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

[Quertus]

I have a question; how do people feel about temporal ogres?

They are like quantum ogres, but travel through time as well as space, and I think a lot of GM's use them without even realizing it.

For example, something scripted to occur so that the players arrive just in time to witness and/or get involved in an important event?

Or an encounter that occurs the first time the players enter a hex regardless of what time of day they arrive and how long it took them to get there?

Or an NPC who just so happens to have a quest then urgently needs doing right as the PCs enter town?





Hmmm.

So your "emergent" game has as much freedom as any "linear" game that I have ever run.

I can't imagine stopping the players from doing any of those things in a linear game, and indeed I quite expect that to be the sort of thing they get up to.

Joining with the bad guys is explicitly always on the table, although I can't recall if the PCs have ever taken me up on it (at least with the main villain, side villains often get allied with).

There is only going to be a problem if the players somehow forget about Voldemort; if they do nothing to address him IC (or have a talk about the direction of the game OOC) their plans to reform magical Britain are probably going to run into some real problems when He Who Must Not be Named takes over the ministry.



Yeah, I suppose if you are "punching down" you can always make an impact on the world. I don't tend to enjoy that sort of game though, as I have said in the past, it feels like bullying.

And of course, my players would get mad if I challenged their perception of omnipotence by having the world react logically to a super powered newcomer trying to overthrow the order by, say, uniting against them or finding champions of their own.

Now, I tend to start games at level 1 because I like the complete experience, from both a mechanical and narrative level. My players tend to be very advancement motivated and retire once they hit max level, and so I start at low levels so that the game can last a long time and I can use a wide variety of plots and challenges.

Although... I imagine characters who start at level 20 still need to come from somewhere in the fiction, and I wonder... if you actually mapped out their entire backstory if it wouldn't have just as much authorial FIAT as any linear game... just something to think about.



This gets at the heart of what I was saying, much more succinctly put.

Linear games allow you to "punch up" on the level of scope you can influence, simply by being in the right place at the right time. The players are more likely to save the lives of royalty, thwart villains, find forgotten artifacts, witness events that change history, etc. Whereas in a fairly run sandbox game, you have to get lucky enough to find these, or at the very least lucky enough to learn of them and decide to go out looking.

Its kind of like the whole idea IRL of the "great man" theory of history or the self-made industrialist. The deeper you look, it appears less that they were super great and special, but more that they just happened to luck into a lot of opportunities and be at the right place and time where a big change in the world was imminent.

Ouch. I scarcely know how to address this.

So... let's start here: I'm not a fan of what you're calling a "temporal ogre", of the PCs just so happening to show up at the right place at the right time, time and again. Where "the only reason we could ever do anything was because of GM pity artifact", in timing form. IMO, that's just... terrible.

Or, to explain that slightly differently, I want PCs to be able to "punch up" because they had a good plan, or invented (not found) the McGuffin of Voldimort Slaying, or sought out Gandalff and convinced him to help with this ringing in their ears, or... whatever. I want the PCs to be active in their "punching up", not following some GM prescribed path. I don't want Gandalff to exist because the GM's story needs him to fight the Baylore, I want Gandalff to exist because he makes sense for the world, and the the PCs to interact with him (or not) however they see fit, for his existence to be a tool in their toolkit, to use to write their story.

If you ran the content 3 different times, with 3 different groups, Gandalff's involvement should be completely different for each group; otherwise, he's not a good object to use...

... is my preference.

Or, to try to win the contest for the rudest comment you've heard on the internet, if your dragon is only interesting in the 15 seconds while it's kidnapping the princess, then your dragon is boring, it and you should be ashamed, and you should both go home and rethink your lives.

That is to say, I think that if you're putting a "dragon" and a "princess" in the game, they should both be interesting objects in their own right, not only interesting because the dragon is kidnapping the princess, and not only interesting during those 15 seconds while the kidnapping is occurring.

The party shouldn't need to just so happen to arrive during those 15 seconds for the dragon and the princess to be interesting objects.

