I have been running the Seaward campaign since I was a pre-teen and Skull Mountain has been part of it since Funkytown was on the Billboard Top 40, but the players always surprise me.
The current crew is still traumatized by level two of Skull Mountain and want to wait a bit before going to level 3. But the need to return because of their self-imposed mission to map the Briars.
I had never thought anyone would map the area, but they are determined to do so. The Briars range from rolling hills to almost badlands and are generally covered in briars, brambles, thorns, pincushion bushes, needle trees, and more. The party is planning to thoroughly hexcrawl all 500+ square miles of the Briars, carefully map it, and then sell the results to the King.
The Briars are home to Ol' Knobby (said to be a massive ogre), Ol' One Fang (a mighty hill giant), the Red Maiden (what appears to be a beautiful woman who rides a giant owl and bestows curses on wanderers), and at least one tribe of goblins. These are just the 'big names'; it is also home to kobolds, lions, giant spiders, and a lot more.
The party decided to do a ton of preparation over the weekend in preparation for a marathon session over Memorial Day weekend.
First was a three way swap of money and potions so Clarence, the not-quite-evil assassin could take Starfalcon's wand of fireballs to Skull Mountain alone. Taking the secret stairs he dumped Fireballs into the caverns containing the huge flocks of stirges, quickly killing them all. It also burned away the wooden screens (painted to resemble stone) at the back of the stirge caverns. Clarence reported to the main party, returned the wand, and then left.
The main group had hired some mercenaries, a cook, and two cartographers. They had also purchased supplies and hired a cart (to go with the carts they own) and transported their NPCs to Skull Mountain where they set up a base camp. The hirelings would remain there under command of some henchmen, while one cartographer observed the party from the various viewing points in the mountain and checked their location with the spyglasses on the peak at regular intervals. The PCs would take their other henchmen and the cartographer with them as they methodically sweep through the Briars dealing with what they find and mapping.
The players have been preparing for this for years. They have sought out and even traded magic items for other items with NPCs to make sure they have what they think they need. The expedition's magic gear:
- a pair of Elven Helms (allow communication with line of sight) - one in Skull Mountain, one with the party so reports can be sent back and forth.
- Boots of Levitation to make sure the wearer of the helm is above the Briars to communicate.
- A Murlynd's Spoon to reduce the need to carry rations.
- an Everful Flask to provide water.
- A Broom of Flying for emergencies.
The party made their way to Skull Mountain, got the base camp setup and the cartographers to work using the spy glass to make a rough map then - climbed into the left eye cavern. Inside they found 14' tunnel sloping up that ended in an iron door with at least 4 Glyphs on it along with a rune they recognize that indicates that it was sealed by a priest to keep danger in. They left it alone.
Next they strike out West to begin the mapping!
Showing posts with label Sandbox. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sandbox. Show all posts
Monday, May 22, 2017
Sunday, August 23, 2015
The Tiny Kingdom: How Random Things End Up in the Campaign
I want to tell you more about my really, really old campaign. Seaward. And I want to talk about a supplement/game that I want.
But first, let's talk about ideas.
By that I mean - how do little bits of inspiration, insight, confusion, and such lead to creative ideas?
Let's talk about the Briars. This is a section of my main campaign world where a lot of adventures have happened over the years and I plan to have a great deal more happen as long as I am still alive.
And I know exactly where the Briars came from.
Growing up I was lucky enough to spend part of every Summer at my Uncle Don's farm in Indiana Amish country. We visited throughout the year, of course, and did everything from help with livestock to snowmobiling. And part of what we did was pick blackberries, dewberries, and cut back sweet briar. It was those outings that made the 'Lost in the Briars' picture in the 1e book so spooky to me; having gotten stuck in the briars when I fell into them at the age of 4 that seemed pretty horrible.
But more critically I remember when the only real neighbor of my Uncle Don sold his place - Uncle Don bought all the farmland, but the neighbor sold the house to a guy that owned a carpet and tile store in town 20-30 miles away. The new owner immediately put in a pool, about 18 tacky garden statues (lions with gold paint; cupids; that sort of thing), bought a peacock, and stopped maintaining the hedges and thickets.
That all happened the Summer I was 5. By the time I was 9 we needed an extra week every year to cut back briars along the property line. And briars are tough - the stems are long, very tough, and often covered in thorns. To get rid of the plants you have to trim them back, and then dig out the root. The new neighbor ignored my Uncle Don's questions, and his warnings, because he was only concerned about his 'main yard'.
