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

[PhoenixPhyre]

I mean, i know several GMs who make a point of not wanting to know the PCs stats and abilities lest that produces biased expectations.

I agree with the rest of this post, but wanted to call out this point as being so utterly alien to me as at be incomprehensible except in the abstract.

I consider character creation to be one of the main ways players tell a DM what they're looking to do. And a mismatch here is fatal to enjoyment in many cases.

If a character is, say, a 3e Beguiler with little that can be used against things immune to mind affecting, I as a DM have a choice at the meta level. I can choose to play into that or against it. If I choose to play against it significantly (such as running a pure undead adventure), I feel I have a duty to warn the player. And I know that at worldbuilding time, even if content is purely emergent. Emergent is not random; even procedural content is curated (or should be IMO).

In less stark scenarios, a player whose abilities are all combat probably wants to use them. So designing everything to require/encourage social challenges or even just ignoring that info seems contrary to what I want from a DM. And the same goes for a face character.

Of course this is no guarantee, but I believe that PC ability and stat choices should bias the DMs thinking to some degree. The other option is to be selfish and only build what the DM wants. Because bias is inevitable.

[kyoryu]

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?

It probably is. Really in tabletop RPGs though, I expect the world to behave differently in response to the PCs.

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.

Because I think GMs really approach session prep very differently. See below.

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.

And yet each state in the middle likely will be different - two playthroughs won't look the same, even if they start from the same initial save.

And I'm making a hard line on "emergent games can have a goal" because a lot do, and that provides direction, and I'm deliberately countering the false criticism of emergent games that they can't have direction.

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.

I think the ending is a little less relevant, since it happens pretty infrequently, you know?

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.

Fair

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.

Pattern recognition. People have associations. That's why it's sometimes useful to break associations.

I'd rather not.

Indeed. This is why the counter of "linearity" is not "prep more branches". It's "don't prep encounters."

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.

Correct. The more time you can spend on encounters, the more detailed and "fair" you can make them.

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...

For sure. CaS tends to be an authored concept.

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?

In my mind, yes. Every state of the board (just looking at "between each shot") is dependent on the previous shot. It is near impossible to actually get the same game, or even similar games. Smart players line up their shots to make their opponents lives more difficult.

That all sounds rather emergent to me.

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.

I mean, there's a place for both. If "eating a penalty" is "taking damage", I think there's plenty of room for understanding - it's basically bullying/threats.

I don't disagree too much which is why i called this a mixture, not pure emergent gameplay.

But if we are talking about unconscious steering, does such behavior not start even earlier ? Do emergent DMs really prepare stuff they don't expect the players to go for wih the same attention to detail as stuff they think will very likely be relevant ? Where will corners be cut, when the GM does not have time time ? And well, even GMs who don't try to guess what the players will do will aquire related knowledge during play. I mean, i know several GMs who make a point of not wanting to know the PCs stats and abilities lest that produces biased expectations. But stuff like that will get revealed during sessions and there are player character traits and interests as well which are hard to actively ignore.

From my POV, emergent and authored GMs plan differently. To put it in a pithy way, authored GMs plan content, emergent GMs plan scaffolding. IOW, the point of planning from an emergent GM's POV isn't "this is what the players will do", it's "front-load creative decisions so that I understand the situation well enough that I can effectively and seamlessly improvise."

If that makes sense.

Detail is usually based on a kind of conceptual distance - the things that the PCs are currently dealing with will have more prep, the things adjacent to them will have some, and the things that are unrelated get very little.

If I'm currently dealing with the assassin's guild in Townville, the structure of the assassins, their relationships (on an individual NPC level), their goals and motiviations will be well known to me. Other groups in the city that might be related to the group might be sketched out but with less detail. Groups highly unrelated (in this case, let's say the nobles are unrelated, though yes we could pixelbitch this and come up with a scenario where they were, just accept my description that they're not for the sake of argument), will have only high level fleshing out.

The nobles in Cityton on the other end of the country will have very little indeed. OTOH, I might know something about their assassins if they're relevant...

In a more D&D-like game, I might pick out a number of appropriate combatants for the relevant factions, though usually I won't go so far as sticking them in concrete encounters, more like a palette of options to choose from.

So there's not a lot of concrete stuff I'm planning out that won't be useful, in some way. And the stuff that doesn't get directly used is probably either indirectly influencing things, could be used later, or at the least probably didn't take a ton of time to plan out.

OTOH, from an authored standpoint, I'd have "okay, here's the starting encounter, here's the other encounters they're going to have, and here's where they'll end." You might do the other stuff, but it's not as critical - it's useful to tell the story you're telling, but it's not really the fabric of what you're doing.

If any of that makes sense?

[Vahnavoi]

In theory an emergent GM could predict what the players would do and prep accordingly while letting them make decisions.

The strongest sign that a game might have emergent qualities is when it's mathematically chaotic enough that a human game master can't even in theory predict and prepare for every decision their players could make. Moment-to-moment predictions may still be possible, where given player's last moves and knowledge of their goals, a game master can predict how the game will go some distance into the future. But in such cases, "preparation" means reactive play and plotting future moves during a game, not preparing content before or between sessions.

[Satinavian]

From my POV, emergent and authored GMs plan differently. To put it in a pithy way, authored GMs plan content, emergent GMs plan scaffolding. IOW, the point of planning from an emergent GM's POV isn't "this is what the players will do", it's "front-load creative decisions so that I understand the situation well enough that I can effectively and seamlessly improvise."

If that makes sense.

But we are talking about generally emergent GMs and the chance to unwillingly slide into authorian stance without realizing.

There is very little between "I kinda can guess what the PCs will engage with and prepare for this more so i have an easier time improvising based on it" and "I kinda can guess what the players will do next and prepare more for it so i have an easier time improvising based on it".

I mean, let's say the session ended with the decision to try diplomacy and arranging a meeting. Because you already have fully flashed out factions, you know what the NPCs want, what their red lines are and what they could back down from long before. But hearing the discussion where the players decided to go for negotiation, you know what they expect/hope for is way beyond those red lines. So starting preparing for the next session, fleshing out the meeting place, the less important delegation members, the protocoll used... stuff you will likely need for the negotiation, you are pretty sure that the negotiation will eventually break down unless your players start to drasticall change their demands or something really unexpected happens. And you start thinking about what the NPCs would do if the negotiation breaks down and decide they would likely try to achieve their objective by force. And you start preparing for the logistics that would involve so you know how much time would go between the PCs coming back from negotiation and potential enemy action which would in such a case still be handled next session.

Now you never atually intended a specific outcome or scene nor have you applied force or are willing to do so, yet you kinda prepared for a series of events. Have you already completely slid back into authored style or not ?

