the GM is inevitably thrust into a leadership role in such situations.

 

[David Johansen]

For all this discussion I still think that a planned adventure or railroad is the way to go for a convention one off or a demo game at a store. It needs to be going somewhere and it needs to get there fast.

I guess that's how I see it. These play styles are tools in the box and not mutually exclusive. One of my friends absolutely hates the way I run games. He wants mission oriented combat oriented and highly structured play. I also hate the way he runs games. It's not really a big deal. I've played in his games and he's played in mine.

 

[TJS]

For all this discussion I still think that a planned adventure or railroad is the way to go for a convention one off or a demo game at a store. It needs to be going somewhere and it needs to get there fast.

I guess that's how I see it. These play styles are tools in the box and not mutually exclusive. One of my friends absolutely hates the way I run games. He wants mission oriented combat oriented and highly structured play. I also hate the way he runs games. It's not really a big deal. I've played in his games and he's played in mine.

I don't think they need to be railroads.

The classic WFRP adventure "Rought Night at the Four Feathers" is one I've run for one shots multiple times.

The party are at an inn for the night. There's a timeline of how things will proceed if the PCs do nothing. And events precede from there. It's never played out the same way twice.

You just need 1) a rich situation, and 2) it needs to be bounded (so that some kind of conclusion will be reached in a single night's play).

 

[robertsconley]

My Scourge of the Demon Wolf is a sandbox adventures that I have run over a dozens times at conventions and games stores within the four hour time block.

I have another unpublished sandbox adventure Deceits of the Russet Lords that works similarly.

It doesn't work for every situation but from time to time something happens in my campaigns that I can yank out and make it work on its own.

Here are two reviews giving other people impression of what I wrote.
Review #1
Review #2

 

[robertsconley]

You just need 1) a rich situation, and 2) it needs to be bounded (so that some kind of conclusion will be reached in a single night's play).

Pretty much this. This scope has to be such that the possibilities are easily followed and feed back into other in a way that focuses the players on the situation at hand rather than dragging the rest of the setting into it.

 

[hawkeyefan]

For all this discussion I still think that a planned adventure or railroad is the way to go for a convention one off or a demo game at a store. It needs to be going somewhere and it needs to get there fast.

I guess that's how I see it. These play styles are tools in the box and not mutually exclusive. One of my friends absolutely hates the way I run games. He wants mission oriented combat oriented and highly structured play. I also hate the way he runs games. It's not really a big deal. I've played in his games and he's played in mine.

No no.....you missed the part where sandboxes are objectively better!

I’m afraid you’re going to have to tell your friend he’s wrong.

 

[TristramEvans]

For all this discussion I still think that a planned adventure or railroad is the way to go for a convention one off or a demo game at a store.

Well, yeah, no reason to bring your A Game for a buncha weirdo strangers with no friends

 

[Endless Flight]

No no.....you missed the part where sandboxes are objectively better!

 

[David Johansen]

I’m afraid you’re going to have to tell your friend he’s wrong.

We've been having that conversation about every two weeks for the last thirty five years.

 

[robertsconley]

And, of course, when John Harper explicitly writes in the rulebook that BitD is intended for sandbox play:

View attachment 27642

or spends an hour explicitly talking about how he designed Blades in the Dark to run sandbox campaigns he's a liar and that's not what he was trying to do, but it's STILL okay because Rob C. is in the house to tell us what Harper REALLY meant.

Thanks for highlighting that I missed both references in the rulebook. As well as the interview.

or spends an hour explicitly talking about how he designed Blades in the Dark to run sandbox campaigns he's a liar and that's not what he was trying to do, but it's STILL okay because Rob C. is in the house to tell us what Harper REALLY meant.

OK let's go with that. Let's see. Yes there is an interview and there are a page devoted to Free Play, mentions of running things as a sandbox, and making things their own. When I popped Harper names into the olde Google search what I got are loads of interviews and articles about how Blades in the Dark is great at running heists. Articles and examples that were consistent with my experiences playing Blades in the Dark. My conclusion have foundations in my experience and in the text.