My Uncle told me how much that upset him. Briars can spread fairly fast and can take over meadow and farm land making it useful only to rabbits and weasels. Without pruning and watching they can cover large areas and reduce the output of even uncultivated land. He said,
"If we ever get many abandoned farms around here the briars could take over miles and miles of the countryside."
That was the day after I drew the coasts and mountains of my setting. I added a large swatch of briars that night and they have been a fixture ever since.
For the first few years the Briars were just a well-nigh-impassable area with an old, very old, road cutting through their center. I placed the entrance to my Big Dungeon, Skull Mountain, at the other end of that road, but for a few years it was just 4-5 days of custom random encounters on the way to the dungeon. Of course, I had secrets tucked away in its depths, like the druid's grove that only druid (with their ability to travel through undergrowth) could reach, a hidden wizard's domain surrounded by impassable thorn hedges and cloaked by illusion, etc. But I was still eager to flesh them out.
I had been reading Tarzan and the Ant Men, a fun read. and then my kid sisters discovered the books about the Littles, tiny people who live in the walls of human houses. After a fair amount of wheedling I made some small houses and such and tucked them around the backyard so the two of them could play games about little humans, just 4" tall, visiting each other.
That is when I saw an ad in Dragon Mag for miniatures of armored knights on gigantic bees. I immediately thought,
"Why not little men on large bees? Heck, why not wee men on just bumblebees?"
And the Tiny Kingdom was born.
Deep in the Briars, surrounded by thorn hedges so thick only a druid could get through them, surrounded by harsh terrain and fierce monsters is the Tiny Kingdom. At the center is a walled city surrounded by tiny farms and villages, then a ring of forts - the Bee Men live here, called that because they have tamed bees. Their best warriors, the Knights, ride bumblebees to and from battle.
Outside the forts are the wild places where the Mice Men, fierce barbarians, roam. Ruins of past nations litter the area with ruined towers and abandoned vaults scattered about the realm. It would take a Bee Man 20 days of walking to travel from the center of the city to the edge of the Briars that surround the realm, the vast distance of - five miles!
I had sketched out rough maps, names, etc. when all sorts of Real Life things happened and I put it all aside. For the next 30+ years the Bee Knights and the Tiny Kingdom were flitting around, always on the edge of turning into something, hinted at in 100 things: pieces of loot; notes from sages; and tales from madmen; but never directly a part of my campaign.
Until this weekend.
Now that the Mice Men have been introduced my players have seized upon the idea with both hands.
They love the idea of the Tiny Kingdom and we brainstormed late into the night about possibilities. Some of the ideas so far are;
-The Tiny Kingdom as a full-bore OSR supplement/setting full of maps, NPCs, magic items, etc.
-Switching to normal-size anthropomorphic animals and release a setting where good-guy mice battle bad-guy weasels and there might be some sort of religious building involved.
-A complete, soup-to-nuts OSR game, with a number of tiny races and their foes.
-Change things a bit and make the setting a vast, enchanted garden of a powerful wizard who is unaware of the empires and battles of wee people in his arbors, then release that as a supplement.
-Combine the full game with the wizard's garden setting.
What do you guys think?
But first, let's talk about ideas.
By that I mean - how do little bits of inspiration, insight, confusion, and such lead to creative ideas?
Let's talk about the Briars. This is a section of my main campaign world where a lot of adventures have happened over the years and I plan to have a great deal more happen as long as I am still alive.
And I know exactly where the Briars came from.
Growing up I was lucky enough to spend part of every Summer at my Uncle Don's farm in Indiana Amish country. We visited throughout the year, of course, and did everything from help with livestock to snowmobiling. And part of what we did was pick blackberries, dewberries, and cut back sweet briar. It was those outings that made the 'Lost in the Briars' picture in the 1e book so spooky to me; having gotten stuck in the briars when I fell into them at the age of 4 that seemed pretty horrible.
But more critically I remember when the only real neighbor of my Uncle Don sold his place - Uncle Don bought all the farmland, but the neighbor sold the house to a guy that owned a carpet and tile store in town 20-30 miles away. The new owner immediately put in a pool, about 18 tacky garden statues (lions with gold paint; cupids; that sort of thing), bought a peacock, and stopped maintaining the hedges and thickets.
