Have you seen Gamers talk themselves out of fun?

[KorvinStarmast]

There's a reasonably well known quip from Robin Laws that goes like this:


"Gamers like to talk themselves out of having fun" I'll need to do a bit of digging to find out the context of his remark, but I think he was on to something.

Have you seen this manifest at any table where you played?

I have experienced a few tables break up that included friendships being marred or ended by stuff that came up during play.

I am not sure that is what he's referring to, but it may be a part of it.

What are your experiences?

[Rynjin]

I only have two real examples of friendships being marred by gaming related stuff, and in the more recent case it was just a matter of one friend being a giant ******* to another friend at the table and everyone immediately ripping him apart for it (the older example is the story I've told several times about a first time GM torpedoing two games because he didn't like a ruling I made in another game).

IME, people are there to have fun. We never want the vibe to deteriorate. Even when disagreements come up, things are left pretty civil; the most it really gets to is a level of someone kind of unintentionally needling another person over a topic that's a sticking point for them (like alignment), and it requires a sharp "hey, look, I get it; now please stop".

This is, to me, the biggest benefit of actually playing with friends and not randos.

[Jack of Spades]

Robin's point was less about table drama and more about pacing and engagement.

Essentially, his assertion is that, given infinite time to plan and discuss, players will most often settle upon a safe, cautious, hyper-conservative mode of play. This ends up creating situations where the players avoid, obviate, or trivialize the big fight with the necromancer, even though having a big fun fight against the necromancer and her skeleton army is actually the engaging part of the game.

Robin was basically, literally saying: do not give your players the chance to talk themselves out of fun. Interrupt them, cut them off, or give them time pressure to ensure that they are running with that first, sloppy, fun plan instead of eliminating all opportunities for twists or fumbles-- and the improvisation that those engender.

That's not everyone's playstyle, of course, but it's certainly Robin's.

[Rynjin]

IME players going the hyper-cautious route is due to a lack of GM trust. Or more accurately, an expectation of difficulty. If you don't plan well, you die. If you die, you don't get to play anymore (that session). That's a lot less fun than getting to play.

[KorvinStarmast]

Robin's point was less about table drama and more about pacing and engagement.

Essentially, his assertion is that, given infinite time to plan and discuss, players will most often settle upon a safe, cautious, hyper-conservative mode of play. This ends up creating situations where the players avoid, obviate, or trivialize the big fight with the necromancer, even though having a big fun fight against the necromancer and her skeleton army is actually the engaging part of the game.

Robin was basically, literally saying: do not give your players the chance to talk themselves out of fun. Interrupt them, cut them off, or give them time pressure to ensure that they are running with that first, sloppy, fun plan instead of eliminating all opportunities for twists or fumbles-- and the improvisation that those engender.

That's not everyone's playstyle, of course, but it's certainly Robin's. I have a tendency (once initiative is rolled) to get to a point where I say "make a decision" if someone drags their feet. But the planning process itself can be a lot of fun. 'Wait, how are we going to infiltrate the necromancer's lair and steal his magic bone wand ...."

Some day, I hope to be able to play a game of Feng Shui. Have heard that it's fun.

[Easy e]

Essentially, his assertion is that, given infinite time to plan and discuss, players will most often settle upon a safe, cautious, hyper-conservative mode of play. This ends up creating situations where the players avoid, obviate, or trivialize the big fight with the necromancer, even though having a big fun fight against the necromancer and her skeleton army is actually the engaging part of the game.

Robin was basically, literally saying: do not give your players the chance to talk themselves out of fun. Interrupt them, cut them off, or give them time pressure to ensure that they are running with that first, sloppy, fun plan instead of eliminating all opportunities for twists or fumbles-- and the improvisation that those engender.



There is a mistaken idea in many circles that they will "win D&D".

I often have to remind my fellow players around the table that there is no "Winning D&D" you simply experience playing D&D.


Edit: There and Their silliness.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I have a tendency (once initiative is rolled) to get to a point where I say "make a decision" if someone drags their feet. But the planning process itself can be a lot of fun. 'Wait, how are we going to infiltrate the necromancer's lair and steal his magic bone wand ...."

Some day, I hope to be able to play a game of Feng Shui. Have heard that it's fun.

I often see people (especially my in-person group) to spend way more time discussing plans than it's actually worth given what knowledge they have. Especially given my love of throwing twists into things.

There are reasons I couldn't play mirror-shade Shadowrun or heist games generally--I like to have the narrative moving constantly. Get in there with a basic plan and some simple fallbacks, then roll with the punches. See what happens. So the whole "plan things perfectly so the execution is trivial and you rarely, if ever, have to roll dice" mode of play just kills my enjoyment.

So yes, I've seen gamers talk themselves out of my fun.

Also, taking the "no risks" route often means missing out on lots of cool stuff. The bard I play has the flaw "insatiable curiosity that often gets him into trouble".

[NichG]

IME players going the hyper-cautious route is due to a lack of GM trust. Or more accurately, an expectation of difficulty. If you don't plan well, you die. If you die, you don't get to play anymore (that session). That's a lot less fun than getting to play.

I've also seen it happen because of social dynamics, like, someone proposes something that would work (or guesses something that was correct) but other people at the table get into an argumentative or critical mode and say 'no, that can't work, you have to prove it to me'

[KorvinStarmast]

I've also seen it happen because of social dynamics, like, someone proposes something that would work (or guesses something that was correct) but other people at the table get into an argumentative or critical mode and say 'no, that can't work, you have to prove it to me'
That is a fine example of Gamers like to talk themselves out of having fun...and may not realize that they are doing it.

I sometimes have said during such an argument "are we here to argue or play?"

[Tanarii]

Yes.

It's usually one of:
- optimization taken too far
- taking too much time trying to dig out the relevant rule
- taking too much time arguing about the rules
- using electronic devices at the table
- slow pacing, especially for combat

Example of the slow pacing destroying fun: Critical Role. You can see the players not having fun constantly.

[Jakinbandw]

There is a mistaken idea in many circles that they will "win D&D".

You can lose DND though. Losing a character can mean sitting around not able to play for the rest of the session. Something most people dont find fun.

[Satinavian]

That's not everyone's playstyle, of course, but it's certainly Robin's.I think that is the important part.

Some people like mirrorshade Shadowrun.

[Easy e]

You can lose DND though. Losing a character can mean sitting around not able to play for the rest of the session. Something most people don't find fun.

I am very confused. There is no winning or losing, only experiencing. The game is a social activity and an excuse to get together with other humans to observe and interact with them.

If you do not have an active character, do you have to leave the room? Sit quietly and not interact with anyone? Observe only from behind a glass wall? Go sit at the kid's table? Keep your Zoom on Mute and close the chat window?

Before I got to rotate into a game; I sat out until the ongoing campaign ended. I had to prove I would show up every session. Despite not having a character in the campaign, I was definitely participating with the group. I was able to throw out ideas about what to do next, where the plot was going, talk in the prep stage, and make a metric ton of side of commentary. Despite all this snarky banter, they still let me rotate in and play the next campaign!

[warty goblin]

IME players going the hyper-cautious route is due to a lack of GM trust. Or more accurately, an expectation of difficulty. If you don't plan well, you die. If you die, you don't get to play anymore (that session). That's a lot less fun than getting to play.

To some degree it's also a system design issue. In FPS games for instance you avoid damage by either going really fast (old school) or hiding behind something (everything from Call of Duty to Red Orchestra.) The old school approach is more aggressive, but you still generally want distance from the enemies so you can dodge better.

Then there's Doom 2016, which let's you recover HP by running up to dudes, tearing their arm off and jamming it through their face. You still need to move fast, dodge and position to mitigate damage, but you really have to be exceedingly aggressive.

I rather wonder how much excessive caution in RPGs could be removed by systems that really promoted being aggressive. But that would generally require a tilt away from global resource management as a gameplay model. I'm not sure how you balance the wizard wanting to rest after every fight with Doomguy, who wants to go murder sinething to heal up.

[KorvinStarmast]

You can lose DND though. Losing a character can mean sitting around not able to play for the rest of the session. Something most people dont find fun.
Here is a lesson in DMing.
If a player's character dies, you the DM can invite the player to play the monsters for you for the rest of the session.
It does two things.
(1) It keeps them engaged, and
(2) it removes a little bit of your work load.
Or, if they are the kind who are self-starters, they can begin to create their next PC in parallel with play going on.
Depends on that person. Figure out what kind of person they are.

If, on the other hand, they just sit there and sulk you have learned another thing about that person.

[Rynjin]

Before I got to rotate into a game; I sat out until the ongoing campaign ended. I had to prove I would show up every session.

I don't even tolerate bull**** like this for job interviews, why would I tolerate it for a game lol.

[animorte]

I don't even tolerate bull**** like this for job interviews, why would I tolerate it for a game lol.
I can definitely agree with this energy. However, I've witnessed enough absent players, I would be willing to do this just for the sake of consistency. Within reason. I would at the very least consult with the DM to ensure that the campaign is even remotely approaching closure. "Oh, sure. We're only 10-15 sessions out." Get bent.

(Unless maybe I'm filling in as DM help. I've done some fun co-DMing before.)

[RedWarlock]

I can definitely agree with this energy. However, I've witnessed enough absent players, I would be willing to do this just for the sake of consistency. Within reason. I would at the very least consult with the DM to ensure that the campaign is even remotely approaching closure. "Oh, sure. We're only 10-15 sessions out." Get bent.

(Unless maybe I'm filling in as DM help. I've done some fun co-DMing before.)

I can see both sides, as a long-frustrated GM. I really like the sit-in idea for joining an ongoing narrative-heavy game, have the new player sit in on a couple sessions, the first to get the sense of the world and the style of players, maybe a second for taking the time to create the character with other players' aid (especially for something mechanically complex) and set up their entry, integrate them into the ongoing plot organically.

[Jophiel]

IME players going the hyper-cautious route is due to a lack of GM trust. Or more accurately, an expectation of difficulty. If you don't plan well, you die. If you die, you don't get to play anymore (that session). That's a lot less fun than getting to play.
I'd also add the basic randomness of dice roll mechanics. Your sneaky PC trying to unlock the gate from inside the mansion could still roll a one and find themselves mauled by alerted guards (who also now know that someone is trying to get in) so the players try to over-plan for every contingency to avoid getting screwed. Randomness can feel fun when it leads to chaotic success but a lot less fun when you feel like your plan failed (or character died) purely due to some BS rolls.

[Satinavian]

Before I got to rotate into a game; I sat out until the ongoing campaign ended. I had to prove I would show up every session. Despite not having a character in the campaign, I was definitely participating with the group. I was able to throw out ideas about what to do next, where the plot was going, talk in the prep stage, and make a metric ton of side of commentary. Despite all this snarky banter, they still let me rotate in and play the next campaign!
That wouldn't fly in my group. talk in the prep stage and throwing out ideas is to be done strictly in character with very few exceptions. And we certainly wouldn't want to hear snarky occ comments all the time or someone at the table with whom we only can talk occ.

Of course we also never would expect someone to sit through whole sessions before they can join.


Thinking back, there have been such spectators in the past. But only on the initiative of the player in question because they wanted to get a feel for group and game before they commit and only for single sessions.

[mucat]

I'd also add the basic randomness of dice roll mechanics. Your sneaky PC trying to unlock the gate from inside the mansion could still roll a one and find themselves mauled by alerted guards (who also now know that someone is trying to get in) so the players try to over-plan for every contingency to avoid getting screwed. Randomness can feel fun when it leads to chaotic success but a lot less fun when you feel like your plan failed (or character died) purely due to some BS rolls.
That's still a matter of DM trust. If (a mostly-reasonable plan) + (a really ****ty roll) = (a session which is no longer fun), then someone is doing the math wrong. The GM has a lot of steering power, and should use it not to make the characters' lives consequence-free, but to make those consequences fun from the players' perspective (if terrifying in-world for the characters). Which is more fun for everyone involved? "Sorry, your plan failed", or "the only way you can pull it off now is to outthink a new cascade of disasters"?

One rule I always try to remember when GMing, is "a low roll doesn't mean they've failed. It means I get to escalate." What to escalate, and how? Hey, that's why GMing is an art.

I find that this works best in a system like Fate, where a low roll explicitly means "Consequences", not "Failure". But even in D&D...that skilled sneak-thief infiltrating the mansion rolls a 1...

...so escalate the stakes. "You realize that you're about to put your foot down on a squeaky floorboard, and freeze mid-stride. As you're standing there with no clear path of advance or retreat, you hear a familiar voice from just around the corner. The guard captain has returned to check on his subordinates, and he's not happy to find them napping on the job."

...or escalate the time pressure. "'Damned raccoons are in the crawlspace again. Wait right here while I find a lantern, and we'll put 'em down for good this time. Won't be a minute...'"

...or force new improvisation. "You turn your ankle turn on a rain-slick flagstone, and nearly fall headlong into the cesspit...but you wrench yourself upright with the poise of a true professional who just damned-near ended up coated in sh*t. You even avoid making too much noise, and begin to congratulate yourself...until you hear the metallic clinking of your stolen key against the rocks as it falls, ending with a splash in the cesspit you just avoided."

...or escalate the moral tension. "You look up and find yourself face-to-face with a goggle-eyes guard, who looks -- for the moment -- too flabbergasted to scream. His helmet is comically oversized, and your heart sinks as you realize the kid can't be over thirteen; the Baron is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for his 'fearsome legions' now..."

...or a hundred other options, any of which are way more interesting and memorable than "Roll to see if tonight's session will be any fun. Natural 1? I guess it won't. Hey, don't blame me; dice are dice."

