This is a sincere question, but I don't care if it devolves into a petty quarrel. Why do many "old school" players assume the sandbox style of play is the ideal "old school" method of play? Growing up, based on the books at hand, the dungeon (i.e. adventure) seemed to be the focal point of the game. Feel free to dash my assumptions, but do please cite your sources.
I was raised up in an unusual gaming environment; my introductions to RPGs (via older brothers) were Marvel Superheroes and D&D. When I wanted to run my own D&D I had a patchwork collection from both AD&D 1st and 2nd editions. The differences were lost on me during my youth and I integrated books from both runs.
Today, most self-proclaimed "old-schoolers" extol the virtues of vast sandboxes and player-driven play. I've successfully run plenty of campaigns using that formula as well. But why do we presume that this style of play was what the original D&D authors intended? Reflecting back on patchwork collection of books I grew up with, I would assume that the dungeon and the stand-alone adventure was the "unit" of a campaign.
Put another way, why do we assume that D&D should be played sandbox style and not adventure-driven, especially in light of publication history (e.g. Isle of Dread was not written until '81)?
Educate me.
The original white/brown box described dungeons but also wilderness adventures on a hexmap, with the strong implication that the latter was the fully-elaborated campaign context.
No where, absolutely nowhere in the original game will you find plot-based, scene-ified, story-type scenarios.
Get your hands on the original game text, or the AD&D 1e DMG. That's all the evidence you need.
Although, I must highlight, the term "sandbox" is a dirty word nowadays. It´s the signpost of a latecomer or bandwagon swine. Also, eerily, the sub-complex swine have perverted it into a tool of LIMITATION, which still puzzles me.
Quote from: Elliot Wilen;382801The original white/brown box described dungeons but also wilderness adventures on a hexmap, with the strong implication that the latter was the fully-elaborated campaign context.
No where, absolutely nowhere in the original game will you find plot-based, scene-ified, story-type scenarios.
Get your hands on the original game text, or the AD&D 1e DMG. That's all the evidence you need.
Bold emphasis mine.
Right, I agree with you here. I'm not implying that
story was ever emphasized by the original designers. If I made that mistake in the OP I made it in error. But I do wonder if the
dungeon/adventure was the primary unit of play vs. what we now recognize as sandbox/campaign as the primary unit of play.
I do own the AD&D 1e DMG. It was my first document used to run a game. But I remain unconvinced that it supported sandbox-style play in the way we currently understand it. Anyone is welcome to cite passages from it though, I don't have it on me and haven't used it for 10+ years. I'm not saying those passages don't exist, but I don't have them available to me currently and invite discussion about "how the game was supposed to be played."
Quote from: Settembrini;382803Although, I must highlight, the term "sandbox" is a dirty word nowadays. It´s the signpost of a latecomer or bandwagon swine. Also, eerily, the sub-complex swine have perverted it into a tool of LIMITATION, which still puzzles me.
Is it? I don't honestly know where I stand on the actual term, although I do have a suspicion that it only entered our vernacular by way of video games to describe how many of us have played D&D for a long time. I don't find the word by itself offensive, nor do I find the way I normally run games a LIMITATION.
Quote from: winkingbishop;382807Is it? I don't honestly know where I stand on the actual term, although I do have a suspicion that it only entered our vernacular by way of video games to describe how many of us have played D&D for a long time. I don't find the word by itself offensive, nor do I find the way I normally run games a LIMITATION.
Several video games which I thought were like sandboxes: "Grand Theft Auto 3" and "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City".
Albeit doing stuff outside of the prescribed missions sequences in GTA, was kind of on the mundane to boring side. Stuff like killing cops, blowing up cars, running over pedestrians, etc ... got pretty boring very quickly.
With that being said, I found sandbox D&D games somewhat more interesting with the right group of players, than a sandbox in Grand Theft Auto.
Quote from: ggroy;382809With that being said, I found sandbox D&D games somewhat more interesting with the right group of players, than a sandbox in Grand Theft Auto.
Yeah. See, I'm not so sure the word "sandbox" as applied to video games is the same thing as applied to RPGs. I wasn't really trying to open up that can of worms in the OP, but I suppose it is worth mentioning. In my view of the D&D I grew up with, the sandbox has a closer relationship to "activating missions" than it does "running around killing cops, see what happens."
That is not to suggest that total free-form interaction with the campaign can't create emergent fun. It can, I've done it, and it requires a fairly experienced referee to satisfy the game table. But I'm not convinced that was the original intent of the designers. I still believe that the sandbox serves as the ether in which adventures or dungeons are placed in.
I think I've already admitted that I am not studied in reading between the lines of Gygax or Arenson, but I'll make that explicit here again. What I'm really asking is was D&D meant to played as a game of dungeons and adventures or did the designers think one should play out every hex/meal/day/encounter as is extolled by (in varying degrees) modern players?
It's got everything to with 1/ Gaming history and 2/ Immersion, actuality of the game world and player choices.
1/ The fact that D&D derived from Chainmail, and that the game was thus conceived with a wargaming frame of mind, where you have a base situation, like two forces opposing each other on a battlefield, with the game itself being the pleasure of solving this situation, unfolding it, with a maximum of player input, with the rules enabling historically (at first) consistent choices rather than inhibiting them. Which leads to ...
2/ The fact that the game is about make-believe and actuality. In other words, the referee prepares an environment for the players to interact with, but choices and strategies on the PCs parts are entirely up to the players and should remain so. From there, the players can go wherever they want below and above the ground, do whatever they want with the environment, however they want to do it. The events of the game develop in real time, at the actual game table, and the players' input is more important under this set of expectations than ever.
It's worth to repeat that the notion of "story" as part of the game is really something anachronistic to the early game. What you're playing is actuality, make-believe events as they actually occur. There's no "story" anywhere. If "story" there is, that'll be later, when the game is over, and you tell other people what happened at the game table: the story of how the game unfolded.
Quote from: winkingbishop;382805I do own the AD&D 1e DMG. It was my first document used to run a game. But I remain unconvinced that it supported sandbox-style play in the way we currently understand it. Anyone is welcome to cite passages from it though, I don't have it on me and haven't used it for 10+ years.
It very much does, as it pertains to the notion of underworld and campaign milieu. You should read it again, with fresh eyes, I agree. :)
Quote from: winkingbishop;382805Bold emphasis mine.
Right, I agree with you here. I'm not implying that story was ever emphasized by the original designers. If I made that mistake in the OP I made it in error. But I do wonder if the dungeon/adventure was the primary unit of play vs. what we now recognize as sandbox/campaign as the primary unit of play.
I do own the AD&D 1e DMG. It was my first document used to run a game. But I remain unconvinced that it supported sandbox-style play in the way we currently understand it. Anyone is welcome to cite passages from it though, I don't have it on me and haven't used it for 10+ years. I'm not saying those passages don't exist, but I don't have them available to me currently and invite discussion about "how the game was supposed to be played."
I appreciate the query.
As I have postulated before, the unit of play and the focus of the game grew in scope over the course of the first couple years of the game. One of the many themes in the original/early maturation of the game dealt with a game for dungeons, to an adventure based game, to a sandbox based game.
AS for the DMG1E, and 1E in general, it certainly supported Sandbox in a myriad of fashions. From the establishment of a keep or power base later in a PC's career, to the tithe's for certain classes, to what sort of courtesan one might meet in a city, to the encounter charts for different types of terrain and the rules for getting lost outside, disease and sanity charts, it took the game from the adventure to the campaign ideal.
If players aren't out there with their characters making choices and doing different things, what's the point?
If my group told me, "We're walking away from the Temple of Elemental Evil module" and went off to some other locale to adventure, I'd oblige them.
It's their world. I simply arbitrate the mechanics that abstract events that occur in it. Who am I to say a giant invisible hand (Bigby!) picks them up and drops them off back in front of the temple? Or that an impenetrable fog surrounds where they're adventuring and they just somehow know it won't dissipate until they've done XYZ thing?
I mean, shit, if I was going to do silly contrived nonsense like that I might as well run the fuckin' Dragonlance novels.
Erm, modules.
Quote from: Benoist;382812It's worth to repeat that the notion of "story" as part of the game is really something anachronistic to the early game.
I don't think that's entirely true and there is plenty of evidence of people running stories as soon as role-playing spread to a wider audience. Exhibit A is Bill Armintrout's article The Metamorphosis Alpha Notebook from The Space Gamer #42 from August 1981 describing his the game he ran in college when the game first came out (http://www.metamorphosisalpha.net/MA_Notebook.pdf) (roughly 1977) in which the the techniques and examples he describe run the gamut from things based on verisimilitude to things based on story (see the "Ah, Dulcinea!" section) and include several examples of GM authority-sharing. Exhibit B is Glenn Blacow's article Aspects of Adventure Gaming from Different Worlds #10 from October 1980 (http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/theory/models/blacow.html) in which he talks about styles of play including, among other things, GM's telling stories. Exhibit C is
Traveller Adventure 3: Twilight's Peak, again from 1980, which contains the following text near the beginning of the book: "Mandatory rumors are essential to the adventure. As such, they must be provided to the adventurers without regard to chance or mischance." Exhibit D,
Traveller Double Adventure 2: Across the Bright Face, also from 1980, doesn't even give the player's a choice and starts the players off in medias res.
So I think there there is clear evidence going back to 1980 of people playing games that involved more than challenging player skill or letting the players wander freely through a predetermined setting, even well before 1980. So unless your definition of the "early game" is limited to those run by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson or stops in 1975 or 1976, I think there is ample evidence that people running plenty of "early games", especially when they learned them from the rulebook, treated them as a sort of Rorschach test that they made their own in the process of trying to figure it out.
Please note that I like sandbox play quite a lot and it's my preferred type of game as a player. My point is simply that a wide variety of play styles go back to the very early days of the hobby, too.
When I'm talking about the "early game", I'm not talking about Metamorphosis Alpha c. 1980 or whatnot.
I'm talking of the original D&D game c. 1973-74.
Quote from: thedungeondelver;382824If players aren't out there with their characters making choices and doing different things, what's the point?
If my group told me, "We're walking away from the Temple of Elemental Evil module" and went off to some other locale to adventure, I'd oblige them.
It's their world. I simply arbitrate the mechanics that abstract events that occur in it. Who am I to say a giant invisible hand (Bigby!) picks them up and drops them off back in front of the temple? Or that an impenetrable fog surrounds where they're adventuring and they just somehow know it won't dissipate until they've done XYZ thing?
I mean, shit, if I was going to do silly contrived nonsense like that I might as well run the fuckin' Dragonlance novels.
Erm, modules.
See, I think I agree with you. But what I'm driving at is just that scenario you presented: Players moving from one "adventure" to another. Is OD&D designed to be a game of one adventure "Temple of E. Evil & My Goblin in my Pocket" or is it a game of living the lives of Tim the Wizard. Is it about what Tim encounters in every hex of his life or is it hand-waving between Dungeons X & Y?
Quote from: winkingbishop;382832See, I think I agree with you. But what I'm driving at is just that scenario you presented: Players moving from one "adventure" to another. Is OD&D designed to be a game of one adventure "Temple of E. Evil & My Goblin in my Pocket" or is it a game of living the lives of Tim the Wizard. Is it about what Tim encounters in every hex of his life or is it hand-waving between Dungeons X & Y?
I'm not sure I undertand the question. Fact is, the original game was thinking in terms of adventure
sites and
milieu. The adventure itself isn't what is on paper. It's what's happening at the game table
while people are playing.
Quote from: Benoist;382834I'm not sure I undertand the question. Fact is, the original game was thinking in terms of adventure sites and milieu. The adventure itself isn't what is on paper. It's what's happening at the game table while people are playing.
I think you got what I was asking. Is the original game more about going from adventure to adventure or is it about living day-to-day as your character?
Quote from: winkingbishop;382832See, I think I agree with you. But what I'm driving at is just that scenario you presented: Players moving from one "adventure" to another. Is OD&D designed to be a game of one adventure "Temple of E. Evil & My Goblin in my Pocket" or is it a game of living the lives of Tim the Wizard. Is it about what Tim encounters in every hex of his life or is it hand-waving between Dungeons X & Y?
Well, consider this:
All of the really fun and sometimes cryptic "stuff" in AD&D was all there because Gary's group put it there as they played OD&D. Chariot of (Dennis) Sustare. The Tzoonk (Rob Kuntz) Fragment. Hell, the way Meteor Swarm is written in the Greyhawk rulebook for OD&D is an in joke between Gary, Rob Kuntz and Jim Ward.
All that stuff came about - kingdom names in Greyhawk, spell names, dungeons (
and the lands those dungeons were located in!) because of campaign verisimilitude (there's that word a second time today!) on the part of Gary (and Rob and Al and Jim etc. etc.).
It is what made and makes D&D great.
I'm not going to tell you that not having a highly textured campaign is "wrong" or anything, but I really think people are missing out on the fun when they don't do that kind of thing, when they don't let players blaze trails, build castles, conquer kingdoms and so forth. Even if you're using a canned world (as I do, with Greyhawk), I mean...come on, there's hundreds of "empty" map hexes there: stuff
happens in there! My WGH3-5 series spans two hexes of The Howling Hills: I don't expect (and I hope it wouldn't be) that DMs just plod from Dungeon to Dungeon without "stuff" happening therein.
But that's just me; I could be wrong.
Quote from: winkingbishop;382837I think you got what I was asking. Is the original game more about going from adventure to adventure or is it about living day-to-day as your character?
It's about exploring sites ripe with adventure opportunities.
Quote from: winkingbishop;382837I think you got what I was asking. Is the original game more about going from adventure to adventure or is it about living day-to-day as your character?
Well, this is not a 'nominal' scale question. The ratio between one versus the other might well be called the 'sandbox ratio' of a game. Even in the most stringent, detailed sandbox, we don't regulate how often a person takes a dump (nor check the chart for the appropriate experience), though I do keep tabs on bathing. I still allow hand waving of a few days at a time, though my groups mainly don't use it.
Now, the very original game was just about playing in a dungeon. There was no outdoor adventures, etc. The very early growth of the game mainly deals with the growth from your first situation into more of the second.
Quote from: Benoist;382831When I'm talking about the "early game", I'm not talking about Metamorphosis Alpha c. 1980 or whatnot.
I'm talking of the original D&D game c. 1973-74.
So what you are talking about is the game as it was run by a very small number of people for a fairly brief period of time.
Quote from: winkingbishop;382837I think you got what I was asking. Is the original game more about going from adventure to adventure or is it about living day-to-day as your character?
It doesn't have to be one or the other. In one part of the campaign, the characters can come to a Keep on the Borderlands and get involved in exploring the area, becoming involved with the inhabitants, become major players at the Keep, or even eventually coming to own it. Or they could leave, joining a merchant caravan as guards. That journey as guards could be a simple description as nothing eventful happens, possibly with npc interactions, or it could be a hour-by-hour adventure that lasts months of real time before the characters arrive at their destination. Somewhere in there you can come across a small village that seems to be under a curse, and try to solve the mystery and break the curse.
The key to the original game is that it wasn't about THIS ONE THING. It was about the imagination.
Quote from: John Morrow;382846So what you are talking about is the game as it was run by a very small number of people for a fairly brief period of time.
What I'm talking about is "the early game".
Quote from: winkingbishop;382811Yeah. See, I'm not so sure the word "sandbox" as applied to video games is the same thing as applied to RPGs. I wasn't really trying to open up that can of worms in the OP, but I suppose it is worth mentioning. In my view of the D&D I grew up with, the sandbox has a closer relationship to "activating missions" than it does "running around killing cops, see what happens."
A "rudderless" sandbox D&D game, will start to resemble "running around killing cops, see what happens". I've played sandbox D&D games which resembled this. This was typically the case when the players had no idea what they really want to do and/or there was no strong take-charge leader type of person playing.
Quote from: winkingbishop;382798Reflecting back on patchwork collection of books I grew up with, I would assume that the dungeon and the stand-alone adventure was the "unit" of a campaign.
That's the way we played. Buying TSR products since 1979, we saw many examples of dungeons and adventures. Precious few of sandbox worlds. Greyhawk was a neat read, but offered very little support for a boots on the ground sandbox campaign (so Almor can field 600 heavy cavalry and 1,200 medium infantry in times of war, and exports cloth and diamonds... interesting. But what in the fuck does that mean to my band of 3rd level PCs tramping across the countryside?).
So using the TSR modules as models, we created our own dungeons. And that was the unit of play - dungeons. One dungeon after another - some published dungeons, and some that we made up. We would start the session reading out the Background section of the dungeons, and then the Start. And off we went. Occassionaly we'd throw in a city adventure, or some random outdoor encounters.
I did know one DM in grade 11 who spent the whole summer creating a sandbox campaign world, using some of his own material and a lot of content from the City State of the World Emperor. But creating and running that campaign was a task of enormous time and effort. Only a totally dedicated DM with a lot of time on his hands would undertake such a task. And being 15, my friends and I had a lot of better things to do with our summer.
But in the end I wouldn't worry about how people played (or say they played) back in 1981. We've seen a lot of Old School Orthodoxy creep into online forums over the last couple years, and it seems driven by equal parts resentment of the modern paradigm and one-true-wayism. And frankly, I'm skeptical how much is even true.
Quote from: winkingbishop;382805Right, I agree with you here. I'm not implying that story was ever emphasized by the original designers. If I made that mistake in the OP I made it in error. But I do wonder if the dungeon/adventure was the primary unit of play vs. what we now recognize as sandbox/campaign as the primary unit of play.
Dungeons certainly were the default unit in the early game. You can look at early Dragon magazine articles that encourage DMs to occasionally take the game out of the dungeon and into the wilderness or a town. But even the wilderness and town tips were writting like dungeons - encouter levels and random tables. And they were presented as occasional diversion from the main setting - the dungeon(s).