That all happened the Summer I was 5. By the time I was 9 we needed an extra week every year to cut back briars along the property line. And briars are tough - the stems are long, very tough, and often covered in thorns. To get rid of the plants you have to trim them back, and then dig out the root. The new neighbor ignored my Uncle Don's questions, and his warnings, because he was only concerned about his 'main yard'.
My Uncle told me how much that upset him. Briars can spread fairly fast and can take over meadow and farm land making it useful only to rabbits and weasels. Without pruning and watching they can cover large areas and reduce the output of even uncultivated land. He said,
"If we ever get many abandoned farms around here the briars could take over miles and miles of the countryside."
That was the day after I drew the coasts and mountains of my setting. I added a large swatch of briars that night and they have been a fixture ever since.
For the first few years the Briars were just a well-nigh-impassable area with an old, very old, road cutting through their center. I placed the entrance to my Big Dungeon, Skull Mountain, at the other end of that road, but for a few years it was just 4-5 days of custom random encounters on the way to the dungeon. Of course, I had secrets tucked away in its depths, like the druid's grove that only druid (with their ability to travel through undergrowth) could reach, a hidden wizard's domain surrounded by impassable thorn hedges and cloaked by illusion, etc. But I was still eager to flesh them out.
I had been reading Tarzan and the Ant Men, a fun read. and then my kid sisters discovered the books about the Littles, tiny people who live in the walls of human houses. After a fair amount of wheedling I made some small houses and such and tucked them around the backyard so the two of them could play games about little humans, just 4" tall, visiting each other.
That is when I saw an ad in Dragon Mag for miniatures of armored knights on gigantic bees. I immediately thought,
"Why not little men on large bees? Heck, why not wee men on just bumblebees?"
And the Tiny Kingdom was born.
Deep in the Briars, surrounded by thorn hedges so thick only a druid could get through them, surrounded by harsh terrain and fierce monsters is the Tiny Kingdom. At the center is a walled city surrounded by tiny farms and villages, then a ring of forts - the Bee Men live here, called that because they have tamed bees. Their best warriors, the Knights, ride bumblebees to and from battle.
Outside the forts are the wild places where the Mice Men, fierce barbarians, roam. Ruins of past nations litter the area with ruined towers and abandoned vaults scattered about the realm. It would take a Bee Man 20 days of walking to travel from the center of the city to the edge of the Briars that surround the realm, the vast distance of - five miles!
I had sketched out rough maps, names, etc. when all sorts of Real Life things happened and I put it all aside. For the next 30+ years the Bee Knights and the Tiny Kingdom were flitting around, always on the edge of turning into something, hinted at in 100 things: pieces of loot; notes from sages; and tales from madmen; but never directly a part of my campaign.
Until this weekend.
Now that the Mice Men have been introduced my players have seized upon the idea with both hands.
They love the idea of the Tiny Kingdom and we brainstormed late into the night about possibilities. Some of the ideas so far are;
-The Tiny Kingdom as a full-bore OSR supplement/setting full of maps, NPCs, magic items, etc.
-Switching to normal-size anthropomorphic animals and release a setting where good-guy mice battle bad-guy weasels and there might be some sort of religious building involved.
-A complete, soup-to-nuts OSR game, with a number of tiny races and their foes.
-Change things a bit and make the setting a vast, enchanted garden of a powerful wizard who is unaware of the empires and battles of wee people in his arbors, then release that as a supplement.
-Combine the full game with the wizard's garden setting.
What do you guys think?
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Personal Rant - Dragonlance, Vampire, Story, Plot, and the Sandbox
[Since more than one person got a mistaken impression, mild edits were made]
There is a fair amount of love in the world for the Dragonlance setting. And a fair amount of hate. My personal opinion is... it isn't good enough to hate, but it sure impacted my favorite hobby.
Personal revelation time (again). I was 16 when the first Dragonlance book came out and, oddly enough, was already living outside the home while going to school and working. I had three great room mates who were all brothers and big gamers who were going to school and working, like me. I was running two games a week, one in my own campaign, called Seaward, and one in Greyhawk where we essentially played all of the official modules plus some unique stuff of mine. One of my room mates would also DM from time to time, usually his own stuff in Greyhawk.
When Dragons of Autumn Twilight hit the shelves we, of course, bought a copy. It was, frankly, bitterly disappointing. The characters were flat, the story line was terrible, the tension wasn't and if the companions were examples of what TSR employees thought was interesting and engaging PCs I'm surprised they lasted as long as they did.