[Satinavian]

One rule I always try to remember when GMing, is "a low roll doesn't mean they've failed. It means I get to escalate." What to escalate, and how? Hey, that's why GMing is an art.

I find that this works best in a system like Fate, where a low roll explicitly means "Consequences", not "Failure".
Personally i don't find that fun, neither as player nor as GM. But i don't like Fate either, so maybe that is not that surprising.

[Amnestic]

Here is a lesson in DMing.
If a player's character dies, you the DM can invite the player to play the monsters for you for the rest of the session.
It does two things.
(1) It keeps them engaged, and
(2) it removes a little bit of your work load.

I'd add 3) It gives them a small taste of DMing, even if it's only the 'monster' side, it might open them up to wanting to do more in the future if they find it enjoyable.

Definitely preferable to have them running monsters if a resurrection or replacement character isn't imminent.

[Rynjin]

Personally i don't find that fun, neither as player nor as GM. But i don't like Fate either, so maybe that is not that surprising.

It's a matter of perspective. I agree, failure should mean failure. But a small failure should not mean an overarching failure.

If someone fails a Disable Device check to disable a trap, that means they failed. And if they fail hard enough, they may even not get to try again.

But it doesn't mean the adventure is over, it's just a setback.

This is especially important to keep in mind for heists and the like. Failing a Stealth check means you get detected, no getting around it. But what does getting detected mean? In most cases, a combat. And that gives another hinge that might be used to salvage the situation. If you can incapacitate the guard before he sounds the alarm, maybe you mitigate the harm. If he does sound the alarm, maybe you can dispatch him and disappear; the guards are now on alert but do not know your position. If they know your position, maybe you can still get the job done fast and escape. If you can't, maybe you can JUST escape, and try again later; even though security will be tighter. If you can't escape, maybe you get captured, and now need to escape from prison. And if you get killed...well, a lot of things had to go wrong to get to that point.

[Satinavian]

Yes, that is significantly more agreeable and closer to my style.


But that brings us back to the topic. What a failed check means relies heavily on what the check was made for. And that relies heavily on the players plan.

If the players plan include one critical action that hinges on a single check and that is not a guaranteed success, well, then they can fail and only have themself to blame. And i like this. I wouldn't want to save them as a GM in such a case. And as a player, i would want to plan/prepare a plan B (even if that is only how to get away without losses). And if such didn't exist, i would want it to feel like a risky gamble with the option of failure to be real.

[KorvinStarmast]

I'd add 3) It gives them a small taste of DMing, even if it's only the 'monster' side, it might open them up to wanting to do more in the future if they find it enjoyable. Bravo for your addition, thank you! :smallsmile:

[Easy e]

I don't even tolerate bull**** like this for job interviews, why would I tolerate it for a game lol.

The reason you do something like this is two-fold.

1. You want to make sure the New Guy isn't a drain and distraction on the group.
2. The new guy wants to make sure that the group isn't a bunch of folks that they are incompatible with.

Do you never go on dates, or do you just start living together immediately instead?

Plus, they were in the middle of a campaign, and it made no sense for some rando to just show up.

I appreciated the discretion since this group had been active and consistently playing for several years before I showed up. I have had plenty of experiences playing terrible RPGs that I had to walk away from. I did not want to do that if it was not necessary.

[Rynjin]

The reason you do something like this is two-fold.

1. You want to make sure the New Guy isn't a drain and distraction on the group.
2. The new guy wants to make sure that the group isn't a bunch of folks that they are incompatible with.

The "date" analogy you use is a good one. The fact that they just jumped straight to "audit multiple sessions of our game" and not "let's hang out sometime" is telling.

The best way to figure out if you're compatible with a group is to hang out with them, not go through three rounds of interviews and an aptitude test first. Go to a bar. Play a boardgame. Hell, play a oneshot together. You know, activities that actually involve everyone in the group equally.

When you go on a date, do you first tag along as third wheel to several of the other person's dates with different people?

[Easy e]

Thanks for your input. I guess we will have to agree to disagree.

Despite my snark earlier, you can get involved with your TTRPG group however you want and in a way that works for you. If it works for you, good for you.

Your previous post didn't seem like you were interested in getting to know people, just TTRPG with them. My apologies for not reading between the lines.

[Rynjin]

Your previous post didn't seem like you were interested in getting to know people, just TTRPG with them. My apologies for not reading between the lines.

Yeah, it's probably worth clarifying that I only game with people I'm already friends with (or who are at most friends of friends), except for play by posts (and even then, I know most people in the scene at least as acquaintances). I've tried gaming with randos before and it always sucks.

[Easy e]

Yeah, it's probably worth clarifying that I only game with people I'm already friends with (or who are at most friends of friends), except for play by posts (and even then, I know most people in the scene at least as acquaintances). I've tried gaming with randos before and it always sucks.

I have also had similar experiences.

I did not mind observing and waiting to rotate in at the next campaign because of those past terrible experiences. I also was able to "fill in" when another player was not able to make it and play there character for them. That was a fun RPG challenge trying to mimic another player's character who you have only watched play them a handful of times.

[Quertus]

"Gamers like to talk themselves out of having fun" doesn't sound like a warning about damaging friendships, so much as one about, you know, sabotaging the fun of the game.

This can take many forms. Perhaps the most obvious is choosing an un-fun way of approaching a situation. Sure, we could have had an epic battle... but, instead, we chose diplomacy, or assassination, or economic warfare. Sure, we could have had a cool court drama... but instead we punched them in the face, or assassinated them beforehand.

Perhaps worse, many GMs take a knee-jerk response to this possibility, and assume that they know better what the other players will find fun, and railroad events to force the "fun" outcome, throwing action at players whenever they pause to think about events, preventing smart plans from working so as to force the party to engage the fun plan, etc.

Another way (that I feel Talakeal's table has mastered) is creating a perfectly good plan... then second-guessing that the GM won't allow it, and trashing it for a second... then a third... and, finally, an often terrible plan that isn't any good at any level.

Obviously, some of this comes down to Combat as War vs Combat as Sport. Some of this comes down to "8 kinds of fun", and just what parts of the game the various players enjoy (I enjoy planning far more than actual resolution in RPGs (mind you, I'm a war gamer, so I love me some combat, too, but that's just not the primary draw for me in an RPG; for that, I'd rather just play a war game)).

But "talking themselves out of having fun", by virtue of how English works, means that they have to have already seen the fun path, and then talked themselves into choosing differently. And you can say that that involves issues of "trust" or "optimization", and that's fair, but it also indicates a lack of skill on the part of the GM, to step in gently shepherd their fun, to ask questions like, "why don't you go with that plan?", and, especially if the response is a fear of a hidden "gotcha!", to blatantly admit that no such gotcha exists.

Now, that said, I'm all about handing players rope. I'm perfectly willing to let them have IC conversations in a location where they should know that the enemy can hear them, to make plans based on faulty or missing or even misheard/misinterpreted information, etc. So long as their mistakes are ones that it's perfectly reasonable for the characters to have made (to mishear the difference between "four fathers" and "forefathers", for example), I'm fine with letting them make their own mistakes. But when it's an issue, not with the characters, but with the players, with a lack of understanding of the level of gotcha/CaW that is appropriate for the table, or a misunderstanding of what the game fundamentally is ("when you heard 'political', you... built a matchmaker???"), then I'm gonna step in and work to align expectations.

Now, I've said I enjoy planning. And that's true. But... not all of my characters share my opinions. Some of my characters are much more likely to want to just Leroy Jenkins the situation, and deal with problems as they come up. Some of my characters want a plan. Some of my characters want a plan, and an exit plan. Some of my characters want a plan, and contingencies. Me, I want a plan, and nested/redundant contingencies (if guards show up, and any given PC is unconscious, how will the remainder handle the situation, rather than just "oh, the Face will talk to them") *and* the ability to be flexible (when it turns out the guards are werewolves or something). Or, perhaps, I want a full toolkit, one I feel is more than adequate to any plausible situation that could arise from the scenario.

-----

So, to answer the question of the OP, have I seen such? Not very often, honestly. In part because most people I play with have a decent sense of what they find fun, and actively pursue it, and in part because, curiously, I'm a part of every group I'm in, and, as player or GM, I try to nudge the game away from unfun scenarios, as I'm aware of this phenomenon.

That said, I have seen several times where... hmmm... I didn't metagame hard enough, and it was obvious in retrospect that the GM was only interested in one particular approach, and the game immediately tanked after the players went a different way. Two campaigns in a row with the same GM had this problem - once, because the players didn't go my way; the other, because they did. Sigh.

Usually, though, it isn't quite that catastrophic, and the GM will recover from a suboptimal experience with the next mission / next chapter of the plot / whatever. Maybe Boba Fett's player cut out a cool "cloud city" scene by just immediately informing the Imperials where the Falcon was, but the GM bounced back with Luke sneaking through the imperial way-station and Vader's new, improved trap. One suboptimal scene needn't kill a whole campaign - and can be used as a learning experience, to have an open conversation between the GM and the players about how to optimize the table's fun.

Talk your table into having fun.

[Telok]

This is especially important to keep in mind for heists and the like. Failing a Stealth check means you get detected, no getting around it. But what does getting detected mean? In most cases, a combat. And that gives another hinge that might be used to salvage the situation. If you can incapacitate the guard before he sounds the alarm, maybe...

Sounds like a D&Dism, one failed stealth check equals a fight. Of course with D&D current fight budgets, fights per day, monster hp vs pc damage, and absolute movement rates it often means there's no recourse except for the whole party to pile on with fireballs & everything. If ya want a hiest or sneak scene in your game you should write stealth rules that give you those kind of scenes instead of just giving the GM a couple numbers labelled "stealth" & "perception" and telling them to figure the rest out on their own.

On topic: yeah, I've seen people talk themselves out of fun. One person despises the idea of "storygames" (despite never trying anything more "storygame" than Shadowrun and having no actual working definition besides random internet forum posters ranting). Another who just won't learn any mechanics more complex than the most basic to hit & damage attack rolls or D&D style marking off a spell cast ("parry? dodge? wazzat? is it an ac bonus?"). And a third who apparently won't read anything not written in an WotC official D&D game book. Between those, that group can't play anything but D&D, even if they claim they want outer space sci-fi or supers or grim & gritty or anything else. So they play D&D, sometimes with random piles of houserules, even if that's not what any of them say they want to play. Because they can't agree on anything else.

[Rynjin]

Sounds like a D&Dism, one failed stealth check equals a fight. Of course with D&D current fight budgets, fights per day, monster hp vs pc damage, and absolute movement rates it often means there's no recourse except for the whole party to pile on with fireballs & everything. If ya want a hiest or sneak scene in your game you should write stealth rules that give you those kind of scenes instead of just giving the GM a couple numbers labelled "stealth" & "perception" and telling them to figure the rest out on their own.

Eh, I'm not gonna come up with bespoke heisting rules for a one-off. If I was ever to run a "thieves guild" campaign again I'd probably expand more than I already did, but a heist in a D&D sense is the same as a heist in an "adventure film" sense. Discovery means the guard shouts "Hey, you! What are you doing there!" and a conflict ensues with swashbuckling action and great derring-do.

It's the style of the game, and no more or less valid than more nuanced takes on it.

[Atranen]

That's still a matter of DM trust. If (a mostly-reasonable plan) + (a really ****ty roll) = (a session which is no longer fun), then someone is doing the math wrong. The GM has a lot of steering power, and should use it not to make the characters' lives consequence-free, but to make those consequences fun from the players' perspective (if terrifying in-world for the characters). Which is more fun for everyone involved? "Sorry, your plan failed", or "the only way you can pull it off now is to outthink a new cascade of disasters"?

One rule I always try to remember when GMing, is "a low roll doesn't mean they've failed. It means I get to escalate." What to escalate, and how? Hey, that's why GMing is an art.

I'm a big fan of this approach; it avoids the binary success vs failure and uses failure to drive the narrative in an interesting way.


There are reasons I couldn't play mirror-shade Shadowrun or heist games generally--I like to have the narrative moving constantly. Get in there with a basic plan and some simple fallbacks, then roll with the punches. See what happens. So the whole "plan things perfectly so the execution is trivial and you rarely, if ever, have to roll dice" mode of play just kills my enjoyment.

I'm the opposite --but not everyone I play with is. I'd love nothing more than to come up with an airtight plan and have it go off without a hitch. But I get the sense that doesn't happen with some of my GMs, even when the plan and rolls merit it, just because they think it would be boring for us to win so easily :smalltongue:

[BRC]

I often see people (especially my in-person group) to spend way more time discussing plans than it's actually worth given what knowledge they have. Especially given my love of throwing twists into things.

There are reasons I couldn't play mirror-shade Shadowrun or heist games generally--I like to have the narrative moving constantly. Get in there with a basic plan and some simple fallbacks, then roll with the punches. See what happens. So the whole "plan things perfectly so the execution is trivial and you rarely, if ever, have to roll dice" mode of play just kills my enjoyment.

So yes, I've seen gamers talk themselves out of my fun.

Also, taking the "no risks" route often means missing out on lots of cool stuff. The bard I play has the flaw "insatiable curiosity that often gets him into trouble".

I think of this around the concept of "Soft Failure"

I like Deadlands Classic a lot for this.

In deadlands classic, you normally roll a a pile of dice and take highest, with dice exploding. You have a meta-resource, Fate Chips, of which the weaker version (White chips)+ let you roll another die after you finish your rolls, and the more powerful versions (Red and blue) let you roll an add an ADDITIONAL dice, and that can theoretically happen twice.

So, if your skill is 5, you roll 5 dice take highest, if you don't like that roll you can spend a white chip to roll an additional die, if you don't like that you can spend a red chip to roll and add, and a blue to roll another dice and add.
So if you have 1 of each chip, your initial roll of 5d6 can be up to 6d6 (Take highest)+ 1d6 + 1d6 .

