Sandbox Objectivity

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TristramEvans said:
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.
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Times like this are a good time, in my opinion, to clearly pull back the curtain and explain if there are prep issues. Personally my approach is to let them go and figure it out as I go if need be (even if it means things are thinner than they otherwise would be because there isn't enough foundational material or something). But there was a time when a player said to me he wanted to go attack a group called the House of Paper shadows at their headquarters. He said this after the game as a heads up actually, not during play. I told him if he waited three weeks to go, I could flesh it out more fully (I left it up to him whether he waited or not, but explained to him there were things there I hadn't quite decided on and fleshed out yet). In the end he waited and the final result was a much more interesting adventure. This was just one of those locations, for whatever reason, I didn't expect anyone to go to, and didn't flesh out as fully as I would have liked for an actual attack or delve into it.
 
Nobby-W said:
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.
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Moral Panic?
How about calling an obvious narrative mechanic what it is?
 
Stevethulhu said:
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.
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I disagree. You prep this location you’re sure the PCs will go to - and they don’t. It’s usable at a later date.

My campaigns are defined by the world, not the PCs. One group doesn’t use it, another will.
Or, if it doesn’t bother you, just put the prep someplace else, tweaking if necessary.
 
CRKrueger said:
Moral Panic?
How about calling an obvious narrative mechanic what it is?
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Sure. But then you also responded to someone saying that a Schrodinger style equipment pack was okay with a Warhammer heresy meme.
 
BedrockBrendan said:
Times like this are a good time, in my opinion, to clearly pull back the curtain and explain if there are prep issues. Personally my approach is to let them go and figure it out as I go if need be (even if it means things are thinner than they otherwise would be because there isn't enough foundational material or something). But there was a time when a player said to me he wanted to go attack a group called the House of Paper shadows at their headquarters. He said this after the game as a heads up actually, not during play. I told him if he waited three weeks to go, I could flesh it out more fully (I left it up to him whether he waited or not, but explained to him there were things there I hadn't quite decided on and fleshed out yet). In the end he waited and the final result was a much more interesting adventure. This was just one of those locations, for whatever reason, I didn't expect anyone to go to, and didn't flesh out as fully as I would have liked for an actual attack or delve into it.
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Yeah, talking to the players outside of the game is certainly different than just saying No to the characters in the game.
 
Justin Alexander said:
Okay, so when I said this:



This is what I was talking about:



For any lingering confusion, this is the post I was referencing when I mentioned your specific claim about preparedness mechanics not being sandbox-OK:
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So...you agree, disagree, or ignoring the Flashback argument?

But the same could be said for the Tools argument. There’s two important phases to getting ready for any serious endeavour, whether it’s a long wilderness trek, a heist, a black ops strike, the SuperBowl, etc. The pbases are Prep and Perform. In actually planning a Heist (or some other job) the PCs could and should be doing legwork.
  • Checking contacts
  • Scouting venues
  • Identifying key people and investigating them to see if they can be bribed/blackmailed into providing intel or be an actual man inside.
  • Finding out as much about the site, including other people who know it. Use your contacts and you might find out you’re Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon from the guy who designed the vault or the security system.
One of the key reasons you do all this is so that you know what you’ll be facing and you bring the proper gear.
Obviously, Tools, once again invalidates the whole point of the Living World. The Schrodinger’s nature of them, combined with the ability to fine tune them to fit by taking a Devil’s Bargain means that you eliminate the entire Prep Phase and go straight to the Perform phase. John Harper thinks the Prep phase is boring and wants to get straight to the action. The totally makes sense considering he’s more interested in using his games as storytelling devices than he is at providing a verisimilar setting for IC immersive Roleplaying.

I am not arguing that John Harper is lying when he says that BitD was constructed for Sandbox play. For his definition of sandbox, looking at RPGs from a Narrative Paradigm, BitD is constructed for, and certainly provides Sandbox play by that definition.