I agree with the rest of this post, but wanted to call out this point as being so utterly alien to me as at be incomprehensible except in the abstract.

I didn't say it is best practice. But some people are valueing GM impartiality really a lot and are willing to suffer the consequence of completely mismatched challenges.

[Hytheter]

The strongest sign that a game might have emergent qualities is when it's mathematically chaotic enough that a human game master can't even in theory predict and prepare for every decision their players could make. Moment-to-moment predictions may still be possible, where given player's last moves and knowledge of their goals, a game master can predict how the game will go some distance into the future. But in such cases, "preparation" means reactive play and plotting future moves during a game, not preparing content before or between sessions.

Here's a secret weapon for preparing sessions in an emergent game: just ask the players what they intend to do next time. No prediction required.

[NichG]

I agree with the rest of this post, but wanted to call out this point as being so utterly alien to me as at be incomprehensible except in the abstract.

I consider character creation to be one of the main ways players tell a DM what they're looking to do. And a mismatch here is fatal to enjoyment in many cases.

If a character is, say, a 3e Beguiler with little that can be used against things immune to mind affecting, I as a DM have a choice at the meta level. I can choose to play into that or against it. If I choose to play against it significantly (such as running a pure undead adventure), I feel I have a duty to warn the player. And I know that at worldbuilding time, even if content is purely emergent. Emergent is not random; even procedural content is curated (or should be IMO).

In less stark scenarios, a player whose abilities are all combat probably wants to use them. So designing everything to require/encourage social challenges or even just ignoring that info seems contrary to what I want from a DM. And the same goes for a face character.

Of course this is no guarantee, but I believe that PC ability and stat choices should bias the DMs thinking to some degree. The other option is to be selfish and only build what the DM wants. Because bias is inevitable.

Well again putting aside any sort of 'emergent = good, authored = bad', I do think that e.g. players determining in advance what they're looking to do and expecting the game to conform to that shape is an attitude that belongs more to an authored mindset than an emergent one. This is probably a good example of the potential pitfalls of a 100% emergent style. The full emergent viewpoint on this would I suspect be that players should be telling a DM what they want to do by doing it, not by pre-arranging it OOC. If you start looking at things like 'we have a combat heavy person, so I'll make sure there are combat encounters in the party's path', that's slipping into an authored stance.

Or with the 'pure undead adventure' thing, the 100% emergent approach would be that the players not only could but should say e.g. 'oh, I hate ghosts, let's make a lot of money doing something else and post a quest for a group of paladins and clerics to go deal with that in our stead'

[BRC]

But we are talking about generally emergent GMs and the chance to unwillingly slide into authorian stance without realizing.

There is very little between "I kinda can guess what the PCs will engage with and prepare for this more so i have an easier time improvising based on it" and "I kinda can guess what the players will do next and prepare more for it so i have an easier time improvising based on it".

I mean, let's say the session ended with the decision to try diplomacy and arranging a meeting. Because you already have fully flashed out factions, you know what the NPCs want, what their red lines are and what they could back down from long before. But hearing the discussion where the players decided to go for negotiation, you know what they expect/hope for is way beyond those red lines. So starting preparing for the next session, fleshing out the meeting place, the less important delegation members, the protocoll used... stuff you will likely need for the negotiation, you are pretty sure that the negotiation will eventually break down unless your players start to drasticall change their demands or something really unexpected happens. And you start thinking about what the NPCs would do if the negotiation breaks down and decide they would likely try to achieve their objective by force. And you start preparing for the logistics that would involve so you know how much time would go between the PCs coming back from negotiation and potential enemy action which would in such a case still be handled next session.

Now you never atually intended a specific outcome or scene nor have you applied force or are willing to do so, yet you kinda prepared for a series of events. Have you already completely slid back into authored style or not ?

I think it really comes down to your mindset when you approach your planning.

The trick is that the "Authored" and "Emergent" sessions can have exactly the same gameplay, assuming the authored DM is a decent enough improviser, and doesn't mind abandoning their plans.

The Authored GM, might look at a scene like the one above and say "Okay, here is the Most Likely Outcome. The negotiations break down, and then X happens, I imagine my players will respond like Y, which will result in Z".

Their notes, and how they imagine the session, is built around a sort of timeline. The GM May be willing to deviate from that if something unexpected happens, but they're approach to planning the session was to Write A Story.


It should be noted that this is a pretty good technique, even if you want a more emergent game. Writing out a Way It Could Go is a good way to fill in a lot of details that you can miss if you start from a point of planning for Everything.

"The Negotiations break down. Alice is secretly armed, and when things break down, she will grab Bob and put a knife to his throat". Now you know that Alice has a knife, and will be edging her way closer to Bob as the negotiations break down.

If something unexpected happens and the negotiations DON'T Break down, Alice still has that knife. If the PC's insist on thoroughly searching everybody before the negotiations begin, Alice will still have that knife on her.


The Emergent GM approaches the scenario planning differently. They might also build out the "Most Likely Path", but purely as an exercise in preparedness. The Emergent Version of the scenario isn't built around something that must be deviated from, instead it's designed by just building out the starting factors of the scenario. "Alice is Ruthless and doesn't think this will go anywhere. She will try to sneak in a hidden knife". There isn't a specific Scene in mind where she grabs Bob and holds him hostage.


Edit:

This is to say, I don't think it's a matter of "Emergent = Good, Improv! Authored = Bad, Railroad" so much as how notes are structured.

If your notes are structured as a script or timeline of any sort, even if you don't intend to actually ENFORCE that series of events if things would deviate, that's the Authored Approach.

If your notes are mostly details about the starting point of the session, without any mention of Events planned for the session, that's more Emergent.

[Easy e]

Here's a secret weapon for preparing sessions in an emergent game: just ask the players what they intend to do next time. No prediction required.

An even deeper secret weapon, ask them to tell you why the people, places they are going are important to them, and what is endangering them.

Example:

GM: Last time, you beat the beholder. Why was that important to you?
Player 1: To free the land of its tyranny!
Player 2: To get it's eye as a spell component!
Player 3: Because it killed my father!

GM: Great, the beholder is now dead, so now that the land is free of its Tyranny, what happens? What are you using the Beholder eye to do? Now that your father is avenged, what are you going to do about your siblings?

Player 1: Ummm, the King re-asserts his power from the castle.
Player 2: I put a stasis spell on it until I need it.
Player 3: Hmmmm, I use the loot to buy them a farm.

GM: Great, now tell me how these all interlink?

Players: Ummm, the farm is near the castle, and ummm, we keep the eye in stasis hidden by burying it in the fields..... and.......