Nor should they need to just so happen to arrive during those 15 seconds to be able to influence the outcome. Maybe they "punch up" by asking for help from the evil princess, who loves to kidnap dragons. Maybe they "punch up" by carefully investigating the scene and crafting some bubble-proof armor (because, by investigating the crime scene with their particular skillset, they learn that this is a bubble-breathing dragon). Maybe they "punch up" by making a deal with Sauron for a Ring of Power in exchange for stabbing Gandalff. Or - get this - maybe they don't need to "punch up" because they're actually strong enough to engage the scenario, because it's actually a level-appropriate encounter.

Given that Harry Potter has "at will, no save, just die" effects, I'm not actually convinced that a D&D Wizard 20 is strictly "punching down" at their world. I'm not sure just how much they'd need to make use of the fact that it's "you" - ie, someone who (in theory) knows a thing or two about their world, rather than a stranger from the outside blundering in oblivious - in order to have a meaningful impact. But the two together was indeed intended to be enough to hopefully be "punching down", so that you could (hopefully) see that there existed some level of ability (power and knowledge) whereby "have an effect" was actually possible. Focusing on "punching down" misses the point.

Still, "punching down" - "of course they succeed" - is, IMO, a better error to make at a table than "the players have no concept how they could ever accomplish anything in this scenario". If you focus on "challenge" and "punching up", your games are more likely to error out on "and then the players have no concept how to proceed", rather than if you focus, not on "punching down", but "allowing capable characters, and giving your players a vast toolkit", where the error state should look more like "and then the players get into an argument about which of the 20 successful ways to proceed they see, whether they should sell the dragon to the evil princess, gain power from Sauron, nuke the site from orbit, build anti-bubble armor, have Toph tunnel under the princess & grab her while the traveling circus the party hires distracts the dragon, ...". Which is different from "punching down", where "20th level Wizard Talakeal debates which spell to use, or Loki tries to get him to engage in an 'I can resolve this in 6 spell levels' competition."

Anyway, my point is, I struggle to imagine a game that is "linear" or "authored" where, when placed into the Harry Potter storyline, the PCs are allowed to get Snape fired, open a "Juno's Jumping Jellybeans" competitor for Berty Bott, kill Harry Potter to cement their place in the new order, use that power to get love potions banned, and otherwise not interact with the Harry Potter plot in any way. Not because the GM planned for them to do any of those things, but because that's what they independently chose to do as they were introduced to the elements of the setting.

I'm not sure if my inability to see it is just because it's not my cup of tea, or if it's as nonsensical a pairing of events and labels as my brain makes it out to be.

Now, I understand that some GMs will let players have their side-projects, so long as they complete all their homework on time. And that there's other GMs on this very site who proudly state that they would never allow players to perform such actions unless they were part of the GM's plot. But I can't see how those things can be the entirety of the plot (while "having Dumbledore's baby and burning the Daily Prophet to the ground" and "replicating the deathly hallows, until Howarts students can pown Voldimort (and the ministry, and the world - "Dumbledore's Army", indeed)" is the entirety of the plot for a second and third group running through the same content), and still call it "authored" or "linear".

Yes, Talakeal, I agree that your description of (what to my knowledge is) your most recent game (with the time monk and the teleporting demon girl and not!Toph and...?) sounded... potentially too "authored" and too "GM Pity/Spite temporal ogred" for my taste. So you declaring its style as "Authored" and "temporal ogred", I won't gainsay.

But... hmmm... nothing in your world really made me say, "here's what I want to do with this", so I can't use that game as a direct example. But... I don't see how you'd take an "authored" (let alone "authored" and "temporal ogred") style, and use that to allow "cross-breed monsters into the entire muggle population of Europe (yes, that'll take a lot of Obliviate / love potions...) and found a new school of Witchcraft and Wizardry", or any of the other Harry Potter universe "plots" I've listed.

How can you possibly implement that without it being "Emergent"? Isn't allowing that kinda the definition of Emergent play?

As to the backstory of a whole-cloth 20th level character being fiat... one, I've lost context, did I actually say anything about the character being new; two, I don't really need to think about it, as my player has seemingly been roleplaying me consistently wrt how I feel about fiat:

Hmmm... "matching existing characterization" was described as "not fiat" by a previous poster.