Before we continue, let me make a few things clear.
1) This is my opinion. Feel free to disagree.
2) My wife and I have worked as freelance, professional editors for large firms and authors whose names you know; we even had our own editing company and it was our primary source of income for some time. This is my personal AND professional opinion.
[If I am a professional editor why are there so many errors in my blog? One, this is for fun; two, the cobbler's kids go barefoot]
[still feel free to disagree]
3) Yes, I know the authors have written a ton of books, sold a ton, and have made a ton of money from this. My reply is - Flowers in the Attic has sold more than 40 million copies and it sucks, too
From the mary sue characters (Weis felt she had to tell us Raistlin was her favorite character?) to the eye-rolling cliches like: the twins (one is physically sickly but smart, the other strong but dull; the weak one is an evil wizard who resents his brother, the strong one is a good warrior who is blind to his brother's evil etc. (my then-nine-year-old sneered at this); the hot, dim, but feisty! barmaid; and the absent minded wizard who has vast power but can't feed himself - but is he really crazy?! (hint - of course not) I feared permanent eye strain.
And it got worse, of course. My mother bought me the next one, so I read it (dutiful son and all) and I received the third as a Christmas gift so I read it, too (I am older now and might not do it today). The writing was clunky, the story boring, the characters terrible, and the details like gully dwarves and tinker gnomes infuriating. I came to the conclusion that they were poorly written children's lit and was amazed at the love showered on them by the gaming community.
And let me add that it is my belief that the depiction of Sturm did more to cement the idea of Lawful Stupid in the collective mind of gamers than almost anything else.
The modules were worse; focused on either being the basis for later novels or (after the first few) being based on the existing novels they are almost the definition of 'railroad adventure': the modules must have certain things happen certain ways with certain conclusions or the rest of the modules don't work.
We will come back to this.
There were a lot of Dragonlance books published - more than 100 if the internet is accurate. And many modules and source books - probably also over 100. There were action figures, and miniatures, and all sorts of stuff.
Interestingly enough, even at the time when I would complain of the terrible quality of the books and modules a fair number of my gaming friends would reply with some version of,
"Well, sure, but it is bringing in a ton of new players!"
The argument was that the Dragonlance books and modules might be objectively terrible in and of themselves but a lot of younger people would read the books and then play D&D so, well, that was good! More players is good for The Community therefore, no matter how terrible the books or modules, Dragonlance was good for Gaming.
Right?
Now, since I haven't read anything Dragonlance in almost 29 years, why am I bringing this up?
Besides the fact that a lot of other OSR bloggers are talking about it, of course.
Because of story, plot, and sandbox.
Walk with me for a moment
In 1991 Vampire; the Masquerade was released and I, like many others, picked it up. I thought the stripped down mechanics were interesting (stripped to the point of being hard to use, in my opinion) and the setting interesting, if rather highly derivative of a certain author's works, I didn't like the game itself. Mainly because of its incredible focus on 'storytelling'. It reminded me a great deal of Ars Magica.
Ars Magica was an interesting system with a clever mechanic for spells, and interesting 'almost real world' setting, and a lot of potential but also a heavy emphasis on 'storytelling'; I liked a lot of elements of the system but didn't like it as a game entire.
I remember finishing reading Vampire and digging out Ars Magica and, boom! same guy involved in both, which I had suspected.
The World of Darkness concepts that flowed from the old Lion Rampant and White Wolf systems were wildly popular at the time and very influential. I believe that a fair amount of this was because of the 'advance work' done by Dragonlance; in those wildly-popular books and modules the goal was completing a story. In the WoD settings the goal was completing a story.
Let's start with the GM: if he is focused on story he must arrange for the entire dramatic structure: exposition; rising action; climax; falling action; denouement. Since the GM is supposed to have an overall story to tell ( the War of the Lance or whatever) the exposition, climax, and denouement of each sub-story, or 'adventure' must have certain things happen for the overarching story arc to be met. In the end this essentially demands that one of two things happen - either the GM places strict rails on certain elements of the adventure or the players willingly participate in the story telling effectively constraining themselves to the needs of the overall story.