GM: Okay, so tell me who comes to cause trouble, and how you know them.

Players: When are you going to do something and bring us adventures?

GM: Once you tell me what the adventures are! <Laughs diabolically>

Now, they start making the new adventure hooks with goals that matter to the players. Of course, at this point it all seems emergent, but eventually the players themselves will put themselves on a rail or path; and the GM will begin to start authoring content then, with an ear to improv as needed.

Hence, why I have a hard time putting a session or campaign into an Emergent or Authored box. They swing between the two poles as the game needs.

[KorvinStarmast]

It probably is. Really in tabletop RPGs though, I expect the world to behave differently in response to the PCs.

What do you mean by 'behave' in that sentence. (I think I see eye to eye with you, but I'd like clarification to that). Respond to PC actions and choices is a facet of behavior. What else do you have packed into that term?

From my POV, emergent and authored GMs plan differently. To put it in a pithy way, authored GMs plan content, emergent GMs plan scaffolding. IOW, the point of planning from an emergent GM's POV isn't "this is what the players will do", it's "front-load creative decisions so that I understand the situation well enough that I can effectively and seamlessly improvise."

If that makes sense.

It does. Why didn't you say that in post #1?

FWIW, scaffolding and content have a bit of overlap and the amount will probably vary with system.

[Vahnavoi]

. 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.

Realism, maybe, fairness, not so much. Fairness depends on how much a game favors or disfavors strategies available to players, keeping track of time can influence that any which way.

Your statements about exponents are false. How are you even quantifying these? I'll attempt some proof sketches to show how and why you are wrong:

Effort for running the game: imagine a simple hex-based campaign. Each hex has a turn limit to reach them to get event A, with players getting event B otherwise. You are at most doubling your work if you place equal effort to detail A and B events, less than doubling if B events are less detailed than A events. This is a linear increase for every new hex and for any C, D etc. events you wish to write down. During play, you are simply keeping track of one, incremental turn counter that only ever goes up, and checking a simple if-then.

Chance of finding something interesting: for the above sample game, you can (try to) count possible paths through the game. This gives a distribution of possible event sequences (from all As to all Bs). Such a distribution is capable of being modeled by a probabilistic method, such as a coin flip, drawing cards or rolling dice - which is one thing wandering monster and random encounter rolls were originally used for. The difference isn't exponential, it can be mathematically close to non-existent, with overall chance of finding something interesting only dependent on event density on the hex map or event frequency on the random generator. The actual difference is that non-random encounters based on position in time and space allow for player choice of path to matter, where as a randomized method reduces the exercise to Snakes & Ladders.

The one thing that does grow exponentially is number of different sequences you can get out of the game - but this doesn't increase game master effort, because they are generated through gameplay, from the material they already prepared. If a game master is willing to reuse their material, they are actually getting more game for same amount of prepwork.

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.

I use "lazy" in the same way "greedy algorithm" uses "greedy": going through least effort for immediate goals. This becomes bad when there are long-term goals you just cannot reach by being lazy. In case of scripting events, if you always script events to happen when player characters first arrive, entire genres of scenarios are out of reach. Also, just to make it explicit: being lazy can lead to more work in the long term, just like a greedy algorithm can end up with non-optimal or even worst possible overall solution.

The error is in thinking that quality of content is predetermined before a game even starts - as opposed to both you and players actively making choices about and generating content through play. It's entirely possible to set a scenario like the sample above so that both A events and B events have appeal to the game master - the actual question of interest then becomes which events the players prioritize and find interesting. The preparation that goes into mutually exclusive events is not needless, it is very specifically needed to facilitate actual choice and actual consequences for flow of time.

Random chance need not enter into it at all. You can as well play in a way that the only unpredictable thing is what the players choose. Of course, if you use a ruleset which constantly gambles on life and death of characters, the entire complaint is rather hollow.

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.

Player agency and meaningful choices are not concepts that have ever been limited to tabletop roleplaying games and appealing to purported special qualities of tabletop roleplaying games to give them special definitions has never been helpful.

The argument is hollow in other ways as well: simple AIs are perfectly capable of serving as reactive opposition to players, which is why they are so widely used in computer games. On the flipside, plenty of human game masters don't run their NPCs in a way that's actually more complex. Similarly, while it's possible to give a tabletop game the same qualities as Minecraft, many actual played games do not, which is the reason why we keep having these threads. A lot of game masters fail to give their players as many meaningful choices as an open-ended computer game and repeated platitudes about open-ended nature of tabletop roleplaying games does nothing to hide that.

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.

One, you are setting bar for "rude" way too low.

Two, your opinion makes a sweeping claim about an entire medium. If you want it to be taken seriously, explain how it fares against the simple litmus test of literally incorporating sandbox play into a game. Notice that I gave a similar reply to Cheesegear, who made (and continues to make) the even stronger and sillier claim that a tabletop game can never be a sandbox game.

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.

And I'm telling you both invocation of such stereotypes and statements of what such players would better served by should wait until you've actually played or at least spend a little thought on a tabletop game that incorporates such activities.

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.

Neither Minecraft nor a real sandbox allow for "maximum number of choices possible to indulge in your creativity unconstrained", and that was never the point. Internal motivation only needs enough choice to a player to set and move towards their own goals. That's not mutually exclusive with tactical squad level combat or creating dramatic narratives, which is why I'm telling you and Cheesegear to go and use a real sandbox as terrain already. Your ideas of what "traditional roleplaying games" are or can do is what's constrained here. Old school D&D allows players, at higher levels, to clear out a hex and build their own fortresses. It is not a leap at all from there to allowing players to plan their fortresses on paper and build them out of sand.

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.

You aren't creating a medium when you are playing in a sandbox - you are acting on it. If you don't get that distinction, that's fine. But appealing to unqualified "most people" is just bad. Internal motivation of players isn't a constant, it's influenced by kinds of games they play, and you run. The reason we can tell helicopter parenting screws up capacity of kids for self-motivated play is because there are other kinds of parenting that don't. By appealing to what "most people" would rather do, you are not only making an argument from popularity, you are appealing to bad habits of people in a way that contributes to those habits. It's only mildly better from occasionally seen "railroading is good because players expect railroading and can't deal with real choices" - the reason they expect railroading and can't deal with choices is because so many game masters run railroaded games and don't give them real choices, so they never learn to cope. It's a self-perpetuating problem.

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."

Projecting your own desires and psychology to the wider population isn't an improvement over argument from popularity. I am not approaching this topic from the angle of what you would personally find worth playing.