But you painted a more complete picture of the situation, pointed out an area I missed, and for that you have my thanks.

Right, right. Any time a D&D rulebook has explicitly contradicted your preferred style of play in the past 50 years, it's just an accident and it's okay because Rob C. is in the house to tell us what Gygax REALLY meant.

What with the attitude and the ad hominem attacks? I have explained numerous times where I drawn my conclusion about the nature of D&D, and Gygax. Source like Playing at the World and forums posts that are available public for anybody else to read and draw their own conclusion from.

Moreso you missed the point of why I included in the previous reply. You been accusing me of holding a double standard. Holding Harper to one standard and Gygax to another. I have criticized Gygax, OD&D, and AD&D on numerous occasions for the same overarcing reason. The book they wrote doesn't reflect the game that they play. And seemly can only be understood after you talk to or watched people who played it.

Now that I discussed it with folks on this forums in various thread. I can see why my impression of the game was not the entire picture. I still don't think it great for traditional roleplaying or sandbox campaign. But I now see how it works for many other folks.

So cut the bullshit, if you have a counter point make it and stop with the ad hominem attacks.

 

[robiswrong]

Jesus. Sure. Linear, in this instance means that there is a problem and solution set. Lots of wiggle room on how to solve the problem, but generally there are specific places to go, people to see, or things to do, and often the order you do those things in probably matters.

That doesn't track to me.

I mean, like, if you're playing pool, you know that there are 15 numbered balls and one cue ball on the table. You know that 7 of the balls either above or below 8 will be sunk, followed by the 8 ball (unless someone screws up and sinks the 8).

That in no way suggests that playing pool is linear.

That's how I view RPG scenarios, especially non-linear/sandbox ones. You might know the pieces in play, but where they go and what they do is unknowable.

 

[CRKrueger]

To be honest, it seems ridiculous to me that such mechanics would be seen as precluding sandbox play, but CRKrueger explicitly said they did and Black Vulmea implied it.

I'm honestly curious about what the exact rationale is and what the full implications of it are perceived to be.

I used the term Living World.
Here’s why flashbacks preclude it.

-The point of a Living World is to have the NPCs moving towards their own goals with or without player interference.
-To use the example from the BitD book, if I have an Inspector show up at the same party a PC is at, there’s a reason, even if that reason is coincidence.
-To have the Player use a Flashback to claim that their PC was the one who tipped off the Inspector so they could impress a Noblewoman, they’re invalidating the reality of why the Inspector is actually there.
- If the PCs can rewrite what the ”game running itself” comes up with, what’s the point of running a Living World campaign to begin with?

 

[CRKrueger]

I’m not sure I'd have an issue with "Schrodinger's bag of tools" per se.

 

[Black Vulmea]

You provided a bunch of character backgrounds in that thread that were all pretty much one to three sentences. They were simple yet evocative.

Thank you.

But none of them were a complete picture in the same way an actual person would be. I think you intentionally left plenty of details to learn about in play.

Definitely.

So how do you then establish things in play? Are you limited to what you used as description of your character's background? Are they unable to know anything beyond what you disclose at the very start of play?

If you do establish things during play, are you retconning?

I feel like establishing things that happened in characters' pasts during play is such a common part of play that the idea of a Flashback being problematic is very surprising to me.

Do you only have an issue with it if it somehow creates an advantage?

Great questions.

Remember, a character is more than their background - they are also represented by rules, some simple, some complex. For FL T2K character Captain Ruzicka, his background reflects his random lifepath: high Stamina ("toughness" respected by his high school coaches), the Load Carrying Specialty (. . . "humping bundles of tar paper and plywood" for his father's roofing business), and his military education and training including the Combat Engineering (USMA class of '94, BS Civil Engineering, AOC 12B Combat Engineer), Tanker, and Improvised Munitions Specialties.