I can see perfectly how someone could draw this conclusion in 1979-1980, if introduced to the game via TSR adventure modules. That's what the publications of the time suggested - they were self-contained and largely finite, even if a lot more open than post-Hickman adventures. Conversely, even older materials, which truly embodied the original "complex, open-ended simulation" ideal of D&D, were not universally available. Nonetheless, if we look at these documents of play - Temple of the Frog, early Judges Guild supplement, Empire of the Petal Throne etc. - they are all sandbox-like to some extent:
a) they don't have much in the way of concrete goals beyond implied ones ("get rich", "go up levels", "defeat your opponents")
b) they are networks filled with adventure possibilities instead of directed paths; movement is typically fairly free in them and can flow in more than direction;
c) they are open scenarios with a lot of links radiating off from them, instead of keeping the action contained.
This, to me, points at strongly freeform campaigns. In fact, a lot of the really early games Gygax and others recounted weren't so much adventures but "what ifs" - what happens if I paint that wizard's tower with stripes? What happens if I play a vampire? What happens if I counter that vampire with a cleric?
This is, of course, not all evident from even the AD&D core books, and especially not basic (which was probably too focused for its own good).
I will add that Greyhawk, as published in the Folio and the Boxed Set editions, does not really invite someone to play sandbox games: since the scale is too big, it is more context, and a tool to get the players go from one adventure to another. Contrast that to the Wilderlands or Blackmoor (or Traveller!), where the "going" is the "doing".
Quote from: Haffrung;382862I did know one DM in grade 11 who spent the whole summer creating a sandbox campaign world, using some of his own material and a lot of content from the City State of the World Emperor. But creating and running that campaign was a task of enormous time and effort. Only a totally dedicated DM with a lot of time on his hands would undertake such a task. And being 15, my friends and I had a lot of better things to do with our summer.
That sounds like creating a full world, though, and not just running a campaign. The latter can be done with very little preparatory work by always staying two steps before the players (by developing a few adventure areas in their vicinity) or even letting things emerge as they go. That's how my first campaign went, and that wasn't even 1st but 2nd edition. Of course, some people may not call that a proper sandbox since it's not all fully established beforehand. Well, I call it a fun and relatively effortless way to run a campaign.
Quote from: LordVreeg;382845Now, the very original game was just about playing in a dungeon.
No, not really. We should be clear about whether we're talking about the pre-publication gaming in Blackmoor and Greyhawk, or the actual written guidelines in original D&D and 1e.
So, pre-publication, there's the oft-cited genesis of D&D, described by Greg Svenson, which was an expedition to the bowels of Blackmoor Castle. But very soon after that, Arneson was running outdoor adventures, e.g. for Robert the Bald, and it was very clear that there was a wider setting-based continuity. Meanwhile, Gygax's group had multiple "Greyhawk" campaigns using the Avalon Hill Outdoor Survival map as the basis.
At publication, all these practices are set forth in rules. Again, all you have to do is look.
Sources:
http://shamsgrog.blogspot.com/2009/05/q-with-greg-svenson.html
http://blackmoor.mystara.us/svenny.html
http://mmrpg.zeitgeistgames.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=printview&t=594&start=0
http://lordofthegreendragons.blogspot.com/2009/03/first-living-campaign.html
Also, I've talked about D&D roots in several posts at my livejournal. IMNSHO you could do worse than to look at http://ewilen.livejournal.com/tag/rpg%20history.
This should also answer the OP's request for sources. I could go and cite pages from the books but I have only so much time for the whack-a-mole game of refuting idle, sourceless speculation.
Quote from: EliotQuote from: Originally Posted by LordVreegNow, the very original game was just about playing in a dungeon.
No, not really. We should be clear about whether we're talking about the pre-publication gaming in Blackmoor and Greyhawk, or the actual written guidelines in original D&D and 1e.
So, pre-publication, there's the oft-cited genesis of D&D, described by Greg Svenson, which was an expedition to the bowels of Blackmoor Castle. But very soon after that, Arneson was running outdoor adventures, e.g. for Robert the Bald, and it was very clear that there was a wider setting-based continuity. Meanwhile, Gygax's group had multiple "Greyhawk" campaigns using the Avalon Hill Outdoor Survival map as the basis.
At publication, all these practices are set forth in rules. Again, all you have to do is look.
Sources:
http://shamsgrog.blogspot.com/2009/0...g-svenson.html
http://blackmoor.mystara.us/svenny.html
http://mmrpg.zeitgeistgames.com/inde...&t=594&start=0
http://lordofthegreendragons.blogspo...-campaign.html
Also, I've talked about D&D roots in several posts at my livejournal. IMNSHO you could do worse than to look at http://ewilen.livejournal.com/tag/rpg%20history.
This should also answer the OP's request for sources. I could go and cite pages from the books but I have only so much time for the whack-a-mole game of refuting idle, sourceless speculation.
Well, with the same information looked at (sans your blog, no insult intended), I still come up with the same change of focus. And I think this is because I see it from pre-publication omward. It is not a black and white thing, but a continual change of focus that went on until 1e was published (so some feel 2e was even more campaign focused). It is apparent from any source that the movement away from the pure dungeon enviroment happenned early, however, and on this I would not disagree with you.
Vol. 3 of the original game is entitled "The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures". It discusses both approaches within. I think that wrongfully redefining the original game as "just dungeons" is a meme that was born in part due to a reaction to the way dungeon crawling was practiced, which seemed boring and limited to some players of the game, up to the point where alternate, and to them, "better" ways of gaming were developed professionally (I'm thinking about Call of Cthulhu, for instance, which had in France an enormous influence on the way gamers came to view D&D as an "obsolete, limited game" where one would just play in a "Porte-Monstre-Trésor"/PMT, i.e. "Room-Monster-Treasure" fashion).
I haven't read the whole thread, but I suggest taking a look at the First Fantasy Campaign. It's very evident that the campaign was more than just the dungeon, with territorial incomes and orders of battles (i.e. resources to be managed), ways to invest/spend your resources, et cetera. Also, consider all the rules in The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures that relate to, well, the wilderness adventure.
I think the campaign world as a "sandbox" and playing field with verisimilitude was an important part of the early game. Gary's emphasis on the importance of keeping track of time for a good campaign is another example, and is something that makes the most sense when you're looking at the campaign from that perspective.
Dungeons have always been popular and important, of course. They're an ideal place to manage class/level based play, and the "underworld" aspect gives you all sorts of opportunities to inject the mystical and fantastic. I don't think the importance of dungeons should be minimized, but I also think that the idea of the campaign as a sandboxy playing field and of "playing the campaign" as part of the game was overlooked by many as D&D became more popular. I think part of that is that dungeons (and particularly smaller, lair and tournament style dungeons) suited publication as modules and became the public's "view" of how a D&D game is played.
Quote from: Benoist;382907Vol. 3 of the original game is entitled "The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures". It discusses both approaches within. I think that wrongfully redefining the original game as "just dungeons" is a meme that was born in part due to a reaction to the way dungeon crawling was practiced, which seemed boring and limited to some players of the game, up to the point where alternate, and to them, "better" ways of gaming were developed professionally (I'm thinking about Call of Cthulhu, for instance, which had in France an enormous influence on the way gamers came to view D&D as an "obsolete, limited game" where one would just play in a "Porte-Monstre-Trésor"/PMT, i.e. "Room-Monster-Treasure" fashion).
Again, I agree to this. We (and I) tend to remember the game as it was often practiced and also the very earliest origins of the game, but even the pre-publication Blackmoor was much more than a pure dungeon adventure, and gained scope and depth rapidly. It became sandbox-y very quickly.
Quote from: LordVreeg;382912Again, I agree to this. We (and I) tend to remember the game as it was often practiced and also the very earliest origins of the game, but even the pre-prublication Blackmoor was much more than a pure dungeon adventure. It became sandbox-y very quickly.
Absolutely. I actually knew we were on the same page. :D
Quote from: LordVreeg;382894It is apparent from any source that the movement away from the pure dungeon enviroment happenned early, however, and on this I would not disagree with you.
Double negative! You are officially
Frenchified, Sir! :D
Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;382910Dungeons have always been popular and important, of course. They're an ideal place to manage class/level based play, and the "underworld" aspect gives you all sorts of opportunities to inject the mystical and fantastic. I don't think the importance of dungeons should be minimized, but I also think that the idea of the campaign as a sandboxy playing field and of "playing the campaign" as part of the game was overlooked by many as D&D became more popular. I think part of that is that dungeons (and particularly smaller, lair and tournament style dungeons) suited publication as modules and became the public's "view" of how a D&D game is played.
This is tied to my earlier remarks (http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=382907&postcount=30). Many focused on the dungeoneering experience of the game, and as a result of mis-GMing, or one-dimensional games, players started to wish there was more to it than just going from room to room, "killing things and taking their stuff". That, and the wish for less abstraction in the rules of the game, resulted in variants (like the Perrin Conventions (http://www.knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3269)), which ultimately led to the publications of other RPGs (
RuneQuest,
Call of Cthulhu).
I wonder how much of this can be blamed on the Gygaxian AD&Desque approach to the game, as opposed to the Arnesonian Campaign approach.
Quote from: LordVreeg;382894Well, with the same information looked at (sans your blog, no insult intended), I still come up with the same change of focus.
Well, I would point you to a few things from my blog that actually show a change of focus in the opposite direction.
http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=136167
QuoteArneson first started running games involving fantasy characters apart from armies. EGG and DLA were, respectively, President and Vice President of the Castles and Crusades Society, the medieval wing of the International Federation of Wargamers. Individual members were assigned fiefs and encouraged to have miniatures battles (using the official Chainmail rules, of course) with each other. When the edition of Chainmail with the fantasy matrix came out, members began including fantasy units in their armies, much to EGG's distress.
Arneson's group was part of this, but quickly began to add things like "Horsepucky the Barbarian wants to sneak into Lord Funt's castel and steal his magic sword". Dave obliged. Soon, the quests and secret missions began to be more frequent than the battles. And action became localized in the vicinity of Blackmoor Castle.Finally, it evolved into the classic dungeon crawl.
(Emphases mine.) Now, that's a secondhand account. But check out what Greg Svenson, who was in Arneson's group, says.
http://blackmoor.mystara.us/svenny.html
QuoteDuring the winter of 1970-71, our gaming group was meeting in Dave Arneson's basement in St. Paul, Minnesota. We had been playing a big Napoleonics campaign which was getting bogged down in long drawn out miniatures battles. So, as a diversion for the group, one weekend Dave set up Blackmoor instead of Napoleonics on his ping pong table. The rules we used were based on "Chainmail", which is a set of medieval miniature rules with a fantasy supplement allowing for magic and various beings found in the "Lord of the Rings". I had never played any games like it before, although I had read "Lord of the Rings". Other members of the group had played the game before, but always doing adventures in and around the town of Blackmoor. By the end of the weekend I had fallen in love with the game.
On this particular weekend, Dave tried a new winkle for the game. He had been working all week to prepare a map of tunnels and catacombs under the town and especially under the castle.
(Emphasis mine.) As this is Greg Svenson's account of the "first dungeon adventure", it indicates that campaign-based roleplaying had preceded dungeoneering.
Quote from: winkingbishop;382832Is it about what Tim encounters in every hex of his life or is it hand-waving between Dungeons X & Y?
It's the sane middle ground between those insane extremes.
Yes, players can refuse to go into
The Temple of Elemental Stupidity, and given my experiences playing it, I wouldn't blame them. But there's got to be some co-operation between players and GM. The GM's job is to present interesting adventure possibilities, the player's job is to accept them. The GM should make it interesting enough that the players don't
want to refuse, but the players should
be interested in things and
want to grab adventure hooks. It's a co-operative thing.
The adventure hooks ain't just, "phat loot, kids!" You can go a bit thespy and look at the character's background and traits. Again, some co-operation here. If the player creates a character whose village were slain by an evil sorceror, well then when the character goes to town and there's a temple run by that sorceror, and the sorceror's trying to take over the kingdom - well then the hook's obvious. The GM made an effort to tie things into the background the player came up with, the player should respect that and not just say, "I leave town." If the player's not interested in slaying evil sorcerors, then the player ought not to put "an evil sorceror slew my family" in their character's background.
It's a co-operative thing. It's neither pure sandbox nor pure railroad. Either of those by themselves is stupid.
Quote from: Haffrung;382862That's the way we played. Buying TSR products since 1979, we saw many examples of dungeons and adventures. Precious few of sandbox worlds.
I started playing before there was a single published adventure. The Blackmoor supplement wasn't out yet, so there wasn't even Temple of the Frog to look at, just the material in Book 3 which was as much about the wildnerness as it was about dungeons. The groups I played with started with dungeons and tried to do wilderness (with my Outdoor Survival map to start with), but dropped wilderness as too dangerous -- random encounter with a tribe of 30d10 orcs or bandits!
Then I came up with the idea that that many creatures couldn't wonder around the wilderness undetected (at least not normally). You would run into small scouting parties or the like before you'd just happen upon a roving tribe of 200 orc warriors and their females and children. With the wilderness no long an almost automatic death sentence, wilderness adventuring became also as common as dungeon adventuring in our neck of the woods (by mid-1976 at the latest).
Quote from: Elliot Wilen;382921Well, I would point you to a few things from my blog that actually show a change of focus in the opposite direction.
http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=136167(Emphases mine.) Now, that's a secondhand account. But check out what Greg Svenson, who was in Arneson's group, says.
http://blackmoor.mystara.us/svenny.html(Emphasis mine.) As this is Greg Svenson's account of the "first dungeon adventure", it indicates that campaign-based roleplaying had preceded dungeoneering.
See, this kind of thing annoys me.
Sure, now that we have internet it's pretty cool to read about how Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax ran their campaigns. What those guys and a few hundred like them did back before the game was commercial is genuinely fascinating and impressive.
However, once the game exploded in the late 70s, the way Gygax and Arneson played became fucking irrelevent. Once 95 per cent of the people who played D&D learned from the books and not from sitting at a table in Lake Geneva, those books defined how people played the game.
Go read your early Dragon magazines. They talk about occasionally taking play out of the dungeon. And by 'the dungeon' they explicitly meant the single dungeon where the PCs adventured. And it's a safe bet that even in its earliest issues there were 10 or 20 gamers who learned about D&D from Dragon magazine for every gamer who had the faintest idea of the First Fantasy Campaign or how Gygax ran Greyhawk.
So yeah, I'm fucking tired of these retroactive definitions of how the game was meant to played - definitions that have only been formulated in the last 5 or 6 years due to the internet. The way Gygax and Arneson played are little more than historical curiosities. Once the game was selling in the tens of thousands its the kids who bought and read the rules, Dragon magazine, and published modules in their basement rec rooms who defined the game.
Quote from: RandallS;382934I started playing before there was a single published adventure.
Cool. I'm sure you and the 2,000 or so D&D players at that time had some pretty fun gaming.
Maybe this all comes down to how we define old-school. Does the fact that there are a couple dozen guys kicking around internet forums who played D&D before 1978 mean that those early days define old-school? Or does the initial commercial explosion of the Blue Box Holmes set still count as old-school? Because the experiences of those two groups, the latter one probably 20 times the size of the former, were very different. And the experiences of those who learned from Moldvay/Cook - a group 20 times bigger again - are they old-school?
It's just weird how many guys I've come across on forums in the last few years who started playing in the early 80s and seem abashed that they didn't play the way Gygax and Arneson played in 1975. It smacks of a kind of revival of Old Testament fundamentalism - a latter-day deference to the original scripture.
well, first we look at the OP...dealing with SAndboxing and how it is seen.
Then we have a few dozen threads recntly asking about the different foci of a game (encounter, dungeon, Adventure, Campaign)
Then we have Eliot's backed up data (most of which I've seen but have always considered rare and stratified), which shows us that Sandboxing was not always a later development but was a concurrent development to the game.
My particular background is more Like Randalls, with an older brother of my best friend inflciting gaming onto us. We always played dungeon style games, but he always added campaign pieces, and this was very early...it's just that we were a little younger and more dungeon oriented.
Now I come to the same conclusion I did before, that Sandbox is a ratio, never completely 100%, but the amount of emphasis placed on non-adventure playing being a part of it, (as opposed to the other extreme, the afore mentioned moving from adventure to adventure, not playing the 'in-between' time).
Quote from: Haffrung;382935So yeah, I'm fucking tired of these retroactive definitions of how the game was meant to played - definitions that have only been formulated in the last 5 or 6 years due to the internet. The way Gygax and Arneson played are little more than historical curiosities. Once the game was selling in the tens of thousands its the kids who bought and read the rules, Dragon magazine, and published modules in their basement rec rooms who defined the game.
It's not a "retroactive definition". You can read the original game for yourself. You can check out for yourself the accounts of guys who were there at the time. Whatever Dragon mag et al. were assuming came after. Sure, you can say "yeah well, what a few hundred people did with the game at the beginning is irrelevant to me". That's fine. Sure.
That doesn't
retroactively erase their own experience of said game.
And to me, what a few hundred thousands, or millions, people were doing with the game in this or that year is far less relevant to my game table than what the guys who came up with the game were doing themselves. Why? Because I enjoy this stuff now.
YMMV and all that.
Playing before there was a single published module available from TSR meant that the game world had to be constructed, pretty much from scratch, using the white books and the very few available supplements published, along with articles from SR, Dragon, Pegasus, and JG Journal.
Ready Ref Sheets for example, if not used for the Wilderlands, but hacked for a homebrew D&D campaign, was extremely sandbox, using a host of tables and charts to randomly generate a session, setting, or campaign area for the players.
Aside from B1/B2 that came with the basic set, I never bought a module for D&D until the 1990's. I played in a few, of course, that other GMs purchased, however always thought it was more important to create a unique fantasy world or campaign for the players.
Plus, as a player if they could buy the module and read it themselves before playing, they could game the system itself. Not having a published module meant that the players all started a session or campaign on an even footing, and emphasized a focus on what the players would do, and how they would act.
This, I prefered to run (and still do), as opposed to a published setting, adventure, or campaign. If something better comes along, I would run games for the new shiny, but haven't seen much in this regard.