This means that, so long as you have a decent pile of chips, you can pretty reliably succeed at plenty of tests. So for critical tests like sneaking past guards, the player with a less-than-sneaky PC can feel fairly confident that they CAN sneak past the guards, the question is just how much it will cost them to do so. Spending chips feels like a real cost, since chips are also XP and wound negation, and nothing is guaranteed, since the dice you chip can still roll 1's. The result is a system that still has tension with critical rolls, but ALSO tends to sidestep the problem of failure ruining everybody's fun, since players tend to self-regulate, if a failure would derail everything and ruin the fun, it gets boosted.


IIRC the Leverage RPG, which is built for heists, has your planning happen retroactively. So rather than an extensive legwork section where you figure out everything and plan out a foolproof approach, you get the basics, start the heist, and anytime you encounter a serious problem you start spending meta-resources to have retroactively found out about it and planned around it.


Both cases allow for "Soft Failure", where failure has real consequence, costing meta-resources, but play doesn't get derailed until a cascade of failures has happened. Similar to how a D&D character can take a hit from an enemy and keep going forwards, it's when they start running out of hit points that they have to start playing cautiously. System that make good use of soft-failure allow that to apply on a strategic level rather than just tactical. Good play is rewarded, as it becomes less expensive to press forwards without failure, but failure doesn't stand much chance of ruining the experience for everyone.

[NichG]

Sounds like a D&Dism, one failed stealth check equals a fight. Of course with D&D current fight budgets, fights per day, monster hp vs pc damage, and absolute movement rates it often means there's no recourse except for the whole party to pile on with fireballs & everything. If ya want a hiest or sneak scene in your game you should write stealth rules that give you those kind of scenes instead of just giving the GM a couple numbers labelled "stealth" & "perception" and telling them to figure the rest out on their own.


My observation has been that the concept of hitpoints as a failure buffer works perhaps better for heists than it does for combats. Call it 'alarm level' or something, and have a failed roll up the alarm level. Or alternatively, roll to see how much alarm buffer you have at the start of the heist and have things cost fixed amounts of alarm to do - guard fails to report in, 4 alarm; move one character across a vision cone in dim conditions, 1 alarm; open a door, 2 alarm; etc.

[Telok]

My observation has been that the concept of hitpoints as a failure buffer works perhaps better for heists than it does for combats. Call it 'alarm level' or something, and have a failed roll up the alarm level. Or alternatively, roll to see how much alarm buffer you have at the start of the heist and have things cost fixed amounts of alarm to do - guard fails to report in, 4 alarm; move one character across a vision cone in dim conditions, 1 alarm; open a door, 2 alarm; etc.

What I find works for me is to run things sort of between RL & movies. Figure out how security is set up for a similar thing in RL then apply some movie logic to the guards/place until the PCs have a chance of success if they put reasonable effort into it.

Weirdly it tends to boil down to there being a few alarms set up in lightly patrolled places or at night, and a few bored guards patrolling in 1s or 2s. Perhaps a guard animal if appropriate. It scales up for really valuable stuff but is still often lighter than most games budget for a single fight and its spread out over the entire area. That's something PCs can normally handle just fine even in Paranoia or Toon, much less some game where they're supposed to be big damn heroes. The only real exceptions are super valuable famous stuff, sensitive parts of military installations, or bases in combat zones.

It does help though that I tend to run modern/sci-fi, so watching a heist movie where the target area is similar to what I'm prepping is pretty easy. Museums, Fort Knox, corporate skyscrapers, banks, university science labs, etc. Like I've got one prepped for what's basically a small city import/export customs office next to a small not very busy space port. There's two bored guards, one sort of patrolling & one half watching some exterior cameras while playing a hand-held, a few locked doors, and some basic alarms on exterior doors & windows. The biggest issues should be finding the right office to raid, not making too much noise using the copier, and remembering to hack & wipe the internal unmonitored security cameras (which only really matters if they bungle something that tips off that the office was burgled). Pretty much any failure just calls for mr. rent-a-cop to make a perception check modified by distance and maybe wander over to take a quick look through a doorway. That set up, if the players have a professional level b&e character or do any prep work, puts them at having to fail multiple checks and not KO a mook before they raise any real alarm.

Now if it were a mad scientist lab or a Shadowrun game it would be more involved. Throw in some mutant attack geese and a few internal alarms or some such. But most of the time real life & movie style security tends to be lighter than most gaming resources & systems imply.

[riot]

IME players going the hyper-cautious route is due to a lack of GM trust. Or more accurately, an expectation of difficulty. If you don't plan well, you die. If you die, you don't get to play anymore (that session). That's a lot less fun than getting to play.

IMO it's more just a matter of human nature. People tend to weigh the chances and consequences of loss far more than the chances and rewards of winning. It only took a broken ankle to render you useless back in the caveman days, so even if the chances of getting injured was in reality 1% or so, taking those chances on the daily meant that you were going to mess up sooner or later. While people playing a fantasy game are definitely going to be more reckless, the more they think about it the more they're going to revert to primal senses than impulsive fun.

[Tanarii]

While people playing a fantasy game are definitely going to be more reckless, the more they think about it the more they're going to revert to primal senses than impulsive fun.
Players are incredibly reckless in TTRPGs.
Until they start losing characters because of it. They they become sensibly cautious and that stops.
Then when it happens over and over despite sensible caution they become paranoid.

Player paranoia in TTRPGs is something that comes about from very old school meat grinder games, where even sensible caution (and planning) isn't sufficient to keep characters alive.

I'm a huge fan of game styles that require some sensible caution and planning, like maybe at least some minimal researching and scouting before charging in head first, and discussing basic fall-back escape plans before you get started. Not assuming your characters can beat a challenge just because it's in front of them. Not sticking your hand (or other body parts) into obvious traps. And failing at those things quite easily having consequences. But old school paranoia with detailed planning and excessive (and slow) hyper-caution can quickly get tedious, both as a player and as a DM.

[137beth]

One example I think of when it comes to talking (or thinking) yourself out of fun is this one courtesy of Kirth on the Paizo forum:

I've often posted before about the guy I played with whose character's prized possession was his flaming sword. The first time the group encountered a troll, he said, "I drop my sword and draw my dagger."
Everyone at the table stared blankly at him.
I said, "You ALWAYS use your sword! You yell 'flame on!' every time we meet a monster! And now all of the sudden you don't want to?"
Player (proudly): "Well, my character wouldn't know that fire hurts trolls! I'm not metagaming!"
Me: (headdesk)

There definitely comes a point at which the efforts of the "metagame police" are self-defeating. In this instance, the poor player was so traumatized by previous DMs that he resorted to blatant metagaming in order to avoid the appearance of metagaming.

I'd rather let the players know stuff, and have us all know that we all know it, and then let the game proceed based on how the character would act.

(Source (https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2tk2b&page=9?Is-pathfinder-becoming-unbalanced#433)).

[Telok]

Player paranoia in TTRPGs is something that comes about from very old school meat grinder games, where even sensible caution (and planning) isn't sufficient to keep characters alive.

I'm a huge fan of game styles that require some sensible caution and planning, like maybe at least some minimal researching and scouting before charging in head first, and discussing basic fall-back escape plans before you get started.

I've found that it's more that the players up their paranoia level until it starts suceeding. Whether it's a "gotcha DM", a series of shoddy modules, or just having a 35% chance to fail every meaningful roll, the players adapt their tactics to whatever works. In some games it's been scouting, planning, and having the fastest getaway vehicle the rules can produce. Other games it's been everyone going all in on flight, long range guns, and as much armor as physically possible to wear & damn the non-proficient penalties. In D&D specifically for us it's become either throwing as many rolls at everything as possible to get a high roll, or having three casters buff one melee into indestructability and then letting them walk through everything.

It's very easy to have an adventure or system that screws over anything normal people consider reasonable and push players into optimizing the fun out of stuff in order to feel like they have any say in the plot/story/whatever. It doesn't take "very old school meat grinder games", just enough sessions of annoying continual failures of your "sensible caution and planning". Railroady modules are especially bad for this, particularly with a GM who isn't great at improv and highly experienced in handling perceived or actual disruptive character abilities.

[Tanarii]

I've found that it's more that the players up their paranoia level until it starts suceeding.
Well yes, but my point was my experience is players generally start at zero paranoia and doing things wildly unreasonable because there are no consequences and they can't die in real life as a result of it being a game, and dial it up from there to something most folks would consider semi reasonable.

Not fully reasonable of course. I'd hazard that most gamers would have their characters retire to a safe life after scoring a years salary in loot to play games at the local pub if they took it to real life reasonableness. :smallamused:

[Pex]

I don't remember the details, but it's happened many times. We scheduled our first game session. Great. While I'm busy doing other things the DM and a player have a discussion online about the game that turns into an argument. I log in the next day to find the game is called off. The game could already have been playing a few sessions when two players have an argument online about how to play one player quits. Before the virus apocalypse it could be the host who quits, and we need to find another venue.

I do remember one player quitting because he was having a hard time understanding how to use a VTT character sheet. He was being a luddite saying he wanted to use pencil and paper even though we were playing online. The DM insisted he use the VTT character sheet. However, the VTT being used was new or at least one I haven't heard of. I was even having trouble trying to get it to work. There were errors in its programming, but the DM absolutely refused to let us use D&D Beyond. The player got frustrated and quit. The DM had his own hissy fit about the situation and decided to cancel the game a day later.

I'm not immune to this. Recently I quit a game because one player who didn't know the rules didn't like me playing my character. He accused me of cheating then convinced the DM to make the rules play as he wanted them to as the DM was new and didn't know the rules either.

[Mastikator]

Robin's point was less about table drama and more about pacing and engagement.

Essentially, his assertion is that, given infinite time to plan and discuss, players will most often settle upon a safe, cautious, hyper-conservative mode of play. This ends up creating situations where the players avoid, obviate, or trivialize the big fight with the necromancer, even though having a big fun fight against the necromancer and her skeleton army is actually the engaging part of the game.

Robin was basically, literally saying: do not give your players the chance to talk themselves out of fun. Interrupt them, cut them off, or give them time pressure to ensure that they are running with that first, sloppy, fun plan instead of eliminating all opportunities for twists or fumbles-- and the improvisation that those engender.

That's not everyone's playstyle, of course, but it's certainly Robin's.

I've seen this in action. In XCOM enemy unknown from 2012 there are no time limits to any mission, so the optimal strategy is to take one step and put all your soldiers in overwatch mode, which is what everyone did and it's also the most boring way to play the game.
In XCOM 2 from 2016 the game developers added a time limit to almost every mission and made it all but impossible to not trigger it early. Which meant the player had to start taking risks just to succeed. I remember many people complaining that this will ruin their playstyle, but in my experience it made the game way more fun. The fact that there's a deadline means that the player has to take calculated risks based on incomplete information, bold daring action must be taken, all must be risked.

I use this lesson when I GM, the players are always on a deadline. Either something bad will happen in X amount of time, or the enemy is currently working to kill the player characters and every second the player spends picking flowers the enemy is building and launching their next attack.

[GloatingSwine]

I've seen this in action. In XCOM enemy unknown from 2012 there are no time limits to any mission, so the optimal strategy is to take one step and put all your soldiers in overwatch mode, which is what everyone did and it's also the most boring way to play the game.
In XCOM 2 from 2016 the game developers added a time limit to almost every mission and made it all but impossible to not trigger it early. Which meant the player had to start taking risks just to succeed. I remember many people complaining that this will ruin their playstyle, but in my experience it made the game way more fun. The fact that there's a deadline means that the player has to take calculated risks based on incomplete information, bold daring action must be taken, all must be risked.

I use this lesson when I GM, the players are always on a deadline. Either something bad will happen in X amount of time, or the enemy is currently working to kill the player characters and every second the player spends picking flowers the enemy is building and launching their next attack.

I'm pretty sure the most popular XCOM 2 mod is the one that turns off those timers. The thing about "taking risks" in XCOM is that all you're actually doing is playing worse on purpose because an arbitrary number says so.

Subsequent games in the genre (especially Gears Tactics) have made aggressive and mobile play better instead of just forcing bad choices.

And this is the real lesson. If you want players to play the game the fun way, make the fun way also the best choice.

[Mastikator]

I'm pretty sure the most popular XCOM 2 mod is the one that turns off those timers. The thing about "taking risks" in XCOM is that all you're actually doing is playing worse on purpose because an arbitrary number says so.

Subsequent games in the genre (especially Gears Tactics) have made aggressive and mobile play better instead of just forcing bad choices.

And this is the real lesson. If you want players to play the game the fun way, make the fun way also the best choice.

Yeah, you are playing worse because you have to, it's harder. Harder games that rely on player skill is more rewarding when you win. It benefits players that are good at calculating risks and playing strategically because they can overcome the time limit.

And players mod their way out of this more fun way to play. It makes the game worse. It's the perfect example of gamers talking themselves out of fun.

The same happens in TTRPGs. If something catastrophic happens at the end of the day unless the players complete their quest then they'll have to take bold action, take risks. In my experience the best games I've DMd are the ones where the players are on an arbitrary time limit. Specifically, the time limit should be a little too short, give the players options and not enough time to explore every option, it should feel like a risk to explore the options. They should feel like if they are in immediate danger and if they dilly dally they will not only lose, but die. Here it is important to tell the players up front that new PCs that are introduced mid-game are weaker than their current ones, no you don't get free magic items and unless you take the time to loot your fallen comrade it's lost. You can loot or revive but it costs time, so it may jeopardize the whole party. Death is a setback. Risks are real. The reward is all the sweeter.

