Quote from: daniel_ream;662410Siege towers don't build themselves.

You've backpedalled nicely with the whole "immersion doesn't mean, y'know, immersion-immersion" explanation, but what you're really saying is that every RPG is Dream Park.  You're not playing a character; you're just playing yourself in some kind of soi-disant theme park version of a fantasy world.  Look too closely and you realize the castles are all wooden facades and the hobgoblins are surly teenagers wearing paper-mache heads.

I could see it being a problem if you are playing and know how long it takes to build a seige tower, and the GM doesn't - if that comes up. If players aren't just ignorant of details, but don't know that they're ignorant of them, it couldn't form any sort of barrier to their immersion.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;662429I could see it being a problem if you are playing and know how long it takes to build a seige tower, and the GM doesn't - if that comes up. If players aren't just ignorant of details, but don't know that they're ignorant of them, it couldn't form any sort of barrier to their immersion.

This is my experience. If you have a player at the table who happens to know a lot bout a given subject, then he may expect more details than the gm or system can honestly provide, but usually the four or five other players dont want that level of detail or realism. I think with any immersive entertainment you find things break down if you look too closely (most movie plots have holes if you think about them, many forms of entertainment routinelyviolate the laws of physics, most video games have a point where you simplyvcant interact with the setting, etc). When I play an rpg, I am looking for an experience where it feels real in the moment, and I am not too worried if later that day, when I think about it, i realize there was a realism or consistency issue.

Quote from: jibbajibba;662414I generated lots of Traveller star systems using 2d6 and a set of tables I figure its not to hard to move that to maps and a computer.

You're right, it isn't. What is hard and the key to a successful sandbox is not the numbers themselves, but the interpretation of them. Any Traveller Referee worth a shit knows this.

Quote from: daniel_ream;662410Siege towers don't build themselves.

Because barn raising tells you everything you need to know about siege engineering. Seriously? Who's being the pompous ass making projections and believing there's some sort of close 1:1 translation that because he's handled some beams and hammered nails in them with some (pacifist) Mennonite buddies, that makes him an expert on what a mercenary must feel on the battlefield?

You know, the very thing you were bitching about in the first place, those hipsters who know fuck all about what they're talking about and believe they're experts:

Quote from: daniel_ream;662034My experience with engineering, classical/medieval history and experimental archaeology is that most moderns couldn't think like the average Dark Ages mercenary if their lives depended on it.

Oh. That's right. YOU would be that guy here on this thread right now, dude.

A hipster thinking he's some kind of expert bitching about other hipsters thinking they're experts. Hm.

Quote from: daniel_ream;662410You've backpedalled nicely

I haven't backpedalled, since I never made the claim you'd like to assign to me. I said pretty much the opposite:

Quote from: Benoist;662210I personally know that working on wooden toys in Santa's workshop and reading books about General Robert E. Lee wouldn't get me much closer to understanding what a Confederate soldier felt like actually fighting at Gettysburg. But the game isn't about "realism" to me. It's about let's pretend, and about suspension of disbelief.

What I did was refute your reformulation of something you evidently have a problem with (immersion) to suit your own pre-made conclusions, which in this case was a silly made-up equivalence between immersion and 1:1 realism of your character.

You've made a strawman argument doubled with a "No True Scotman" take you'd easily bash thereof, but the problem is, (1) no one but yourself made that equivalence, and (2) you come off as the only one here claiming he's somehow an expert on siege engineering for having raised a couple of barns.

Give me a break.

Quote from: daniel_ream;662410with the whole "immersion doesn't mean, y'know, immersion-immersion" explanation, but what you're really saying is that every RPG is Dream Park.  You're not playing a character; you're just playing yourself in some kind of soi-disant theme park version of a fantasy world.  Look too closely and you realize the castles are all wooden facades and the hobgoblins are surly teenagers wearing paper-mache heads.

You know, if you look hard enough at any game table you're playing, you will catch a glimpse of a real life and blood GM behind the screen.

Who's the guy building "No True Scotsman" definitions of "immersion-immersion" out of thin air again? Oh right. That'd be you.

And yeah, you can role play yourself in outlandish situations, or nearly not yourself at all (there's always IME a part of oneself at play in a character, no matter how different it is from the real you on the character sheet), or anything in between.

Whether one is in effect playing an entirely realistic alter ego has nothing to do with immersion, which is the mental act of seeing yourself as your character (your character being you, a shade of you, or almost not you in the game) in the imaginary world depicted by the game.

What DOES aid immersion, as I previously mentioned, is the believability of the game milieu, as expressed here:

Quote from: Benoist;662210Let's pretend and suspension of disbelief are aided by the believability of the game milieu. Different gamers will have different thresholds in that regard: some will need more believable elements than others to in effect pretend and suspend disbelief, while the nature of these elements, what "feels believable" in fact, will also vary from gamer to gamer. On Thud and Blunder reads to me like a column discussing what feels believable and what the value of a minimum of thinking and research are to the believability of a fantasy setting. And I wholeheartedly agree with that.

You'll excuse me, but I'm tired of arguing with people who do not read posts or if they do, either imagine stuff people said they actually never said, or rewrite/ignore whatever is actually written to suit their own arguments, and are being smug hypocrites bitching about shit they are themselves doing in the process, as you just did pretending you're an expert about what mercenaries must feel like on a battlefield because you've done some computing, read a bunch of books and hammered a couple of nails in a barn with some pacifists some day.

I'll go back to work, if you don't mind.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;662429I could see it being a problem if you are playing and know how long it takes to build a seige tower, and the GM doesn't - if that comes up. If players aren't just ignorant of details, but don't know that they're ignorant of them, it couldn't form any sort of barrier to their immersion.