Note that I do like and would run the Eberron campaign setting, and a few of the 3e adventures like Forge of Fury, Twin Crowns, and the Sicaris/Arcanis campaign setting. I also bootstrap the best material from all of those and drop that into my homebrew setting, sometimes with a twist and sometimes straight up.
I'd like to give KingMaker a shakedown as well, just haven't had an opportunity to do that yet.
Quote from: Haffrung;382940It's just weird how many guys I've come across on forums in the last few years who started playing in the early 80s and seem abashed that they didn't play the way Gygax and Arneson played in 1975. It smacks of a kind of revival of Old Testament fundamentalism - a latter-day deference to the original scripture.
My guess is that you're just seeing what you want to see. Confirmation bias.
Quote from: Benoist;382944My guess is that you're just seeing what you want to see. Confirmation bias.
You can say that you talk solely about your gaming preferences all you want, and you could care less about what anyone else does. If you do that, you don't get to tell other people what AD&D is. You can't have it both ways.
Quote from: Benoist;382854What I'm talking about is "the early game".
Are you really? The Greg Svenson account posted earlier by Elliot Wilen (http://blackmoor.mystara.us/svenny.html) (I was going to post it myself if he didn't -- there are also other accounts of games set in the first three campaign settings -- Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Kalibruhn -- out there) not only suggests "that campaign-based roleplaying had preceded dungeoneering" but also describes an adventure scenario that assumes the PCs will assume specific roles and follow the introductory adventure hook (i.e., playing a specific scenario). There is also something of a deus ex machina ending that allows the single PC to survive and exit the dungeon. This discussion of the early Greyhawk game (http://piedpiperpublishing.yuku.com/topic/2186/t/Good-Times.html) includes the description of game events where the player felt Gary Gygax fudged what was going on ("Fudgin' Judgin'") to make the game go a certain way:
QuoteRobilar would have been proud of Fiffergrund's evilness, though the best I did, really, as far as evil acts was to kill the filthy elven-hirelings in my employ when I changed alignment, as EGG said "no way" they would also follow that change. Gary had one "escape" using a poly-other potion, which I wasn't even sure he owned. That one went back to the City of Greyhawk and starting sqawking to the "goodies" about my evil ways, so my attempt to carry off a silent integration failed (of course EGG was accused of Fudgin' Judgin', naturally!). Otherwise I played Robilar as a neutral (if you excuse the TOEE episode, which sh- uld have redeemed me, as I WAS slaying _lots_ of evil things that day).[/i]
Maybe someone who was actually in those early games like Old Geezer would like to clarify, but I don't get the impression that there was one pure approach to play even then.
Quote from: John Morrow;382946Are you really? The Greg Svenson account posted earlier by Elliot Wilen (http://blackmoor.mystara.us/svenny.html) (I was going to post it myself if he didn't -- there are also other accounts of games set in the first three campaign settings -- Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Kalibruhn -- out there) not only suggests "that campaign-based roleplaying had preceded dungeoneering" but also describes an adventure scenario that assumes the PCs will assume specific roles and follow the introductory adventure hook (i.e., playing a specific scenario). There is also something of a deus ex machina ending that allows the single PC to survive and exit the dungeon. This discussion of the early Greyhawk game (http://piedpiperpublishing.yuku.com/topic/2186/t/Good-Times.html) includes the description of game events where the player felt Gary Gygax fudged what was going on ("Fudgin' Judgin'") to make the game go a certain way:
Maybe someone who was actually in those early games like Old Geezer would like to clarify, but I don't get the impression that there was one pure approach to play even then.
well, yes to this. anyone who thinks there has been one right way is deluded, I would expect. There are some way I think are more wrong than others, but I doubt I am in any position to point fingers.
Quote from: Kyle Aaron;382929It's the sane middle ground between those insane extremes.
It's a co-operative thing. It's neither pure sandbox nor pure railroad. Either of those by themselves is stupid.
You all can shut the fuck up on this. As usual, Kyle Aaron got it in one.
In defense of the railroad somewhat, I have seen gaming groups where there was a distinct lack of initiative. A player driven sandbox falls apart when the players don't drive the game, and those sort of players tend to be perfectly satisfied following the rails of a railroaded game.
Quote from: John Morrow;382846So what you are talking about is the game as it was run by a very small number of people for a fairly brief period of time.
It wasn't that brief. Modules didn't come out in force until after 1980 even then level coverage was spotty so you were forced to come up with your own stuff. The most comprehensive was Judges Guild along with their Wilderlands products. It wasn't until after around 1985 I started running into gamers that didn't have any wargame background whatsoever. And it wasn't until Vampire came out and attracted it's group of fans that I encountered them in large number.
I've never made a secret about the fact that my first D&D experience was puzzling my way through a (not present) ruleset and filling in the gaps that the pull out sheets in (the edited for Holmes Basic) B2 didn't cover - for a year or so B2 was my rulebook.
Like a lot of kids in the 80's I played D&D with some regularity for a couple years, then quit for a stretch, then started gaming again. The group I played with played Champions/Hero System, Rolemaster, Call of Cthulhu, and a couple of short Mechwarrior (and later Mechwarrior 2) campaigns and a lot of wargaming in between. But never D&D. The group just didn't want to play it.
Thing is, in '98 or '99 when I went looking for a new game to play, I thought "Hey, why not AD&D? I have this Players Handbook here..." Then I heard about the glorious, coming revolution of 3e. I asked the occasional question and the responses tended to be "Don't bother - 3e is coming out soon, that'll fix everything" (of that ilk). Well...I realized a couple of things. One, I don't like being told what I will like and to "not bother" with what I think I might already like. Two, when I bought a new set of AD&D hardbacks and really read them, approached them with the view of being a stand alone RPG, without conflating them with Basic D&D and did I need to play Basic D&D first and so on and et cetera (no, really, I was totally confused by that as a kid) I realized I'd missed an awesome game.
I'm not abashed to find I didn't play D&D "the way it should have been" back in the day - I had fun! If anything I remember that first brush with D&D very fondly. I didn't know I wasn't doing it right when I stumbled through using B2 as my rules. Didn't know, didn't care! I'm not playing AD&D now to try and erase some past sin or go "OH OH OH NO SEE I'M OLD SCHOOL AND THAT MAKES ME BAD ASS GRR!"
I find AD&D to be a great game, so I play it.
Period.
Quote from: estar;382957It wasn't that brief.
Benoist said, "I'm talking of the original D&D game c. 1973-74," because I was trying to talk about the somewhat later period through 1980. That's a very brief period in the hobby.
I had no wargaming background when I started role-playing around 1980, though I'd played plenty of board games (unless you want to count wargame like board games like the American Heritage Dogfight and Broadside or things like Stratego and Risk). And since I learned from a the books rather than someone else, I interpreted the games to suit my own needs. My earliest Traveller games had no GM and players playing groups of characters that result from merging role-playing game rules with what my friends and I had been doing with action figures and toy cars for years before that. And my point is that I don't think that sort of Rorschach test experience where we did things our own way was all that uncommon once role-playing started spreading by people buying and reading the rules rather than being taught how to play by others. What allowed that was a fairly sparse set of representative (rather than metagame) rules that didn't force people to play any particular way to get some use out of them.
Oh if you want to know what module came out when check out http://www.acaeum.com/ which covers both TSR and Judges Guild.
Quote from: John Morrow;382963Benoist said, "I'm talking of the original D&D game c. 1973-74," because I was trying to talk about the somewhat later period through 1980. That's a very brief period in the hobby.
I had no wargaming background when I started role-playing around 1980, though I'd played plenty of board games (unless you want to count wargame like board games like the American Heritage Dogfight and Broadside or things like Stratego and Risk). And since I learned from a the books rather than someone else, I interpreted the games to suit my own needs. My earliest Traveller games had no GM and players playing groups of characters that result from merging role-playing game rules with what my friends and I had been doing with action figures and toy cars for years before that. And my point is that I don't think that sort of Rorschach test experience where we did things our own way was all that uncommon once role-playing started spreading by people buying and reading the rules rather than being taught how to play by others.
You missed my point is that there wasn't enough material printed to run a campaign solely based around adventures. before the early 1980s. Coverage was too spotty and at some point you had to make your own stuff up. I was referring the main topic about sandboxes.
As for your point, you are right in that there were many gamers that roleplayed without playing wargames first. Especially when roleplaying exploded in the late 70s. Which is why I said "in my experience" as part of my comment. Wargames hit their high point in 1980 selling millions of copies per year and declined after that. Although games like Battletech kept the spirit alive. In my area (rural Northwest PA) I knew several dozen gamers and nearly all of them had or played wargames in addition to RPGs.
And yes I ran into gamers that learned D&D cold. Included two of my best friends.
Quote from: estar;382965You missed my point is that there wasn't enough material printed to run a campaign solely based around adventures. before the early 1980s. Coverage was too spotty and at some point you had to make your own stuff up. I was referring the main topic about sandboxes.
What I'm not seeing is how this is an either-or choice. My point is that lots of GMs who made their own stuff up also came up with their own interpretation of what their role was and how the stuff they made up should be used. So you could have one GM writing sandboxes and another GM writing railroaded stories and yet another GM running a wargame and so on, even from the earliest days. If you read the Bill Armintrout article, it's clear that when he got Metamorphosis Alpha and played it in college that he was simultaneously considering verisimilitude issues, campaign goals, player satisfaction about how the story was running, game balance, authority sharing with a co-GM and the players, and so on. I don't see why D&D would be any different for him and others like him. He wasn't doing a pure sandbox or a pure railroaded adventure or a pure wargame. He was doing a bit of it all.
Quote from: estar;382965And yes I ran into gamers that learned D&D cold. Included two of my best friends.
And how did they approach the game? What kinds of adventures did they expect or run?
Quote from: John Morrow;382946Are you really?
I am, really.
Quote from: John Morrow;382946The Greg Svenson account posted earlier by Elliot Wilen (http://blackmoor.mystara.us/svenny.html) (I was going to post it myself if he didn't -- there are also other accounts of games set in the first three campaign settings -- Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Kalibruhn -- out there) not only suggests "that campaign-based roleplaying had preceded dungeoneering" but also describes an adventure scenario that assumes the PCs will assume specific roles and follow the introductory adventure hook (i.e., playing a specific scenario). There is also something of a deus ex machina ending that allows the single PC to survive and exit the dungeon. This discussion of the early Greyhawk game (http://piedpiperpublishing.yuku.com/topic/2186/t/Good-Times.html) includes the description of game events where the player felt Gary Gygax fudged what was going on ("Fudgin' Judgin'") to make the game go a certain way:
I never suggested that campaign-based role playing didn't precede dungeoneering, first. Second, there certainly was variation and experimentation of game play going on. Third, the discussion about how Rob suspected EGG to have made up an escape route for an NPC via potion and so on actually shows that this wasn't thought of as a good thing: "
of course EGG was
accused of Fudgin' Judgin',
naturally!" Naturally. Exclamation point. This was
not fair, if that's what actually took place (since it was never confirmed wether EGG was making things up or not on this one).
Quote from: John Morrow;382946Maybe someone who was actually in those early games like Old Geezer would like to clarify, but I don't get the impression that there was one pure approach to play even then.
I never said there was "one pure approach". That's a strawman.
Quote from: John Morrow;382967What I'm not seeing is how this is an either-or choice. My point is that lots of GMs who made their own stuff up also came up with their own interpretation of what their role was and how the stuff they made up should be used.
My experience that in there were strong regional styles of D&D rules until the late 70s when D&D became a fad which made easier to find product, the BASIC set was release, and finally AD&D. That many did weird things based on what they encountered first especially if all they had was a module. And that when they encountered the larger gaming community they learned the the D&D game as the locals defined it.
GMs that railroaded players were not well liked and were not common as they couldn't attract players. Now it may be my town of Meadville was unusual in having a dozen or so groups of my age within walking distance of each other. (3 mile radius or so). Plus several more groups of older gamers that we only knew vaguely of and referred to as the old hands. I think there were 3 or 4 of them. My own age group heyday was from 1980 to 1988 after which college and life split everybody up.
I started with the Holmes Blue Book edition so it was always fairly obvious to me how to play and referee D&D. If there was a default style it was the dungeon. Just about every DM I know of could grasp the idea of town, dungeon and a surrounding wilderness. A few had a signature dungeon.
Quote from: John Morrow;382967He wasn't doing a pure sandbox or a pure railroaded adventure or a pure wargame. He was doing a bit of it all.
Having been on the ground floor of promoting the sandbox campaign (As one of the authors of the Wilderlands boxed set in 2003-2004) people really take the concept too literally. To run a sandbox you need to do it all. A sandbox is a framework to run the milieu in which the campaign is set.
Sometimes the players choices led them into a sequential series of adventures that looks little different than a railroad. They endure this because they want whatever the goal that lies at the conclusion of these adventure. They play wargames with mass combat as part of establishing a kingdom. They get missions because they choose to become part of the king's guard.
The problem is that people had little idea of how to effectively organize a setting to allow players to wander freely and make their own choices without the DM being overwhelmed. Most current setting products are of little help because they read like travelogues. While fun to read they require a lot of prep to use at the table. With the Wilderlands style format it becomes a lot easier for a GM to manage his campaign while the players wander around.
However it just a different way to get the players to an adventure. The adventure are the same range of stuff run with other styles.
Back in the day, in my town, there were DMs that were known to explode six ways to sunday because somebody "screwed up" their beautiful campaign world. Others let their players run riot through their world. I was one of the latter.
When gaming companies found out that settings can develop a fanbase and sell the former DMs turned into fanboys of various settings. TSR and later Wizards pushed their house settings to the point where people had forgotten there was another way of doing settings. One that was used by the Wilderlands, X1 Isle of Dread, and B2 Keep on the Borderlands.
Quote from: John Morrow;382967And how did they approach the game? What kinds of adventures did they expect or run?
All they had was the two adventures so they made up some d6 rules and ran each other through the dungeons. Then within months they figure out that there were rules books explaining the adventure and learned to play D&D. From school they learned about other groups which clarified the few areas they had questions on.
Quote from: Haffrung;382935See, this kind of thing annoys me.
The original poster asked, "why do we presume that this style of play was what the original D&D authors intended?"
I answered with research, backed up by sources. We don't have to "presume" anything; we know how the authors played and what they wrote in the original published rules.
As it turns out I prefer the "sandbox" end of the spectrum, although Sett and others are right when they say the current "old school" has a strain of purism that's a construction after-the-fact. "Sandbox" is a neologism; back in the early '90's on Usenet nobody used the term--"world-based" was close as a concept but not identical. In Glenn Blacow's four-part division of gaming styles (http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/theory/models/blacow.html), "story telling" is closest. (Bear in mind that "story" isn't a precise term today, even less so then. You have to read the text to see what Blacow was talking about--and if you do, you'll see that his idea is so broad that it includes campaign meta-plot, seen as anathema to modern "sandbox" gamers.)
I don't have a problem with isolated adventures although, when my friends and I played that way in the very very early days of learning the game, I probably gravitated toward a more "wilderness adventure" approach because there was a collective lack of skill in making really good megadungeons. Still, we're all entitled to own opinion, but not to our own facts.
For the record, while I like the kind of campaign gameplay shown in stuff like First Fantasy Campaign, I'm not interested in labeling it as a "pure way" or a "better way" or even "the old school way." I just don't give a shit about even beginning to discuss all that crap. I think it's "a cool way" and "a fun way" that's worth checking out. That's about it.
Quote from: Elliot Wilen;382972The original poster asked, "why do we presume that this style of play was what the original D&D authors intended?"
I answered with research, backed up by sources. We don't have to "presume" anything; we know how the authors played and what they wrote in the original published rules.
Yes you did. Don't take my silence to mean I'm not listening or not satisfied with any of the answers here. A man must sleep. Coming back, this thread has been an excellent read. Same goes to the rest of you that posted.
Quote from: thecasualoblivion;382954In defense of the railroad somewhat, I have seen gaming groups where there was a distinct lack of initiative. A player driven sandbox falls apart when the players don't drive the game, and those sort of players tend to be perfectly satisfied following the rails of a railroaded game.
The first 4E D&D game I DM'd was a sandbox in the 4E Forgotten Realms. It turned out the players didn't have a lot initiative on their own part. The game ended up being rudderless, and eventually fell apart.
We ended up dropping my game abruptly, where one of the other players took up the DM chair. With this new DM, we played through Thunderspire Labyrinth more or less as written. The other players and I were fine with this arrangement.
Awhile later, I found another group where I ended up DM'ing a sandbox 4E D&D game in Golarion. With this group, the players were more experienced and had a lot of initiative in driving their own game. For this group, the sandbox was a better fit.
Quote from: thecasualoblivion;382954In defense of the railroad somewhat, I have seen gaming groups where there was a distinct lack of initiative. A player driven sandbox falls apart when the players don't drive the game, and those sort of players tend to be perfectly satisfied following the rails of a railroaded game.
I'm fairly sure someone upthread alluded to this, but I don't believe an entire campaign need be entirely one or the other (sandbox or railroad). I've run what some would call a sandbox campaign but had particular evenings where the players themselves just couldn't light a fire under their own asses. I think it is a quality of a good GM to perceive these cues and quietly put up a few rails so that the whole evening isn't an entire loss.
And if I've learned one thing since starting this thread it is that even in the early development of the game, different people were playing in different ways, irrespective of what the designers "meant." That ability to be played so many different ways is, in my opinion, one of the joys of D&D.
Quote from: winkingbishop;382798But why do we presume that this style of play was what the original D&D authors intended?
I don't. I consider the sandbox as one of several useful bits that got applied to many different games by many different ways. The old school scene tends to underline the sandbox because it is one of the techniques from the early history of the hobby that nearly went the way of the dodo, at least in terms of public discussion of the game. Taking the sandbox more seriously than that seems to me like an ill-advised step towards ritualistic observation rather than an artistic choice.
Quote from: ggroy;382987The first 4E D&D game I DM'd was a sandbox in the 4E Forgotten Realms. It turned out the players didn't have a lot initiative on their own part. The game ended up being rudderless, and eventually fell apart.