It logically follows that character creation, design, and development is subject to and inferior to the needs of the story. If you have to have a Sturm to check of the boxes for 'knight of solamnia', 'lawful good', 'noble hero', and 'tragic death', well - someone better roll up a Sturm or the story ain't happening. And you better hit your marks, utter your lines with conviction, and sell that death to the crowd.
Further, the plot may well demand that you do create friendships with certain NPCs, dislike other NPCs, do certain things within certain time windows, realize certain facts within other time windows, etc. This constrains everything from the weapons selected and skills taken to even the appearance of a character. Just a few years after storytelling was seen as a prime paradigm of RPGs you saw articles on how to design characters level by level, stat by stat, skill point by skill point, in order to 'maximize' them.
There are obviously a fair number of people who enjoy this sort of play; damn near everyone in the Drama department of the local college was playing LARP Vampire within a year.
But to me this was instantly an Issue - I don't play RPGs because I am a frustrated screenwriter or actor, I play RPGs because I like RPGs. Yes, there are clearly elements of mutual storytelling in any tabletop RPGs. No, the goal isn't telling a story!
The goal of RPGs is for the players to have fun. For me and for a lot of people the railroading/constraints of the RPGs=Storytelling approach leach out the fun.
Personally, I have run what I call a 'near sandbox' for 36+ years. Seaward and Blackstone are both highly detailed, well-stocked, etc. with a large number of detailed NPCs, plot hooks, etc. scattered all over. The players are free to roam as they wish, if they wish, set their own agendas, change character goals on the fly, etc. Sure, the occasional adventure has a time limit imposed, but if the characters give that room a miss, meh. If they thwart the dragon without ever seeing it, great!
But I have seen a small handful of bloggers advocate something I will call 'pure sandbox'; the GM stocks the world, restocks it as necessary, etc., but gives no plots or any such thing to the players. New players with a 2nd level party of 5 in the campaign decide that Mount Thunder is a low-level goblin clearing when it is really home to the King of the Ogres?
"If you give them a hint, you aren't really 'Sandbox'!"
A particular player really wants to quest for such-and-such an item but you don;t have it in the mythology of your world?
"If you add it in you aren't really 'Sandbox'!"
I disagree. This is tying the hands of the GM and the players almost as much as the railroad style. Oh, I don't dislike it as much as 'well, I am 4th level so I better take Cleave or I will never be able to compete in 7 more levels' or 'OK, I get it - the dodgy alcoholic is a critical plot element or exposition center - I will sit and listen to him talk rather than follow that mysterious stranger'. But taken to this extreme it can seriously hinder the development of a campaign through ongoing co-creative work of the GM and players.
Are these extreme types of 'pure Sandbox' advocates common? No, but I see them and I suspect it is largely a rejection of storytelling as goal taken too far.
Remember those definitions I posted earlier? In my opinion any dynamic, internally-consistent, campaign world with a healthy, vigorous interaction between players and GM will "generate" plot lines for the characters to be exposed to that will naturally lead to a dynamic structure - it is just that the pace, climax, and denouement of the dynamic structure is not pre-determined and aimed for. Indeed, this dynamic, collaborative structure will result in better results than either extreme will ever be capable of.
The space between "story is goal" and "pure sandbox" is vast and most of us fall in that range already.
In my opinion, the thing to remember when GMing and playing is that there is a tacit agreement between all members of the group that a minimum level of cooperation is required to play and also that a minimum amount of latitude is also required to play: the GM can't have a story arc that from before anyone throws 3d6 in order requires a 9th level thief with Boots of Striding and Springing, a 67% Open Locks ability, and a volatile relationship with an NPC barmaid from 3 levels ago be standing at the altar of Baal at moonrise on MidSummer exactly 100 years after the paladin Gervine died. On the other hand, the GM also has to provide a bit more than 'you are in an inn, there are 6 other people in the room, you know no one, what do you do?'. Both represent extremes that take away from the core goal of RPGs.
Fun.
Opinions?
There is a fair amount of love in the world for the Dragonlance setting. And a fair amount of hate. My personal opinion is... it isn't good enough to hate, but it sure impacted my favorite hobby.
Personal revelation time (again). I was 16 when the first Dragonlance book came out and, oddly enough, was already living outside the home while going to school and working. I had three great room mates who were all brothers and big gamers who were going to school and working, like me. I was running two games a week, one in my own campaign, called Seaward, and one in Greyhawk where we essentially played all of the official modules plus some unique stuff of mine. One of my room mates would also DM from time to time, usually his own stuff in Greyhawk.