I know it sounds harsh, punishing and unfair, like I'm a killer DM. But when I set up the quest this way the players have the most fun. They talk about their awesome plan and their amazing risks they took, whether it killed them or rewarded them either way they love it.

The receipts are in, players will talk themselves out of fun if you let them. So don't let them.

[warty goblin]

I'm pretty sure the most popular XCOM 2 mod is the one that turns off those timers. The thing about "taking risks" in XCOM is that all you're actually doing is playing worse on purpose because an arbitrary number says so.

Subsequent games in the genre (especially Gears Tactics) have made aggressive and mobile play better instead of just forcing bad choices.

And this is the real lesson. If you want players to play the game the fun way, make the fun way also the best choice.

The really weird thing is that XCOM Enemy Within pretty much solved this problem just by putting timers on the upgrade juice in each level. Any given mission you could play super defensively, e.g. if it looked like it was hard or your squad was under-leveled, but on net you were rewarded for playing at least somewhat aggressively by getting that sweet, sweet Meld. And then taking one of your dudes, sawing off their limbs, and turning them into a giant cybernetic killing machine, which is obviously the best reward.

[Quertus]

Personally, I prefer a balance. Some encounters you know your tools and abilities are up for the job, and you can just rush in. Some encounters are thrust upon you, and you have to adapt on the fly. Some encounters, you research, plan, and prepare. And some encounters, you research, realize your toolkit is inadequate, and go shopping / get a training montage / seek out the McGuffin / build yourself an undead mech army.

Not only that, but which is which should vary depending on what characters we brought. For example, Batman can trivially ace the stealth mission Superman needs to puzzle through how to set up for Clark, whereas Superman can just fly off into space while Bruce has to wait for Wayne Enterprises to finish construction of a spaceship.

A good GM can set up adventure content that can be approached with any such variety of approaches, from gung-ho to training montage, from on-the-fly adaptation to careful research, depending on the needs and desires of the party.

And it's that balance that I find fun. Many GMs talk the party out of fun by forcing just one of these approaches as the "right" one.


Not fully reasonable of course. I'd hazard that most gamers would have their characters retire to a safe life after scoring a years salary in loot to play games at the local pub if they took it to real life reasonableness. :smallamused:

I love that you say this while I've got a thread open talking about characters saving up for retirement. :smallbiggrin:

Plus, there's the issue of how of "what's reasonable" changes in a given world/system / under a given GM, and how that must be learned. As well as the fact that the hobby is more escapist, and few people want to spend their gaming time caring about the boring bits, like taxes or thinking, when they avoid those IRL.


I'm pretty sure the most popular XCOM 2 mod is the one that turns off those timers. The thing about "taking risks" in XCOM is that all you're actually doing is playing worse on purpose because an arbitrary number says so.

Subsequent games in the genre (especially Gears Tactics) have made aggressive and mobile play better instead of just forcing bad choices.

And this is the real lesson. If you want players to play the game the fun way, make the fun way also the best choice.

Eh, yes and no. Yes, I absolutely agree that making fun play the better choice than boring play is better than making boring play the better choice. However, even agreeing with you, there are a few issues to consider.

For example, what's the point in having the less fun options if they're always inferior? So, if "run and gun" is more fun, but "overwatch" exists, there should scenarios where overwatch is the obviously superior strategy - and maybe some where it's not so obvious that it's still a good plan.

Also, who says "run and gun" is more fun? It may turn out, people respond to the above with, "I really loved the overwatch scenario". Of course, that could happen even if "run and gun" is generally more fun, and the more intelligent version of that comment were, "I really loved the overwatch scenario, but I think it could get boring if every scenario were played that way".

Even if "run and gun" is the more fun option, you don't want it to feel forced that you've made it also the superior option. If the scenarios or game physics get too unrealistic (too unversamilitudinal?), you'll start to build up dissonance. You've gotta make it feel like that's the right choice, where your 5-year-old advisor doesn't look at the plans and say "that's dumb".

And there's other considerations, like having multiple ways to win each scenario, adding diversity to gameplay, giving players the option to make mistakes, etc.


The same happens in TTRPGs. If something catastrophic happens at the end of the day unless the players complete their quest then they'll have to take bold action, take risks.

Eh, in that scenario, I think I'd eventually just let the bad things happen, while I focused on researching Time Travel, to go back in time and prevent them from happening. "A world that's constantly on the brink" isn't fun for me.

[Mastikator]

Eh, in that scenario, I think I'd eventually just let the bad things happen, while I focused on researching Time Travel, to go back in time and prevent them from happening. "A world that's constantly on the brink" isn't fun for me.

It shouldn't be constant. You need a mix between the high stakes, low time, high reward, and the relaxed low stakes, long time, low reward. The catastrophic thing should matter to the players in some way, it doesn't have to be the end of the world, monsters successfully wiping out a village that the players are in is in no way the end of the world. But it could mean not all of the player characters makes it out alive. Focused and precise bad events can be just as devastating to the players without disrupting the campaign setting.

The quests with more breathing room can also be useful to foreshadow future stuff, immerse players in lore with the show-not-tell technique. Both those quests tend to not be celebrated as much in my experience. The good stuff happens when the players need to take risks or die.

However, if players are not engaging with my offered plot hooks I'd ask them what they're interested in so I can make stuff that makes them want to engage and win. I know a few players who will answer with "I don't know", my interpretation of that is they're not here for the game, they're here to hang out with friends. If I had only players like that I'd bring out some other board game like cards against humanity or whatever. I'm lucky if I can drag my players away from their family drama and jobs get my players to play once a month, so I have to make the best of it. Using that little time on personal side-quests/downtime activities (that can be done electronically) is IMO a waste.

[Eurus]

One quirk of some of my play groups is that most of my players are invested in being heroic, or at least decent people. So if they think there's a possibility to resolve a situation without stabbing anyone, they'll generally go for it and feel bad if they fail to do so. But they do still enjoy combat, when they aren't worried that they're being jerks...

These days, I generally tell them OOC if a given situation is "supposed to be" a fight or not so that they can get in the right mindset. Unfortunately, these bandits need to have their heads knocked together before they'll calm down enough that you can convince them of the error of their ways~ :smallamused:

[Satinavian]

Eh, in that scenario, I think I'd eventually just let the bad things happen, while I focused on researching Time Travel, to go back in time and prevent them from happening. "A world that's constantly on the brink" isn't fun for me.You regularly bring in time travel.

But i must say that IME time travel is rarely been made available because :

a) In kinda kills all the tension if a do-over is always an option.
b) it is hard to balance
c) people don't like deeling with paradoxa. And they have to if players choose to crate them.

Have you really been in that many group that allow you time travel ?

[Jay R]

This is related to a rule in my "Rules for DMs":


3. What the players want today is a quick, easy victory. But what they will want tomorrow is to have brilliantly and valiantly turned the tables to barely survive a deadly encounter where it looked as if they were all about to die.

Robin has over-stated his point; gamers who carefully make sure that there is no danger or risk are still having fun playing D&D. [And I over-state my point too. There are probably some players who never want the suspenseful, hazardous encounters that I remember most fondly long after the game is over.]

Players will work hard to optimize their approach to an encounter. This is fine -- they're supposed to. No fantasy hero ever said, "Let's not ambush the ogres; that won't be dangerous enough. We'll let the ogres ambush us."

Nonetheless, it's quite often true that, if you let the players do so, they will turn the thrilling, perilous encounter into a boring, simple victory.

The DM needs to remember that the PCs are supposed to optimize their attacks. It's not their job to ensure suspense and thrills. That's the DM's job.

[Tanarii]

Robin's point was less about table drama and more about pacing and engagement.

Essentially, his assertion is that, given infinite time to plan and discuss, players will most often settle upon a safe, cautious, hyper-conservative mode of play.Back to the OP referenced law and this explanation of it: I disagree strongly. New players will, given infinite time to plan and discuss, always charge in to a situation recklessly without any caution.

It's only after they've paid the price for that repeatedly that it changes.

Robin must have made this rule when TTRPGs were in its infancy and the rules made it incredibly easy to outright die even if you were very cautious and planned well, and players inevitably shifted to this style of play as a result. In most modern TTRPGs where death and other serious failures generally only happen if the GM throws you in a situation too deep, or gives you a situation too deep as one possibility out of several and you charge in recklessly, most players will never end up here.
And even for the latter they won't end up there, they'll generally instead resort to scouting things out a little to make sure it's not too much then go do something else if it is.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Back to the OP referenced law and this explanation of it: I disagree strongly. New players will, given infinite time to plan and discuss, always charge in to a situation recklessly without any caution.

It's only after they've paid the price for that repeatedly that it changes.

Robin must have made this rule when TTRPGs were in its infancy and the rules made it incredibly easy to outright die even if you were very cautious and planned well, and players inevitably shifted to this style of play as a result. In most modern TTRPGs where death and other serious failures generally only happen if the GM throws you in a situation too deep, or gives you a situation too deep as one possibility out of several and you charge in recklessly, most players will never end up here.
And even for the latter they won't end up there, they'll generally instead resort to scouting things out a little to make sure it's not too much then go do something else if it is.

I've seen strong results the other way.

I had a party of 100% new players. Never played a TTRPG. These were adults who weren't gamers either. Basically 100% new to fantasy RPGs, the whole bit. Of all the groups that were presented with a simple challenge (get in, grab chalice off of table, get out), they were the only ones who cautiously approached every thing, took no chances, and completed the mission without setting off any alarms or triggering any traps.

I had lots of genre-savvy, experienced players who charged straight in, kicking down doors and setting off obvious traps. It's not new vs experienced, or even "CaW" vs "CaS". It's mostly down to individual play style.

[Telok]

I've seen this in action. In XCOM enemy unknown from 2012 there are no time limits to any mission, so the optimal strategy is to take one step and put all your soldiers in overwatch mode, which is what everyone did and it's also the most boring way to play the game.

In the original XCOM overwatch wouldn't get you many wins. You rarely had the lines of fire needed for it to work, enemies wouldn't suicide charge you or random walk into lines of fire once a soldier was spotted, some were fast enough to pop in and out of cover before your soldiers reacted, you'd lose a terror mission if too many civilians died even if you killed all the aliens eventually, and the chrysallids were freaking murde on packed soldier formations (double if they were inside a civilian and your soldiers wouldn't shoot them normally). Oh, and the ****ers used grenades, then eventually psi and missiles that could turn corners. Overwatch tactics did jack all when a unseen floater on top of a building tossed a 'nade into your squad because some mook on the ground spotted you.

[oxybe]

For the people who meticulously plan things, i find it's likely because they like that. There might be some gamer PTSD involved if their previous group was a meatgrinder, but when shown that the current game isn't of that sort, those who naturally don't lean towards heavy planning will revert to their regular style of play. For the planners though, it's fun to them and kind of rude to assume that they're just "talking themselves out of fun".


Essentially, his assertion is that, given infinite time to plan and discuss, players will most often settle upon a safe, cautious, hyper-conservative mode of play. This ends up creating situations where the players avoid, obviate, or trivialize the big fight with the necromancer, even though having a big fun fight against the necromancer and her skeleton army is actually the engaging part of the game.

Since it just came out with a major update, I'm reminded of playing the videogame Hitman: do you plan out your route and try to kill your targets without being discovered or do you just go in guns a blazing? Why would you assume the latter is universally more "fun" or "engaging" then the former even though both are supported courses of action? And if that's not the case, then why would this also not apply to TTRPGs?

The Necromancer and Skeleton army are still there and the players ARE engaging with it... it's a thing they have to deal with in some form, they're just doing it through planning and preparation instead of having a donnybrook in the crypts.

In the group I play on Tuesdays, I doubt we'd plan things beyond a rough outline and adjust as the refuse hits the ventilation, to turn a phrase. Of us 4 players, only one is overly cautious given the opportunity. Of the other 2 guys, one is... not disposed to planning. At all. The dude games, builds characters and levels them by the seat of his pants and seems to just zone out or lose focus when the action stops for too long. The second guy is more like me, we don't mind planning when it calls for but otherwise it's best to keep the ball rolling instead of making a 5 minute workday out of every situation.

Our Wednesday group fluctuates between 5-7 players and it's very easy to get bogged down into planning or preparation simply due to the size of the group. Not that we don't have fun during that prep time, but some sessions can get very little done, followed by the next session or two being super productive as we put the last week's prep into motion.

Different strokes and all that.

[Segev]

I, for one, have never seen a group talk about how awesome it was for a game to end tragically when they could have saved the day, but man was it worth it for the awesome fight they got defeated in, or where the tragedy strikes because they decided it was cooler to Leeroy Jenkins rather than treat the encounter as a serious one that requires planning and strategy.

[Quertus]

It shouldn't be constant. You need a mix between the high stakes, low time, high reward, and the relaxed low stakes, long time, low reward. The catastrophic thing should matter to the players in some way, it doesn't have to be the end of the world, monsters successfully wiping out a village that the players are in is in no way the end of the world. But it could mean not all of the player characters makes it out alive. Focused and precise bad events can be just as devastating to the players without disrupting the campaign setting.

The quests with more breathing room can also be useful to foreshadow future stuff, immerse players in lore with the show-not-tell technique. Using that little time on personal side-quests/downtime activities (that can be done electronically) is IMO a waste.

It’s great that you recognize the need for a balance of encounter types / pacing, and yeah, in such a scenario I’d be unlikely to reach for time travel. And “end of the world” was meant to be figurative, so I think we’re on the same page on that. But there’s still a few more benefits to Time Travel worth commenting on.

First and foremost (and germane to the thread topic), it puts control of just how much time the characters have to plan in the players’ hands.

Then, depending on the time travel mechanics in play, it also allows the players to adjust other dials, like the threat level or the potential rewards.