So there's chargen underlying much of his background, and the rest is color. Would it be reasonable for him to know a few phrases in Czech or German? Maybe, but I'd be pushing it if he suddenly carried on a fluent conversation with a Czechoslovakian brigade commander, particularly since there are rules for languages in the game. Even worse would the plukovník being a distant member of the family.

For Eladio Luna, for 2e Boot Hill, a game with virtually no skills at all, we were guided by 1e AD&D secondary skills to determine what our characters could do and know. He was a cowboy, so he knew how to do a broad range of cowboy stuff, no questions asked. If I suddenly decided he was also a saddler, that would've been out of character. When he wanted to learn Apache, he asked a Navajo woman who was a Mescalero captive to teach him; when he wanted to learn about running a business, he hired an accountant as a tutor - I didn't reveal out-of-the-blue that his tio was a contador who instructed his young nephew in bookkeeping one summer back in Nebraska. Abilities established in play were actually established in play.

If you look at the sort of stuff I revealed about Eladio in actual play, none of it grants him special abilities or projects conflict into the setting. It just expands a bit on his motivations, his ethos, adds depth to him as a human being; moreover, his actions in play suggest the background reveals, so his character deepens over the course of the campaign.

So, I don't see expanding on his background as a retcon, or creation of anything much more than hopefully interesting anecdotes. As I said in that earlier message, "But here's something I think is really important: none of the stuff I learned about my character altered the setting or projected conflict into actual play. There were no old family enemies, no lost birthright, no 'friends of my father' suddenly appearing in some dusty town. I don't like rules which allow that sort of setting editing. Aside from 'creating' a ranch near Fort Kearney, Nebraska, owned by the Greene family and worked by the Lunas, nothing I learned about my characters altered the setting except through actual play, in-character."

That's how Dad did it, that's how America does it, and it's worked out pretty well so far.

 

[Justin Alexander]

Okay, so when I said this:

The flashback mechanics are probably too contentious at this point, unfortunately, for valuable discussion to emerge. This happened in the previous thread, too. Attempts to move the conversation past the specific dissociation of the player-triggered flashback went nowhere because people had become completely tribalistic about the specific heresy of the flashback mechanic and simply could not move past it.

This is what I was talking about:

If you wanted to interrogate that idea, we could look at, for example, preparedness mechanics and abstract wealth mechanics: In both cases, the players make a mechanical check to see if their character has a particular resource which has not been explicitly established to either exist or not exist. To be honest, it seems ridiculous to me that such mechanics would be seen as precluding sandbox play, but @CRKrueger explicitly said they did and @Black Vulmea implied it.

I used the term Living World.
Here’s why flashbacks preclude it.

-The point of a Living World is to have the NPCs moving towards their own goals with or without player interference.
-To use the example from the BitD book, if I have an Inspector show up at the same party a PC is at, there’s a reason, even if that reason is coincidence.
-To have the Player use a Flashback to claim that their PC was the one who tipped off the Inspector so they could impress a Noblewoman, they’re invalidating the reality of why the Inspector is actually there.
- If the PCs can rewrite what the ”game running itself” comes up with, what’s the point of running a Living World campaign to begin with?

For any lingering confusion, this is the post I was referencing when I mentioned your specific claim about preparedness mechanics not being sandbox-OK:

It’s also the game where instead of the player actually deciding what equipment to use and bring, you bring a number of Schrodinger-style “Tools”, and then when you use one, it is then defined from the game’s equipment list. This mechanic allows the player to narratively storytell himself a way out of an obstacle, like Batman or Ocean’s crew would. There’s a Living World approach to how you would run a heist. This isn’t it.

 

[Justin Alexander]

I'm not sure where my limit is, TBH, where the concept starts to interfere with immersion for me. I know the Flashback mechanic is one step too far for my tastes, but I'm not sure I'd have an issue with "Schrodinger's bag of tools" per se.