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

It's far less relevant to sandbox play than you think it is. It's possible to give players enough options to trigger decision paralysis, I'm not denying that. But that's distinct from lack of internal motivation. Internal motivation often helps to avoid decision paralysis, because it makes a player focus on those options that help them pursue their goals.

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.

I'm not convinced you have tried it, because I'm not convinced you even know how to do it in a reasonable manner. Being "boring" is not inherent trait of the game. Sandbox games aren't boring to people who have an inkling of what they want out of them. I have seen players come to the realization that they really can do what they want instead of following steps outlined by me as the game master, but far more importantly I've seen that this realization was delayed because of their past experience of games being linear affairs and the consequent assumption that all games would be like that.

So, as far as I'm concerned, the only reason why the medium would be unsuitable for sandbox play, or just play as you put it, is because common examples of the medium have given people impression that it is. The solution to that is not to go back and do more of the same. It is to run actual sandboxes and ask your players to engage in play, until they actually get the hang of it. There are no shortcuts.

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

And I and Satinavian can both tell your experience is wrapped in common game tropes. I'm saying those tropes are not actually relevant to analysis of your experience, so you can stop recounting them.

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.

What said common response often leaves unstated is that people who like Starcraft and know how Starcraft works often still get mad when someone screws up their plans - because common emotional responses aren't dictated or limited by game genre. People don't want to lose, they don't want to have their work undone - not even in games that are competitive or adversarial by their very nature. What sets a graceful loser apart from a sore loser is the ability to deal with it.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Well again putting aside any sort of 'emergent = good, authored = bad', I do think that e.g. players determining in advance what they're looking to do and expecting the game to conform to that shape is an attitude that belongs more to an authored mindset than an emergent one. This is probably a good example of the potential pitfalls of a 100% emergent style. The full emergent viewpoint on this would I suspect be that players should be telling a DM what they want to do by doing it, not by pre-arranging it OOC. If you start looking at things like 'we have a combat heavy person, so I'll make sure there are combat encounters in the party's path', that's slipping into an authored stance.

Or with the 'pure undead adventure' thing, the 100% emergent approach would be that the players not only could but should say e.g. 'oh, I hate ghosts, let's make a lot of money doing something else and post a quest for a group of paladins and clerics to go deal with that in our stead'

But there's a certain amount of worldbuilding and basic style choices that have to be made (that are completely unconstrained a priori).

And that brings up the question: are characters being made outside of the context of the world (that is, is the process character creation --> world creation, where "world" may just be that one little part including the agreed-on starting point) or is there a pre-existing world/starting point that characters are created against.

Personally, the idea that the DM shouldn't know or care about the player characters, their personalities, etc is, to me, missing the entire point. We're discovering the story of those characters. And I can't play the NPCs properly without knowing that. But then again, I'm very much in favor of absolutely open OOC conversations about things. Hidden information is risky. Any situation that can be resolved simply by knowing the facts wasn't an interesting one at all.

From a mindset point of view, I see things as going back and forth. They (either OOC or through their characters) tell me what they're doing next. I (either ahead of time during worldbuilding, via randomization, or on the fly) figure out what happens when they do so. Which may lead straight into something else (DM retaining priority) or may drop back into their laps. Or an action 3 sessions ago may have queued up an event that happens and interrupts what they're trying to do.

A game isn't one or the other. It's a conversation. And open communication during a conversation (not hiding the pieces) makes for better play. I have no interest in trying to be "purely" one side or the other--purity tests get in the way of my real objective, which is to facilitate a fun game for everyone. And I find knowing my player characters strongly helps in accomplishing that objective. Trying to be "objective" and "neutral" actively hinders it. I'm a fan of the characters. I want them to do fantastic, in character things. Which requires me to make the props available and the foils against which to strive meaningful and relevant.

[NichG]

But there's a certain amount of worldbuilding and basic style choices that have to be made (that are completely unconstrained a priori).

And that brings up the question: are characters being made outside of the context of the world (that is, is the process character creation --> world creation, where "world" may just be that one little part including the agreed-on starting point) or is there a pre-existing world/starting point that characters are created against.

Personally, the idea that the DM shouldn't know or care about the player characters, their personalities, etc is, to me, missing the entire point. We're discovering the story of those characters. And I can't play the NPCs properly without knowing that. But then again, I'm very much in favor of absolutely open OOC conversations about things. Hidden information is risky. Any situation that can be resolved simply by knowing the facts wasn't an interesting one at all.

From a mindset point of view, I see things as going back and forth. They (either OOC or through their characters) tell me what they're doing next. I (either ahead of time during worldbuilding, via randomization, or on the fly) figure out what happens when they do so. Which may lead straight into something else (DM retaining priority) or may drop back into their laps. Or an action 3 sessions ago may have queued up an event that happens and interrupts what they're trying to do.

A game isn't one or the other. It's a conversation. And open communication during a conversation (not hiding the pieces) makes for better play. I have no interest in trying to be "purely" one side or the other--purity tests get in the way of my real objective, which is to facilitate a fun game for everyone. And I find knowing my player characters strongly helps in accomplishing that objective. Trying to be "objective" and "neutral" actively hinders it. I'm a fan of the characters. I want them to do fantastic, in character things. Which requires me to make the props available and the foils against which to strive meaningful and relevant.

Again though, I think its important to keep a separation between 'things I do to GM' or 'things I think are good GMing' and the particular distinction between Authored and Emergent here. The wrong order to use in any kind of discussion like this is to first pick the word you'd like to describe your GM-ing, then to argue that everything in your GM-ing is in that word and vice versa... It's a completely reasonable style to say 'I'm going to use OOC conversations with the players to plan ahead a game that I and the players have the best possible chance of enjoying'. But 'because it's reasonable, it should be considered Emergent' doesn't follow - that casts Authored as 'the bad style'. It's fine to say 'I like emergence in these things, but there's a boundary where for me and my group it's a lesser good than this other consideration, so we do things differently there'. Hidden information is risky - that's why an Authored stance may be advantageous for groups who are particular about what they enjoy. We can ascribe good properties to Authored stances, that isn't taboo.

But it's also useful to recognize as well that other groups may draw those lines in different places. Some groups may want that danger of hidden information because navigating around those dangers is part of the play to them. Some groups may want to deal with unbalanced scenarios as they hash out, because that makes things feel more visceral or helps with immersion or again is just part of the gameplay for them. So it makes sense to me if someone says 'I don't want to know the PCs' skills' because I can imagine the sort of gaming environment where knowing the PCs' skills would detract. It also makes sense to me if someone says 'I definitely want to know the PCs skills' because I can also imagine that gaming environment and the reasons why for some groups that would be much better. And I can even understand where those differences are a matter of different profiles of GM skill - a GM who recognizes that they have trouble not adjusting enemy stats or DCs of challenges in order to achieve a certain desired result based on where they think the party's current abilities lie may have a greater need to hide aspects of the PCs' skills from themselves to serve the group's needs than a GM who is better at keeping that separate. A GM who is quick at improvising stats has different needs than someone who needs hours for a single monster's stat block. None of this is ultimately as simple as 'you must always do X' or 'you mustn't ever do X'.