These days, I generally tell them OOC if a given situation is "supposed to be" a fight or not so that they can get in the right mindset. Unfortunately, these bandits need to have their heads knocked together before they'll calm down enough that you can convince them of the error of their ways~ :smallamused:

Switching to OOC conversations is definitely a tool that should be in the GM’s toolkit. If that’s what works for your players, then I guess that’s the way to go.


You regularly bring in time travel.

But i must say that IME time travel is rarely been made available because :

a) In kinda kills all the tension if a do-over is always an option.
b) it is hard to balance
c) people don't like deeling with paradoxa. And they have to if players choose to crate them.

Have you really been in that many group that allow you time travel ?

Mu?

Look, most GMs aren’t competent enough to manage consistency with just “regular” world physics; I certainly wouldn’t trust them to handle time travel mechanics. So just as I wouldn’t enjoy constant time pressure, I wouldn’t enjoy utilizing time travel under most GMs either. But it’s a tool in my toolkit, and I bring it up in part because nobody else does, and in part because, while he doesn’t understand it as well as I do, Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, has it as a tool in their toolkit as well. (Quertus hasn’t encountered, and hasn’t bothered to theorize, as many types of time travel mechanics as I have. Then again, his concerns wrt manipulating time are more “immediate” (heh) than my own.)

Maybe someday I’ll make a thread about how stupid people are about time travel - I’ve been kinda :smallmad: about the topic ever since I saw a YouTube video that said that there are only 2 kinds of time travel.

But, to answer your question, plenty of groups have allowed time travel - more than I’d actually care to allow to utilize the tool, actually.


For the people who meticulously plan things,

it's fun to them and kind of rude to assume that they're just "talking themselves out of fun".

Yeah, conversation >> assumption.


I, for one, have never seen a group talk about how awesome it was for a game to end tragically when they could have saved the day, but man was it worth it for the awesome fight they got defeated in, or where the tragedy strikes because they decided it was cooler to Leeroy Jenkins rather than treat the encounter as a serious one that requires planning and strategy.

Hahaha, true that. Heck, even though I’m a fan of a well-deserved loss, I’m struggling to remember an instance when such was the coolest part of the campaign, let alone when such a loss being caused by Leroy Jenkins was the coolest part of the campaign.

Most groups, “causes unnecessary problems” is a sign of a problem Character/Player, rather than something praiseworthy the group actively seeks out.

[Segev]

Hahaha, true that. Heck, even though I’m a fan of a well-deserved loss, I’m struggling to remember an instance when such was the coolest part of the campaign, let alone when such a loss being caused by Leroy Jenkins was the coolest part of the campaign.

Most groups, “causes unnecessary problems” is a sign of a problem Character/Player, rather than something praiseworthy the group actively seeks out.

Agreed, but I want to clarify that I was using "Leeroy Jenkins" to characterize the style of play that is, "Well, we COULD plan and work out how to make this the most effective assault we possibly can enact, or we could just wing it and hope that the dice favor us...so let's do that latter because it sounds like more fun!"

I don't see groups who actually do the "plan until the combat is as tilted in our favor as we can make it" as their strategy disliking it when the fight with the necromancer-cyberdruid-king and his army of undead robot trees goes rather well with their traps and plans working to make it an "easy" victory feeling like they talked themselves out of fun. I have seen individual players who wish there was more of a fight to engage in, which is something groups should try to accommodate, but it's not the planning that's the problem, there. Plans should hit hitches, generally speaking, and that's when the fighting happens.

One of my favorite victories in a game was when we spent three sessions building up our infiltration of a dragon empress's court after luring her away with rumors of a great rival for her throne gathering support half the world away. We showed up, impersonated a noble and his entourage, and made a mess of things before one of her loyalists got suspicious enough to just flat-out attack us. That fight was pretty epic. The fight with the dragon empress would've been even more devastating, but we rigged it by getting one of her minions who was bound by magical contract and didn't want to be to deliver her a message about treachery at her castle, timed so she'd arrive at a particular time. We laid a trap in her throne room, having arranged for her to be able to magically appear right there. And when we sprang the trap, the fight lasted only a couple of rounds, during which we mostly worked to keep her disoriented rather than to damage her, because the trap was effectively a banishment blanket falling on her.

It worked more or less exactly as planned, albeit with some tense moments as we desperately worked to keep her from acting and moving out from under the trap or noticing it falling.

And it was awesome.

[Jay R]

Having said that, that level of planning and preparation doesn't have to lead to trivial encounters. It can lead to brilliant and otherwise impossible victories. I was in a party of 6 people who stopped an invasion of 1,000 soldiers, in a world without magic.

The game was Flashing Blades-- swashbuckling adventures in the musketeer era. My character was Jean-Louis.


In a previous session (during the fall), we had intercepted bills of lading for an invasion planned for the spring. The bills of lading implied an army of roughly 2,000 soldiers and camp followers and 500 horses, led by the General Don Miguel , whose last name is a moot point, as shown below. All winter, we had horses staked out to attract two wolf packs to the forest between Luneville and Drouville. We wanted numerous wolves used to feeding on horseflesh to greet the Spanish army.

The first delivery was at St. Die. We arranged that the food would arrive two days early, to allow spoilage. Then there was a heavy rain that delayed the troops. The wine was (very mildly) spiked with bad water. There were 20 pistoles baked into the bread. We spread a rumor that the rich soldiers have been throwing coins to the peasants. Adrienne (an actress) and Jean-Louis (a rogue with tumbling and juggling skills) began to join the army as camp followers, Adrienne concentrating her attentions on the officers. Jean-Louis started to become a common face, performing, spreading rumors, asking questions. "What's this I hear about a missing paywagon?"

The next day was Baccarat. 20 more pistoles and 2 Louis d'Or were baked in the bread. The wine was slightly more spiked. Deliveries of the food arrived mid-morning the next day, further delaying the troops. Adrienne had two officers fighting a duel over her we spread rumors about the paywagon, and bad blood between officers. (Jean-Louis gathered a crowd of soldiers at the dueling field.) We started a fire in town after the troops left. Some cavalry units left early, and so were not fed.

iNear the town of Luneville, we burned a bridge and planted stakes. The cavalry units tried to cross first, and one horse was lamed. So they waited for the rest of the army to arrive to build the bridge. More unrest, more rumors, more bad food. We incited some guttersnipes to throw rocks across the river at them.

The bridge was finished mid-morning the next day, so late the next night, a bedraggled, tired, dispirited army arrived at Drouville. The army was forced to detour through the wolf forest by a road block. We spread rumors that the army had been torching villages behind them. The food was strongly poisoned, and the rye bread was tainted with ergot. The army was not going to be in shape to deal with the situation.

Adrienne lured Don Miguel to her room at an inn, and murdered him in his sleep. We spread poisoned oats out in the woods. Then we torched the town, stampeding the horses. We started several fires on the upwind side of town. While cutting horses loose, Jean-Louis was spotted. He yelled, "Release the horses — don't let them burn!" This convinced the sentries to help him free all the Spanish horses. The Spanish lost supplies, horses, and lots of time trying to round up the horses that survived the night. Note that spooked horses aren't too bright, and that they were downwind of the flames. Many horses were lost (or eaten by wolves). Jean-Louis slipped into the General's headquarters. He fought and killed two sentries, leaving them in a pose indicating that they had slain each other. He then made off with the general's orders, dispatches, and 70 escudo (4200 L.!).

In nearby towns the next day we spread rumors that the army was berserk, looting and burning. We spread rumors in the army that the general was seen running off with a courtesan. Henri went north and bought their next shipment of food (with their money), which we dumped in the river. After spreading a few more rumors in Nancy, the capital of Lorraine, we returned to Paris, where we delivered the orders and dispatches to Richelieu.

The army split up, some becoming bandits until captured by the Duke of Lorraine; some continuing on, ravaging the countryside as they went.


This kind of triumph requires the same careful planning that can also lead to dull, easy encounters.

[Mastikator]

It’s great that you recognize the need for a balance of encounter types / pacing, and yeah, in such a scenario I’d be unlikely to reach for time travel. And “end of the world” was meant to be figurative, so I think we’re on the same page on that. But there’s still a few more benefits to Time Travel worth commenting on.

First and foremost (and germane to the thread topic), it puts control of just how much time the characters have to plan in the players’ hands.

Then, depending on the time travel mechanics in play, it also allows the players to adjust other dials, like the threat level or the potential rewards.

If a player starts demanding that they get the reins of time, encounters and reward I'd gladly just give it to them, along with the DM's screen, and ask to make a character in their campaign. :smallsmile:

There can only be one person in the driver seat.

Edit- I should clarify that I am not closed to the idea of time travel in my campaigns, but it should be a special, rare, risky and unpredictable. It would require a quest to discover, another quest to learn how to use, a third quest to attempt. A single attempt can be made, player choices + dice rolls determine the outcome. Building a time machine or a time traveling spell is a step too far. I wouldn't allow a time traveling wizard who can just go wherever and whenever he wants, such a PC is omnipotent and has effectively taken over my job as DM. If you want my job as DM just ask.

[animorte]

I like the idea of a time travel in a campaign. Even if it was a character's full concept. It would need to start out small and be something that can't overwhelm the group. Maybe they can hop back a few rounds but can only remain a few seconds (1 round) before you're plunged back into the present. Eventually you can jump back a minute or two, then perhaps an entire day. Only at absolute max level and under the right conditions could one jump back, say, a year.

[Satinavian]

As a GM i would allow time travel under 3 conditions that must be simultaneously met :
a) It must be established part of the setting and well explained
b) It must not be more powerful than other tools that are similarly hard to get
c) I must like the particular implementation of it

If not all three are valid, there will be no time travel. And i don't mean only no time travel for PCs, i mean no time travel whatsoever in any part of the multiverse for anyone or anything.

[Easy e]

To get back on topic, I have seen players talk themselves into making a small time disagreement and/or non-relevant difference of opinion into a reason to stop gaming with the group.... essentially over "I prefer vanilla ice cream and you prefer chocolate ice cream" type disputes over preference.

Therefore, the gamers talked themselves into the idea that this petty squabble was such a cultural divide, that they had to stop playing in the group. I frequently read, "But I play with adults so this stuff doesn't happen." Yeah, me too. High school level antics and immature decisions still happen all the time. Adults are still humans.

[Quertus]

If a player starts demanding that they get the reins of time, encounters and reward I'd gladly just give it to them, along with the DM's screen, and ask to make a character in their campaign. :smallsmile:

There can only be one person in the driver seat.

Edit- I should clarify that I am not closed to the idea of time travel in my campaigns, but it should be a special, rare, risky and unpredictable. It would require a quest to discover, another quest to learn how to use, a third quest to attempt. A single attempt can be made, player choices + dice rolls determine the outcome. Building a time machine or a time traveling spell is a step too far. I wouldn't allow a time traveling wizard who can just go wherever and whenever he wants, such a PC is omnipotent and has effectively taken over my job as DM. If you want my job as DM just ask.

Odd that you would word it “demanding that they get reigns on time”, instead of the neutral wording of developing the tool I had used.

And wrt “There can only be one person in the driver seat”, and your feeling that that person is the GM, are you aware that, in addition to linear games, there are also sandboxes? That, in a sandbox, the players drive? That a group of people, rather than just a single individual, can drive the game?

Because that’s the real point of Time Travel in this example: to help the GM see when driving the pace, and choosing the pace that they have chosen, is suboptimal. And, especially in the case of monotone (mono-pacing?) GMs, to show them that alternative pacing strategies exist, and can be fun.

If you’ve got a pacing strategy that works for your group, and lets them have fun in your limited window of play, well, do that. But if I were in a group that jumped from crisis to crisis with no variation, like the post I initially responded to sounded like it was describing, then I’d not really enjoy the pacing of the game, and certainly pull out some tool in my toolkit to try to fix things.

[Satinavian]

If you’ve got a pacing strategy that works for your group, and lets them have fun in your limited window of play, well, do that. But if I were in a group that jumped from crisis to crisis with no variation, like the post I initially responded to sounded like it was describing, then I’d not really enjoy the pacing of the game, and certainly pull out some tool in my toolkit to try to fix things.If i were in a group where i had problems with the pacing, i would talk with the group and the GM about my pacing preferrences.

And you refer to time travel as your tool in your toolkit. I don't think you can assume that you actually have such a tool in your kit. And you are not the one who decides if you do.

[Mastikator]

Odd that you would word it “demanding that they get reigns on time”, instead of the neutral wording of developing the tool I had used.

And wrt “There can only be one person in the driver seat”, and your feeling that that person is the GM, are you aware that, in addition to linear games, there are also sandboxes? That, in a sandbox, the players drive? That a group of people, rather than just a single individual, can drive the game?

Because that’s the real point of Time Travel in this example: to help the GM see when driving the pace, and choosing the pace that they have chosen, is suboptimal. And, especially in the case of monotone (mono-pacing?) GMs, to show them that alternative pacing strategies exist, and can be fun.

If you’ve got a pacing strategy that works for your group, and lets them have fun in your limited window of play, well, do that. But if I were in a group that jumped from crisis to crisis with no variation, like the post I initially responded to sounded like it was describing, then I’d not really enjoy the pacing of the game, and certainly pull out some tool in my toolkit to try to fix things.
Never played with anyone who can handle a sandbox. I run semi-linear self contained quests. The players choose the quests ahead of the session start.

The reason I run crisis quests is because my players need it to get off their butts. I need the players to get off their butts because otherwise valuable time is wasted. Time at the table is extremely limited and I want to maximize game quality. If I could increase quantity to such a level that I would feel comfortable spending it on downtime activities I would.

[Rynjin]

Why are "crisis quests" considered the only time that has value to you?