There are a number of aesthetic spectrums with potential lines that can be crossed by mechanics like these. Similar to your Contacts attribute, Trail of Cthulhu recommends that players put points into the Language skill (with each point = 1 language known) but only determine which languages they actually know during play.

Such mechanics primarily operate as a form of deferred character creation: When you spend the partially spent resource to determine that your character knows Italian, you obviously aren't making an as-if decision (as if you were your character). But you are making a decision that absolutely no one would find weird during character creation, and on those grounds there are many people who would be okay with that in a way they wouldn't be with, for example, the preparedness mechanic that determines whether or not something is in your backpack (because the decision to pack a flashlight is not a character creation-type decision).

OTOH, I had a player who really didn't like unspent Language skill points but adored the Preparedness mechanic in Trail of Cthulhu. They expressed the blank Language spend as being "too convenient." I believe the meaningful distinction was that they had control over the Language they chose (making it feel as if the character was simply able to declare that they had learned a new language instantaneously) whereas making a Preparedness check felt like consulting a mechanical oracle to determine an unknown fact about the game world.

Similarly, Black Vulmea isn't comfortable framing a non-linear scene in which we discover something previously unknown about the world, but is perfectly fine with leaving all of a character's worldly possession in a state of quantum uncertainty.

 

[Nobby-W]

I played using abstracted wealth in MSH RPG and d20 Modern, and in my experience, travelling back in time to change the present isn't the same as abstracting a checkbook and a couple of credit cards.

I think that's a straw man version of flashback mechanics. The way they work in the Forged in the Dark family is that you don't change the timeline of what's happened in the adventure. There's still (for example) a guard. The flashback allows you to establish some preparation retrospectively, like going out on the piss with the guards and getting them drunk, or bribing them to look the other way or some such. The rules are quite specific on this.

It's also worth noting that flashbacks are a finite resource and burn stress, which is a metacurrency pool that doesn't refresh all that quickly. For a trivial flashback like having something illegal but easy to obtain on the street, one might charge zero stress, but anything non-trivial will cost stress at a rate that really only allows you to use one or two flashbacks between downtime episodes where stress is replenished.

I've been running a couple of Scum and Villainy games for a while now, and the moral panic I've seen in these threads doesn't tally with my experience of how they get used and their effect on the game in practice.

 

[TJS]

You know I've pretty much come to the conclusion that what a lot of people on this forum mean by 'sandbox' is what I tend to think of as "playing a role-playing game in a basically functionally manner".

I probably have to add "...and doesn't have any mechanics which I don't like".

 

[AsenRG]

I think this article is relevant.

Why tabletop wargames tell better stories than most RPGs

On one priceless, sought-after metric, Warhammer 40K beats The Witcher 3 every day of the week

www.wargamer.com

 

[Voros]

I always wondered if Blades could have been reworked into a military missions RPG.

John Harper designed an excellent military game The Regiment. Although it only exists in draft form. More PbtA rather than BitD but the system are closely related.

 

[Sloth_in_a_bowl]

One thing that I am surprised at within this whole discussion is what the players what out of the game. Though some people that I have played with like a sandbox, the vast majority of them want a light rail style of campaign. They want the freedom to explore the world in their own way but understand that the adventures that they run into will be part of a bigger story line and expect those adventures to be tailored to giving them that experience. It is also in my personal experience that most players start a campaign with no ideas of their character or it's motivations. They expect some light rail to get them moving.

Why is this my experience? Well to be honest I suspect that most people are not leaders, they are team players. This seems to correlate with the results of work personality tests that I have been involved with, where team player personality types vastly outnumber leader personality types. A team player will not pick up into a sandbox environment well unless there is some leadership to help get them started and some of them will never be comfortable in a full sandbox environment. Light rail allows them to be involved in the story and the adventure and if they make their own choices, wobble off line and discover the sandbox behind, all is well, but do not expect this of your players.