Yeah, 'dip and run' is one of the downsides of a true sandbox.
The trouble with sucky sandboxers is that they would suck in anything they do. DM-chaff.
Helpful as ever!
Quote from: jrients;382994The old school scene tends to underline the sandbox because it is one of the techniques from the early history of the hobby that nearly went the way of the dodo, at least in terms of public discussion of the game. Taking the sandbox more seriously than that seems to me like an ill-advised step towards ritualistic observation rather than an artistic choice.
Like many attempts to recover, restore, or rescue something that has fallen into obscurity or disfavor, this may simply be a matter of overcompensation.
Quote from: Settembrini;382999The trouble with sucky sandboxers is that they would suck in anything they do. DM-chaff.
Not true. A significant part of the hobby, in my experience, consists of casual gamers who simply don't have the personality or desire to drive a game as a player and, not coincidentally, don't have a desire to GM. They want to consume the game experience fairly passively, in much the same way that they might watch a movie or television show or play a video game. And while it's common for people who engage in online discussions of role-playing, who themselves often take how they make-believe with toys and dice way too seriously, to mock and look down at such players, I personally find it difficult to fault someone who doesn't want to work hard to have fun in their free time. It's like complaining that people who only watch movies but don't have the initiative to go out and fund and film their own movies are somehow unworthy.
Such players sprinkled in among a few proactive players can add quite a bit of flavor to a game while avoiding the problems that can occur if every player is proactive and wants to control the direction the game is going in. And an entire game full of casual players is actually the perfect match for a GM who wants to tell a railroaded story because it satisfies everyone involved, even if such games cause problems for proactive players. Isn't fun the whole point of playing?
No, it isn´t. Those people are self-mutilated-gaming-cripples. They harm themselves and the hobby. No amount of "fun" they have vindicates such behaviour.
Quote from: Settembrini;383023No, it isn´t. Those people are self-mutilated-gaming-cripples. They harm themselves and the hobby. No amount of "fun" they have vindicates such behaviour.
They are not. They are the players with the numbers to grow the hobby. if your casual gamers are buying supplements and campaign resource books, they are funding the expansion and continued success of the RPG they are playing.
Deliberately excluding a segment simply because they don't play the game the same way as your group does is one additional reason RPGs have been eclipsed in popularity by computer and console games.
If the playing experiences are good enough the casual player would be tempted to invest even more into the game, no?
Quote from: estar;382957It wasn't until after around 1985 I started running into gamers that didn't have any wargame background whatsoever. And it wasn't until Vampire came out and attracted it's group of fans that I encountered them in large number.
Can I ask how old you are? The first big growth of D&D (from hundreds to thousands of players) was 1977 to 1979, and mostly among college students and wargamers. The second, and far big explosion (from thousands to hundreds of thousands and then millions), was between 1980 and 1984, and mainly among 12 to 17 year olds. Precious few of the guys I knew who took up D&D in grade 7 or 8 had any wargaming experience, and that was confined to Squad Leader.
Quote from: GameDaddy;383032They are not. They are the players with the numbers to grow the hobby. if your casual gamers are buying supplements and campaign resource books, they are funding the expansion and continued success of the RPG they are playing.
Even if they never buy anything, many people game with their friends. If your friends are willing to sit down and game with you, then you are likely to keep role-playing. If your friends would rather go to a movie, watch a football game, play a video game, get drunk, or do anything but role-playing, then you are likely to spend a lot of time doing those things with those friends rather than role-playing, becoming someone who might buy books and dream of playing but who doesn't actually play.
I continue to be amazed that what is essentially a social hobby is filled with so many anti-social people.
Quote from: Haffrung;383037Can I ask how old you are? The first big growth of D&D (from hundreds to thousands of players) was 1977 to 1979, and mostly among college students and wargamers. The second, and far big explosion (from thousands to hundreds of thousands and then millions), was between 1980 and 1984, and mainly among 12 to 17 year olds. Precious few of the guys I knew who took up D&D in grade 7 or 8 had any wargaming experience, and that was confined to Squad Leader.
I was in 8th Grade during the 1979-1980 school year. I had a friend named John who had a closetful of wargames like 1776 he was in 7th grade I was in 8th. We played constantly throughout the winter of 77 and fall of 78. During the summer of 1977 I was teased about not playing D&D by a kid waving a what I know now to be a copy of the White Box of OD&D. Somewhere i got a copy of Holmes D&D played it with John, the fall of 78 we got a copy of the AD&D Player's Handbook (I paid 7.50 john paid 7.50) and was disappointed that it didn't have combat chart. After the release of the DMG in late 79 D&D became the primary focus of our gaming time. But Wargames continued especially games like Civilization that worked well with large numbers of players.
Quote from: jrients;382994I don't. I consider the sandbox as one of several useful bits that got applied to many different games by many different ways. The old school scene tends to underline the sandbox because it is one of the techniques from the early history of the hobby that nearly went the way of the dodo, at least in terms of public discussion of the game. Taking the sandbox more seriously than that seems to me like an ill-advised step towards ritualistic observation rather than an artistic choice.
Agreed. I may write about it a lot and it a dominant part of my game but what i boils down is that players are free to pursue their own agendas in the Majestic Wilderlands. It doesn't mean I am passive about plot. The world continues around the player with the NPCs pursuing their own agenda. Some of which the players interact with and other they don't. Some will impact the player whether they want too or not, other don't unless they choose to be part of them.
Some of my games are heavily mission oriented because the players choose to be part of an organization. Other games have the players bouncing around from place to place doing whatever. Most of my campaign are a hybrid.
Sandbox campaign are a tool, a method of organizing a campaign, and a another method of organizing a setting. There are other methods that can work with their own set of trade offs.
Quote from: jrients;382994I don't. I consider the sandbox as one of several useful bits that got applied to many different games by many different ways. The old school scene tends to underline the sandbox because it is one of the techniques from the early history of the hobby that nearly went the way of the dodo, at least in terms of public discussion of the game. Taking the sandbox more seriously than that seems to me like an ill-advised step towards ritualistic observation rather than an artistic choice.
It's like estar, winkingbishop and others have observed on the thread: it's a question of synergy between the campaign organization and the players. Under the best of conditions, with proactive players willing to explore the world and make the most out of it, the sandbox will shine. If you've got passive players, then you'll need as referee to make sure the play experience matches their expectations, which means you'll have to use triggers, hooks, and maybe even "quietly put up a few rails", as WB was saying, for them to enjoy the game.
So yes, I don't think the sandbox/open world play style is a panacea with all groups in all circumstances, far from it.
Quote from: estar;383049Some of my games are heavily mission oriented because the players choose to be part of an organization. Other games have the players bouncing around from place to place doing whatever. Most of my campaign are a hybrid.
One doesn't preclude the other, absolutely. You can have a potentially open world and have specific stuff going on within it, like specific missions assigned to the PCs because they are part of the "Grand Lodge of Magickry" or whatever.
Was it Kyle who was saying that there was a happy medium to be found? Well in practice, in a significant number of cases, as far as game groups variations go, that's what's going to happen. A sort of hybrid between the open world and the railroad.
Quote from: GameDaddy;383032Quote from: Settembrini;383023No, it isn´t. Those people are self-mutilated-gaming-cripples. They harm themselves and the hobby. No amount of "fun" they have vindicates such behaviour.
They are not. They are the players with the numbers to grow the hobby. if your casual gamers are buying supplements and campaign resource books, they are funding the expansion and continued success of the RPG they are playing.
Well, yes. That's why I'm happy to see Paizo produce its Adventure Paths and whatnot for that purpose. Then as the hobby grows, you have opportunities to meet players who want to have other experiences with RPGs, feel somehow limited in what they actually play at the time, and that's when you can bring your sandbox to them.
The problem though is that for one such guy who wants to experience the sandbox, you'll have a host of them who will keep on drinking the Kool-Aid, and more games to accomodate their expectations. So... yeah. It's not all black or white, in this regard. Maybe it's preferrable to play with people who aren't coming with a whole host of gaming expectations to begin with. Introduce new people to the game. Have fun with them. You know.
Quote from: Settembrini;382803Although, I must highlight, the term "sandbox" is a dirty word nowadays.
I find this assertion puzzling. Where is it considered a dirty word. Compare its use to 'railroad', for instance.
Quote from: thedungeondelver;382824If players aren't out there with their characters making choices and doing different things, what's the point?
There's a rather large assumption here that if you're not using a pure sandbox, players have no choices to make. Like Kyle says:
Quote from: Kyle Aaron;382929It's the sane middle ground between those insane extremes.
...
It's a co-operative thing. It's neither pure sandbox nor pure railroad. Either of those by themselves is stupid.
He gets it absolutely right here.
Quote from: Fifth Element;383071There's a rather large assumption here that if you're not using a pure sandbox, players have no choices to make.
That's only true if you make an incorrect assumption about what I said.
Quote from: thedungeondelver;383087That's only true if you make an incorrect assumption about what I said.
I gave your post the most obvious reading. It was a good example of the extremism Kyle mentioned - otherwise why would you have mentioned players not making choices?
Quote from: Fifth Element;383071I find this assertion puzzling. Where is it considered a dirty word. Compare its use to 'railroad', for instance.
He doesn't mean that the term is used as an epithet. He means...the rest of the post, that you apparently didn't read.
I.e., "sandbox" isn't a historical term, it's a neologism or an import from somewhere else (most likely videogaming). It's been turned into a simplistic and sometimes distorted projection of the 70's.
Quote from: Elliot Wilen;383106He doesn't mean that the term is used as an epithet. He means...the rest of the post, that you apparently didn't read.
I.e., "sandbox" isn't a historical term, it's a neologism or an import from somewhere else (most likely videogaming). It's been turned into a simplistic and sometimes distorted projection of the 70's.
Actually, the rest of the post is what I did find puzzling. In my experience the ones I've seen use the term 'sandbox' to describe their game are old-time gamers who still play AD&D or OD&D.
It may be a recent term, but the ones I've seen using it are certainly not new to the hobby.
Quote from: Elliot Wilen;383106I.e., "sandbox" isn't a historical term, it's a neologism or an import from somewhere else (most likely videogaming). It's been turned into a simplistic and sometimes distorted projection of the 70's.
It originated among the authors of Necromancer Games' Wilderlands boxed set. And used to describe we were doing with the material and how other can use the Wilderlands boxed set.
Yes it is a "new term" borrowed from computer games. But it best described what James Mishler, myself, and other were doing with the Wilderlands for the past 25+ years.
I don't know who actually came up with it among our group. I do know we all started using it all at the same time. Almost immediately, especially among those liked to push debates to extremes, we had to correct the idea that to use the Wilderlands the referee couldn't have any plot at all. That the game only consisted of players wandering from place to place.
Our main point was that the list of ruins, islands, lairs, castles, and villages made it really easy for us to respond to unexpected choices by the players. That the supplied detail acted as a idea generator and did not force us to always made shit up on the fly. Instead there was some basic information and a preview of what was ahead which made running the game smoother.
But your creativity wasn't stifled as there was a lot of details that needed to be made up in order to implement a particular locales. As a side note most of the detail in the boxed set of the Wilderlands were local so it wasn't a big deal to rip out whole regions to put your own material in. Plus much of the overall background was so vague that you still reuse much of the original locales for whatever you wanted to do.
The problem has been and still remains that most campaign setting stuff are written as travelogues and not many people are doing stuff that support sandbox play. So we keep seeing rounds of explanations, misunderstanding, and more explanations.
Again the term is new the style is not. In fact it is the default mode of Traveller campaigns.
Quote from: John Morrow;383007A significant part of the hobby, in my experience, consists of casual gamers who simply don't have the personality or desire to drive a game as a player and, not coincidentally, don't have a desire to GM. They want to consume the game experience fairly passively, in much the same way that they might watch a movie or television show or play a video game.
Yes. We call them "boring". They're the ones who drift from one group to another, claiming everyone
else is boring. They usually have the largest collections of rpgs, because each time they're bored they wonder if it's the system, so they go buy another one.
They're pretty sad and lonely as gamers. That's because gaming isn't a passive experience like watching tv. Active participation is required. You can't sit at the table being entertained without doing anything anymore than you can play soccer without moving around the field trying to kick the ball.
Nobody's going to change soccer to accommodate having most of the players just stand around and only kick the ball if it hits them. Soccer is a game where people chase the ball and kick it to another player. If you don't like running around chasing balls, don't play soccer. Chasing balls is the entire point of soccer, take that out and it's not soccer anymore.
If you don't like participating in a game session actively... stay at home. Active participation is the whole point of roleplaying games, take that out and they're not rpgs anymore. The GM really would be a "storyteller", then. Which is a nice thing, I'm very much in favour of telling and hearing stories. That's one reason I organise the Geektogethers.
But passively listening ain't roleplaying games. Roleplaying games require active participation. Sorry.
Quote from: John MorrowI personally find it difficult to fault someone who doesn't want to work hard to have fun in their free time.
There's a difference between "making an effort" and "working hard." Gaming doesn't ask huge amounts of us, really. You have to roleplay a bit, but you don't have to be Helen Mirren. You have to use your tactical mind, but you don't have to go through Army infantry officer training. As I said, the game session's a co-operative thing - so long as you're making an effort and your ideas aren't
totally ridiculous, the GM is going to work with you and let some of them go to the dice to see what happens.
It's an effort, but hobbies require effort. The model train guys have to lay out tracks, social volleyballers have to jump to block, rock climbers have to climb, quilters have to sew, and so on. But it ain't "working hard" unless you are truly, truly bone idle. Or an extremely boring person.
Quote from: John MorrowEven if they never buy anything, many people game with their friends. [...] I continue to be amazed that what is essentially a social hobby is filled with so many anti-social people.
What you're driving at here is that if we say, "we're here to game tonight," then we're anti-social. Uh-huh. So if I go down to the courts for the social volleyball league, and half the team has fucked off to the pub and we had to forfeit the match,
I'm the anti-social one? Rightyo.
You can be committed to a hobby involving other people and still be social. It's not either/or. It is as you say a social hobby. That's why it's not passive like watching tv. That's why those guys who just sit there expecting to be entertained are boring - participation in the game session is a
social action and experience.
"Many people game with friends, and -" I hear this all the time. What's forgotten is, how did they meet? How did they
become friends? In many cases, they first met in a game session, and their friendship was developed by active participation in that game session. You talk, you interact, you share ideas, you tell stories of other game sessions or talk about your life outside gaming - this is part of the game session, and it's social, and it builds friendships.
The passive guys don't build friendships out of gaming, because they don't participate so nobody is interested in them, and they don't hang around long enough to befriend anyone, they're wandering off to the next group in search of their passive viewing experience.
A roleplaying game session requires your active participation. Again, it doesn't have to be an all-out balls-to-the-wall effort from everyone all the time. Just, you know, toss in a few ideas from time to time, talk to an NPC or two, look under the stone idol and that sort of thing. Be interested. We're here to play.
Chase the ball, and kick it to another player. Or get up from the table and go home. You can leave your snacks, though.
Quote from: Fifth Element;383109Actually, the rest of the post is what I did find puzzling. In my experience the ones I've seen use the term 'sandbox' to describe their game are old-time gamers who still play AD&D or OD&D.
It may be a recent term, but the ones I've seen using it are certainly not new to the hobby.
I don't blame anyone (least of all Rob) for coming up with the term, but it
has been fetishized and distorted in use. Also, while I don't follow the "old school scene" very closely, you ought to be aware that some of the "old school" pundits are recent "converts", James Maliszewski (author of Grognardia) being a prime example.
Quote from: Elliot Wilen;383118I don't blame anyone (least of all Rob) for coming up with the term, but it has been fetishized and distorted in use.
I wonder how much of that is just perception. Didn't the gaming community have almost exactly this same conversation with the megadungeon standing in for the sandbox? I remember people saying the "old school movement" was suffering from revisionism/one-true-wayism/fetishizing that, as well. It was ignoring how people played. It was ignoring the broader elements of the game and the "end-game." Et cetera.
I think the so-called "OSR" is just a collection of individuals that talk about whatever they get interested or excited about, and that have overlapping interests. The focus moves from one subject to the next. It used to be megadungeons. Now its the "sandbox" campaign approach. A few months from now it will probably be something else. :shrugs:
Quote from: Kyle Aaron;383115Yes. We call them "boring". They're the ones who drift from one group to another, claiming everyone else is boring. They usually have the largest collections of rpgs, because each time they're bored they wonder if it's the system, so they go buy another one.
They're pretty sad and lonely as gamers. That's because gaming isn't a passive experience like watching tv. Active participation is required. You can't sit at the table being entertained without doing anything anymore than you can play soccer without moving around the field trying to kick the ball.
Nobody's going to change soccer to accommodate having most of the players just stand around and only kick the ball if it hits them. Soccer is a game where people chase the ball and kick it to another player. If you don't like running around chasing balls, don't play soccer. Chasing balls is the entire point of soccer, take that out and it's not soccer anymore.
If you don't like participating in a game session actively... stay at home. Active participation is the whole point of roleplaying games, take that out and they're not rpgs anymore. The GM really would be a "storyteller", then. Which is a nice thing, I'm very much in favour of telling and hearing stories. That's one reason I organise the Geektogethers.
But passively listening ain't roleplaying games. Roleplaying games require active participation. Sorry.
There's a difference between "making an effort" and "working hard." Gaming doesn't ask huge amounts of us, really. You have to roleplay a bit, but you don't have to be Helen Mirren. You have to use your tactical mind, but you don't have to go through Army infantry officer training. As I said, the game session's a co-operative thing - so long as you're making an effort and your ideas aren't totally ridiculous, the GM is going to work with you and let some of them go to the dice to see what happens.
It's an effort, but hobbies require effort. The model train guys have to lay out tracks, social volleyballers have to jump to block, rock climbers have to climb, quilters have to sew, and so on. But it ain't "working hard" unless you are truly, truly bone idle. Or an extremely boring person.
What you're driving at here is that if we say, "we're here to game tonight," then we're anti-social. Uh-huh. So if I go down to the courts for the social volleyball league, and half the team has fucked off to the pub and we had to forfeit the match, I'm the anti-social one? Rightyo.