As far as my own style for my own group, I generally do want to forget specifics of PC abilities because I always improvise stat blocks on the fly, and that frees me up from having to worry about whether or not I'm pinning numbers to the party versus pinning numbers to my conception of the power level of a particular creature, NPC, etc in the greater setting. I do want to generally know 'does the party like stealthy solutions, does the party like social solutions, etc', but I don't want to remember say that the party regularly hits DC 40 stealth checks or something like that. That way, when the numbers turn out a certain way, it becomes a meaningful point for the party to come to a conclusion e.g. 'we need to become stealthier to do what we want' or 'we're stealthy enough as is, lets focus on other things'. 'Willfully seeking power when needed is important' vs 'power just lands on you as a result of playing longer' is a major theme in my games, so having that question of 'do we need to seek power?' not be determined on my end is something I value. Different group, different GM, different theme: well, I'd expect the answer to be different too. And I'm not going to say either way that my particular style choices are definitive of either emergent or authored mindsets.

[BRC]

Again though, I think its important to keep a separation between 'things I do to GM' or 'things I think are good GMing' and the particular distinction between Authored and Emergent here. The wrong order to use in any kind of discussion like this is to first pick the word you'd like to describe your GM-ing, then to argue that everything in your GM-ing is in that word and vice versa... It's a completely reasonable style to say 'I'm going to use OOC conversations with the players to plan ahead a game that I and the players have the best possible chance of enjoying'. But 'because it's reasonable, it should be considered Emergent' doesn't follow - that casts Authored as 'the bad style'. It's fine to say 'I like emergence in these things, but there's a boundary where for me and my group it's a lesser good than this other consideration, so we do things differently there'. Hidden information is risky - that's why an Authored stance may be advantageous for groups who are particular about what they enjoy. We can ascribe good properties to Authored stances, that isn't taboo.

But it's also useful to recognize as well that other groups may draw those lines in different places. Some groups may want that danger of hidden information because navigating around those dangers is part of the play to them. Some groups may want to deal with unbalanced scenarios as they hash out, because that makes things feel more visceral or helps with immersion or again is just part of the gameplay for them. So it makes sense to me if someone says 'I don't want to know the PCs' skills' because I can imagine the sort of gaming environment where knowing the PCs' skills would detract. It also makes sense to me if someone says 'I definitely want to know the PCs skills' because I can also imagine that gaming environment and the reasons why for some groups that would be much better. And I can even understand where those differences are a matter of different profiles of GM skill - a GM who recognizes that they have trouble not adjusting enemy stats or DCs of challenges in order to achieve a certain desired result based on where they think the party's current abilities lie may have a greater need to hide aspects of the PCs' skills from themselves to serve the group's needs than a GM who is better at keeping that separate. A GM who is quick at improvising stats has different needs than someone who needs hours for a single monster's stat block. None of this is ultimately as simple as 'you must always do X' or 'you mustn't ever do X'.

As far as my own style for my own group, I generally do want to forget specifics of PC abilities because I always improvise stat blocks on the fly, and that frees me up from having to worry about whether or not I'm pinning numbers to the party versus pinning numbers to my conception of the power level of a particular creature, NPC, etc in the greater setting. I do want to generally know 'does the party like stealthy solutions, does the party like social solutions, etc', but I don't want to remember say that the party regularly hits DC 40 stealth checks or something like that. That way, when the numbers turn out a certain way, it becomes a meaningful point for the party to come to a conclusion e.g. 'we need to become stealthier to do what we want' or 'we're stealthy enough as is, lets focus on other things'. 'Willfully seeking power when needed is important' vs 'power just lands on you as a result of playing longer' is a major theme in my games, so having that question of 'do we need to seek power?' not be determined on my end is something I value. Different group, different GM, different theme: well, I'd expect the answer to be different too. And I'm not going to say either way that my particular style choices are definitive of either emergent or authored mindsets.

[QUOTE=PhoenixPhyre;25453851
A game isn't one or the other. It's a conversation. And open communication during a conversation (not hiding the pieces) makes for better play. I have no interest in trying to be "purely" one side or the other--purity tests get in the way of my real objective, which is to facilitate a fun game for everyone. And I find knowing my player characters strongly helps in accomplishing that objective. Trying to be "objective" and "neutral" actively hinders it. I'm a fan of the characters. I want them to do fantastic, in character things. Which requires me to make the props available and the foils against which to strive meaningful and relevant.[/QUOTE]
I feel like this is brushing up against the Idea of something being Player Driven Vs PC Driven.


A friend of mine was running a Masks game, and at one point one of her players requested that their character get Kidnapped. So a session ended on a cliffhanger as a robot showed up, grabbed the character in question, and flew off with them.

The Player wanted to play through a scenario where their character was kidnapped, because they were very interested in exploring how being rescued by the rest of the party would develop their relationships with other characters.

However, from a PC-Driven perspective, this was pure railroad. A robot that they couldn't stop showed up, grabbed the character, and took them off to a prison cell.

We have this idea that Player Agency Is A Good Thing, because nobody likes to be sat in a chair for 4 hours while the DM reads the first draft of their fantasy novel to you and tells you when to roll dice.

And so a game that responds to what the players do, an "Emergent" game is considered a Good Game because you've given the players a way to shape the game into something they want through gameplay, and "Shape the story through Gameplay" is exactly the sort of agency that bad GMs (Specifically railroaders) deny their players.

But if they can ONLY shape the game through gameplay, that's actually more limiting as far as shaping the game into what they want. A PC can't influence the world to make clues about their father's mysterious disappearance appear. They can LOOK for some clues, but unless the GM put them there to be found, they won't find anything.


It's like PheonixPhyre says, the game is a conversation, and one that happens at multiple levels.

The point is, it's easy to argue for a totally emergent gameplay style, a fully PC driven game, and believe you're the one arguing for the Players to have the most Agency because you're telling the GM to butt out and not try to control things, but there are certain types of agency, agency that people really value, which can only come about through conversation with the GM.

I'm okay with Authored vs Emergent as a dichotomy of Mindset, of how the GM approaches the game, but it's not a simple sliding scale of player agency, where the more Emergent a game is, the more agency Players have.