It’s not, however, a Living World. A Living World is more than just a tapestry backdrop. It’s more than a list of Situations and Adventure Hooks that give you an engine of logical things for players to do. It’s a highly detailed construct - a web where every touched strand matters, a clockwork of gears, whatever metaphor you want to use, it’s a complex system, where every action does have consequences - because the nature of the action will organically, due to the detail of the setting, produce real consequences. It’s not because the GM and player talk about what consequences the mechanics produced or the player specifically chooses to take a consequence to gain mechanical advantage.

That’s why I use the term Living World or World in Motion, it’s to specifically differentiate it from a sandbox because otherwise, we’ll spend another thread doing the “Is Not”-“Is Too” dance as two different paradigms of RPG thought compete for who owns the definitions.
 
CRKrueger said:
All that demonstrates is that you’re unwilling to actually argue your position and instead use bad faith characterisations of the arguments you don’t like.
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withdrawing_projections.jpg
 
I mostly just laugh when people tell me all about what a designer was thinking. *shrug*
 
CRKrueger said:
Heh, good thing we have the designer’s own words about what he was thinking, huh?
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And they bear an oddly poor resemblance to your words. It's possible I'm not reading yours correctly through the fog of sarcasm and superiority though. Who knows. Maybe it's the self serving and self aggrandizing editorial additions to your hot take version of what you think Harper wanted to say, that's also a possibility. Either way, let's not pretend you're quoting the man. We are men of action, lies do not become us.
 
David Johansen said:
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.
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As I’ve said before, even your most open sandbox campaign will contain linear adventures from time to time. It would be a weird campaign if it didn’t.
 
Postmortem said:
Who needs Sat cartoons when I have this comedy? Watching nerds rant is hilarious. Till it gets old. At about page 7.
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Damn, it must suck that someone strapped you to a chair then and is forcing you to read all this. :hehe:
 
Hold on tight folks, thread will reopen in a bit, a change is coming...
 
Allright Postmortem Postmortem, you're just trolling, and not contributing to the conversation, so threadban.

Likewise Nobby-W Nobby-W, you're not contributing to the discussion, just complaining about other posters. Temporary threadban, if you come back, do so because you want to discuss the subject of the thread.

Everyone else...

Buried in this thread, between the snark, and personal attacks, and people simply refusing to engage with any arguments in good faith, there's some really good, interesting posts. At first I thought maybe I could seperate them out into their own thread, but the morass is deep and frankly, I just dont have the time. It's two days until Mid-Terms for me.

After mid-terms, I plan to start a new Mod+ thread about Sandbox/Living World games, because it is a good topic, and as I said, there's been some really great and helpful posts sadly lost under the dross. But I just don't have time for the extra modding that requires until then, because apparently this is another subject that brings out the worst in people.

In the meantime, this isn't a Mod+ thread, you guys can just pointlessy argue if you want, but, if it just continues at this level o snark, we'll probably just close it, because it's not doing anything for The Pub's morale and there's nothing interesting about reading a bunch of back and forth snipes, so instead I strongly suggest before posting again, take a moment and think about if you're adding content to The Pub, if you have a worthwhile contribution to make on the topic at hand, or you're just looking for a "gotcha" at another poster.

That's the last warning, thread reopened.
 
Fenris-77 said:
And they bear an oddly poor resemblance to your words. It's possible I'm not reading yours correctly through the fog of sarcasm and superiority though. Who knows. Maybe it's the self serving and self aggrandizing editorial additions to your hot take version of what you think Harper wanted to say, that's also a possibility. Either way, let's not pretend you're quoting the man. We are men of action, lies do not become us.
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I didn’t say I was directly quoting the man, so I’d appreciate you not insinuating that I’m lying by claiming I’m doing so.

However, do I really need to go find exact quotes to prove that John Harper said...
  • That BitD does planning by skipping the boring stuff and cutting straight to the action?
  • That the point of BitD is to provide a collaborative storytelling experience?

I mean...I guess I do, so ok...
”Everything in this book exists to help you and your friends express yourselves by creating collaborative social fiction about a crew of daring scoundrels.”

I’ll go get more if you like, but I thought you said lies don’t become us, and we’re not pretending, so how many quotes do I need to prove the above two points that are probably two of the most obvious things about the game? I’ll do straight talk, but you have to as well.