You can be committed to a hobby involving other people and still be social. It's not either/or. It is as you say a social hobby. That's why it's not passive like watching tv. That's why those guys who just sit there expecting to be entertained are boring - participation in the game session is a social action and experience.
"Many people game with friends, and -" I hear this all the time. What's forgotten is, how did they meet? How did they become friends? In many cases, they first met in a game session, and their friendship was developed by active participation in that game session. You talk, you interact, you share ideas, you tell stories of other game sessions or talk about your life outside gaming - this is part of the game session, and it's social, and it builds friendships.
The passive guys don't build friendships out of gaming, because they don't participate so nobody is interested in them, and they don't hang around long enough to befriend anyone, they're wandering off to the next group in search of their passive viewing experience.
A roleplaying game session requires your active participation. Again, it doesn't have to be an all-out balls-to-the-wall effort from everyone all the time. Just, you know, toss in a few ideas from time to time, talk to an NPC or two, look under the stone idol and that sort of thing. Be interested. We're here to play.
Chase the ball, and kick it to another player. Or get up from the table and go home. You can leave your snacks, though.
Well-said.
Quote from: Kyle Aaron;383115Yes. We call them "boring". They're the ones who drift from one group to another, claiming everyone else is boring. They usually have the largest collections of rpgs, because each time they're bored they wonder if it's the system, so they go buy another one.
No, I'm talking about the people who show up reliably every week, don't complain very much, roll what they are supposed to roll, respond to the GM, say what their character is doing when needed, respond to NPCs, and may even offer suggestions during group discussions about what to do from tie to time but who don't have any interest in setting the goals for the group or finding a story to pursue in the setting and don't mind being given missions and otherwise being led along by NPCs and other PCs. Almost every group I've played with has had one or two of these people.
Quote from: Kyle Aaron;383115A roleplaying game session requires your active participation. Again, it doesn't have to be an all-out balls-to-the-wall effort from everyone all the time. Just, you know, toss in a few ideas from time to time, talk to an NPC or two, look under the stone idol and that sort of thing. Be interested. We're here to play.
And I don't really disagree with that, and it's not really what I'm talking about. It takes more than that to be dropped in a game setting and told be the GM, "Go figure out what you want to do yourselves. I'm not providing an adventure for you." You can find plenty of messages on role-playing message boards about GMs complaining that their players will roll the dice, respond to NPCs, and so on but will sit around and not go find adventure if the GM doesn't give them one to go after. They are what Settembrini called "sucky sandboxers" and they make up a sizable part of the hobby. So long as they are playing with a GM willing to feed them adventures or with other players willing to find adventures for them and lead the group, they aren't a problem.
That said, if there is a GM willing to tell stories to players who do sit there like a bump on a log and don't really participate and they are all having fun, what's the point of calling it badwrongfun and claiming they'd all be better saying at home?
Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;383122I wonder how much of that is just perception. Didn't the gaming community have almost exactly this same conversation with the megadungeon standing in for the sandbox? I remember people saying the "old school movement" was suffering from revisionism/one-true-wayism/fetishizing that, as well. It was ignoring how people played. It was ignoring the broader elements of the game and the "end-game." Et cetera.
I think the so-called "OSR" is just a collection of individuals that talk about whatever they get interested or excited about, and that have overlapping interests. The focus moves from one subject to the next. It used to be megadungeons. Now its the "sandbox" campaign approach. A few months from now it will probably be something else. :shrugs:
Two things:
1. A lot of "Old School" statements go along the lines of "This, to me, is D&D". Whether they mean it or not, this is an aggressive statement, or at the very least a passive aggressive one.
2. Modern D&D and the hobby in general evolved from how people played back in the day. If you read the introduction to 2E AD&D, David "Zeb" Cook described the changes made as better representing AD&D as most people were playing it. The OSR people are "louder" when it comes to talking about these games because they stuck with them as opposed to moving on to more modern games.
Quote from: Kyle Aaron;383115Yes. We call them "boring". They're the ones who drift from one group to another, claiming everyone else is boring. They usually have the largest collections of rpgs, because each time they're bored they wonder if it's the system, so they go buy another one.
They're pretty sad and lonely as gamers. That's because gaming isn't a passive experience like watching tv. Active participation is required. You can't sit at the table being entertained without doing anything anymore than you can play soccer without moving around the field trying to kick the ball.
Nobody's going to change soccer to accommodate having most of the players just stand around and only kick the ball if it hits them. Soccer is a game where people chase the ball and kick it to another player. If you don't like running around chasing balls, don't play soccer. Chasing balls is the entire point of soccer, take that out and it's not soccer anymore.
If you don't like participating in a game session actively... stay at home. Active participation is the whole point of roleplaying games, take that out and they're not rpgs anymore. The GM really would be a "storyteller", then. Which is a nice thing, I'm very much in favour of telling and hearing stories. That's one reason I organise the Geektogethers.
But passively listening ain't roleplaying games. Roleplaying games require active participation. Sorry.
There's a difference between "making an effort" and "working hard." Gaming doesn't ask huge amounts of us, really. You have to roleplay a bit, but you don't have to be Helen Mirren. You have to use your tactical mind, but you don't have to go through Army infantry officer training. As I said, the game session's a co-operative thing - so long as you're making an effort and your ideas aren't totally ridiculous, the GM is going to work with you and let some of them go to the dice to see what happens.
It's an effort, but hobbies require effort. The model train guys have to lay out tracks, social volleyballers have to jump to block, rock climbers have to climb, quilters have to sew, and so on. But it ain't "working hard" unless you are truly, truly bone idle. Or an extremely boring person.
What you're driving at here is that if we say, "we're here to game tonight," then we're anti-social. Uh-huh. So if I go down to the courts for the social volleyball league, and half the team has fucked off to the pub and we had to forfeit the match, I'm the anti-social one? Rightyo.
You can be committed to a hobby involving other people and still be social. It's not either/or. It is as you say a social hobby. That's why it's not passive like watching tv. That's why those guys who just sit there expecting to be entertained are boring - participation in the game session is a social action and experience.
"Many people game with friends, and -" I hear this all the time. What's forgotten is, how did they meet? How did they become friends? In many cases, they first met in a game session, and their friendship was developed by active participation in that game session. You talk, you interact, you share ideas, you tell stories of other game sessions or talk about your life outside gaming - this is part of the game session, and it's social, and it builds friendships.
The passive guys don't build friendships out of gaming, because they don't participate so nobody is interested in them, and they don't hang around long enough to befriend anyone, they're wandering off to the next group in search of their passive viewing experience.
A roleplaying game session requires your active participation. Again, it doesn't have to be an all-out balls-to-the-wall effort from everyone all the time. Just, you know, toss in a few ideas from time to time, talk to an NPC or two, look under the stone idol and that sort of thing. Be interested. We're here to play.
Chase the ball, and kick it to another player. Or get up from the table and go home. You can leave your snacks, though.
Awesome post.
Quote from: Kyle Aaron;383115Yes. We call them "boring". They're the ones who drift from one group to another, claiming everyone else is boring. They usually have the largest collections of rpgs, because each time they're bored they wonder if it's the system, so they go buy another one.
They're pretty sad and lonely as gamers. That's because gaming isn't a passive experience like watching tv. Active participation is required. You can't sit at the table being entertained without doing anything anymore than you can play soccer without moving around the field trying to kick the ball.
Nobody's going to change soccer to accommodate having most of the players just stand around and only kick the ball if it hits them. Soccer is a game where people chase the ball and kick it to another player. If you don't like running around chasing balls, don't play soccer. Chasing balls is the entire point of soccer, take that out and it's not soccer anymore.
If you don't like participating in a game session actively... stay at home. Active participation is the whole point of roleplaying games, take that out and they're not rpgs anymore. The GM really would be a "storyteller", then. Which is a nice thing, I'm very much in favour of telling and hearing stories. That's one reason I organise the Geektogethers.
But passively listening ain't roleplaying games. Roleplaying games require active participation. Sorry.
There's a difference between "making an effort" and "working hard." Gaming doesn't ask huge amounts of us, really. You have to roleplay a bit, but you don't have to be Helen Mirren. You have to use your tactical mind, but you don't have to go through Army infantry officer training. As I said, the game session's a co-operative thing - so long as you're making an effort and your ideas aren't totally ridiculous, the GM is going to work with you and let some of them go to the dice to see what happens.
It's an effort, but hobbies require effort. The model train guys have to lay out tracks, social volleyballers have to jump to block, rock climbers have to climb, quilters have to sew, and so on. But it ain't "working hard" unless you are truly, truly bone idle. Or an extremely boring person.
What you're driving at here is that if we say, "we're here to game tonight," then we're anti-social. Uh-huh. So if I go down to the courts for the social volleyball league, and half the team has fucked off to the pub and we had to forfeit the match, I'm the anti-social one? Rightyo.
You can be committed to a hobby involving other people and still be social. It's not either/or. It is as you say a social hobby. That's why it's not passive like watching tv. That's why those guys who just sit there expecting to be entertained are boring - participation in the game session is a social action and experience.
"Many people game with friends, and -" I hear this all the time. What's forgotten is, how did they meet? How did they become friends? In many cases, they first met in a game session, and their friendship was developed by active participation in that game session. You talk, you interact, you share ideas, you tell stories of other game sessions or talk about your life outside gaming - this is part of the game session, and it's social, and it builds friendships.
The passive guys don't build friendships out of gaming, because they don't participate so nobody is interested in them, and they don't hang around long enough to befriend anyone, they're wandering off to the next group in search of their passive viewing experience.
A roleplaying game session requires your active participation. Again, it doesn't have to be an all-out balls-to-the-wall effort from everyone all the time. Just, you know, toss in a few ideas from time to time, talk to an NPC or two, look under the stone idol and that sort of thing. Be interested. We're here to play.
Chase the ball, and kick it to another player. Or get up from the table and go home. You can leave your snacks, though.
Quote from: The Shaman;383124Well-said.
Quote from: Benoist;383127Awesome post.
I don't really understand how you say things like this and act all surprised and incredulous when people accuse you of spouting "badwrongfun".
Quote from: thecasualoblivion;3831261. A lot of "Old School" statements go along the lines of "This, to me, is D&D". Whether they mean it or not, this is an aggressive statement, or at the very least a passive aggressive one.
Please explain further. "This is D&D" looks pretty obviously to me like an attempt to claim territory. "This, to me, is D&D" seems to leave the field open to alternate interpretations. I don't see how the latter is aggressive. If someone asks me what D&D is, how should I answer?
Quote from: jrients;383130Please explain further. "This is D&D" looks pretty obviously to me like an attempt to claim territory. "This, to me, is D&D" seems to leave the field open to alternate interpretations. I don't see how the latter is aggressive. If someone asks me what D&D is, how should I answer?
Its not as big of a difference as you make it out to be. When you say that something "Is D&D", you also tend to say or strongly imply that something else isn't. The OSR as a whole has a strong undercurrent of defining or implying things as "not D&D". With some people this is intentional, and others don't realize they are doing it, but either way its there. Its the negative side that the aggression/passive aggression stems from.
Saying that it only applies to you isn't as strong a statement than the negative implication itself, and doesn't entirely mitigate it.
Quote from: thecasualoblivion;383132Its not as big of a difference as you make it out to be. When you say that something "Is D&D", you also tend to say or strongly imply that something else isn't. The OSR as a whole has a strong undercurrent of defining or implying things as "not D&D". With some people this is intentional, and others don't realize they are doing it, but either way its there. Its the negative side that the aggression/passive aggression stems from.
Saying that it only applies to you isn't as strong a statement than the negative implication itself, and doesn't entirely mitigate it.
With this line of thinking aren't you pretty well damning any use of the verb "is" when defining something? That's fine if you're talking to Robert Anton Wilson, but not particularly useful when having a conversation with ordinary people. Again I ask if someone asks me what D&D is, how should I answer? Avoid "to be" usages entirely?
Quote from: thecasualoblivion;383132Its not as big of a difference as you make it out to be. When you say that something "Is D&D", you also tend to say or strongly imply that something else isn't. The OSR as a whole has a strong undercurrent of defining or implying things as "not D&D".
You're right, to some extent. 4e isn't D&D to me. It may be D&D to a whole lot of other people, but it isn't D&D to me. OD&D and/or AD&D1e isn't D&D to a lot of people who started playing with 3.x or 4e, but both are exactly what I think of when I say "D&D." The difference between you and me seems to be that you find such statements somehow inherently offensive where I simply find them accurate statements what what different people think of when they hear the words "D&D." The fact that I think 4e is a complete waste of time and paper doesn't make it any less fun for those who enjoy it any more that the fact that some don't think OD&D rules are comprehensible (let alone playable) prevents me from enjoying it.
People are allowed to have their opinions on such things (and to state those opinions in public) and there is really no disputing them as they are all about personal tastes. 4e can't be demonstrated to be objectively the best (or worst) version of D&D ever any more than any other version can. But everyone is entitled to their opinion on the issue and to state what is and isn't D&D to them.
Quote from: RandallS;383136You're right, to some extent. 4e isn't D&D to me. It may be D&D to a whole lot of other people, but it isn't D&D to me. OD&D and/or AD&D1e isn't D&D to a lot of people who started playing with 3.x or 4e, but both are exactly what I think of when I say "D&D." The difference between you and me seems to be that you find such statements somehow inherently offensive where I simply find them accurate statements what what different people think of when they hear the words "D&D." The fact that I think 4e is a complete waste of time and paper doesn't make it any less fun for those who enjoy it any more that the fact that some don't think OD&D rules are comprehensible (let alone playable) prevents me from enjoying it.
People are allowed to have their opinions on such things (and to state those opinions in public) and there is really no disputing them as they are all about personal tastes. 4e can't be demonstrated to be objectively the best (or worst) version of D&D ever any more than any other version can. But everyone is entitled to their opinion on the issue and to state what is and isn't D&D to them.
I don't think they're equivalent. I don't see 3E/4E people calling earlier editions "not D&D". They may state that they prefer modern editions, or think modern editions better, but those aren't on the same level as calling somebody's game "not D&D". I don't consider OD&D/1E/2E "not D&D". I don't even consider 3.5E, which at this point I
HATE, "not D&D". I consider them D&D editions I don't play, and D&D editions I prefer 4E to.
Preferring 3E/4E to earlier editions contains no aggression. Stating that you don't consider 2E/3E/4E to truly be D&D is an agressive statement.
Quote from: jrients;383135With this line of thinking aren't you pretty well damning any use of the verb "is" when defining something? That's fine if you're talking to Robert Anton Wilson, but not particularly useful when having a conversation with ordinary people. Again I ask if someone asks me what D&D is, how should I answer? Avoid "to be" usages entirely?
Deconstruct much? Can you state that without the legalese?
Quote from: thecasualoblivion;383138Preferring 3E/4E to earlier editions contains no aggression. Stating that you don't consider 2E/3E/4E to truly be D&D is an agressive statement.
What's your opinion on a statement like "I consider 3e/4e to be a different game, despite the D&D brand name." Or "The WotC editions are not your daddy's D&D." Aggressive? Offensive?
Quote from: thecasualoblivion;383139Deconstruct much? Can you state that without the legalese?
Please tell me how I can better express my opinions without using such 'aggressive' language as "This, to me, is..."
Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;383143What's your opinion on a statement like "I consider 3e/4e to be a different game, despite the D&D brand name." Or "The WotC editions are not your daddy's D&D." Aggressive? Offensive?
I don't see "not your daddy's" D&D to be a problem, as it doesn't say my D&D isn't D&D. Considering 3e/4e to be a different game, despite the D&D brand name implies that 3e/4e are not D&D and as such is an aggressive statement.
Quote from: jrients;383145Please tell me how I can better express my opinions without using such 'aggressive' language as "This, to me, is..."
Its more a case of don't comment on how other people play their games and expect them not to respond.
Quote from: Elliot Wilen;383118but it has been fetishized and distorted in use.
With the small amount of product released for Sandbox campaigns it is not surprising to me that there is a lot of confusion on the term.
Quote from: Elliot Wilen;383118Also, while I don't follow the "old school scene" very closely, you ought to be aware that some of the "old school" pundits are recent "converts", James Maliszewski (author of Grognardia) being a prime example.
I played GURPS for 20 years before taking up Swords & Wizardry. However I pretty much ran a sandbox regardless of the ruleset I used. Which so far as been AD&D 1e, Fantasy Hero 1st, Harnmaster 1st, GURPS 2nd, GURPS 3rd, GURPS 4th, D&D 3.0, D&D 4.0 and now Swords & Wizardry.
Quote from: thecasualoblivion;3831261. A lot of "Old School" statements go along the lines of "This, to me, is D&D". Whether they mean it or not, this is an aggressive statement, or at the very least a passive aggressive one.
Pure and utter bullshit. If you find that statement aggressive or passive-aggressive, that's on you and not the person making the statement.
Quote from: Drohem;383164Pure and utter bullshit. If you find that statement aggressive or passive-aggressive, that's on you and not the person making the statement.
The manner in which it is generally stated by the OGL community either implies or directly states that newer editions of D&D either aren't D&D, or are lesser D&D.
Frankly, whether you are stating as fact that what I'm playing isn't D&D or you are saying that in your opinion that what I'm playing isn't D&D doesn't make much difference. You don't get to tell me what is or isn't D&D.
I'm not saying that you have no right to say this or are wrong to say this. What I'm saying is that you can't say things like this and expect people not to call you an asshole.
Saying that a person's preferred edition of D&D is not D&D is fightin' words. Saying that you prefer edition X or think edition X is better than edition Y is not in the same ballpark. One is a fight and one is a disagreement.
Quote from: thecasualoblivion;383165The manner in which it is generally stated by the OGL community either implies or directly states that newer editions of D&D either aren't D&D, or are lesser D&D.
Frankly, whether you are stating as fact that what I'm playing isn't D&D or you are saying that in your opinion that what I'm playing isn't D&D doesn't make much difference. You don't get to tell me what is or isn't D&D.