My final point for why light rail is a better experience for most players is this crude example.
The players are involved in the activities of the campaign and are tying to defeat the network of necromancers but go to the wrong city in following the lead for the next necromancer in the chain, do you a) leave them hanging or b) move the necromancer to the city they went to?
Most GM's would pick b as it makes the campaign run more smoothly and yet that breaks full sandbox which apparently is a bad thing for some people and that is totally their rightful opinion.


P.S. BitD can be sandbox (to my personal definition of sandbox), the main expansion into sandbox play is giving the crew a suitable flexibility of the heist target.

Non-Sandbox BitD
GM - 'Your next target is the manor of a minor noble man who has left town for the week, it is a medium length heist."

Sandbox BitD
GM - 'You have leads on three different targets, there is the a manor of a minor nobleman who is leaving town for a week, a new shipment of spice has entered the Feltem's warehouse and the Old Arsenal is sending weapons to the Grint Foundry for repair.'
Player 1 - 'We want to hit back at the Kelly Gang for the trouble they caused us last month.'
GM - 'OK, You can hit the Kelly gang to reduce their power, but will get less loot from that run, how do you want to hit them.'
Player 2 - 'Can we burn out their main hideout?'
GM - 'It will take a minor run to discover the location of their base of operations. You know that one of the gang members lodges at the Blue Parrot Inn.'

 

[Nobby-W]

I always wondered if Blades could have been reworked into a military missions RPG.

Band of Blades does that - it's written by the folks who did Scum and Villainy and uses the Forged in the Dark system. The basic premise is a grimdark fantasy setting about soldiers fighting a rearguard action against an undead army and the mechanics are designed to use this sort of mission-downtime cycle.

 

[AsenRG]

Asen, who has a hell of a memory, knows my style better than anyone on earth who's never met me in person. From the bookshelf at my right as I type this, twenty such binders even: two with my house rule magic spells, one with charts and tables and stuff, one for my setting's religions, one for its price lists, one for cultural info of the dominant regional culture, one for my wife's wizard's estates (!), one of various regional cultural tidbits (cuisine, naming conventions, regional institutions, customs, the like), five for major cities, and seven for particular notable realms.

I swear, Asen, one of these days I'll get you into my Discord campaign ... or I would, if I hadn't the gnawing sense that it would burst my bubble.

I'm flattered either way!

I realize that. Your post just prompted that thought about agency. I have seen the issue of agency come up in similar ways. Often with one side emphasizing the agency of the player, the other the agency of the character (i.e. how much impact does the player, regardless of character, have on the course of play, versus how much impact does the player, through their character, have on the course of play). The fault lines around this one seemed quite similar. And it is usually related to discussions around things like sandboxes

Well, I sure emphasize the agency of the character - but then it includes the agency of the player.
If you're not allowed to kill the Prince in a VtM game - say by social contract - then it is outside the character's agency as well. And vice versa: killing a Solar in a straight-up battle in Exalted is outside your ability as a player* if you're playing a heroic mortal.
All of this changes, of course, if you can change the setting to suit you. Which is why I consider a Scroedingerbox to be a different kind of game, even if it's closely related.


*Because we said "straight-up", not "a battle that looks straight-up".

 

[AsenRG]

I only started doing that because my players wanted to jump campaigns any time I put in the effort to do prep work. It's a problem with doing open gaming in a mostly dead, hole in the wall store. I have to be careful not to alienate what customers I have even when sometimes I'm ready to strangle them.

Yeah, that would suck!

Asen, who has a hell of a memory, knows my style better than anyone on earth who's never met me in person. From the bookshelf at my right as I type this, twenty such binders even: two with my house rule magic spells, one with charts and tables and stuff, one for my setting's religions, one for its price lists, one for cultural info of the dominant regional culture, one for my wife's wizard's estates (!), one of various regional cultural tidbits (cuisine, naming conventions, regional institutions, customs, the like), five for major cities, and seven for particular notable realms.