When Dragons of Autumn Twilight hit the shelves we, of course, bought a copy. It was, frankly, bitterly disappointing. The characters were flat, the story line was terrible, the tension wasn't and if the companions were examples of what TSR employees thought was interesting and engaging PCs I'm surprised they lasted as long as they did.
Before we continue, let me make a few things clear.
1) This is my opinion. Feel free to disagree.
2) My wife and I have worked as freelance, professional editors for large firms and authors whose names you know; we even had our own editing company and it was our primary source of income for some time. This is my personal AND professional opinion.
[If I am a professional editor why are there so many errors in my blog? One, this is for fun; two, the cobbler's kids go barefoot]
[still feel free to disagree]
3) Yes, I know the authors have written a ton of books, sold a ton, and have made a ton of money from this. My reply is - Flowers in the Attic has sold more than 40 million copies and it sucks, too
From the mary sue characters (Weis felt she had to tell us Raistlin was her favorite character?) to the eye-rolling cliches like: the twins (one is physically sickly but smart, the other strong but dull; the weak one is an evil wizard who resents his brother, the strong one is a good warrior who is blind to his brother's evil etc. (my then-nine-year-old sneered at this); the hot, dim, but feisty! barmaid; and the absent minded wizard who has vast power but can't feed himself - but is he really crazy?! (hint - of course not) I feared permanent eye strain.
And it got worse, of course. My mother bought me the next one, so I read it (dutiful son and all) and I received the third as a Christmas gift so I read it, too (I am older now and might not do it today). The writing was clunky, the story boring, the characters terrible, and the details like gully dwarves and tinker gnomes infuriating. I came to the conclusion that they were poorly written children's lit and was amazed at the love showered on them by the gaming community.
And let me add that it is my belief that the depiction of Sturm did more to cement the idea of Lawful Stupid in the collective mind of gamers than almost anything else.
The modules were worse; focused on either being the basis for later novels or (after the first few) being based on the existing novels they are almost the definition of 'railroad adventure': the modules must have certain things happen certain ways with certain conclusions or the rest of the modules don't work.
We will come back to this.
There were a lot of Dragonlance books published - more than 100 if the internet is accurate. And many modules and source books - probably also over 100. There were action figures, and miniatures, and all sorts of stuff.
Interestingly enough, even at the time when I would complain of the terrible quality of the books and modules a fair number of my gaming friends would reply with some version of,
"Well, sure, but it is bringing in a ton of new players!"
The argument was that the Dragonlance books and modules might be objectively terrible in and of themselves but a lot of younger people would read the books and then play D&D so, well, that was good! More players is good for The Community therefore, no matter how terrible the books or modules, Dragonlance was good for Gaming.
Right?
Now, since I haven't read anything Dragonlance in almost 29 years, why am I bringing this up?
Besides the fact that a lot of other OSR bloggers are talking about it, of course.
Because of story, plot, and sandbox.
Walk with me for a moment
In 1991 Vampire; the Masquerade was released and I, like many others, picked it up. I thought the stripped down mechanics were interesting (stripped to the point of being hard to use, in my opinion) and the setting interesting, if rather highly derivative of a certain author's works, I didn't like the game itself. Mainly because of its incredible focus on 'storytelling'. It reminded me a great deal of Ars Magica.
Ars Magica was an interesting system with a clever mechanic for spells, and interesting 'almost real world' setting, and a lot of potential but also a heavy emphasis on 'storytelling'; I liked a lot of elements of the system but didn't like it as a game entire.
I remember finishing reading Vampire and digging out Ars Magica and, boom! same guy involved in both, which I had suspected.
The World of Darkness concepts that flowed from the old Lion Rampant and White Wolf systems were wildly popular at the time and very influential. I believe that a fair amount of this was because of the 'advance work' done by Dragonlance; in those wildly-popular books and modules the goal was completing a story. In the WoD settings the goal was completing a story.
Quick Aside: a 'story' is defined as "an account of people and events told for entertainment. May be real or fictional"
The definition of ;'plot' is "the events that make up the main part or parts of a story"
Don't forget the difference!But how does this affect actual gaming? Not just game play itself, but the metagame around it: GM prep, adventure and world design; post-game work, character design, party dynamics, etc.