[Mastikator]

Why are "crisis quests" considered the only time that has value to you?

Already said before: it's the one that my players respond to best. The kind that they enjoy the most. The ones that they reminisce about for months. The ones where they complement my DMing the most.

In short, the receipts are in. Time pressure and high stakes is the crém de la creme.

[Rynjin]

Already said before: it's the one that my players respond to best. The kind that they enjoy the most. The ones that they reminisce about for months. The ones where they complement my DMing the most.

In short, the receipts are in. Time pressure and high stakes is the crém de la creme.

It might be the thing they enjoy most on a macro sense, but if they're actively trying to spend time on downtime stuff it seems pretty clear that that is what they're enjoying in the moment, so interrupting it seems counterproductive.

[Ionathus]

IME players going the hyper-cautious route is due to a lack of GM trust. Or more accurately, an expectation of difficulty. If you don't plan well, you die. If you die, you don't get to play anymore (that session). That's a lot less fun than getting to play.

Bingo. I try really hard to instill a sense of trust in my players - to help them understand that I'm not going to screw them over or make their PC seem like a buffoon just because they made the "wrong" choice. I don't think the average audience member realizes how frequent setbacks are in fiction. They're a natural part of a dynamic story, and important to make the conflict interesting and let it have actual weight.

Same with D&D: you might win every fight your PC gets into, but that doesn't mean that every plan is going to be successful. The most important thing is getting your players to be comfortable with the idea that their plans might be disrupted by bad execution or villain sabotage or pure bad luck, and that's okay and expected.

One of the skills that nobody ever teaches you as a DM is to recognize when the players have hit a threshold where they're not going to get anything more out of spending more table time on the plan. Whether that's because the plan is already excellent, or because the plan is doomed to failure by something they couldn't have a chance of predicting. If it's the former, they've already earned their cool moment through creative thinking and I want to give it to them. If it's the latter, they're going to be frustrated if I let them think they had a real chance to succeed and they put a ton of energy into it. Striking that balance can be tricky.

[Rynjin]

Yeah. After a particular event when running Carrion Crown I had to have a short chat with my players.

I don't really pull punches, which can sometimes make me feel like a "killer GM"; especially when running published material. But I run things fair and I try to make things...streamlined for the party.

On one notable occaison the party spent close to 2 hours planning what they were going to do for an upcoming underwater excursion. This was...excessive, and annoying to me as a GM. The players didn't seem to really be having a lot of FUN planning either. They just felt it was necessary.

Ultimately that 2 hours of planning made the singular underwater encounter marginally easier before they ended up in the underwater base that made that preparation meaningless.

I had to make very clear "Hey, look. I know some combats so far have been brutal, but I'm not here to **** you with no recourse. You can chill a bit lol. Make plans, but try to make them quickly. I'll prompt you if I think you've missed anything super obvious your characters would think of.".

That seemed to pop the bubble a bit, and the rest of the campaign went smoothly, without any significant planning slowdowns except where it really WAS necessary (mostly for social bits/negotiating with NPCs).

[icefractal]

Personally, I'm against time travel - for anyone, PCs or NPCs - because I've experienced it in campaigns and it wasn't good, unless you like spending large amounts of real-time on things that are literally ret-conned away a few sessions later.

In the game I'm referring to, we allied with an NPC who could travel a short distance back in time (1-5 minutes, IIRC). She could redo the loop more than once, but not an unlimited amount because her stamina didn't recover until the loop was ended. So, interesting ability, seemed fun ... until we got into a fight that didn't go well. And we realized that logically, she should just rewind the fight and do it again, which would be fine IC, but OOC would mean redoing the last hour of real-time. More than once, potentially. We convinced the GM to short-cut the second iteration of the fight, and then contrived a reason for her not to directly be on the team.

Later, after several months in the campaign, we time-traveled back to the start of it but with some of us still possessing our future knowledge. It was a lot of fun at first, knowing what would happen and being able to get the jump on people, making jokes about the previous loop, etc. But after a couple sessions, I realized that we'd erased most of the events and character development that happened the first iteration, and replaced them with a brief "speedrun" version, and we didn't really want to re-enact the same scenes for the sake of bringing them into this iteration. Overall a negative, IMO.

And that's just talking about PC's using time travel. Imagine this - you've spend the last three months of real-time disrupting the BBEG's operations, wittling away his support and allies, and are finally ready to confront him directly. And then ... it's the start of the campaign again; the BBEG time-traveled back and prevented the first move you made against him, so now you have to start over and hope you can take him by surprise this time ... or the next, or the next. Seems like it's right up there with "it was all a dream" as things you don't want to hear in a TTRPG.

Those kind of time-loops and repeated iterations work better in single-author fiction, because you can just skip the repetitive parts. And maybe a TTRPG that was time-travel focused would have some solution to do the same. But for games in general, it's something I don't recommend.

[Ionathus]

I'm glad they took the advice to heart and trusted you!

I've even been more explicit on occasion...one time I remember the players devised an excellent, very unique and narratively fun plan. And then they worried it wasn't complex enough and started fiddling with the minutiae - I peeked my head over the top of the 4th wall for a second and said "listen, I love this plan, I don't think you need to do anything else with it. You've given me what I need." But that group was also very trusting and enjoyed mild railroading, because they were most interested in the cool story beats that I could come up with from their prompts (and vice versa). So if there's a stronger desire for the gameplay element and a table of players don't like the DM hinting at whether they've "done enough", that might not work. But it was very successful for that session (and saved us all from another 30 minutes of pointlessly gilding the lily!).

[gbaji]

If i were in a group where i had problems with the pacing, i would talk with the group and the GM about my pacing preferrences.

And you refer to time travel as your tool in your toolkit. I don't think you can assume that you actually have such a tool in your kit. And you are not the one who decides if you do.

Yup. There is a distinction between the players and the characters. If the players have an issue with pacing and whatnot, then they should come to me with their concerns.

The characters, on the other hand, never ever have a "tool in their toolkit" to fix this. They have only what is written on their character sheets, and those things all are things that exist and are defined in my game setting, and recorded therein based on the game system being played. Nothing more. And no. There are no characters who have "time travel" in my game, unless I've put that there.


I had to make very clear "Hey, look. I know some combats so far have been brutal, but I'm not here to **** you with no recourse. You can chill a bit lol. Make plans, but try to make them quickly. I'll prompt you if I think you've missed anything super obvious your characters would think of.".

That seemed to pop the bubble a bit, and the rest of the campaign went smoothly, without any significant planning slowdowns except where it really WAS necessary (mostly for social bits/negotiating with NPCs).

And this is probably the most imporatant bit. Just as the characters should not act on player/meta knowledge, the characters should not be limited to player/meta knowledge either. What that means is that if you are playing a character with specific skills or knowledge, that does not mean that you, the player, must have those same skills/knowledge yourself to effectively play the character.

And yes, this means that I will inform the player if I think their character is making a gross mistake that a real person, with the skills/knowledge they have, would not make. The players maybe play these characters once a week, for a few hours a session. The characters "live their lives". They don't have difficulty remembering key details of the information they were given 8 game sessions ago. It's critically important to them. They will remember it. The skilled war veteran character would not miss the fact that he's standing in a gatehouse, under a set of murderholes, and not realize what is coming when the GM says something like "you hear shuffling and scraping sounds from above, and smell a strong oil smell along with burning torch smoke".

As a GM, it's imperative that you avoid "gotcha" moments like that. And yeah, I think that most players being overly cautious, or taking far too much time to plan things out are the players doing that. Letting them know that you will alert them to any gross mistakes they're making is a good way to work through/around this. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to clue them in on suprises that their characters could *not* reasonably know about. But again, I've found that players rarely noodle that stuff out anyway, and most of their time spent planning for every contingency is often wasted time.

You have to find a good balance for that. I've also found that sometimes players can spin off on really strange tangents. I'm currently running an adventure where there's a bit of a mystery and some investigation going on. The PCs are basically halfway through the investigation (enough to see a pattern emerging), and one player is spending a ton of table time speculating about what is happening. Funny thing is that I know what's going on, but watching him/them speculate is actually kinda interesting. They're actually coming up with far more strange stuff than I thought of. Also though, they're being much more direct ("bad guy must be behind it"), where I'm actually setting up a broader set of circumstsances that will define for them a course of action (which happens to actually deal with said bad guy, at least on one front).

It's also setting up *why* the bad guy is the bad guy in the first place. But they'll find that out over time. Eh. And I could be worried about pacing, but the players seem to be enjoying themselves, so... Well, except for one of our younger players, who decided to go off and do some silly/fun stuff on his own. Turns out, he's not as good at what he was trying to do as he thought. Fast forward through a series of monumentally bad die rolls (yeah, "failure" turned into "escalate" here), and I basically improvised a way for him to get out of the pickle he found himself in, but at a cost (had to do a favor for someone who didn't seem very savory). This got a couple of the other PCs involved in a quick heist thing I made up on the spot, which went off well, and they retrieved some sealed box that the unsavory guy wanted. Of course, having rescued their buddy, and not really wanting to hand this thing over, they instead decided to get some other (more friendly) NPCs to look into it.

Now I have a week to figure out "what's in the box?" Cause honestly? Have no clue. Made it up on the spot. I'll probably toss in some hook/info in there that will spark off some future scenario or something.




Later, after several months in the campaign, we time-traveled back to the start of it but with some of us still possessing our future knowledge. It was a lot of fun at first, knowing what would happen and being able to get the jump on people, making jokes about the previous loop, etc. But after a couple sessions, I realized that we'd erased most of the events and character development that happened the first iteration, and replaced them with a brief "speedrun" version, and we didn't really want to re-enact the same scenes for the sake of bringing them into this iteration. Overall a negative, IMO.

And that's just talking about PC's using time travel. Imagine this - you've spend the last three months of real-time disrupting the BBEG's operations, wittling away his support and allies, and are finally ready to confront him directly. And then ... it's the start of the campaign again; the BBEG time-traveled back and prevented the first move you made against him, so now you have to start over and hope you can take him by surprise this time ... or the next, or the next. Seems like it's right up there with "it was all a dream" as things you don't want to hear in a TTRPG.

Those kind of time-loops and repeated iterations work better in single-author fiction, because you can just skip the repetitive parts. And maybe a TTRPG that was time-travel focused would have some solution to do the same. But for games in general, it's something I don't recommend.

Yeah. Time travel is a fun-killer in most cases. For pretty much the reasons you just mentioned. I do allow it in my game, but never at the initiation of the PCs. It's always something that I put into a scenario with a specific scenario purpose, and never just something the PCs can learn to do and use.

I once used time travel as a means to "fix" someone else's time travel mistake (or intention depending on how you look at it). And in that case, the PCs found themselves in an alternate timeline, not knowing how things changed, then eventually discovered how to fix things. And they were transported by an already established being who did have time travel powers.

Another time, I intentionally put in a time-loop situation. In this case, the PCs were planar hoping. In my setting, different planes have time move at different speeds. Well, that's not technically true. Time moves the same everywhere, but some natural portals between planes may have their end points move through time at different rates. So you walk from plane A into plane B, wait a hour, then walk back and find two hours have passed in your starting plane. That's because both endpoints of the portal/wormhole/whatever actually move forward through time at different rates, resultling in the appearance of time passing differently.

This does lead to the possibility, that if one had sufficient knowledge of these portals, and could chart a path through enough planes, they could in fact, find themselves a route back to their own plane in a time earlier than when they left. Possible, but difficult. And, not surprisingly, only the aforementioned time being has the one map in all existence with the full info required (think Time Bandits map here). So yeah, I ran them in a scenario where they were temporarily handed the map, to arrive at a specific time and place, for a specific reason. Along the way, they had to travel to this plane that had some incredibly powerful tech/magic users. It was more or less a death trap. Intentionally. But, the portal from the previous plane to that one existed in only one point in time. It was a single point in their 4 (5?) dimensional map, but the endpoint was a line (ish). They had to wait for their entry point to appear, then jump through. The endpoint on the other side, however, moved normally through time. The whole point was that, if they ran into any of the numerous spots where "really bad things" would likely happen to them, as long as any members of their group survived, they could run back to the portal, jump through, and arrive right back at the point in time in the starting plane when they first jumped through from the other side.

Time travel in my setting also does not allow for the same person to exist at the same time in the same plane in two different locations (aforementioned time being excepted). The usual result is for the traveling version to merge with the existing version, combining into one form, but with the memories of the whole. Thus. Time loop. PC had memories of what happened on the previous run, knew what to avoid, and they managed to work their way through, without making the same mistake again.

It worked because it was a short adventure section, and nothing of significance happened except "how do we avoid running into overly powerful bad guys until we get to the next portal indicated on the map?" You never want to do this if you're effectively erasing PC experience and advancement. Players will put up with that sort of thing on occasion, and if it's interesting. But if this becomes a common thing (we'll just reset time and do the whole last week again), it's going to become a problem. And if the PCs have the ability to initiate this on their own, it can eliminate any sense of risk/reward in the game.

Dunno. I think that would herald a somewhat unrecoverble downward spiral into any game setting it was introduced into. Just my opinion, of course. Such things should be rare, scenario specific, purpose limited, and rare (yes. I said rare twice for a reason).

[DigoDragon]

I've had a GM talk himself out of fun.

We were at a port town and we had about two weeks to burn off as downtime while waiting for a ship to arrive. The GM didn't have much of anything for us to do here, but we the players put our heads together and came up with the idea to travel to a Hobbit village four days away to return some books we borrowed from a previous adventure. Plus we could visit the old Brass dragon we met the first time. We knew the GM liked role-playing the dragon, and we were all up for telling the dragon about the adventures we had since our last visit, plus the Hobbits had some of the best travel meals you could get this side of the realm. Overall a win for everyone and a fun time.