Also where is all the superiority, self-serving and self-aggrandizing coming from? (Since we’re being straight, the charge of sarcasm coming from you is a little hypocritical, isn’t it?)

I’m drawing a distinction between general sandbox play and the play I call Living World. Yes, one is more complex and takes more prep and has more moving parts. So? They’re not the same is what I’m saying.

You like games with lighter mechanics and based on many of the systems you like, it seems you prefer abstracting a lot of things about the setting. I don’t.

Someone whose favorite boardgame is Twilight Imperium isn’t a Nietzschean Superman, but they are handling a more complex system than most Boardgames.
 
In spirit I do not like saying "no" to a course of action in a sandbox. The ugly reality is that our table time is precious and limited so once in a blue moon I have to discourage player activity that is boring or futile. I will clarify the situation and explain the likely outcomes of those actions, typically through IC means. This means I don't do red herrings in my investigations and assume PCs are competent enough at their job to recognize false leads.

BedrockBrendan said:
Times like this are a good time, in my opinion, to clearly pull back the curtain and explain if there are prep issues.
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This is what I do as well. Once in a while I will be blunt and ask for time to prep for an unexpected course of action (heists and invasions are the big ones). No one has ever complained, everyone is cool about it.
 
BedrockBrendan said:
Times like this are a good time, in my opinion, to clearly pull back the curtain and explain if there are prep issues. Personally my approach is to let them go and figure it out as I go if need be (even if it means things are thinner than they otherwise would be because there isn't enough foundational material or something). But there was a time when a player said to me he wanted to go attack a group called the House of Paper shadows at their headquarters. He said this after the game as a heads up actually, not during play. I told him if he waited three weeks to go, I could flesh it out more fully (I left it up to him whether he waited or not, but explained to him there were things there I hadn't quite decided on and fleshed out yet). In the end he waited and the final result was a much more interesting adventure. This was just one of those locations, for whatever reason, I didn't expect anyone to go to, and didn't flesh out as fully as I would have liked for an actual attack or delve into it.
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I was playing in a game about a year ago, and when an NPC wizard was killed, I suggested we immediately proceed to his home to loot it while the distraction of his death was ongoing. The GM paused a moment, said he wasn't prepared for that and asked for a twenty-minute break. I didn't view it as GM weakness that he wasn't prepared for my action. I was impressed that he going to roll with my action and do some additional work to let me try it, rather than invent some quick excuse why I couldn't, such throwing an impregnable, magical force field around the house.

Anyone with any experience with RPGs knows that GM doesn't really have every detail of the world filled out before the game begins, and they will be fine with letting you have a little time to flesh things out when you need to.
 
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Brock Savage said:
In spirit I do not like saying "no" to a course of action in a sandbox. The ugly reality is that our table time is precious and limited so once in a blue moon I have to discourage player activity that is boring or futile. I will clarify the situation and explain the likely outcomes of those actions, typically through IC means. This means I don't do red herrings in my investigations and assume PCs are competent enough at their job to recognize false leads.

This is what I do as well. Once in a while I will be blunt and ask for time to prep for an unexpected course of action (heists and invasions are the big ones). No one has ever complained, everyone is cool about it.
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Yep, occasionally you have to stop and say “Umm, I need a little time to get ready.” A famous example is in the Enemy Within campaign for WFRP. Death on the Reik leaves the players with a merchant river barge and no blazing trail to follow to get to Power Behind the Throne. There is a lead that will send them to Middenheim, but it’s not a clear railroad sign. Players quite frequently start becoming river merchants, river pirates, etc. At that point, the GM may have to reassess. :shade:
 
Nobby-W said:
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.
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In my games, guards don't exist in a quantum space-time continuum allowing you to spend metacurrency to change them from unbribed to bribed two days ago. You bribed them beforehand, or you didn't, full stop.

Spycraft had a bunch of rules like this, and as much as I wanted to like it, I couldn't warm up to them. I understand how they work, and I think for the right gamer they're probably a lot of fun. I'm just not that gamer.
 
Black Vulmea said:
In my games, guards don't exist in a quantum space-time continuum allowing you to spend metacurrency to change them from unbribed to bribed two days ago. You bribed them beforehand, or you didn't, full stop.