Let's start with the GM: if he is focused on story he must arrange for the entire dramatic structure: exposition; rising action; climax; falling action; denouement. Since the GM is supposed to have an overall story to tell ( the War of the Lance or whatever) the exposition, climax, and denouement of each sub-story, or 'adventure' must have certain things happen for the overarching story arc to be met. In the end this essentially demands that one of two things happen - either the GM places strict rails on certain elements of the adventure or the players willingly participate in the story telling effectively constraining themselves to the needs of the overall story.
It logically follows that character creation, design, and development is subject to and inferior to the needs of the story. If you have to have a Sturm to check of the boxes for 'knight of solamnia', 'lawful good', 'noble hero', and 'tragic death', well - someone better roll up a Sturm or the story ain't happening. And you better hit your marks, utter your lines with conviction, and sell that death to the crowd.
Further, the plot may well demand that you do create friendships with certain NPCs, dislike other NPCs, do certain things within certain time windows, realize certain facts within other time windows, etc. This constrains everything from the weapons selected and skills taken to even the appearance of a character. Just a few years after storytelling was seen as a prime paradigm of RPGs you saw articles on how to design characters level by level, stat by stat, skill point by skill point, in order to 'maximize' them.
There are obviously a fair number of people who enjoy this sort of play; damn near everyone in the Drama department of the local college was playing LARP Vampire within a year.
But to me this was instantly an Issue - I don't play RPGs because I am a frustrated screenwriter or actor, I play RPGs because I like RPGs. Yes, there are clearly elements of mutual storytelling in any tabletop RPGs. No, the goal isn't telling a story!
The goal of RPGs is for the players to have fun. For me and for a lot of people the railroading/constraints of the RPGs=Storytelling approach leach out the fun.
Personally, I have run what I call a 'near sandbox' for 36+ years. Seaward and Blackstone are both highly detailed, well-stocked, etc. with a large number of detailed NPCs, plot hooks, etc. scattered all over. The players are free to roam as they wish, if they wish, set their own agendas, change character goals on the fly, etc. Sure, the occasional adventure has a time limit imposed, but if the characters give that room a miss, meh. If they thwart the dragon without ever seeing it, great!
But I have seen a small handful of bloggers advocate something I will call 'pure sandbox'; the GM stocks the world, restocks it as necessary, etc., but gives no plots or any such thing to the players. New players with a 2nd level party of 5 in the campaign decide that Mount Thunder is a low-level goblin clearing when it is really home to the King of the Ogres?
"If you give them a hint, you aren't really 'Sandbox'!"
A particular player really wants to quest for such-and-such an item but you don;t have it in the mythology of your world?
"If you add it in you aren't really 'Sandbox'!"
I disagree. This is tying the hands of the GM and the players almost as much as the railroad style. Oh, I don't dislike it as much as 'well, I am 4th level so I better take Cleave or I will never be able to compete in 7 more levels' or 'OK, I get it - the dodgy alcoholic is a critical plot element or exposition center - I will sit and listen to him talk rather than follow that mysterious stranger'. But taken to this extreme it can seriously hinder the development of a campaign through ongoing co-creative work of the GM and players.
Are these extreme types of 'pure Sandbox' advocates common? No, but I see them and I suspect it is largely a rejection of storytelling as goal taken too far.
Remember those definitions I posted earlier? In my opinion any dynamic, internally-consistent, campaign world with a healthy, vigorous interaction between players and GM will "generate" plot lines for the characters to be exposed to that will naturally lead to a dynamic structure - it is just that the pace, climax, and denouement of the dynamic structure is not pre-determined and aimed for. Indeed, this dynamic, collaborative structure will result in better results than either extreme will ever be capable of.
The space between "story is goal" and "pure sandbox" is vast and most of us fall in that range already.
In my opinion, the thing to remember when GMing and playing is that there is a tacit agreement between all members of the group that a minimum level of cooperation is required to play and also that a minimum amount of latitude is also required to play: the GM can't have a story arc that from before anyone throws 3d6 in order requires a 9th level thief with Boots of Striding and Springing, a 67% Open Locks ability, and a volatile relationship with an NPC barmaid from 3 levels ago be standing at the altar of Baal at moonrise on MidSummer exactly 100 years after the paladin Gervine died. On the other hand, the GM also has to provide a bit more than 'you are in an inn, there are 6 other people in the room, you know no one, what do you do?'. Both represent extremes that take away from the core goal of RPGs.
Fun.
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