So decisions that are made which match existing characterization of a character are not fiat.

Which means that all choices of new characters are fiat; consistently roleplayed choices of existing characters are not.

I wonder if this is related to why I prefer to run existing characters? I just don't like (apparent) fiat.

And... it would match why I prefer hard mind control - it removes fiat from the interpretation of how to react. Huh. I seem to have found one of my core values, and found that I'm roleplaying having that value consistently.

Seems I don't care for a new 20th level character any more than a new 1st level character in that regard.

I would say that emergent games definitionally do not. That world reactivity is kind of the point. However, that world reactivity makes pre-planning on an individual scene basis very difficult.

In fact, I'd say that a static sandbox is closer to Authored than it is emergent - all the scenes are there (even if via random table). The only things the players can really do is choose the order they engage in them with.

Wait, what?

OK, let's imagine a Minecraft-like puzzle world, where the PC is the only "actor".

I play the game, build snow golems, get them to destroy spiders, use the webs to build a rope, use the rope to retrieve the Gloves of Catching, use the gloves to catch snowballs, use the snowballs to kill pigs to stockpile food, use the stockpiled food to make it to the Crystal Cliffs, use the rope to retrieve the Bottled Storm, unleash the Eternal Storm from the bottle to get water for crops, realize I've inadvertently killed my snow golems (and can't make more) and therefore have finite ammo, and now the story is about my struggle to snowball pigs to death to feed myself while waiting for my crops to grow.

Someone else took a character with different skills into the exact same world, and their story is about stealth and bow-hunting and foraging as they search for the legendary moo-shroom island. A third player with a third character leaves behind a trail of destruction as they carve a bloody path with their shovel and wooden sword, their biggest challenge being sickness, as they're not bright enough to differentiate "cow meat" from "zombie meat", until they reach Village, and learn that YANA.

It seems to me that the story is emergent, the scene transitions are emergent. How is this not your definition of Emergent, even without any active "actors" besides the PC?

A good analogy. Even if the game was really "about" stopping Voldy (I think an Emergent game can have a goal/direction, provided everybody buys into it), how they do it would likely be very different than in the books.

Emergent / Sandbox games can have... an agreed-upon goal, like "stop Voldy". But not only is the path there dynamic, inherent to it being Emergent, it's not guaranteed that the PCs will succeed at their goal.

This is one place where, IMO, discussing macro / super-macro agency seems easier than discussing Emergent/Sandbox or Linear/Authored.

I'm not entirely sure I agree, can you explain more?

Ah... hmmm...

OK, the simplest bit is this: "Authored vs Emergent" and "Linear vs Sandbox" have inherent in them - or in ourselves - that people will tend to want to label an entire game with a single label, color an entire game with just one red or blue crayon. Whereas the (super) [macro/micro] agency listing has inherent in its definitions the scope of each label.

That's not quite right. Let me try again: because the other model has multiple labels for different kinds of agency, it is easier to know what, exactly, you are talking about when using such a label.

More word make talk more good. Sigh.

If I say someone is a "redhead", that means something different than if I call them a "redskin". It's kinda like how I rebeled (recoiled? revolted? there's some word that starts with re- that goes here...) at the notion that Civilization was Emergent, because there are hard constraints on the end condition. And hard constraints on what "getting there" looks like.

So my point was about how it's easier to use a system that has words for different areas of agency, when trying to discuss just some limited form of agency relative to that area.

"red" vs "redhead".

Clearer?

It feels like "Authored" and "Emergent" need more words, like "Emergent Scene Transition" or "Authored Ending", to make clear / limit the scope of their usage when describing a style element of limited scope.

Especially when you in particular also want to use the terms to talk about... a general mindset of play? Boy, this is feeling more and more complicated.

Except I don't think it's that obvious of rebranding. I mean...... yeah, if you squint you can just substitute one for the other (as has been done in this thread), but since there is a difference (it's been talked about for decades) I don't see a way around that. And the point here is that it's not just a rebranding, it's a refocusing of the definition specifically to stop implying certain things that are false or strawman argument.

Ah, so I've been focusing too much on their similarity, rather than simply using that as a jump-start, then focusing on their differences, and then viewing them as their own thing, like I should have. Gotcha.