I'm not saying that you have no right to say this or are wrong to say this. What I'm saying is that you can't say things like this and expect people not to call you an asshole.
And what I said was that your statement was pure and utter bullshit. Yes, I can say things like "This, to me, is D&D" and expect sensible people who don't have a chip on their shoulder not to react like an asshole.
Quote from: John Morrow;382828I don't think that's entirely true and there is plenty of evidence of people running stories as soon as role-playing spread to a wider audience.
Your
MA 'exhibit' consists of an example of a PC and NPC having a relationship and players running NPCs on behalf of the referee, and "storytelling" in the
DF article is at its most extreme a metaplot and at its most common, in my experience, the sort on content one finds riddled through
status quo, 'sandbox-y' settings.
I think you're really reaching more than a bit here.
As far as the
Traveller 'exhibits' go, I agree that MWM tended to publish very linear adventures,
The Traveller Adventure being among the worst of these, but GDW also published
Leviathan, about as 'sandbox-y' a published adventure as one is likely to find.
Quote from: estar;383162I played GURPS for 20 years before taking up Swords & Wizardry. However I pretty much ran a sandbox regardless of the ruleset I used. Which so far as been AD&D 1e, Fantasy Hero 1st, Harnmaster 1st, GURPS 2nd, GURPS 3rd, GURPS 4th, D&D 3.0, D&D 4.0 and now Swords & Wizardry.
I suppose by writing "some of the 'old school' pundits" I opened up the possibility that I was referring vaguely to everyone who associates themselves with "old school", but really I was just saying that James isn't the only one.
In other words, not pointing the finger at you, Rob.
And to shift gears: TCO, people have opinions, deal with it.
Quote from: Elliot Wilen;383179And to shift gears: TCO, people have opinions, deal with it.
You're putting too much stock into my aggression and miss what I'm saying.
I hear a lot of "Old Schoolers" acting all shocked when somebody accuses them of calling something "badwrongfun" or taking offense to their statements. All I'm saying is that this is what happens when you directly or indirectly comment on how somebody else plays a game. I could care less what people say, but trying to act all innocent about it rubs me the wrong way. That and the fact that "X isn't D&D" is a much more inflammatory statement than "X sucks" or "I prefer Y to X", and there is a strong undercurrent among the OGL community of "X isn't D&D".
Quote from: John Morrow;383125No, I'm talking about the people who show up reliably every week, don't complain very much, roll what they are supposed to roll, respond to the GM, say what their character is doing when needed, respond to NPCs, and may even offer suggestions during group discussions about what to do from tie to time but who don't have any interest in setting the goals for the group or finding a story to pursue in the setting and don't mind being given missions and otherwise being led along by NPCs and other PCs. Almost every group I've played with has had one or two of these people.
I know I do. Doesn't mean they're boring, or anti-social. They talk a lot. And have a lot of fun playing. But setting goals and making plans isn't in their makeup. They just go with the flow. Doesn't really matter to them if it's another player or the DM steering the boat.
Quote from: thecasualoblivion;383180You're putting too much stock into my aggression and miss what I'm saying.
Well, first you overreacted to simple disagreement, so it's hard to say where your argument begins and ends.
Then you demonstrated that you don't know what "passive aggressive" means, so it's difficult to tell if what you write is actually indicative of what you're trying to communicate.
Finally, you habitually use the word "orthodoxy" as shorthand for "if my statements are disregarded or shown to be false, it's evidence of a deceitful conspiracy to suppress The Truth".
If you feel people don't understand you, try communicating more clearly and consistently without resorting to paranoia as justification for faulty reasoning.
Quote from: Elliot Wilen;383179I suppose by writing "some of the 'old school' pundits" I opened up the possibility that I was referring vaguely to everyone who associates themselves with "old school", but really I was just saying that James isn't the only one.
In other words, not pointing the finger at you, Rob.
Didn't mean to sound/write defensive I was thinking more about the questions about my experiences and so wrote that.
As for Old School Pundits in general I think most of them including James do good work in uncovering the roots of the hobby. We may not always agree with their conclusions but most especially James put out the "raw data", so to speak, so people can draw their own conclusion if they don't agree with with the pundits.
TCO is spot on when he says there is an undercurrent from a lot of people that basically goes what you are playing is not D&D. Anyone who can't see that in comments round here is being pretty blinkered.
You get it from both sides 4e fans saying that their version of game is the current version and all else is irrelevant because the game people play is the one that matters. And OD&D fans saying that all versions since '76 have been polluted with a mix of narrativism, min/maxing and PC as a special snowflake-ism.
Personally... I would say ... bollocks.
Play the game you want to play. Anyone on this site could write their own RPG that would be as good as anything you could buy provided they listen to their players and dump the stuff that doesn't work and reinforce the stuff that is good. Just cos this play style or that play style or that rule system or this rule system was once touched by the hem of Gygax's cloak or has been rated best rule system evar by the PRG writer's guild of America or has shifted 3,000,000 copies in a week doesn't make them any better than something you knock up yourself and refine through actual play.
Back the OP. Personally I am not keen on sandboxes. As a DM I find them too much work as a player I find they don't lead to interesting stories.. Yes that's right stories. I get bored with sandbox environments as a player because I want to feel like there is an arc here that the story I am involved with is going somewhere has some resolution. I gave up on MMOs because you wander about killing increasingly tough things and taking their stuff, true sandbox play. I want intrigue I want player driven plots I want plot hooks linked back to that NPC I mentioned in my character background, I want to be a special fucking snowflake.
Heresy I hear them cry... in fact if I look out of the window I can see the villagers heading this way with their pitchforks and torches.
Quote from: jibbajibba;383207Back the OP. Personally I am not keen on sandboxes. As a DM I find them too much work
That what I mainly work on. Showing folks that it is not any harder to prep for and some techniques to make it easier.
Quote from: jibbajibba;383207as a player I find they don't lead to interesting stories.. Yes that's right stories. I get bored with sandbox environments as a player because I want to feel like there is an arc here that the story I am involved with is going somewhere has some resolution. I gave up on MMOs because you wander about killing increasingly tough things and taking their stuff, true sandbox play. I want intrigue I want player driven plots I want plot hooks linked back to that NPC I mentioned in my character background, I want to be a special fucking snowflake.
Sandboxes can have plots it just set up differently. Rather being a choice of adventures the "plot" unfolds around the character through the events of the campaign. It is up to the players to interact with these events and resolve them however they like.
Plus a lot of discussion about sandboxes miss the idea that the players need context to make meaningful decision. A great way to provide that context is in character backgrounds. A well designed sandbox campaign will use a character's background to a far greater extent than a normal campaign.
What sandbox, as a RPG term, started out as is way of explaining how to use the Wilderlands Boxed Set. Many of use who ran campaign with the original wilderlands found that the lists of locales used by the original made it easy to referee players when they decided to left instead of right while traveling in a setting. We realized that original one line stat block was perhaps too terse and that a one or two paragraph expansion was about right in giving the referee something to go on yet allowing him to exercise his creativity.
But we said nothing about the contents of the locales. You can construct things so that they all building on each other to some predetermined event or locale. For example you create a sandbox setting where pieces of a plot where the world is about to be invaded by Slaads are scattered across the locale. Or you could go and make a ultra-realistic setting that plays like a slice of life in medieval europe.
The more I read these sandbox thread and more I think people are reading too much into the term. It is a format and a method of organizing your campaign. What the campaign is about still remains the same range of possibilities as before.
Finally Paizo's Kingmaker is a good example of a Sandbox with a goal (two actually). One is the PCs building a kingdom in the Stolen Lands and the other is a larger plot dealing with a threat to the region as a whole that the players stumble across through investigating the various locales.
Quote from: EstarSandboxes can have plots it just set up differently. Rather being a choice of adventures the "plot" unfolds around the character through the events of the campaign. It is up to the players to interact with these events and resolve them however they like.
I always use the term, "World In Motion" to describe this. A goal of a good GM in this type of game is to provide a feeling that events are happening with or without the PCs, that there is a natural cause and effect going on, and that the PCs CAN change the course of events but if they do nothing, things will continue to move on.
Often this also means providing the PCs with more information than simple plot hooks. It is vital to have things happenning around the PCs that contribute to the feel that they are in a live, moving world.
It also means giving them more choices.
You see , as I have espoused in the past, I use a technique called making shit up.
I start my making up some stuff then I enrich that with some more stuff I basically make up. Where possible I use the backgrounds that the players have written for their PCs however brief or complete because it adds to the illusion of texture.
I then tack a plot onto everything else and drive it with some NPCs (who I might stat but probably not fully, well not until it looks like the PCs might meet them).
Now I used to do this without thinking now I do it and try to make sure its not a railroad as I noticed a definite tendency to come back to things I had thought of because they were cool rather than allowing the PCs to drive their own conclusions.
Quote from: jrients;382994I don't. I consider the sandbox as one of several useful bits that got applied to many different games by many different ways. The old school scene tends to underline the sandbox because it is one of the techniques from the early history of the hobby that nearly went the way of the dodo, at least in terms of public discussion of the game. Taking the sandbox more seriously than that seems to me like an ill-advised step towards ritualistic observation rather than an artistic choice.
Yes to both. It is an approach to create a creative and enjoyable campaign, which may seem like a breath of fresh air to many in its platonic (hexcrawl-style) form. It is a way to play the game.
Ironically, this thread is full of arguments appealing to popularity and history, and it is mostly coming from the people who wish to deligitimise sandbox campaigns for their own particular reasons.
Quote from: jibbajibba;383239You see , as I have espoused in the past, I use a technique called making shit up.
Yes that nice, but some folks appreciate learning more specific techniques to help them make shit up.
Quote from: Kyle Aaron;383115Yes. We call them "boring"...
Quote from: John Morrow;383125No, I'm talking about the people who show up reliably every week, don't complain very much, roll what they are supposed to roll, respond to the GM, say what their character is doing when needed, respond to NPCs, and may even offer suggestions during group discussions about what to do from tie to time but who don't have any interest in setting the goals for the group or finding a story to pursue in the setting and don't mind being given missions and otherwise being led along by NPCs and other PCs. Almost every group I've played with has had one or two of these people.
The irony is that Kyle is now describing an extreme position, while excluding the middle. There may be some players as he describes, but they're quite rare and certainly don't fall under "casual gamer" as most people use the word.
Quote from: LordVreeg;383230I always use the term, "World In Motion" to describe this. A goal of a good GM in this type of game is to provide a feeling that events are happening with or without the PCs, that there is a natural cause and effect going on, and that the PCs CAN change the course of events but if they do nothing, things will continue to move on.
Often this also means providing the PCs with more information than simple plot hooks. It is vital to have things happenning around the PCs that contribute to the feel that they are in a live, moving world.
It also means giving them more choices.
I have nothing to add to this except +1.
Quote from: LordVreeg;383230I always use the term, "World In Motion" to describe this. A goal of a good GM in this type of game is to provide a feeling that events are happening with or without the PCs, that there is a natural cause and effect going on, and that the PCs CAN change the course of events but if they do nothing, things will continue to move on.
Often this also means providing the PCs with more information than simple plot hooks. It is vital to have things happenning around the PCs that contribute to the feel that they are in a live, moving world.
It also means giving them more choices.
Yes. Amen brother.
World in motion (great term) is certainly the way I always run a sandbox. I think that the issues some other people have with sandboxes is that if you run them the other way (ie. like a video game, where everything in the world is just standing there, static, waiting for the PCs to show up and make things happen, and nothing ever changes except when the PCs do something) has LESS feeling of immersion than a non-sandbox game. But a real sandbox, one that does use "world in motion", is certainly going to have an even MORE immersive feel than a plot-driven game, if run well.
RPGPundit
Quote from: LordVreeg;383230I always use the term, "World In Motion" to describe this.
I am going to adopt this term to describe this aspect of campaigning. Great job in coming up with it.
It certainly is an appropriate term. :)
Quote from: LordVreeg;383230I always use the term, "World In Motion" to describe this. A goal of a good GM in this type of game is to provide a feeling that events are happening with or without the PCs, that there is a natural cause and effect going on, and that the PCs CAN change the course of events but if they do nothing, things will continue to move on.
I call this a "dynamic sandbox." It's "opposite" is a "static sandbox" where nothing really happens in the world unless the PCs are involved in it.
Quote from: Benoist;383573It certainly is an appropriate term. :)
well you've seen some of my stuff. World in cyclotronic motion, sometimes..
but my thanks.
Quote from: LordVreeg;383640well you've seen some of my stuff. World in cyclotronic motion, sometimes..
but my thanks.
It really conveys the idea of a world living and breathing outside the characters' scope. I really like it.
I like it, too: concise, descriptive, and catchy.
Quote from: Melan;383267Ironically, this thread is full of arguments appealing to popularity and history, and it is mostly coming from the people who wish to deligitimise sandbox campaigns for their own particular reasons.
I have no interest in delegitimizing sandbox play. It's actually a style of play I enjoy quite a bit. What I'm addressing are romantic notions that if we peer back to the earliest days of role-playing that there was some sort of Garden of Eden of stylistic purity and I don't think that's the case.
Quote from: The Shaman;383172Your MA 'exhibit' consists of an example of a PC and NPC having a relationship and players running NPCs on behalf of the referee,
Here is the key bit from the "PC and NPC having a relationship":
"
Eventually he succeeded. (Who was I, a mere game master, to stand in the way of True Love?)"
Sounds like the GM giving the PC a storybook ending to me.
Quote from: The Shaman;383172As far as the Traveller 'exhibits' go, I agree that MWM tended to publish very linear adventures, The Traveller Adventure being among the worst of these, but GDW also published Leviathan, about as 'sandbox-y' a published adventure as one is likely to find.
I'm not saying that sandboxes didn't exist or that people didn't play that way in the earliest days of the hobby. What I'm saying is that people also played other ways going back to the earliest days of the hobby and that they often mixed and matched approaches, as people still do. People experimented, tried different things, made up their own rules, and so on. That comes through loud and clear in the Armintrout article, which is why I like it so much and always have (I own that issue and it was always one of my favorite gaming magazine articles).
Quote from: LordVreeg;383230I always use the term, "World In Motion" to describe this. A goal of a good GM in this type of game is to provide a feeling that events are happening with or without the PCs, that there is a natural cause and effect going on, and that the PCs CAN change the course of events but if they do nothing, things will continue to move on.
It's a nice and evocative phrase but my advice would be to keep it lower case and avoid turning it into jargon because jargon like that always seems crystal clear to the people who turn it into jargon but once it gets out into the wild, it mutates. The next thing you know, people will be telling you that all sorts of games are "World In Motion" (or maybe "WIM") games just because they want to make their games fit your neat phrase and those games won't seem like "World In Motion" games to you. Just look at how hard it's become for people to give a crisp definition of "sandbox", "immersion", "old school", or even "story" with respect to role-playing that everyone can agree on.
Hmmm. Maybe I should coin the phrase, "Jargon Heartbreakers". ;)
Quote from: John Morrow;383664I have no interest in delegitimizing sandbox play. It's actually a style of play I enjoy quite a bit. What I'm addressing are romantic notions that if we peer back to the earliest days of role-playing that there was some sort of Garden of Eden of stylistic purity and I don't think that's the case.
I don't think any of us that use the Sandbox term a contend that.
Many campaigns back in the 70s may seem have similar elements to a sandbox in that they borrow a lot from miniature wargaming particularly the campaign where two players (or two teams) start with an order of battle, a overall map, make moves, then counter moves and then fight individual scenarios. However both sides were free to do whatever within the confines of the map and rules.
That is the origin of why we use term campaign as part of roleplaying. This is the source of the golden age aura that surrounds the term sandbox. However RPGs campaign exploded in variety early on as you noted. The connection is over hyped.
Quote from: estar;383672That is the origin of why we use term campaign as part of roleplaying. This is the source of the golden age aura that surrounds the term sandbox. However RPGs campaign exploded in variety early on as you noted. The connection is over hyped.
That's pretty much all I'm personally trying to say.
To me, an Immersive world or World in Motion means sandbox play in the fact that the world goes on. The PCs are encountering and interacting with an active world, not one that revolves around them. At the same time, a World in Motion also means that there are plenty of story arcs and plot going on at any given time. Every NPC is a potential adventure.
The characters get that special snowflake feel from being in the right place at the right time. Just because the world is in motion doesn't mean there isn't a status quo. Some bad things that are happening won't get stopped unless the players do it, or uncover it and bring it to the attention of others. They become very important in the small scheme of things and eventually become important in the large scheme of things.
Sandbox to me never meant "arena-style" encounters, where each one is completely separate from the world. When I make up a random encounter list for an area, the monsters or bandits have lairs (when appropriate) with treasure and/or captives that lead to other opportunities.
I think that people look back fondly on "sandbox" campaigns because they do harken back to a mythical time. A time when we were younger and could spend 20 hours a week on campaign prep to do a good World in Motion campaign.:D Doing a good sandbox campaign while juggling job, friends, significant others and offspring is goddamn hard work.
Quote from: CRKruegerI think that people look back fondly on "sandbox" campaigns because they do harken back to a mythical time. A time when we were younger and could spend 20 hours a week on campaign prep to do a good World in Motion campaign. Doing a good sandbox campaign while juggling job, friends, significant others and offspring is goddamn hard work.
Oh, don't tie this back to the whole "Rose Colored Glasses' thing, we've already beat that horse, dragged it around, beat it again, put the bones in a museum, then stole the exhibit and pulverized it in the escape attempt.
I admit I miss not having to make all the tough choices I do now. It does make it harder for adults to make time to game. But Prep time? There are a lot of tools that did not exist when I was spending all that time prepping. I can't begin to tell you how much time my wiki and email and printer save me over what I used to have to do for prep.
Quote from: John Morrow;383664I have no interest in delegitimizing sandbox play. It's actually a style of play I enjoy quite a bit. What I'm addressing are romantic notions that if we peer back to the earliest days of role-playing that there was some sort of Garden of Eden of stylistic purity
... which I don't think anybody said...