But then the GM didn't know about a four day trip there and again back, and if he should prepare some ambush encounters for the trip, and just doubted himself into ditches the idea and forcing a fast-forward two weeks for the ship to arrive and ended the session on a monologue that the ship sank, the crew was lost, and we would be teleported to our destination instead by a high level spellcaster hired by our patron, the king.

So... okay then.

[Mastikator]

It might be the thing they enjoy most on a macro sense, but if they're actively trying to spend time on downtime stuff it seems pretty clear that that is what they're enjoying in the moment, so interrupting it seems counterproductive.

TBH they're not actively trying to spend time on downtime stuff. A player is passively trying to spend time on downtime stuff, the rest are on their phones looking at social media and memes. I've seen this in other people's games all the time where the DM doesn't actively engage the players

Edit- what is wrong with this toxic den of vipers of a forum anyway? Every time I write how I DM and how the players respond really really well to it people jump on me trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong.
"How do you know the players are having fun because it sounds dreadful?"
"They tell me they're having fun and they tell me I'm a great DM"
"But what if they secretly really enjoy when you do the other thing?"
"Because when I do that they don't enjoy it as much"
"But how do you know they don't enjoy it so much, maybe stop focusing on yourself"
"Because I see them daze out, lose interest in the game, and play mobile games on their phones"
"But what if that's what they really wanted to do?"

I'm not doing anything wrong, I'm doing everything right. I know so because of what my players tell me. It's their words.

[Satinavian]

To go back somewhat, the only time i have seen groups planning way too long and not actually having fun doing so where when :

- The stuff they planned for was kinda necessary or unavoidable
- They deemed their current plan to be a very bad one sure to result in utter failure
- They had no ideas whatsoever how to salvage this

So the feet dragging began with everyone hoping that anyone else would finally have a bright idea but not really believing it would happen.

Now that usually happens either when the challenges the GM provides are widely outside of the groups comfort zone (which is why they are not happy with their plans) or when the group is seriously mistaken about the situation at hand, likely due to missing information. The latter is something the GM needs to correct but some don't recognize the need.

The most stupid occasions are if the GM has planned the PCs to be thrown into a seemingly doomed situation and then rescued by some surprise (NPCs, wonders, revelation, sudden power-up). Of course the players and PCs see that the situation would be hopeless and don't find a way out and thus are extremely reluctant to get there in the first place. But they obviously can't plan with the surprise rescue.





But all of this is rare and generally lengthy planning is totally fine.

[Rynjin]

I'm not doing anything wrong, I'm doing everything right. I know so because of what my players tell me. It's their words.

I'll give you a bit of advice that will help in any public conversational context.

Being questioned on your beliefs is not an attack, it's a probe, or at worst a chance to self-reflect. Other people are not you. They do not have 100% of the context of your life. When you make an assertion, asking "how do you know that?" as the main followup is an extremely natural conversational chain.

In the context of an open forum, if you do not wish to have a conversation, it is best not to post. Nobody can question you, converse with you, "attack" you if you don't start a conversation in the first place.

Making the choice to post is making the choice to invite other people to comment. And not everyone commenting is going to agree with you; and the ones that DO might still question you because they don't understand the context, or only agree 80% with your opinion and not 100%.

Making posts without the expectation of starting a conversation is more the purview of a blog than a forum.

[Segev]

TBH they're not actively trying to spend time on downtime stuff. A player is passively trying to spend time on downtime stuff, the rest are on their phones looking at social media and memes. I've seen this in other people's games all the time where the DM doesn't actively engage the players

Edit- what is wrong with this toxic den of vipers of a forum anyway? Every time I write how I DM and how the players respond really really well to it people jump on me trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong.
"How do you know the players are having fun because it sounds dreadful?"
"They tell me they're having fun and they tell me I'm a great DM"
"But what if they secretly really enjoy when you do the other thing?"
"Because when I do that they don't enjoy it as much"
"But how do you know they don't enjoy it so much, maybe stop focusing on yourself"
"Because I see them daze out, lose interest in the game, and play mobile games on their phones"
"But what if that's what they really wanted to do?"

I'm not doing anything wrong, I'm doing everything right. I know so because of what my players tell me. It's their words.

I can't speak for anybody else, but if I were to respond questioningly to any of your posts, it'd be the one about nobody you game with being able to handle sandboxes. That may well be true, but they tend to be one of my favorite ways to game. To the point that I am most potentially-disruptive as a player when there's a linear quest with expectations about how the PCs will solve it (or will have to make sacrifices to survive it). "Surely, they will not prevent this big set piece disaster they have every incentive to try to prevent," is often a major flaw in modules, in my experience, and while sometimes they're right, I've been in games where a good DM has let the PCs actually take meaningful, reasonable action to alter the course of events in such a way that the big set piece doesn't happen.

This is best handled by sandboxes, which don't expect all set pieces to occur, and is most harmful to linear quests, which often don't like the butterfly-effects from such changes.

I do agree that giving players quests to start on - or even several to choose from - is often necessary to get them moving. That's really just laying out the hooks for them to sink their teeth into the world. That doesn't make it not a sandbox (though, obviously, it need not be a sandbox, either). What characterizes a sandbox, to me, isn't a lack of important things the players need to choose to do. It's not a lack of quests. It's the idea that the world progresses around the PCs regardless of what they choose to do. Sandboxes tend to have more, not less, time-crunch to their quests if only because failure to do anything about quest line A means it evolves past the point where it was a simple quest starter PCs could do anything about, and possibly becomes a source of different quests because it's evolved well past the point it used to be.

The hunt for the evil sorcerer who is on several villages' wanted boards that gets ignored may later become rumors of an undead army rising in the area. Leave that alone, and eventually the necromancer-king may start sending his minions on probing attacks into neighboring lands, and start consolidating his power. Leave it to his own devices, and he may take over a small kingdom entirely, and the next opportunity to interact will be on a diplomatic level as the Undying Kingdom starts interacting with further-afield neighbors and seeking trade rather than warfare.

All of this while the PCs were taking on quests to rescue lost ships, aid one kingdom in defeating an empire they've been at war with for decades, earn favors from several archfey, and establish a PC as the dragon-lord of a distant domain.

It isn't a lack of quests that makes a sandbox, to me; it's the ability to tackle them in whatever way you choose, provided you have the resources, and to apply your resources however you like. It's the ability to interact with the world and make your own quests if you want to. But generally speaking, that stage of gameplay only comes about after at least 1 or 2 "pre-fab" quests that drew the PCs into interactions with NPCs and the setting in general. Gave them some anchor points to feel part of the world, gave them things to care about that evolved from play rather than trying to spitball backstory, and let hem form goals that have concrete places in the setting.

[Jophiel]

To go back somewhat, the only time i have seen groups planning way too long and not actually having fun doing so where when :

- The stuff they planned for was kinda necessary or unavoidable
- They deemed their current plan to be a very bad one sure to result in utter failure
- They had no ideas whatsoever how to salvage this
It occurred to me that another cause is game downtime. Recently, I was in a game where we were trying to infiltrate a fortress. We had a brief abortive attempt at the defenses before the game ended for the night. So now there's a week gap and nothing much to do but endlessly plan and debate on Discord how we're going to hit this up next time. I think the GM started to get a bit frustrated (and told us were were overthinking it) but when you have a week's time between you and a tough objective and an easy means for the party to chatter for that week...

[NichG]

Personally, I'm against time travel - for anyone, PCs or NPCs - because I've experienced it in campaigns and it wasn't good, unless you like spending large amounts of real-time on things that are literally ret-conned away a few sessions later.

In the game I'm referring to, we allied with an NPC who could travel a short distance back in time (1-5 minutes, IIRC). She could redo the loop more than once, but not an unlimited amount because her stamina didn't recover until the loop was ended. So, interesting ability, seemed fun ... until we got into a fight that didn't go well. And we realized that logically, she should just rewind the fight and do it again, which would be fine IC, but OOC would mean redoing the last hour of real-time. More than once, potentially. We convinced the GM to short-cut the second iteration of the fight, and then contrived a reason for her not to directly be on the team.

Later, after several months in the campaign, we time-traveled back to the start of it but with some of us still possessing our future knowledge. It was a lot of fun at first, knowing what would happen and being able to get the jump on people, making jokes about the previous loop, etc. But after a couple sessions, I realized that we'd erased most of the events and character development that happened the first iteration, and replaced them with a brief "speedrun" version, and we didn't really want to re-enact the same scenes for the sake of bringing them into this iteration. Overall a negative, IMO.

And that's just talking about PC's using time travel. Imagine this - you've spend the last three months of real-time disrupting the BBEG's operations, wittling away his support and allies, and are finally ready to confront him directly. And then ... it's the start of the campaign again; the BBEG time-traveled back and prevented the first move you made against him, so now you have to start over and hope you can take him by surprise this time ... or the next, or the next. Seems like it's right up there with "it was all a dream" as things you don't want to hear in a TTRPG.

Those kind of time-loops and repeated iterations work better in single-author fiction, because you can just skip the repetitive parts. And maybe a TTRPG that was time-travel focused would have some solution to do the same. But for games in general, it's something I don't recommend.

I love campaigns with time travel, either as GM or player, but you do need to flesh it out with mechanics - give it at least as much attention as you would give to something like a school of spells in a magic system. For example, in the system I'm currently running (a sort of godlike-superhero system called Limit Break), any character with a high enough Reflexes stat can 'dodge things atemporally' - that is, if someone goes back in time and targets them as a baby, they get to play baby-them using their current stat block and powers specifically in response to that specific interaction. Additionally, characters with time travel powers can only 'anchor' one fork of the timeline (basically, everything that results from a single instance of travelling backwards), and doing so takes up a slot and manifests as an active field of sorts that can be interacted with in the present via powers that interact with that kind of field, which about half of all characters will have baseline access to (and for other characters, its just more expensive). Also, that anchor always has to exist or time reverts - if the person is anchoring it in themselves, then kill that person and the timeline reverts; if they anchor it in an artifact or facility, well, you get the idea.

When these fields intersect, such as if two people travel back from the original timeline and both choose to anchor, then from the later of the two points at which they travelled back, the world partitions into bubbles following one timeline or the other, with actual interfaces where the bubbles meet (within the bubble its as if the entire world worked according to that timeline up until that moment, at which point 'suddenly half the world changed in an instant'). So timetravel acts more like 'use a power in the original timeline to replace the world with this alternate history from that point going forward'. It's not entirely free of paradoxes, but it helps resolve them because you can think of the alt-history as a patch being placed on top of the original history rather than something that has to be internally self-consistent including the act which formed that alt-history in the first place.

So maybe not just anyone could 'dispel the effects of consequences of that guy's time-travel globally' (but in a given setting, there would be many who could), but at the stage where time-travel becomes a serious concern I'd expect the party to be able to reactively improvise a power that could at least let them do stuff like 'make a bubble in which the original timeline holds' to shelter in and see what they could do. The fact that changes have to be anchored and spring back without the anchor also means that there is a 'most real' underlying sequence of events which is easy to go back to and risky to try to permanently deviate from. At the same time, creating an alternate timeline and then bubbling it off as a parallel dimension you can access for resources or simulation or information or just to hang out in is quite accessible. My players mostly used this as a kind of resurrection/rescue tool, which is quite on point with the genre. Someone dies, you make a clone body, go back in time and copy their mind over, and release the anchor.

Or for an example from something I've played in, the PCs were specifically anchored at an 'end of time' that was disconnected causally from other things, and could portal to different points in the timeline of worlds that they were trying to nurture and grow. Changing something by fiat (rather than creating a self-consistent thing) or using time-travel to duplicate items or anything like that incurred some cost of 'Paradox', to the character or item or both, which was initially impossible to get rid of and eventually just expensive (you could burn off Paradox at the cost of losing levels, basically). As you got higher Paradox, the multiverse starts to reject you, and eventually from the perspective of the other PCs the character would disappear, but from their own perspective would just continue adventuring or whatever, just in an alternate version of the multiverse from which the original one could not easily be distinguished. At the same time, having a little Paradox basically made you immune to being edited out of time or having your own stuff reverted out of under you - instead at worst you'd take a bit of extra Paradox as damage. There were also items, abilities, etc that granted different resistances and immunities and 'go along for the ride' mechanics with regards to time-travel and time-manipulation effects - things that would let you hop in on any time-travel going on that might impact you, things that would let you analyze changes induced by time-travel or figure out where/when someone went, things that would just make you not be affected, etc.

[Easy e]

If I find my players over-planning or dragging their feet, I follow the advise of Raymond Chandler. Raymond Chandler was an author of hard-boiled detective novels from the 40's and 50's IIRC. He said:

"When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand"

Basically, I force an insighting incident that spurs the characters to action that is appropriate for the place they are at in the game. Works 100% of the time 80% of the time. LOL.


@Mastikator- If you are listening to your audience and delivering the experience they want, you are doing just fine.

[gbaji]

Now that usually happens either when the challenges the GM provides are widely outside of the groups comfort zone (which is why they are not happy with their plans) or when the group is seriously mistaken about the situation at hand, likely due to missing information. The latter is something the GM needs to correct but some don't recognize the need.

Yeah. I would agree that most of the time, when players are massively overplanning something, it's because they lack information (or think they lack information). I think, also (and I think a couple people have mentioned this), that it can arise when there is a lack of trust by the players towards the GM. If the GM has a pattern of always throwing in "last minute twists", that just happen to be perfectly aligned to mess up their carefuly laid plans, then the players will respond to this by laying out even more careful plans.