Spycraft had a bunch of rules like this, and as much as I wanted to like it, I couldn't warm up to them. I understand how they work, and I think for the right gamer they're probably a lot of fun. I'm just not that gamer.
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The supposed “only fills in things not known” claim about flashbacks can only be really used if there’s a Metric Fuckton Christload of things not known. Once again, defeating the entire point of the Living World.
 
Isn't the classic rumour table a series of 'plot hooks'?

Although I realize the term 'plot' gives some the vapors.

tenor.gif
 
Voros said:
Isn't the classic rumour table a series of 'plot hooks'?

Although I realize the term 'plot' gives some the vapors.

View attachment 27708
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Oh hey, a person who plays narrative games likens critics to old women having hot flashes and vapours.

I am Jack’s total lack of surprise.
 
CRKrueger said:
Oh hey, a person who plays narrative games likens critics to old women having hot flashes and vapours.

I am Jack’s total lack of surprise.
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Is it all right if we screencap this so we can post it on your behalf later?
 
Voros said:
Oh shit, I've been outed as someone who likes a variety of games!!??



:eat:
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No, you’ve been outed as someone who takes passive-aggressive shot at those who think differently, and apparently doesn’t have the spine to admit taking the shot.
 
Someone so desperately wants my attention. Kinda sweet. :sweat:
 
The typical reaction of CK to a thread that mentions his trigger words.

 
CRKrueger said:
The supposed “only fills in things not known” claim about flashbacks can only be really used if there’s a Metric Fuckton Christload of things not known.
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With campaign turns in a sandbox, you can cover large swaths of time, so there are situations where days or weeks of time are condensed without a minute-to-minute accounting of the action:

"In a roleplaying game, campaign turns may be an opportunity for a mini-game, such as the aforementioned military campaign for Flashing Blades or the cattle drive mini-game published in Reilly Associates' Variant magazine back in the early Eighties for 2e Boot Hill, or they may be something akin to one or more sorts of montages. One could, for example, imagine a Flashing Blades' priest's six months of 'religious duties' as a series of vignettes: collecting alms for the poor, praying in his cell, saying Mass, leading a saint's day procession, hearing confession, and so on. . . . Smart players will use campaign turns similarly, as an opportunity to pursue long-term character development and engagement with the game-world; perhaps our FB priest will use his six months of pastoral obligation to become acquainted with a seigneur and his family, or to research conflicts between Catholics and heretics from the Wars of Religion in his parish." (source)

If a player wants his character to spend a campaign turn to getting to know the guards - hang out at the same pubs, buy drinks, carouse - and identify a likely mark to suborn, that's a terrific use of that time, but the brakes are gonna screech hard if a player tells me, yeah, I bribed him last week to let us in right now, 'cause we've got a little roleplaying and likely a roll or two to make first.

From what I gather, that's what BitD specifically strives to avoid; it wants you to make a quick plan, GO, and then resolve details as needed. For the genre it wants to emulate, it's a clever approach, and it's very different from the way I play.

Endless Flight said:
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Sorry to disappoint you, brother. :wink:
 
Well, Ravenswing Ravenswing and BedrockBrendan BedrockBrendan probably both use more time than me preparing, so it fits:shade:.

Me? I'd have taken this approach.
Baulderstone said:
I was playing in a game about a year ago, and when an NPC wizard was killed, I suggested we immediately proceed to his home to loot it while the distraction of his death was ongoing. The GM paused a moment, said he wasn't prepared for that and asked for a twenty-minute break. I didn't view it as GM weakness that he wasn't prepared for my action. I was impressed that he going to roll with my action and do some additional work to let me try it, rather than invent some quick excuse why I couldn't, such throwing an impregnable, magical force field around the house.

Anyone with any experience with RPGs knows that GM doesn't really have every detail of the world filled out before the game begins, and they will be fine with letting you have a little time to flesh things out when you need to.
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:thumbsup:
 
Voros said:
The typical reaction of CK to a thread that mentions his trigger words.

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Says the guy that took the shot and still doesn’t have the spine to admit he took the shot, while claiming others are the problem.

My new sig says it all.
 
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