Maybe it's "Authored" vs. "Emergent"

[Talakeal]

Quantum ogre was already a bad term and following it up with "temporal ogre" helps no-one. There's plain English term for what you're describing: scripted event. It's a basic building block for scenario design and the discussion is just how and why to use it.

Like most people in this thread, I am not really interested in arguing over terminology or coining new terms. I use temporal ogre because the original quantum ogre article is what made me think about it; that article acts as if the player's route is important but what is occurring in those areas is more or less constant. Fairness and realism would require the DM keep track of time as well as space, but that makes running a sandbox campaign exponentially more effort for the DM, and makes it exponentially less likely that the players will happen upon interesting things by random chance.


If you prefer to use scripted event go for it; although I feel like that term has other baggage I didn't meant to imply.

These are all attempts at constructive laziness. "When player characters arrive" is a start condition that's easy to remember and easy to tell when it applies, and it gets players engaged with the meat of the situation immediately. Alternatives involve randomizing when events happen or processing how events are progressing on the background where player characters can't perceive them. The last two allow for more emergent behaviors, but require more resources from a game master.

The first and simplest step to evolve a game design beyond this is just to put time conditionals on events flags. Instead of happening when player characters arrive, game begins at timestamp X scripts are initialized at timestamp Y. This is out of fashion for chiefly two reasons:

1) a lot of game masters apparently can't count time and can't keep a calendar.
2) sunk cost fallacy: a lot of game masters get upset at wasting their time if players miss an event they scripted. Solution? Don't give players a chance to miss the script.

While I don't disagree with you per se, I don't think this is a bad thing.

As a GM, I already spend hours every week prepping, usually more time than I actually spend at the table playing. I don't think it is really "lazy" to want that effort to matter. Likewise, if my content is genuinely good, I don't want it to get missed.

And this goes both ways; as a player I don't want to burnout my GM with lots of needless prep work and I don't want to miss quality content by random chance.

In a game like Minecraft, you can dig up most of the visible game world and turn it into your dream city, or a giant computer, or whatever, creating large scale and visible differences in the game's setting. This should be obviously different from a game where you can spend hours customizing your character, but can't open a door if the game master doesn't think it's time yet. Linear scenario design naturally and demonstrably limits meaning of character creation choices in a different way from a sandbox game. Saying both are "full" of choices means nothing, there are both quantative (amount of choices) and qualitive (what is chosen) differences between game structures.

I think there is a lot of talking past one another going on here.

IMO you can do everything you can do in Minecraft in an RPG. One thing Minecraft cannot do, is have the inhabitants on the world react to you in a meaningful way rather than follow their simple AI routines. One thing that an RPG should do, imo, is having the NPCs react to your actions; which would often mean "kicking over your sandcastle" if it interferes with their own goals.

In my opinion, shaping the narrative and nature of the setting are what constitutes meaningful choices in an RPG, and are more or less impossible in Minecraft except on the most literal level.

Considering it is again possible to take a roleplaying game to a literal sandbox and use it as tabletop, I don't think your opinion of what the medium is good or bad for holds much merit.

I have to say, this is one of the rudest things anyone has ever said to me on the internet. Congratulations.

Although, I have to say, judging from the other posters are sain this thread, this assertion likewise holds very little merit.

Creating art is not the opposite of playing a game. See all other games where players are creating art in competition with each other.

Not what I said.

I said that there is an old stereotype of telling rail-roady GM's to go write a novel. And I am saying that "emergent" players of this sort would be better served painting a picture, or sculpting with clay, or playing with Legos, or even playing the afermentioned Minecraft.

RPGs tend to be focused around exploring a simulated world and getting into the head of a single character in that world. Most are also focused around tactical squad level combat or creating a dramatic narrative. If you really just want to make the maximum number of choices possible to indulge your creativity unconstrained, I don't think it is a particularly good medium for it.

Heck, there are even tabletop games like Microscope which are specifically built around the creative aspects of the game which are far better for creativity and collaborative world building than a traditional RPG.

Do you know what causes aimlesness? Lack of internal motivation. Do you know what causes lack of internal motivation? Experience of being harried by external rewards and punishments to make one act according to someone else's whims and wishes.

This reads as a weird sort of reverse psychology.

This also is very much contrary to my experience with the world. Most people would rather consume media than create their own.

I am by far the most creative person I know, but even I would often rather play a video game or watch a movie than write a novel on most days, it takes a lot of energy and inspiration.

Likewise, I prefer games with robust character creation options, but hate video games with "sliders" as I am incapable of actually making anything that looks good, in the same way that a big furniture warehouse gives me more options than a home depot where I can, theoretically, learn to make whatever furniture I want.

Even in fictional settings and RPGs, and again I am very much into creativity and worldbuilding and character choices, I still think its more interesting to imagine something like "What if I were a member of the Fellowship of the ring?" rather than "Man, imagine how much fun I could create for myself if I was dropped down in the middle of Rohan at some point in the Third Age."

The Paradox of Choice is a very real thing in human psychology or philosophy.

If you take a real kid who had helicopter parents or restrictive living conditions and place that kid in a real sandbox, chances are they won't have an idea what to do. They will stare at the sand. They will get bored. The actual correct choice, for an outside observer, is to wait that out. Let the kid get bored. They actually need the experience of no-one else coming to save them from boredom, to save themselves from it.

Maybe. But if I try it in real life, all that happens is that the players stop showing up to game night.

I have seen boring games hemorrhage players. I have not seen the players suddenly come to the realization that they need to make their own fun.

As for the rest, it still falls in line with what I just said about sandbox games: of course a game feels more aggressive and unpredictable when one has to deal with some mofo knocking over one's castle, as opposed to simply building a castle in peace or going around knocking over castles of other without retaliation. Wrapping the discussion in terms of genre tropes (heroes reactive, villains proactive etc.) isn't helpful or even required for understanding dynamics of play and what is happening in minds of your players.

Its not about tropes, its about me relating my past experience with games.

In my experience, characters with good alignment tend to seek out powerful villains who are preying on the weak and helpless and thwart their schemes.
In my experience, characters with evil alignment tend to prey upon the weak and helpless, and then rival NPCs seek them out to thwart their evil schemes.

If we agreed to play a peaceful game about building a community in peace, then yeah, that wouldn't apply. But as I said, most RPGs are built around the idea of fantastic squad level combat and / or creating a dramatic story with lots of tension and drama.


To use another analogy; in RTS games like Starcraft, a lot of players get mad if you attack them before they finish building their base. The common response to this is, you don't want to be playing an RTS, you want to be playing Sim City.