[NichG]

I feel like this is brushing up against the Idea of something being Player Driven Vs PC Driven.


A friend of mine was running a Masks game, and at one point one of her players requested that their character get Kidnapped. So a session ended on a cliffhanger as a robot showed up, grabbed the character in question, and flew off with them.

The Player wanted to play through a scenario where their character was kidnapped, because they were very interested in exploring how being rescued by the rest of the party would develop their relationships with other characters.

However, from a PC-Driven perspective, this was pure railroad. A robot that they couldn't stop showed up, grabbed the character, and took them off to a prison cell.

We have this idea that Player Agency Is A Good Thing, because nobody likes to be sat in a chair for 4 hours while the DM reads the first draft of their fantasy novel to you and tells you when to roll dice.

And so a game that responds to what the players do, an "Emergent" game is considered a Good Game because you've given the players a way to shape the game into something they want through gameplay, and "Shape the story through Gameplay" is exactly the sort of agency that bad GMs (Specifically railroaders) deny their players.

But if they can ONLY shape the game through gameplay, that's actually more limiting as far as shaping the game into what they want. A PC can't influence the world to make clues about their father's mysterious disappearance appear. They can LOOK for some clues, but unless the GM put them there to be found, they won't find anything.


It's like PheonixPhyre says, the game is a conversation, and one that happens at multiple levels.

The point is, it's easy to argue for a totally emergent gameplay style, a fully PC driven game, and believe you're the one arguing for the Players to have the most Agency because you're telling the GM to butt out and not try to control things, but there are certain types of agency, agency that people really value, which can only come about through conversation with the GM.

I'm okay with Authored vs Emergent as a dichotomy of Mindset, of how the GM approaches the game, but it's not a simple sliding scale of player agency, where the more Emergent a game is, the more agency Players have.

Well I think I said something along these lines earlier, but as far as I see it, Authored vs Emergent isn't really about agency at all. That distinction certainly interacts with agency, but you could have a fully Emergent, zero-agency game if for example all choices made by players were uninformed choices and the game made excessive usage of random tables to determine things like what NPCs do, what's in a particular area, etc. Similarly you could have an extremely high agency Authored game by making the players be the authors. In the same sense, I don't think 'high agency = good, low agency = bad' is a useful way of thinking either.

And in general, anything that tries to make the discussion about 'the good term vs the bad term' without consideration of the needs of a specific play group I think is pretty harmful. It leads to a need to defend one's playstyle as belonging to whatever word people have decided fills the 'good' role, and the stakes of the conversation aren't a deeper understanding of possibilities or an increase in GM-ing tools or anything like that, but rather the creation of new taboos and the exile of a particular subset of playstyles from good company as badwrongfun. So I basically outright reject any argument that starts by trying to divide things into 'what's good' and 'what's bad', because the aim of such arguments doesn't lead to an end with any utility no matter how it gets resolved.

[Vahnavoi]

Here's a secret weapon for preparing sessions in an emergent game: just ask the players what they intend to do next time. No prediction required.

For an open-ended game, there are a lot of valid answers which would be of limited use for such preparation.

To give a simple example: "We want to build a house."

The basic rules I use already have listed prices for common equipment, labor, land, etc. In that respect, no additional work is needed. I could ask for specifications like "where are you going to build it?" and "how big of a house?", except I wouldn't get very far before these questions become the same ones I'd ask during play to resolve the building process. Players trying to tell me what they will do would just become the same as playing the game. Might as well save it for the next session.

[PhoenixPhyre]

A friend of mine was running a Masks game, and at one point one of her players requested that their character get Kidnapped. So a session ended on a cliffhanger as a robot showed up, grabbed the character in question, and flew off with them.

The Player wanted to play through a scenario where their character was kidnapped, because they were very interested in exploring how being rescued by the rest of the party would develop their relationships with other characters.

However, from a PC-Driven perspective, this was pure railroad. A robot that they couldn't stop showed up, grabbed the character, and took them off to a prison cell.

We have this idea that Player Agency Is A Good Thing, because nobody likes to be sat in a chair for 4 hours while the DM reads the first draft of their fantasy novel to you and tells you when to roll dice.

And so a game that responds to what the players do, an "Emergent" game is considered a Good Game because you've given the players a way to shape the game into something they want through gameplay, and "Shape the story through Gameplay" is exactly the sort of agency that bad GMs (Specifically railroaders) deny their players.

But if they can ONLY shape the game through gameplay, that's actually more limiting as far as shaping the game into what they want. A PC can't influence the world to make clues about their father's mysterious disappearance appear. They can LOOK for some clues, but unless the GM put them there to be found, they won't find anything.


It's like PheonixPhyre says, the game is a conversation, and one that happens at multiple levels.

The point is, it's easy to argue for a totally emergent gameplay style, a fully PC driven game, and believe you're the one arguing for the Players to have the most Agency because you're telling the GM to butt out and not try to control things, but there are certain types of agency, agency that people really value, which can only come about through conversation with the GM.

I'm okay with Authored vs Emergent as a dichotomy of Mindset, of how the GM approaches the game, but it's not a simple sliding scale of player agency, where the more Emergent a game is, the more agency Players have.

Right. Players should be able to (in anything I'd like to call Emergent mindset) shape the game. But restricting them to only doing so via the medium of the characters and gameplay sharply limits that ability. I want them to be able to shape the game even before play starts as well as between sessions or during sessions. By everything including
* Discussions around where we want to start and how all the characters know each other
* Character backstories [1]
* Character mechanics
* OOC discussions during non-session time
* OOC discussions during sessions
* Contributing ideas as to worldbuilding both IC and OOC[2].
* Actions taken by the characters during sessions.

Restricting the possibilities to only that last bullet point seems the epitome of having a straight jacket approach and results in unsatisfying games because you can't actually plan anything (even factions or NPCs) with any eye towards hooking onto a player character's exposed eyebolts. All you can do is create random ones. Which has a really high failure-to-engage (with the setting, NPCs, or anything) rate. Sure, it's all you can do if you're pre-writing a sandbox module for a generic audience. But you're guaranteeing that you see fewer interesting emergent events and more frustrated milling around or boredom. It's the difference between a canned lecture without interactivity and a one-one-one or small-group tutoring session. You're giving up most of the power and potential of a TTRPG out of some obsession with "purity". Which means that restricting "emergent" to that one narrow niche makes it seem much less interesting generally.