Quote from: John Morrow;383664and I don't think that's the case.
Me neither.
Quote from: LordVreeg;383742...But Prep time? There are a lot of tools that did not exist when I was spending all that time prepping. I can't begin to tell you how much time my wiki and email and printer save me over what I used to have to do for prep.
this is true for sure.
I might not prep much for games but I also run a Murder Mystery company for paying customers and obviously that needs prep in terms of character write up props and so on and the web is totally and utterly invaluable.
I used to have to wade through library books checking for historical facts or names of people at certain times. Now is on wikipedia or somewhere. The quality of props I can create now thanks to photoshop and access to a world of stuff like post-marks from 1922 Berlin or newpaper adverts from 1886 all that stuff it is totally golden.
Want an authentic Will from the 1920s just type Wills 1920 into Google :D
Quote from: LordVreeg;383742I admit I miss not having to make all the tough choices I do now. It does make it harder for adults to make time to game. But Prep time? There are a lot of tools that did not exist when I was spending all that time prepping. I can't begin to tell you how much time my wiki and email and printer save me over what I used to have to do for prep.
Plus some of who had some experience with sandbox campaign have written points to help make the most of GM's limited prep time. For example my "How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox" here http://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-to-make-fantasy-sandbox.html
Takes about a couple of days to do and you have enough material to last a while.
Quote from: LordVreeg;383742Oh, don't tie this back to the whole "Rose Colored Glasses' thing, we've already beat that horse, dragged it around, beat it again, put the bones in a museum, then stole the exhibit and pulverized it in the escape attempt.
I admit I miss not having to make all the tough choices I do now. It does make it harder for adults to make time to game. But Prep time? There are a lot of tools that did not exist when I was spending all that time prepping. I can't begin to tell you how much time my wiki and email and printer save me over what I used to have to do for prep.
Rose-colored glasses means you're looking back and giving something a fonder memory then it deserves based on sentimentality. I'm talking about something concrete, like actually having a lot of prep time to do things right. Not having enough time to adequately prep a sandbox can lead to smaller-scale campaign areas, which start to appear like less of a sandbox. Of course, the technology issue is a good one, prep is a lot easier these days, also with age might come less time, but also you're way better at making stuff up on the fly.
It doesn't have anything to do for me with some mythical time playing 20 hours a game. It's got everything to do with practical, actual gaming now. I honestly don't think one needs that much prep to get a sandbox ready to go. Just like you can get a full dungeon map with a dozen keyed, one-line encounters and run it from there.
Quote from: Benoist;383879It doesn't have anything to do for me with some mythical time playing 20 hours a game. It's got everything to do with practical, actual gaming now. I honestly don't think one needs that much prep to get a sandbox ready to go. Just like you can get a full dungeon map with a dozen keyed, one-line encounters and run it from there.
True, but that depends entirely on how much Motion you want your World to be in. :D Really making a campaign come alive takes a fuckton of prep if your campaign is say City of Greyhawk as opposed to Keep on the Borderlands.
Quote from: CRKrueger;383937Really making a campaign come alive takes a fuckton of prep if your campaign is say City of Greyhawk as opposed to Keep on the Borderlands.
Really? Does it? :hmm:
Quote from: CRKrueger;383937True, but that depends entirely on how much Motion you want your World to be in. :D Really making a campaign come alive takes a fuckton of prep if your campaign is say City of Greyhawk as opposed to Keep on the Borderlands.
Yeah, when I mentioned the glasses, I was referring to the thread that would not die a little while ago.
I also agree that while there are a lot of tools for making it an easier job that it used to be, and that there are shortcuts and templates...nothing beats prep to make it happen. It's lile improv theatre vs a Broadway play...talent shows, and it can work...but the rehearsals and familiarity with the material will tell every time.
Igbar, Capital of Trabler (http://celtricia.pbworks.com/Igbar,+Capital+of+Trabler) has been a play center for Celtricia for over 26 years now. and it still takes a lot of work. For a few sessions, a GM can really fake it, but good prep is impossible to fake, long term. No argument.
You see I don't think that there is as much prep as folks think.
I ran a Cyberpunk style campaign for 2 years my prep was a flow chart and about 4 NPCs. The PCs ended up travelling to a lunar base and back and the game ended with a shootout in a luxury Hotel in LA. Similarly I have run campaigns ranging from a few months to years on the same basis.
I like the world in motion concept but like so much else that relates to RPGs its all an illusion.
Like Benoist says a map and a few notes on encounters is all it takes.
I don't knock prep but it should be seen as fun for its own sake not as a requirement to a great game.
Linking back to the what makes a good DM theme I would say if you have
i) Rules mastery - because it builds trust
ii) A good memory - because then you don't to ask questiosn abotu PCs or look up loads of stuff, but I think its most important with hooks. If you can hook an improv'ed or random encounter back to the PC's background you last read 4 weeks ago never having asked them to see it again they will think that the whole think was plnned from the get go.
iii) A great Imagination - texture and detail are the key.
iv) The Trust of the players - if players trust you they will go with it and any micro errors will be over looked
You don't actually need to do that much prep. The ruels for improv games are simple
i) never overuse the same trope - if every NPC is called Bob and talks with an Irish accent it gets old really fast
ii) always make sure stuff stays where you left it - this includes names and flavour of places
iii) give the illusion of a 'World in Motion' through linking arcs - you can create all sorts of sub-plots on the fly, the PCs see a courtier leaving the queen's chambers in the middle of the night can lead to a string of adventures
iv) keep the game moving - don't let games drag, a 2 KM maze might sound like a good idea on paper but gets dull reall fast, feel free to collapse and telescope time - this is just standard GM practice but if you are improv'ing the tendancy to repeat is really strong.
v) Foreshadowing - don't just adlib the present, seed stuff you will reuse later, the name of a sage, a scrap of parchment, chuck it in and remember it for later (shit if you are lazy then write it down somewhere :) ).
It also depends on the rules system, as I don't think many DMs could successfully run a low-prep sandbox using 3E D&D.
Seven locations. That's all the prep you need to start with. The hex the PCs are in and the six adjacent ones.
Quote from: Benoist;383939Really? Does it? :hmm:
I think so. I think we all, as GMs run into the world of improv quite a bit, as there is no such thing as full preparation for the players in an RPG game. But I think that the GM who underpreps a campaign and thinks they are running as good a session as they would have run with enough prep is fooling themself. The players may not complain, and maybe people had a good time, but underprepping is something I notice. A good GM who underpreps may be better still than a lousy with tons of extra backstory done, but a good GM with the prep will run the best possible game in most situations.
Or, to answer Jibba in his own terms,
Quote from: JibbaI don't knock prep but it should be seen as fun for its own sake not as a requirement to a great game.
It is not a requirement for a good game, or a fun game. It is not even a requirement for a great game. It will make almost any game better, however. Yours, mine, everyone's. And in my opinion, a GM is deluding themselves if they think they are running a
great campaign without enough prep.
Quote from: VreegI also agree that while there are a lot of tools for making it an easier job that it used to be, and that there are shortcuts and templates...nothing beats prep to make it happen. It's lile improv theatre vs a Broadway play...talent shows, and it can work...but the rehearsals and familiarity with the material will tell every time.
Quote from: jrients;384037Seven locations. That's all the prep you need to start with. The hex the PCs are in and the six adjacent ones.
Yes. I tend to agree with this.
Or, to put it in other words, what I think you really need is a base idea, a concept for the area, like for instance two tribes fighting over the river and resources, or some such, a bunch of landmarks, maybe a list of random encounters to roll on every once in a while, and that's it, really. You can have a great game with just this.
Quote from: LordVreeg;384038[Prep] is not a requirement for a good game, or a fun game. It is not even a requirement for a great game. It will make almost any game better, however. Yours, mine, everyone's. And in my opinion, a GM is deluding themselves if they think they are running a great campaign without enough prep.
Depends what we mean by "Great Campaign". You'd need to precise your thought in this regard.
If you want depth, sure, no prep might become a problem, because what exists in terms of the GM's side of the screen is basically what the PCs get to interact with, and not much else, AT FIRST. Indeed, this stuff may accumulate through actual play and take a life of its own via game interactions. In that case, there's virtually no prep going on, but the world is literally set in motion by the players during the first (few) games, and then takes momentum from the players' initial shove. It's not impossible and in fact, not that hard to realize, IMO.
Also, let's not forget that the synergy between all the players and the GM, and the players between themselves, is ultimately what matters the most towards people having a good time.
Lastly, there is such a thing as too much prep, as well.
Quote from: BENOISTQuote from: Originally Posted by LordVreeg[Prep] is not a requirement for a good game, or a fun game. It is not even a requirement for a great game. It will make almost any game better, however. Yours, mine, everyone's. And in my opinion, a GM is deluding themselves if they think they are running a great campaign without enough prep.
Depends what we mean by "Great Campaign". You'd need to precise your thought in this regard.
If you want depth, sure, no prep might become a problem, because what exists in terms of the GM's side of the screen is basically what the PCs get to interact with, and not much else, AT FIRST. Indeed, this stuff may accumulate through actual play and take a life of its own via game interactions. In that case, there's virtually no prep going on, but the world is literally set in motion by the players during the first (few) games, and then takes momentum from the players' initial shove. It's not impossible and in fact, not that hard to realize, IMO.
Also, let's not forget that the synergy between all the players and the GM, and the players between themselves, is ultimately what matters the most towards people having a good time.
Lastly, there is such a thing as too much prep, as well.
Slippery Slope #1...The term, "enough prep"
Slippery Slope #2...The term, "Great Campaign"
Let me put that out there first.
Let me also agree that excess depth in certain areas is wasted time for the GM.
My opinion, hoever, remains that this situation,
Quote from: BenoistIn that case, there's virtually no prep going on, but the world is literally set in motion by the players during the first (few) games, and then takes momentum from the players' initial shove. It's not impossible and in fact, not that hard to realize, IMO.
is always made better by work on backstory, plot, NPCs, motivations, and history. I'm not saying you can't have a good, fun game with the skeletal approach. But it invariably will be a better game when the 'back of the house' in order. I don't care how talented, how experienced, or how good the group is. The real consistency and depth that is NECESSARY for a continued 'World in Motion 'feel needs work and effort.
Quote from: LordVreeg;384073Slippery Slope #1...The term, "enough prep"
Slippery Slope #2...The term, "Great Campaign"
Yes. Slippery slopes they are. No question about it.
Quote from: LordVreeg;384073My opinion, hoever, remains that this situation, is always made better by work on backstory, plot, NPCs, motivations, and history. I'm not saying you can't have a good, fun game with the skeletal approach. But it invariably will be a better game when the 'back of the house' in order. I don't care how talented, how experienced, or how good the group is. The real consistency and depth that is NECESSARY for a continued 'World in Motion 'feel needs work and effort.
I don't agree. Not always.
I know what you mean: it's your turf. Your specialty. That's where your heart and soul goes into gaming: the world-building. You're a guy who loves structure, coherent conceptual design, with a particular attention to detail and depth. I feel like I know you, dude. ;)
It's not like that for every GM, though.
If anything, I feel this will HUGELY depend on the particular GM, and his improvisational skills especially (and beyond that, the way his brain operates in terms of imagination - there's no right or wrong answer on this, just different takes according to different types of brains and personalities). I honestly can tell you stories of games that went much better than I could ever have hoped for BECAUSE there was little prep involved, not more.
I guess there will be a "right amount of prep" sort of balance that each GM will have to figure out for him or herself, and sometimes, not prepping extensively means you're opening yourself up to the inspiration of the moment in the game. Some of my best memories of gaming, if not the vast majority of them, really, came from the players doing something unexpected that required from me to basically throw my pile of notes through the window and just run with whatever they had in mind, making shit up as we went.
Quote from: CRKrueger;383937True, but that depends entirely on how much Motion you want your World to be in. :D Really making a campaign come alive takes a fuckton of prep if your campaign is say City of Greyhawk as opposed to Keep on the Borderlands.
I'd disagree.
IME, you can start a city-based sandbox the same way you start a wilderness-based sandbox: A dozen or two keyed locations; some methods of dynamic content generation (i.e. random tables); and a handful of good scenario hooks to get the PCs involved in the game world.
In terms of keeping the city "in motion", I can manage that with two documents: What's scheduled to happen to the PCs (appointments they've made and people/things planning to find them) and a timeline of meta-events/headlines (1-3 per day).
These are occasionally supplemented by more complex "backdrop" scenarios revolving around major events (like a schism of the local church or a major gang war), but even these generally end up flowing through the other two documents.
You can obviously do more than that. But you don't have to design the entire City of Greyhawk boxed set or the 600 pages of Ptolus in order to start adventuring in those cities. (Any more than you need to design the entire world of Greyhawk in order to start a wilderness-based sandbox.)
I´m a top-down person. I always had troubles with DMs who´d just prepare the "seven hexes" but YMMV.
Quote from: Benoist;384077Yes. Slippery slopes they are. No question about it.
I don't agree. Not always.
I know what you mean: it's your turf. Your specialty. That's where your heart and soul goes into gaming: the world-building. You're a guy who loves structure, coherent conceptual design, with a particular attention to detail and depth. I feel like I know you, dude. ;)
It's not like that for every GM, though.
If anything, I feel this will HUGELY depend on the particular GM, and his improvisational skills especially (and beyond that, the way his brain operates in terms of imagination - there's no right or wrong answer on this, just different takes according to different types of brains and personalities). I honestly can tell you stories of games that went much better than I could ever have hoped for BECAUSE there was little prep involved, not more.
I guess there will be a "right amount of prep" sort of balance that each GM will have to figure out for him or herself, and sometimes, not prepping extensively means you're opening yourself up to the inspiration of the moment in the game. Some of my best memories of gaming, if not the vast majority of them, really, came from the players doing something unexpected that required from me to basically throw my pile of notes through the window and just run with whatever they had in mind, making shit up as we went.
Yes, specific games...But not campaigns.
Look again in our comments, and where your is leading you. I am talking long-term, you are still talking about specific games.
(You also are not wrong on your read on me....mea culpa)
We spoke about World in Motion as an ingredient for immersion, and the consistency one gets from continued prep and bacl work helps this immeasurably.
Let me ask you, and there is no right answer...Do you feel that Prof. Tolkien's extra efforts in linguistics were wasted, or his historical work? Do you think they added to the internal consistency and took a very good story and made it legendary? or was the writing and the plot enough?
Becasue that is my contention, as i have writtten it a few times. The detailed prep work can make a bad game tolerable, a good campaign great, and a great campaign legendary.
Quote from: thecasualoblivion;383132Its not as big of a difference as you make it out to be. When you say that something "Is D&D", you also tend to say or strongly imply that something else isn't. The OSR as a whole has a strong undercurrent of defining or implying things as "not D&D". With some people this is intentional, and others don't realize they are doing it, but either way its there. Its the negative side that the aggression/passive aggression stems from.
Saying that it only applies to you isn't as strong a statement than the negative implication itself, and doesn't entirely mitigate it.
"I don't like the Star Wars prequels."
This is not an aggressive statement towards people who happen to like the Star Wars prequels. To interpret someone as being aggressive because they have an opinion that differs from yours would seem to require an immense degree of personal insecurity.
Ironically, OTOH, I think "4th Edition is a fundamentally different game from previous editions of the game" is a statement of fact, not opinion. One can factually compare the rules and demonstrate the difference.
Does this mean that 4th Edition "isn't D&D"? Well, that depends on how one chooses to identify what "D&D" is. Do you mean a game that features the same core gameplay as the game designed by Gygax and Arneson? If so, then 4th Edition clearly isn't D&D. (But Labyrinth Lord is.)
Do you mean anything that has the "D&D" trademark on it? Well, then it clearly
is D&D. (And Labyrinth Lord isn't.)
Do you mean any fantasy roleplaying game? Well, then it's clearly D&D. (And so are Runequest and Nobilis.)
All of which drives us back into the realm of opinion.
Quote from: Justin Alexander;384091"I don't like the Star Wars prequels."
Hey! Welcome Justin. Do you know how many times we linked your essay on dissociated mechanics around here?
A lot. ;)
Quote from: LordVreeg;384090Yes, specific games...But not campaigns.
Look again in our comments, and where your is leading you. I am talking long-term, you are still talking about specific games.
(You also are not wrong on your read on me....mea culpa)
Okay. I was about to say "I'm talking about long term too" but then I realized what you actually mean. You mean to say (correct me if I'm wrong) that, even if you start with little to no prep, as the campaign evolves and stuff happens, even if you fill in
some blanks as the players explore the world in improv-mode, you'll start to invest more and more time to
make sense of this stuff between game sessions. Which leads us back to the notion that sooner or later you'll have to pay attention to the details so that the feeling of verisimilitude doesn't suddenly shatter in the game.
I agree.
Quote from: LordVreeg;384090We spoke about World in Motion as an ingredient for immersion, and the consistency one gets from continued prep and bacl work helps this immeasurably.
Let me ask you, and there is no right answer...Do you feel that Prof. Tolkien's extra efforts in linguistics were wasted, or his historical work? Do you think they added to the internal consistency and took a very good story and made it legendary? or was the writing and the plot enough?
Becasue that is my contention, as i have writtten it a few times. The detailed prep work can make a bad game tolerable, a good campaign great, and a great campaign legendary.
I wouldn't take JRRT as a good example for RPG game settings. It's probably the
worse example of campaign building you could take. Middle-earth probably is one of the worse examples of fully detailed literary world I would use for an long-running campaign, precisely because it is too detailed, too crowded for the PCs to really make a difference in the world without retconing a whole bunch of stuff or going "Ah. To Hell with the canon!" Unless you start talking about Fourth and Fifth Age stuff, which isn't exactly JRRT's Middle-earth, if you see what I mean.
I see your point though, if I interpreted it correctly in the paragraph above.
As to the first para, We are getting closer. the longer a campaign runs, the deeper it can become, the more backtracking, forshadowing, and detail making that goes on. And since this is a 'Sandbox' thread, there are a LOT of details thrown out in a sandbox game, more than in other games. Remembering these is critical, and tying them together...when the players nod and say, 'Oh, yeah, I remember them', then you are winning. That's the kind of prep we are talking.