Yes. The problem is expectations. It's not about objective reality, but about one's subjective expectations of what would be believable or not. It doesn't matter if a guy raising a Mennonite barn actually became after that experience an expert in the field of medieval siege engineering. What matters is that this particular guy might believe so to some extent, and that affects what he is going to expect as being "realistic" or not in the game, i.e. what he's going to believe or not, what's going to aid him to immerse in the situation of the game, or on the contrary impede it.

Quote from: daniel_ream;662410Siege towers don't build themselves.

You've backpedalled nicely with the whole "immersion doesn't mean, y'know, immersion-immersion" explanation, but what you're really saying is that every RPG is Dream Park.  You're not playing a character; you're just playing yourself in some kind of soi-disant theme park version of a fantasy world.  Look too closely and you realize the castles are all wooden facades and the hobgoblins are surly teenagers wearing paper-mache heads.

Great post!

Its one of those things that should be written in a wall for everyone to remember that, no matter how hard you aim for immersion or realism or simulation or consistency or whatever, in the end its just a game of make-believe on a stage decorated with fake trees. So, yeah, don't take it too seriously.

Silva, you of all people should know that we do not take you seriously.

Quote from: jibbajibba;662397If you define your sandbox as a standard M class planet . . .

You know that "M-class planet" is made-up Star Trek technobabble, right?

Quote from: Black Vulmea;662465You know that "M-class planet" is made-up Star Trek technobabble, right?

Don't confuse him with facts! It'll hurt his brain!

Here's a thread discussing some made-up gaming technobabble and we get two geniuses....

Quote from: jeff37923;662470

Quote from: Black Vulmea;662465You know that "M-class planet" is made-up Star Trek technobabble, right?

Don't confuse him with facts! It'll hurt his brain!

This amuses me.

Quote from: Bedrock Brendanhowever the best computer rpg i ever played was Darklands and that came out years ago (that may be nostalgia though)

Yeah, Darklands is awesome. I think a remake would give a great kickstarter project. But while it’s a very "open-ended" game, its sandbox quality has fallen behind the wave a bit though.

Perhaps Ironically, the videogames nowadays that I would call the "state of the art" on sandboxes are not even RPGs, but strategy/sims or genre-hybrids. That’s because most RPGs still rely on heavily scripted-entities and events, while the top sandbox games rely on simulated-entities and events. So, for eg: while on Dragon Age (a pure RPG) the world entities are pretty "static" while youre out and just come to life when you approaches them, in a game like Stalker (a FPS/RPG hybrid) or Crusader Kings 2 (a grand strategy/Sim hybrid) the entities are pretty "alive" roaming the world on their own accord to fulfill their agendas and needs, and even provoking changes in the world just as the player would.

I find that weird, because the crpg genre in my mind should be the one which most invest in "alive" worlds. But sadly, it keeps giving more importance to tell a story than to provide a alive experience.

QuoteWhenever i play an online multiplayer game, this seems to be a key area where computer games havent caught up with D&D. It still doesnt quite feel like a living world (though i must admit they have gotten considerably better over the years)

I think MMOs are the worst place to find a good sandbox or "liveable" experience, because their entities tend to be there just to fill shallow complementary roles (store owners, quest givers, monsters, bosses, etc) to the actual players.

Quote from: silva;662529I think MMOs are the worst place to find a good sandbox or "liveable" experience, because their entities tend to be there just to fill shallow complementary roles (store owners, quest givers, monsters, bosses, etc) to the actual players.

Then please tell us why you have been claiming that Grand Theft Auto is a sandbox.

Between other things, because entities in GTA have the potential to change and evolve based on the player interactions with the environment, be it in regard to the very protagonist (through degrees of relationship - positive or negative), or regardless of him.

While CPU entities in MMOs are pretty much static - whatever the changes the player causes to the environment, they rarely change. I think the reason for that is the underlying premise of most MMOs - that its the players who should provide all changes to the environment directly, not the AI. Regardless of the reason though, the outcome is a world that feels pretty artificial, except if all players strive to make it "alive" consciously (as is the case in some "roleplaying servers"), which is rarely the case, really.

EDIT: only MMO I know of that came close to being a true sandbox was EVE Online, even then only regarding its economical aspect, that was really deep and well developed.

Quote from: silva;662537Between other things, because entities in GTA have the potential to change and evolve based on the player interactions with the environment, be it in regard to the very protagonist (through degrees of relationship - positive or negative), or regardless of him.

While CPU entities in MMOs are pretty much static - whatever the changes the player causes to the environment, they rarely change. I think the reason for that is the underlying premise of most MMOs - that its the players who should provide all changes to the environment directly, not the AI. Regardless of the reason though, the outcome is a world that feels pretty artificial, except if all players strive to make it "alive" consciously (as is the case in some "roleplaying servers"), which is rarely the case, really.

Could you please repeat this in english. I can't figure out what you are trying to say in that first paragraph.

Oops. sorry Im not a native.

Try this: Entities in GTA have the potential to change or evolve based on the player interactions with the environment. This change may be in relation to the very player (through degrees of relationship - positive or negative), or not. While MMOs lack these.


OBS: I think its important to note that, the sandbox potential for implementation is always evolving, specially on the computer environment. So, what we called a great sandbox yesterday (Darklands) could be a weak sandbox by nowadays standards and computational capabilities. Even GTA lacks more advanced things seen more recently in games like Crusader Kings 2, Dwarf Fortress, Stalker, Minecraft, etc.

OK, but it is still limited by what the computer game has been programmed with. Although it is closer than what you were saying earlier when you talked about direct Player input as to how the narrative would change, because in a computer game like GTA the only way you can interact is through your character.