I swear, Asen, one of these days I'll get you into my Discord campaign ... or I would, if I hadn't the gnawing sense that it would burst my bubble.

I'm flattered either way!

I realize that. Your post just prompted that thought about agency. I have seen the issue of agency come up in similar ways. Often with one side emphasizing the agency of the player, the other the agency of the character (i.e. how much impact does the player, regardless of character, have on the course of play, versus how much impact does the player, through their character, have on the course of play). The fault lines around this one seemed quite similar. And it is usually related to discussions around things like sandboxes

Well, I sure emphasize the agency of the character - but then it includes the agency of the player.
If you're not allowed to kill the Prince in a VtM game - say by social contract - then it is outside the character's agency as well. And vice versa: killing a Solar in a straight-up battle in Exalted is outside your ability as a player* if you're playing a heroic mortal.
All of this changes, of course, if you can change the setting to suit you. Which is why I consider a Scroedingerbox to be a different kind of game, even if it's closely related.


*Because we said "straight-up", not "a battle that looks straight-up".

 

[Ravenswing]

I think the point players can't do anything they desire (within the confines of the realism of the game world and events), is the point the GM is no longer running a sandbox.

Mm. I don't quite agree. Another anecdote incoming.

See, one player decided -- absent a whole lot of evidence -- that the Evil Empire was responsible for all their woes. He proposed that the group travel to the capitol city of the empire, the largest city on my gameworld. And there they would go fishing: asking questions, poking around, bringing the malefactors to heel. It would be the last great swing at things before the party took six months off, because every several years I do a few months worth of a Firefly-milieu game. And the rest of the players went "meh, sure, why not," and said they'd pitch in.

And after a couple days' worth of reflection, for the first and so far only time in 43 years of GMing, I said "No."

Because I wasn't up for doing the vast amount of prep work to get a city of half a million people up and running, the freaking Heart of Darkness, never mind the various cities and locales en route, because I am really most sincerely not one of those "Okay, so you travel three months, and you get there" fellows. Certainly not when the plan was to shut down the fantasy run for a while in two or three months all the same.

And I wasn't up for the certain TPK that was ensuing, because this was sorta like a bunch of Americans going to Moscow in the 1960s, just poking at things and trying to bring those damn Commies down, not really wrapping their heads around the fact that they're enemy foreign nationals, NOT trained spies, recognizable to any local who pays attention to accents, and outnumbered about a hundred thousand to one. Rather akin to throwing a rock at a tank in Tienanmen Square and shouting "Take THAT, you bastard!"

But I especially wasn't up for a pie-in-the-sky fishing expedition, especially since the player was utterly wrong. The Evil Empire had nothing to do with the mess. There wasn't any proof of the same, any evidence of the same; it was a matter of tossing a dart at the rogues' gallery by way of making a wild-ass, somewhat lazy guess. The Blofelds and Darth Vaders of the world may always be bad guys, but they aren't necessarily always THE Bad Guy.

I don't feel I stopped being a sandbox GM that day.

 

[Stevethulhu]

Mm. I don't quite agree. Another anecdote incoming.

See, one player decided -- absent a whole lot of evidence -- that the Evil Empire was responsible for all their woes. He proposed that the group travel to the capitol city of the empire, the largest city on my gameworld. And there they would go fishing: asking questions, poking around, bringing the malefactors to heel. It would be the last great swing at things before the party took six months off, because every several years I do a few months worth of a Firefly-milieu game. And the rest of the players went "meh, sure, why not," and said they'd pitch in.

And after a couple days' worth of reflection, for the first and so far only time in 43 years of GMing, I said "No."

Because I wasn't up for doing the vast amount of prep work to get a city of half a million people up and running, the freaking Heart of Darkness, never mind the various cities and locales en route, because I am really most sincerely not one of those "Okay, so you travel three months, and you get there" fellows. Certainly not when the plan was to shut down the fantasy run for a while in two or three months all the same.