And I did not ask about Tolkien's work as an RPG. I asked if you though his efforts were wasted. He wasn't trying to write an RPG, and so I was not asking about it in that light. I asked how his backstory work affected the story, since that is what he was writing. I think that question translates very well into Prep work that people do in an RPG, as my contention is that it lowers the barrriers to immersion.
I might have to plan a trip for us to have this discussion face to face. :)
Quote from: LordVreeg;384101As to the first para, We are getting closer. the longer a campaign runs, the deeper it can become, the more backtracking, forshadowing, and detail making that goes on. And since this is a 'Sandbox' thread, there are a LOT of details thrown out in a sandbox game, more than in other games. Remembering these is critical, and tying them together...when the players nod and say, 'Oh, yeah, I remember them', then you are winning. That's the kind of prep we are talking.
OK. I get what you're saying now.
Quote from: LordVreeg;384101And I did not ask about Tolkien's work as an RPG. I asked if you though his efforts were wasted. He wasn't trying to write an RPG, and so I was not asking about it in that light. I asked how his backstory work affected the story, since that is what he was writing. I think that question translates very well into Prep work that people do in an RPG, as my contention is that it lowers the barrriers to immersion.
Alright, assuming the Fellowship is the actual group of PCs, in other words.
You must know this, right? (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612) :D
Quote from: LordVreeg;384101I might have to plan a trip for us to have this discussion face to face. :)
Anytime. Just be ready to roll 3d6 in order and get some Black Abbey exploration done as well. ;)
To tell you the truth I don't really see how a "World in Motion" or Immersive campaign can really happen without adequate prep. Yes, there is going to be a whole lot of improv and smoke and mirrors, but to be honest, Lord Vreeg is right, more prep would be better.
If you don't prep, you're relying on your characters going along with the fact that this is an illusion. They're not walking down the street to the tavern you didn't mention because they know you don't have it prepped. Your skeleton works because your players willingly suspend disbelief. Can they have a crazyass fun time? Yes. Would it have been even better with prep? probably.
I like to start off small with an area that is prepped to hell and back. Pick an NPC and I'll tell you what hand he jerks off at night and who he's thinking about doing it. Players notice that level of prep. They'll push the envelope trying to find the house that's just a prop, not a home. If they don't find the curtain in the first couple adventures, then they'll just stop looking. At that point you ease up a bit because they won't be looking for the curtain, at the same time, they won't be willingly settling for a skeleton campaign either. At that point the smoke and mirrors actually work, instead of the players making you think it does.
Quote from: Settembrini;384089I´m a top-down person. I always had troubles with DMs who´d just prepare the "seven hexes" but YMMV.
You've got to walk before you can run.
The amount of needed to get adequate detail isn't that much. To follow my "How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox" will take two weeks worth of evenings with one or two hours to spare each evening. That is assuming you make presentable version of everything. If all you go for is rough sketches then it will take a week or so of evening.
The problem is that Sandbox are so under utilized that it not common knowledge how to approach them. The main examples folks see are fully fleshed out travelogues for settings and detailed keyed locales for adventures. As long as you have a dozen or two ideas to use as seeds it takes far less time to create a sandbox.
Plus if you keep the same setting from game to game and build on it each the prep on subsequent campaigns can be more focused on specifics rather than world building.
Quote from: EstarPlus if you keep the same setting from game to game and build on it each the prep on subsequent campaigns can be more focused on specifics rather than world building.
This, by the way, is one of the great secrets...keep your notes...
Quote from: LordVreeg;384143This, by the way, is one of the great secrets...keep your notes...
Agreed.
30 years of stuff in there.
Quote from: estar;384177Agreed.
30 years of stuff in there.
How do you post your thumbnails in that format?
Quote from: CRKrueger;384109To tell you the truth I don't really see how a "World in Motion" or Immersive campaign can really happen without adequate prep. Yes, there is going to be a whole lot of improv and smoke and mirrors, but to be honest, Lord Vreeg is right, more prep would be better.
If you don't prep, you're relying on your characters going along with the fact that this is an illusion. They're not walking down the street to the tavern you didn't mention because they know you don't have it prepped. Your skeleton works because your players willingly suspend disbelief. Can they have a crazyass fun time? Yes. Would it have been even better with prep? probably.
I like to start off small with an area that is prepped to hell and back. Pick an NPC and I'll tell you what hand he jerks off at night and who he's thinking about doing it. Players notice that level of prep. They'll push the envelope trying to find the house that's just a prop, not a home. If they don't find the curtain in the first couple adventures, then they'll just stop looking. At that point you ease up a bit because they won't be looking for the curtain, at the same time, they won't be willingly settling for a skeleton campaign either. At that point the smoke and mirrors actually work, instead of the players making you think it does.
You see I am exactly the oposite. They will never find a house that is just a prop because I can populate any house they go into in a second.
For reasons I won't go into my mum took up rpgs when I was at Uni. She was really into prep and a lot of her ideas were excellent. She ran three parallel campaigns with differnt parties with an over riding story arc that linked it all in. Her prep was huge. Every house had an A5 index card with the folks that lived there , sketches of most of the major NPCs etc etc. But to play it was so slow and felt so stiffled.
What actually happens is the PCs enter a house the DM tells them who is there and what the house is like. The PCs don't care if you look this up in your database or just make it up (provided when they go back the house is the same of course) so long as its interesting plausible and consistent with the game world.
Now I don't think I am an exceptional GM. I am pretty smart and have a good memory and I have an eye for hooks and tapping what the players want. I don't think these are exceptional skills I think all experienced GMs have them.
I can see that in a very heavy game like 4e or even 3e you need to prep monsters if you are going to provides a range of mixed encounters. In earlier versions of D&D and most other games ...no need. I mean in most of my 2e games I adlib the monsters stats.
The creatures are certainly goblinoid but they have pronounced hunch-backs and their arms are log enough to reach the the floor and their hands bear 5 wickedly sharp claws... etc... give um 3hd, 2 attacks 1d6, ac 5 due to natural hide, 60 feet infravision your done. Why break the flow to look shit up?
Now as I noted previously a key to good improv is foreshadowing. You make up these Smetin (name just give to creature above) ad a random encounter and then you build that event into a village plagued by Smetin raiders. this really is bread and butter stuff.
As I have mentioned previously I think the really improv challenge would be to improv the whole system based on player votes at the start of the session. So the players want a scifi game with a cinematic feel and lots of space combat. They want these 8 stats and a d20 skills system. They want to build their characters from point buy. All of which were voted for at each point by the players. Now as the GM you adlib all that take the PCs through chargen which you have to adlib of course (tricky with a point buy system but far from impossible) and then play the game that you were sketching out in your head whilst you were also making up the skills sytem and making sure it fitted with the combat stystem which provided what the PCs voted for ... then you play a 4 hour session. Now that would be sweet.
I like sandboxes when they're well-done. I do think a lot of people are pretty shitty at world design, present company excepted, of course.
Setting write-ups tend to be a lot of wanky shit about superheroic gods kicking the shit out of one another, tongue-twistingly useless language families and a million hexes of desert to wander through one random roll at a time, but all the material culture is Ren Faire with superficial reskinning, and the climate and geography make no goddamn sense.
I think that stuff is actually fairly important to sandbox games because it provides a set of stable templates from which the DM can extrapolate as needed, rather than forcing them to become an autistic kid spending days and days mapping the dimensions of every house in town, or some flakey would-be author who just waves the setting aside whenever it becomes inconvenient to his predetermined scenes.
While I suspect most of us acknowledge or practice this, I don't recall seeing it mentioned in the thread so here goes: I feel that even in "full prep" sandbox play there is no assumption that all potential hot spots require the same amount of detail.
In practice, the small village my PCs have been haunting the last few session is probably vastly more detailed than the capital city they couldn't possibly reach in less than a month of travel. Political or social importance is not equal to game importance.
Similarly, drop-in encounters or lairs can be swiftly improvised using a variety of tools. However, the dungeon (whatever the size) your players have explicitly stated they intend to explore can only benefit from some extra planning.
I do not propose that the world wrap around the whims of the players, only acknowledge the practical limits of what a DM can prepare in a new sandbox-style game. Those of you that have been running the same setting for a decade or more are free to ignore. :)
Quote from: Settembrini;384089I´m a top-down person. I always had troubles with DMs who´d just prepare the "seven hexes" but YMMV.
It's all a question of perspective.
For my current wilderlands-based sandbox I wrote about 6 pages of background notes which laid out the broad history of the local hexmap (one sheet of hex paper) and put together a 2 page briefing for players. That gave me a broad foundation for building the first 25 hexes (roughly 3 hexes deep around the starting position because I'm using a granular scale).
The point is that you should prep
broad and only worry about
deep prep for the places in your campaign world where the PCs are going to be focusing their immediate attention. When they start focusing their attention beyond their immediate point of origin, you can extend the deep prep to follow.
PCs head west? Then prep west and leave the east lightly sketched in.
PCs interested in the God of War? Then prep the God of War and don't worry too much about the God of the Harvest yet.
IMO, it's the only sane way to manage prep.
Quote from: winkingbishop;384198While I suspect most of us acknowledge or practice this, I don't recall seeing it mentioned in the thread so here goes: I feel that even in "full prep" sandbox play there is no assumption that all potential hot spots require the same amount of detail.
Exactly. And the players will tell you where you need the detail.
Tip 1: Ask the players what they're planning to do next.If they tell you, "We're going to follow up those clues on the Clan of the White Claw." Then you know exactly what you need to be prepping for the next session.
Tip 2: Pay attention to what the players are interested in.For example, in my current campaign I knew the PCs were going to wake up an in an inn with partial amnesia. I laid out about 20-30 "regulars" -- other guests, frequent visitors to the common room, the staff, etc. I gave 'em a couple sentences of detail each. After a couple sessions I knew which NPCs had "clicked" with the players and I knew which ones hadn't. Guess which ones got full stat blocks?
Quote from: LordVreeg;384101And I did not ask about Tolkien's work as an RPG. I asked if you though his efforts were wasted. He wasn't trying to write an RPG, and so I was not asking about it in that light.
Because he wasn't prepping for an RPG it's a little difficult to see the application.
But if you think of Tolkien as playing a solo game with himself and look at how he actually developed Middle Earth, I think the analogy becomes clear: He started with languages because that's what interested him. When he needed some rudimentary cultures to provide context for those languages, he created them. Then he started providing more and more history for those cultures. He flitted around that history and revised it as he pleased. When he wrote
The Hobbit he lifted large chunks of the material he'd already created to fill in the blanks, but only later figured out that
The Hobbit was actually connected to all of this other stuff he had created.
Because he was driven by whatever caught his interest at the moment, he actually left the development of Middle Earth in a very disjointed state: Some of it was hyper-detailed. Other bits were essentially vast voids which were barely sketched in at all. Occasionally he would toss off random comments that he only figured out how to fit into the wider scope of his world much later one (Queen Beruthiel being perhaps the most famous example). Some stuff was never made consistent with the rest.
Now, instead of "solo play", let's provide Tolkien with a group of players: Instead of being guided by his own whimsy about what he wanted to develop next, he's also being guided by the whimsies and interests of his players.
The point is: "Yes, that prep is great." But you don't need 40 years of work in order to get started.
If you want a gaming example of the same basic process, check out M.A.R. Barker.
Quote from: CRKrueger;384109If you don't prep, you're relying on your characters going along with the fact that this is an illusion. They're not walking down the street to the tavern you didn't mention because they know you don't have it prepped. Your skeleton works because your players willingly suspend disbelief. Can they have a crazyass fun time? Yes. Would it have been even better with prep? probably.
I think there are two points to be made here:
(1) By prepping smarter instead of harder you can generally stay ahead of your players without a "shit-ton" of work.
(2) My players rarely know when they've actually managed to "breach my prep". This partly comes from knowing the "basic rules" of the world really well; partly from being willing to improv; and partly from having systems for procedural content generation.
In fact, my current group often
thinks they've managed to get ahead of my prep when, in fact, they haven't. They seem to enjoy it, so I just quietly nod and flip the page to the map I've had sitting in the binder for a couple of months.
Quote from: Benoist;384092Hey! Welcome Justin. Do you know how many times we linked your essay on dissociated mechanics around here?
Hopefully in good ways. :)
Folks in this thread might be interested in the series I just started posting today: It'll be delving into the nuts-and-bolts of how to structure non-linear scenarios.
I think this is where a lot of people get hung up: As a structure, plots make sense. We've been studying plots since we were in grade school. Effective structuring for non-linear material, OTOH, can be a bit tougher to grok.
Quote from: winkingbishop;384190How do you post your thumbnails in that format?
All the way at the bottom of your reply to thread window there is a Manage Attachment button that opens a window.
Quote from: estar;384230All the way at the bottom of your reply to thread window there is a Manage Attachment button that opens a window.
Bitchin. Found it, thank you.
Quote from: Justin AlexanderQuote from: Originally Posted by LordVreeg \
And I did not ask about Tolkien's work as an RPG. I asked if you though his efforts were wasted. He wasn't trying to write an RPG, and so I was not asking about it in that light. [/QUOTEBecause he wasn't prepping for an RPG it's a little difficult to see the application.
But if you think of Tolkien as playing a solo game with himself and look at how he actually developed Middle Earth, I think the analogy becomes clear: He started with languages because that's what interested him. When he needed some rudimentary cultures to provide context for those languages, he created them. Then he started providing more and more history for those cultures. He flitted around that history and revised it as he pleased. When he wrote The Hobbit he lifted large chunks of the material he'd already created to fill in the blanks, but only later figured out that The Hobbit was actually connected to all of this other stuff he had created.
Because he was driven by whatever caught his interest at the moment, he actually left the development of Middle Earth in a very disjointed state: Some of it was hyper-detailed. Other bits were essentially vast voids which were barely sketched in at all. Occasionally he would toss off random comments that he only figured out how to fit into the wider scope of his world much later one (Queen Beruthiel being perhaps the most famous example). Some stuff was never made consistent with the rest.
Now, instead of "solo play", let's provide Tolkien with a group of players: Instead of being guided by his own whimsy about what he wanted to develop next, he's also being guided by the whimsies and interests of his players.
The point is: "Yes, that prep is great." But you don't need 40 years of work in order to get started.
If you want a gaming example of the same basic process, check out M.A.R. Barker.
No.
Christ, is this that hard?
The point of the original comment was asking if the backstory and detail in Tolkien's work was wasted, or if it made his literary works deeper and easier to immerse into.
He wasn't writing it as an RPG, so there are vast differences in how he did things AS A WRITER and how he would have done them as a GM. So comparing how he did the detail work is not my point (it can be your point, but you quoted me....). How he did things is irrelevant to what I am trying to get accross.
Did he need to do all the backstory and history? No. His prose and imagination would have stil created a heck of a series of books. But it is my ascertation that the level of depth and detail already present made his works as beloved as they are. What is relevant is not how he did it; it is the effect it had.
Quote from: Originally Posted by CRKruegerIf you don't prep, you're relying on your characters going along with the fact that this is an illusion. They're not walking down the street to the tavern you didn't mention because they know you don't have it prepped. Your skeleton works because your players willingly suspend disbelief. Can they have a crazyass fun time? Yes. Would it have been even better with prep? probably.
I'm in this camp, guys, because I've done both the full on improv, the partial improv, and the 50% improv that even the most detailed of games still entails (the PCs will always need some improv...one of the needed skill sets, no one is denying that).
Getting ahead and staying ahead of the PCs is one thing. Creating enough interwoven depth is another thing altogether. Of course, you need to flesh details out ahead; that's why I am still awake tonight after practise, to flesh out the Iambic TrebleHorn Bardic Inn in the Bazaar section of Steel Isle Town for my online group. But I'll draw my liquor menu from previous prep here (http://celtricia.pbworks.com/What-to-Drink), the players know that Bardic Taverns (http://celtricia.pbworks.com/Bardic-Taverns) are different in a few ways from normal ones. We all have to prep in the direction that players are moving toward, that's pretty fundamental.
Prepping smarter and harder is real secret. Same as any other art or hobby, 90% perspiration, 10% inspiration...more and better prep makes the game better. You can have a great game without it, but I still think it makes almost ANY game better.
Quote from: LordVreeg;384235But it is my ascertation that the level of depth and detail already present made his works as beloved as they are. What is relevant is not how he did it; it is the effect it had.
Except, of course, it is relevant. Because you're insisting that this level of depth and detail can only be done during prep.
My point is that Tolkien didn't spend decades "prepping to write
Lord of the Rings". He spent decades creating whatever he felt like creating and, over time, the details accumulated.
When you apply that example to roleplaying games it means that you don't have to do a "fuckton" of prep work: You can just start playing and the details will accumulate.
Quote from: Justin Alexander;384272When you apply that example to roleplaying games it means that you don't have to do a "fuckton" of prep work: You can just start playing and the details will accumulate.
You (and others) are missing Lord Vreeg's point. You DO NOT have to do a lot of prep (or any) but if you DO your campaign will be better for it. Plus there have been suggestions on how to make the best of the limited time that you have.
Quote from: estar;384297You (and others) are missing Lord Vreeg's point. You DO NOT have to do a lot of prep (or any) but if you DO your campaign will be better for it. Plus there have been suggestions on how to make the best of the limited time that you have.
This. Plus, Vreeg's not talking about prep before the campaign exclusively. He's talking about all sorts of prep during the game, while the campaign unfolds, as well, and it's true: you can sort of do without it, but if you put in some time and attention into the details, the campaign will be better for it. The argument clicked with me when I realized that, even if you start with Seven Hexes and make shit up during the first few games, you'll still keep track of this stuff over time, and make sense of it all between games, so that whatever you come up with during the game doesn't feel like it's just wrecking what you came up with two weeks prior.
So yeah. Even in that scenario, over time, you end up with some prep that, if taken care of, will end up benefitting the whole of the game later on.