I've heard sandbox used to mean:

1. Any emergent game
2. Living worlds, where the players can do things, but the world goes on
3. Static worlds, where the players do things, and nothing happens that they don't initiate.

So it's not surprising that your definition of sandbox is unclear.

A "wife" can be a drug-addled narcissist. But if you say you have a wife, and I inherently picture a drug-addled narcissist, and cannot picture anything else, no matter how much you explain it to me, I think that's on me, no?

Humanity needs an update.

I mean, are they fundamentally mutually exclusive? I dunno. In practical terms, they tend to be, simply due to practical constraints - see arguments about "game have to be railroaded becuase GMs don't have time to create infinite branches" in other threads.

I'd rather not.

Not necessarily. You could totally have a CaW authored setup as well.

Sure. I think you said something equivalent to, "one of the strengths of 'Authored' is that it is easier to craft fair challenges". Easier, not that they were inherently linked.

Ehhhhh not really sure I agree with that. Like, that doesn't really feel emergent to me. I think mostly because the challenge is just in isolation. It's the contents of a path, and doesn't impact the path itself after that.

Like, my example of megadungeons - if the rooms don't interact, if it's just a series of combat encounters, then it's authored (non-linear authored). If you can start making alliances, or the various tribes react to invaders in ways that have an impact on the larger megadungeon, to me it's emergent.

We may be stuck on the "emergent mincraft puzzle world" concept again here.

However... if we cross "making alliances" with "choosing what the room copies", we break the "balanced encounter" promise of the room. Of course, "making alliances" tends to break balance too much for CaS to begin with...

I mean, billiards is a highly emergent game, right?

I don't know, is it?

The game (or, the game I play, which may or may not share any resemblance with billiards) only has 2 valid end conditions: sink 8 ball, scratch on 8 ball.

It has exactly 1 pre-determined start condition. (and, as an aside, I think talk of "start conditions" in RPGs is missing the point in this thread)

The play in between can contain infinite variations of its very, very few variables.

And, assuming I'm playing against an opponent instead of just by myself, my perception of my opponent's personality and skills adds a whole 'nother layer to the game.

Does that make it Emergent?

To be clear, by "soft control" I mean things like "for x period of time (or x number of uses, or whatever), if you do something against the implanted goal, you suffer <penalty>." The PC still has an incentive to comply with the directive, but the choice hasn't been completely removed. It makes an interesting set of decisions about how counter to their own goals you want to make the control. So it's not really "fiat" - you can accept the penalty (be it a penalty on actions, damage, whatever). But it's not hard control in that you still have the choice.

Yeah, I'm one of those oddballs who prefers hard mind control. In no small part because of the Fiction. If Loki had said, "help me take over the world... or eat penalties!", I think most of the SHIELD agents would have dealt with the stomach issues those penalties caused when ingested. I think if the "Imperious" curse gave its victims the option to not betray everything they love, it might not have qualified as an unforgivable curse. I don't think the Purple Man would be so feared or hated if his mind control could be so trivially bypassed. I don't think a D&D monster with "Do what I say... or take a -2 penalty to craft: underwater basketweaving" feels even remotely the same as one that just has "Do as I say".

As I player, I don't really want to have to think about how my character responds to a supernatural urge that I, in theory, have no valid frame of reference for. I want hard mind control that says, "you do this", rather than a Gamist "you do x else you eat penalty y". I'd rather roleplay how the character goes about X, than break to the system layer, and game the system of whether to x or y.

Yes but probably not in the way you think. Describing it as a continuum is probably the worst answer you could give, because that's basically the only answer I don't want. But knowing that that is the answer, probably means that I should've left the thread a long, long time ago, and labels are a hindrance, not a help.

These characters are printed in two colors on my screen: black, and white. No continuum of grey. Just black, and white. However, it is not the case that the entire screen is black. Nor is it the case that the entire screen is white. There is both black, and white, used alternately, in a pattern that makes these words.

"Black" and "White" are labels that have meaning when describing technology's implementation of these characters. Both are being used on the same screen. This does not make the terms meaningless.