And I wasn't up for the certain TPK that was ensuing, because this was sorta like a bunch of Americans going to Moscow in the 1960s, just poking at things and trying to bring those damn Commies down, not really wrapping their heads around the fact that they're enemy foreign nationals, NOT trained spies, recognizable to any local who pays attention to accents, and outnumbered about a hundred thousand to one. Rather akin to throwing a rock at a tank in Tienanmen Square and shouting "Take THAT, you bastard!"

But I especially wasn't up for a pie-in-the-sky fishing expedition, especially since the player was utterly wrong. The Evil Empire had nothing to do with the mess. There wasn't any proof of the same, any evidence of the same; it was a matter of tossing a dart at the rogues' gallery by way of making a wild-ass, somewhat lazy guess. The Blofelds and Darth Vaders of the world may always be bad guys, but they aren't necessarily always THE Bad Guy.

I don't feel I stopped being a sandbox GM that day.

You didn't need to prep a city of half a million. Just the bits the players were likely to interact with.

Something I got from an interview with writer Stephen R Donaldson was the concept that time spent creating things you don't need is time wasted.

And I really do believe that holds doubly true in an RPG.

 

[Nobby-W]

You didn't need to prep a city of half a million. Just the bits the players were likely to interact with.

Something I got from an interview with writer Stephen R Donaldson was the concept that time spent creating things you don't need is time wasted.

And I really do believe that holds doubly true in an RPG.

Terry Pratchett used to build Discworld a bit at a time when he needed stuff for stories as well.

Certainly, I think that extensive mid-level world building is a waste of time or even counterproductive, a subject on which I have been known to pontificate on occasion. However, one doesn't necessarily know a priori which bits your players are actually going to interact with, so some hit-and-miss is to be expected in a way that's not necessarily going to be the case with writing stories. By and large, though, it's best to drive world building off what you need for adventures as that means it's most likely to be useful.

 

[TristramEvans]

Mm. I don't quite agree. Another anecdote incoming.

See, one player decided -- absent a whole lot of evidence -- that the Evil Empire was responsible for all their woes. He proposed that the group travel to the capitol city of the empire, the largest city on my gameworld. And there they would go fishing: asking questions, poking around, bringing the malefactors to heel. It would be the last great swing at things before the party took six months off, because every several years I do a few months worth of a Firefly-milieu game. And the rest of the players went "meh, sure, why not," and said they'd pitch in.

And after a couple days' worth of reflection, for the first and so far only time in 43 years of GMing, I said "No."

Because I wasn't up for doing the vast amount of prep work to get a city of half a million people up and running, the freaking Heart of Darkness, never mind the various cities and locales en route, because I am really most sincerely not one of those "Okay, so you travel three months, and you get there" fellows. Certainly not when the plan was to shut down the fantasy run for a while in two or three months all the same.

And I wasn't up for the certain TPK that was ensuing, because this was sorta like a bunch of Americans going to Moscow in the 1960s, just poking at things and trying to bring those damn Commies down, not really wrapping their heads around the fact that they're enemy foreign nationals, NOT trained spies, recognizable to any local who pays attention to accents, and outnumbered about a hundred thousand to one. Rather akin to throwing a rock at a tank in Tienanmen Square and shouting "Take THAT, you bastard!"

But I especially wasn't up for a pie-in-the-sky fishing expedition, especially since the player was utterly wrong. The Evil Empire had nothing to do with the mess. There wasn't any proof of the same, any evidence of the same; it was a matter of tossing a dart at the rogues' gallery by way of making a wild-ass, somewhat lazy guess. The Blofelds and Darth Vaders of the world may always be bad guys, but they aren't necessarily always THE Bad Guy.

I don't feel I stopped being a sandbox GM that day.

I would say tha the reasons why the players wanted to go to the city are completely irrelevant.

Practicially, what happened is that they discovered an invisible wall put up by the GM to prevent them from doing something perfectly normal and within their ability - travel to a city that exists.