Additionally, saying that "emergent" == "no planning involving timelines or events" means that you can't actually do anything. Because there are always timelines, there are always events that will happen whenever the PCs don't intervene. Not being able to plan timelines or events means that the world is static, frozen in time until the PCs do something and the world can only react. Which is basically the pathological case of most sandboxes and removes time as a major consequence. Time advances whether they do something or not. Villains have plans, which they're working to bring to fruition. NPCs of all types are pumping events onto the global event queue, as are the PCs. The key difference between authored and emergent, however, is that an emergent DM is planning timelines speculatively, with the possibility of branch prediction failure[3], where the authored one is committing to a finite set of possibilities that will come to pass one way or another.

And then there are events that will happen. There is a (hypothetical) earthquake that will happen on Day X of year Y in place Z. No, you can't stop it from happening--that's not in your choice set (because it's happening deep in the crust in a place you don't and can't know about and involves more energy than every 9th level spell cast at once can provide). That meteor will crash into the planet on the other side, causing a tidal wave. You can choose how you react to it, but it's going to happen. The God of Evil has acquired the Seven Deadly McGuffins (when the game starts) and will unlock the Gate to Hell while you're only level 1. Or 2. So planning for events and their consequences is an essential part of worldbuilding (the world being built out of a chain of events and consequences).

[1] I've had lots of success hooking into people's backstories, mining them for factions, NPCs, world-level events to stick in the queue (possibly to get canceled later), mysteries, and worldbuilding. My current party is engaged in a mission right now based around a backstory NPC getting married and the party getting an invitation. If they didn't attend, the event would happen. Now that they've decided to attend,
[2] I've gotten most of my great ideas from players chatting about things. Most of them involved me (metaphorically) throwing away my notes and deciding "you know what? That makes a whole lot more sense than the explanation I had. Let's go with that.
[3] As in a CPU, which predicts which branch of code will get taken multiple steps ahead but starts doing the work down both branches, being prepared to throw one away when it really finds out which path was taken. Emergent-mindset DMs aren't tied to their planning in any way, where Authored ones are to at least some degree. In the pathological case, they refuse to deviate from their plans to the point of forcing everyone back into the "one true path".

[NichG]

I would say that the emergent mindset would be that rather than planning timelines at all, you prepare motivations, obstacles and costs, levers of power, degrees of inertia and instability, personalities, resources, powers, etc. Timelines are then derived from these things during play. If the PCs do nothing, that doesn't mean the world is static, but you still figure out what happens as you go rather than in advance.

The way to have a high hit rate on player motivations in that kind of approach is to center information acquisition and detail things in response to inquiries rather than trying to have everything ready beforehand. So the players should feel comfortable saying e.g. 'I'm looking into advice about starting a winery' and then you react to that on the fly with increased detail. As opposed to 'well, I need to know you're going into the winery business before game starts so I can come up with wine-related plotlines'.

That is a valid style. You're allowed to have a different style that one. You don't have to have or desire a pure emergent style for us to discuss what a pure emergent style might look like or how one might alternately resolve these issues to make it work.

[Quertus]

And yet each state in the middle likely will be different - two playthroughs won't look the same, even if they start from the same initial save.

And I'm making a hard line on "emergent games can have a goal" because a lot do, and that provides direction, and I'm deliberately countering the false criticism of emergent games that they can't have direction.

The only way to slay BBEG Thanos is with the McGuffin of Infinity. It doesn't matter what else you do during the game, nothing else actually matters. No plan you can ever have will ever succeed, unless you use the pre-scripted McGuffin (in exactly the right way, at exactly the right time, used by exactly the right person...). There is only 1 way to succeed.

The players are free to do whatever irrelevant fluff they desire, so long as they follow the rails of the GM's story.

I suspect you wouldn't call that Emergent? Or maybe I'm too caught up in the old definitions.

Because, most of the gameplay is Emergent. But most of the gameplay is also irrelevant.

I feel that this is the most important part of the conversation, so I'm singling this bit out to poke at.

[Stonehead]

From my POV, emergent and authored GMs plan differently. To put it in a pithy way, authored GMs plan content, emergent GMs plan scaffolding. IOW, the point of planning from an emergent GM's POV isn't "this is what the players will do", it's "front-load creative decisions so that I understand the situation well enough that I can effectively and seamlessly improvise."

If that makes sense.

Detail is usually based on a kind of conceptual distance - the things that the PCs are currently dealing with will have more prep, the things adjacent to them will have some, and the things that are unrelated get very little.

See, I think this is why I have a hard time trying to understand the dichotomy. To me, it looks like a bunch of people saying there's two types of DMs. Emergent DMs do <Thing A>, but Authored DMs do <Thing not mutually exclusive to A>. Nothing stops you from prepping a situation to be improvised on later and focus on a theoretical path you expect the players to take. I know when I DM, I draw out all the major forces so I can properly adapt to the players' actions at the table. And I try predict (to varying degrees of accuracy) what the players will do, so I can put more effort into those areas of the game. And I don't think I'm some outlier with a unique DMing style, that's how most people I know do it.

I think it really comes down to your mindset when you approach your planning.

The trick is that the "Authored" and "Emergent" sessions can have exactly the same gameplay, assuming the authored DM is a decent enough improviser, and doesn't mind abandoning their plans.

And then stuff like this muddies the water a whole lot more. If there are two completely different approaches to a game, but the sessions in each type can look indistinguishable from each other, what's the distinction about? Maybe there is some difference at the heart of what's being talked about, but if it's actually about different mindsets, I start to doubt it's usefulness as a discrete binary classification system.

I'm not saying there's no distinction to be made, but the sentiment "I like authored games, not emergent games" or vise-versa really lose their meaning if the two "can have exactly the same gameplay".

[Quertus]

Personally, the idea that the DM shouldn't know or care about the player characters, their personalities, etc is, to me, missing the entire point. We're discovering the story of those characters. And I can't play the NPCs properly without knowing that.

Can you also not roleplay a PC without knowing the NPC's personality, stats, and intended role in the narrative?

(Presumably, that's not what you're saying -> "what do you really mean?")

Right. Players should be able to (in anything I'd like to call Emergent mindset) shape the game. But restricting them to only doing so via the medium of the characters and gameplay sharply limits that ability. I want them to be able to shape the game even before play starts as well as between sessions or during sessions. By everything including
* Discussions around where we want to start and how all the characters know each other
* Character backstories [1]
* Character mechanics
* OOC discussions during non-session time
* OOC discussions during sessions
* Contributing ideas as to worldbuilding both IC and OOC[2].
* Actions taken by the characters during sessions.