I've mentioned this a couple times in the past. One of the hardest things for a GM to do is "just let the players win". If they come up with a great plan that makes the encounter you planned easier than you intended, resist the temptation to add something else to make it harder. Give them the victory. Reward them for good planning. I think many GMs take their cues from popular fiction/tv/films, where the villian always has a twist to throw at the heroes, which throws them off their game, and <makes things harder, allows the villain to escape, whatever>. That's maybe good in a written story. It's not good in the cooperative storyteling format of a RPG.


The most stupid occasions are if the GM has planned the PCs to be thrown into a seemingly doomed situation and then rescued by some surprise (NPCs, wonders, revelation, sudden power-up). Of course the players and PCs see that the situation would be hopeless and don't find a way out and thus are extremely reluctant to get there in the first place. But they obviously can't plan with the surprise rescue.

Yeah. That's horrible GMing IMO. Railroading to the Nth degree as well. It also what happens when GMs try to script the story, rather than just write a plot and let the players fill in the details. A good adventure outline is: "bad guys are doing this, there, then. Good guys can discover clueA here, clueB there, and clueC in the other place". Then you let things progress. Bad adventure outline is. "The bad guy does this. The players respond with that. The bad guy captures the players and holds them here. The players will be rescued by allies. Then the players will learn information X. Then the players will use that information to go to Y. Then they will accomplish goal Z, and defeat the bad guy". The end". That's... not how to write an adventure.



But all of this is rare and generally lengthy planning is totally fine.

Yeah. Generally. I do agree that sometimes, it can get excessive. I don't think I've ever had the players "talk themselves out of fun", but I have seen them "talk themselves into making things more complex/difficult". I've also (on many occasions), had them make assumptions about what was going on early in an adventure, and then have a really hard time dropping those assumptions later on, even when there are a ton of clues that they are incorrect. And that usually happens when they spend too much time talking about things instead of actually doing some more digging and investigating (or just adventuring and letting some more events unfold). Although, I do just let them do this anyway. It's fun, sometimes quite amusing, and they generally figure it out in the end anyway. It can be good storytelling for the heroes to be mistaken about what's really going on initially, afterall.


I do agree that giving players quests to start on - or even several to choose from - is often necessary to get them moving. That's really just laying out the hooks for them to sink their teeth into the world. That doesn't make it not a sandbox (though, obviously, it need not be a sandbox, either). What characterizes a sandbox, to me, isn't a lack of important things the players need to choose to do. It's not a lack of quests. It's the idea that the world progresses around the PCs regardless of what they choose to do. Sandboxes tend to have more, not less, time-crunch to their quests if only because failure to do anything about quest line A means it evolves past the point where it was a simple quest starter PCs could do anything about, and possibly becomes a source of different quests because it's evolved well past the point it used to be.

I actually call that a "dynamic setting". Contrasted with "static settings" (basically game module style play). When I've seen people use the term "sandbox", they are usually talking about a game setting in which the players are free to do "whatever they want", and the GM will facilitate this by creating stuff that matches what the players want to do. The difference is that in non-sandbox, the GM presents events to the players, and the players react to them. In a sandbox, the players tell the GM what they want to do and the GM reacts to that instead. That's not to say that any game can't include the PCs taking action and the GM reacting to them (the should), but a sandbox specfically applies to core game elements. The players tell the GM that there's a dragon up in the hills that they want to fight, so the GM creates a dragon in the hills for them to fight. The players say that they want to fight an evil overlord in the next kingdom, so the GM creates a kingdom with an evil overlord. That's not the same as the players saying "we're going up into the hills to see what's there" or "we're going to travel to the next kingdom", and the GM deciding what is there.

I suppose different people use the term sandbox differently though. Again though, when I hear sandbox, it's mostly that the players are driving the game events and objects, not the GM.


The hunt for the evil sorcerer who is on several villages' wanted boards that gets ignored may later become rumors of an undead army rising in the area. Leave that alone, and eventually the necromancer-king may start sending his minions on probing attacks into neighboring lands, and start consolidating his power. Leave it to his own devices, and he may take over a small kingdom entirely, and the next opportunity to interact will be on a diplomatic level as the Undying Kingdom starts interacting with further-afield neighbors and seeking trade rather than warfare.

Except that the GM created the evil sorceror. The GM decided that if they don't engage with that sorceror, he will start studying necromancy and raise an army of undead. The GM decided that, if left unchecked, his army will eventually start threatening the lands near the PCs, and if still not challenged, will conquer neighroing kingdoms and come after theirs. That's still the GM creating "threats", and then allowing those threats to progress naturally in the absence of PC action. The GM creates the game events and objects. The PCs react to those things and choose what to do about them.

To me. That's just normal world building. A good game should *always* work that way. A sandbox is where the PCs create the world. Just like when you play in a sandbox, you build the castles to play with your action figures on, and you build the ramps you run your toy cars down, etc. That is differentiated from an already assembled piece of playground equipment, like slides, swings, monkey bars, etc, where what is there and what you can do with them was built by someone else, and *not* the people playing with them. The players choose which piece of eqiupment to play on, and how they play on them, and for how long, but the equipment itself is built and placed there by someone else.

[Segev]

I actually call that a "dynamic setting". Contrasted with "static settings" (basically game module style play). When I've seen people use the term "sandbox", they are usually talking about a game setting in which the players are free to do "whatever they want", and the GM will facilitate this by creating stuff that matches what the players want to do. The difference is that in non-sandbox, the GM presents events to the players, and the players react to them. In a sandbox, the players tell the GM what they want to do and the GM reacts to that instead. That's not to say that any game can't include the PCs taking action and the GM reacting to them (the should), but a sandbox specfically applies to core game elements. The players tell the GM that there's a dragon up in the hills that they want to fight, so the GM creates a dragon in the hills for them to fight. The players say that they want to fight an evil overlord in the next kingdom, so the GM creates a kingdom with an evil overlord. That's not the same as the players saying "we're going up into the hills to see what's there" or "we're going to travel to the next kingdom", and the GM deciding what is there.

I suppose different people use the term sandbox differently though. Again though, when I hear sandbox, it's mostly that the players are driving the game events and objects, not the GM.



Except that the GM created the evil sorceror. The GM decided that if they don't engage with that sorceror, he will start studying necromancy and raise an army of undead. The GM decided that, if left unchecked, his army will eventually start threatening the lands near the PCs, and if still not challenged, will conquer neighroing kingdoms and come after theirs. That's still the GM creating "threats", and then allowing those threats to progress naturally in the absence of PC action. The GM creates the game events and objects. The PCs react to those things and choose what to do about them.

To me. That's just normal world building. A good game should *always* work that way. A sandbox is where the PCs create the world. Just like when you play in a sandbox, you build the castles to play with your action figures on, and you build the ramps you run your toy cars down, etc. That is differentiated from an already assembled piece of playground equipment, like slides, swings, monkey bars, etc, where what is there and what you can do with them was built by someone else, and *not* the people playing with them. The players choose which piece of eqiupment to play on, and how they play on them, and for how long, but the equipment itself is built and placed there by someone else.
The GM always creates the world. That's the role of the GM. The PCs don't write the setting. Not even in a sandbox. There are games designed around players taking on the setting-creation role, but that is not what defines a "sandbox."

Civilization is a "sandbox" game. So is Minecraft. Players do not run creative mode Minecraft to hand-craft the game world before playing in it. They react to the world that is put before them. Players don't design the enemy civilizations, don't plan out the continents and the starting locations of each player entity. They react to where things start.

So, yes, we use the term differently, you and I. If an NPC doing things the GM decides he does makes it "not a sandbox," it's impossible to truly run a D&D game that is a sandbox.


What makes a sandbox, to me, is the ability of the players to decide, once they've gotten their teeth sunk into the world, that the next adventure is going to be to go try to save the village of mushroom people who are left starving in the aftermath of having the spore-plague clouds that were poisoning the land for everyone but the mushroom people be destroyed. The GM may have had no plans for anything but the village drying up and disappearing, but the PCs decided they wanted to save it, and have come up with plans using things they learned about the setting in the last adventure to set about trying to build a solution.

That's not the PCs creating the setting. But it is sandbox play.

[Peat]

Best example for me is during a Shadowrun game, I anticipated my player group would try to call the cops on a bunch of criminals rather than go and sort them out themselves. They were all the sort of people who liked to leverage resources, try and do as much as possible in the setting, and be very clever. Which is great! But not at the cost of the session's climactic fight.

So I wrote into the adventure that it was easily found out that the criminals had lots of cops in their pockets.

Of course, the fact that I completely forgot to mention that when they were asking for info on the criminals did somewhat put a hole in my clever plan.

Needless to say, one player did suggest using the cops so I went "ah crap, sorry, I'd meant to say, look, its in my notes and everything". Which they accepted.

Which, yes, is rather railroady. But given my group had the attention span and destructive capabilities of toddlers who've just found a gangland cache, I told them at the start the campaign would be four sessions long and that I wanted them to buy in to sticking to the tracks to get there. If I get another group, would maybe look at it different.

[Tanarii]

Which, yes, is rather railroady.
Thinking of one common and easily used tool in the toolbox in advance and taking it away with a good in-world reason (with notes) isn't railroady. It's starts to become so if you cut off all the avenues of choice you can think of except the 'right' one in advance, but not completely if they can still think of something you didn't. And it's definitely if you take away choices on the fly for any choice except the 'right' one.

Where many GMs trip up is trying to take away 'kill the guy(s)' tool. Because that's taking away a bunch of tools under the guise of one.

E.g. what would you have done if they called in a favor from a corporate hit squad instead? Same result you didn't want, but different tool to get a similar result.

[KorvinStarmast]

Basically, I force an insighting incident
Inciting? I find that one occasionally needs to get the party off of top-dead-center, yes.

[Dr.Samurai]

Robin's point was less about table drama and more about pacing and engagement.

Essentially, his assertion is that, given infinite time to plan and discuss, players will most often settle upon a safe, cautious, hyper-conservative mode of play. This ends up creating situations where the players avoid, obviate, or trivialize the big fight with the necromancer, even though having a big fun fight against the necromancer and her skeleton army is actually the engaging part of the game.

Robin was basically, literally saying: do not give your players the chance to talk themselves out of fun. Interrupt them, cut them off, or give them time pressure to ensure that they are running with that first, sloppy, fun plan instead of eliminating all opportunities for twists or fumbles-- and the improvisation that those engender.

That's not everyone's playstyle, of course, but it's certainly Robin's.
I almost did this at our session last week. We had an opportunity to attack the giant chieftain, but he was in a small room with his best warriors. Definitely got into that cautious, hyper-conservative mode and time froze and we started strategizing into infinity. I actually thought about this thread and this post in particular and said "Let's just go in and wreck these guys!" and we did. Session ended in round 2 for the night so let's see what happens tomorrow :smallcool:.

But thank you and Korvin for bringing this up. I think it prevented us from stalling until the end of the session, and allowed us to have some more fun :smallamused:.

[Easy e]

Inciting? I find that one occasionally needs to get the party off of top-dead-center, yes.

Yes, thank you.

I knew I had spelled it wrong, but for the life of me could not get it right.

LOL

[Lemmy]

IME, the more common problem is a bit of another one... When players stay silent for a while and wait for each other to come up with their next action... And end up staring each other for a few minutes, because they are not used to be more proactive.

I've tried making cautious characters in the past, but I often end up being the impulsive guy because otherwise, we waste too much time in silent stare-downs (especially in PbP).

[KorvinStarmast]

IME, the more common problem is a bit of another one... When players stay silent for a while and wait for each other to come up with their next action... And end up staring each other for a few minutes, because they are not used to be more proactive. And that's even more of a challenge when playing on a VTT.

[animorte]

IME, the more common problem is a bit of another one... When players stay silent for a while and wait for each other to come up with their next action... And end up staring each other for a few minutes, because they are not used to be more proactive.

I've tried making cautious characters in the past, but I often end up being the impulsive guy because otherwise, we waste too much time in silent stare-downs (especially in PbP).
That describes me exactly. I've always liked the idea of playing a quieter individual, or a follower of sorts, but I'm one of the few that isn't afraid to take the lead, and actually knows how. I also do a good job of including others while in that position, which often helps people to speak up more.

[Cactus]

That describes me exactly. I've always liked the idea of playing a quieter individual, or a follower of sorts, but I'm one of the few that isn't afraid to take the lead, and actually knows how. I also do a good job of including others while in that position, which often helps people to speak up more.
Do you mind if I borrow this for my next job interview?

[animorte]

Do you mind if I borrow this for my next job interview?
Absolutely! I appreciated that I've inspired you.

You saying that has actually inspired me to approach interviews the way I talk about D&D. I've always had an exceptional work ethic, but I'm garbage at interviews.

[gatorized]

To some degree it's also a system design issue. In FPS games for instance you avoid damage by either going really fast (old school) or hiding behind something (everything from Call of Duty to Red Orchestra.) The old school approach is more aggressive, but you still generally want distance from the enemies so you can dodge better.

Then there's Doom 2016, which let's you recover HP by running up to dudes, tearing their arm off and jamming it through their face. You still need to move fast, dodge and position to mitigate damage, but you really have to be exceedingly aggressive.

I rather wonder how much excessive caution in RPGs could be removed by systems that really promoted being aggressive. But that would generally require a tilt away from global resource management as a gameplay model. I'm not sure how you balance the wizard wanting to rest after every fight with Doomguy, who wants to go murder sinething to heal up.

It's been solved for quite some time by systems that don't tie down players with arbitrary limits on how often they can use their fun abilities. I've found that players are also much more likely to take risks when using a system that empowers them and facilitates fun, instead of constantly saying "no, you can't do that because you didn't take this feat, or you're not this level, or you're not this class, or you can't use that weapon, etc ad infinitum"

[truemane]

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