Restricting the possibilities to only that last bullet point seems the epitome of having a straight jacket approach and results in unsatisfying games because you can't actually plan anything (even factions or NPCs) with any eye towards hooking onto a player character's exposed eyebolts. All you can do is create random ones. Which has a really high failure-to-engage (with the setting, NPCs, or anything) rate. Sure, it's all you can do if you're pre-writing a sandbox module for a generic audience. But you're guaranteeing that you see fewer interesting emergent events and more frustrated milling around or boredom. It's the difference between a canned lecture without interactivity and a one-one-one or small-group tutoring session. You're giving up most of the power and potential of a TTRPG out of some obsession with "purity". Which means that restricting "emergent" to that one narrow niche makes it seem much less interesting generally.

Or build more connective factions and PCs?

So, take... Harry Potter, the 4 houses of Hogwarts. Then take some of my characters chosen "at random" (OK, not really, just the first ones to come to mind).

Most show my bias as a Slitherclaw, and would connect with Ravenclaw, or maybe Slitherin. A few could connect with Hufflepuff, or even Griffindor.

Most, it's easy to see how they'd form connections (positive or negative) with one or more professors. The students? Eh, that's a little... most of the student body is a little less interesting, IMO - few connections are quite as obvious there for my characters.

Or take Marvel, where you've got SHIELD, the Avengers, Hydra, the Illuminawhati. That's... much less interesting, from an arbitrary character PoV. Few of my characters would want much interaction with any of those organizations.

The 5 factions from Divergent (etc)? Erudite, Candor, Dauntless, Amity and Abnegation would all see takers (obviously, some of my characters are Divergent ).

The MTG color wheel? Nah, the Ravnica 10 guilds. Hmmm... Izzet, Dimir, Selesnia, Boros, Rakdos, maybe Simic - yeah, I can quickly see my selected characters getting involved with those organizations.

The Forgotten Realms deities? Eh, that one's a bit harder, as most of my characters already have a defined religious stance (even if that stance is "get your superstitious mumbo-jumbo away from me" or "why, yes, I did create the universe, but I prefer to go by 'Steve' these days"), so it's harder to imagine them interacting well with alternate religions.

But characters who don't have a strong religious stance? Hmmm... they might check out Mask, Azuth (and laugh at the notion of Mystra as a valid deity), Balal, one whose name I don't remember, and... Ilsensine, oddly enough. I doubt they'd be instant strong converts (Balal, I think, would be very not what that character was looking for, once they got into the details), but there's religions in that world that would pique their interests.

That's what I want when I look at someone else's world - enough sufficiently interesting elements to catch my attention. Repeatedly. No matter what character's PoV I take. A world worth interacting with.

Put another way... I can see how the Illuminati is cool for Doctor Strange. But if his player drops out of the game, that's so much work that's now wasted, now useless to the players.

Whereas, if the mad scientist / environmentalist / half-angel half-daemon leaves the party, Izzet / Golgari / Orzov still has an active presence in the world - one that the party can see, and might want to interact with. And, even if that player/PC are still present, the rest of the party may still find the guild's actions to provide them motivation, independent of the one PC who is "most interested" in the guild.

The key difference between authored and emergent, however, is that an emergent DM is planning timelines speculatively, with the possibility of branch prediction failure[3], where the authored one is committing to a finite set of possibilities that will come to pass one way or another.

[3] As in a CPU, which predicts which branch of code will get taken multiple steps ahead but starts doing the work down both branches, being prepared to throw one away when it really finds out which path was taken. Emergent-mindset DMs aren't tied to their planning in any way, where Authored ones are to at least some degree. In the pathological case, they refuse to deviate from their plans to the point of forcing everyone back into the "one true path".

FWIW, I think I tend to plot out one (or more) timeline(s), and then get proactive enough players to guarantee that said timeline does not come to pass. But running through that timeline gives me practice roleplaying the NPCs, knowledge of their history and motivations, so that I can roleplay their interactions with the PCs.

Not sure if that helps or muddies the waters wrt doing a "chicken / not chicken" test for Authored vs Emergent in that regard.

[Tanarii]

From my POV, emergent and authored GMs plan differently. To put it in a pithy way, authored GMs plan content, emergent GMs plan scaffolding. IOW, the point of planning from an emergent GM's POV isn't "this is what the players will do", it's "front-load creative decisions so that I understand the situation well enough that I can effectively and seamlessly improvise."

If that makes sense.

Okay, so you're really talking about planned vs freeform.

In that case, I see both linear and sandboxes as planned, and freeform (winging it) is it's own thing that is neither.

Although folks do like to call their winging it games "sandboxes".

[Vahnavoi]

See, I think this is why I have a hard time trying to understand the dichotomy. To me, it looks like a bunch of people saying there's two types of DMs. Emergent DMs do <Thing A>, but Authored DMs do <Thing not mutually exclusive to A>. Nothing stops you from prepping a situation to be improvised on later and focus on a theoretical path you expect the players to take. I know when I DM, I draw out all the major forces so I can properly adapt to the players' actions at the table. And I try predict (to varying degrees of accuracy) what the players will do, so I can put more effort into those areas of the game. And I don't think I'm some outlier with a unique DMing style, that's how most people I know do it.

[...]

And then stuff like this muddies the water a whole lot more. If there are two completely different approaches to a game, but the sessions in each type can look indistinguishable from each other, what's the distinction about? Maybe there is some difference at the heart of what's being talked about, but if it's actually about different mindsets, I start to doubt it's usefulness as a discrete binary classification system.

I'm not saying there's no distinction to be made, but the sentiment "I like authored games, not emergent games" or vise-versa really lose their meaning if the two "can have exactly the same gameplay".

I'm tempted to copy-paste my earlier Chess puzzle thought experiment here in its entirety, but maybe we'd be better off using Conway's Game of Life.

The error which makes seeing the difference between authored and emergent content hard is expecting to see it by looking at the simplest steps of gameplay. Except that this is exactly the opposite of how emergence is observed. You don't see it by looking at step-by-step gameplay, you need to zoom out and take a wider view of how the simple steps operate in total.

For example, in Conway's game of life, each cell in every initial pattern is processed by the same simple rules. You cannot find the difference between a "still life" (a static pattern) and a "spaceship" (a pattern that appears to move across a grid) on the level of individual cells. You have to look at an entire cluster of cells for multiple game rounds to spot the difference.

Now, once a pattern has been identified as having some emergent quality, it is possible to start a new game of life and make the pattern with known emergent qualities part of the initial pattern. If all you can see as an outside observer is the frozen pattern, it is impossible to know if it was directly placed by a human (authored) or if there was a previous, unseen pattern from which it was derived (emergent). To know the difference, you have to know how the pattern got there.

When applied to roleplaying games, the game master ought to know by default, because they're the one setting up their game. That's the thing. The most relevant discussion on the topic is always on how to design games and scenarios, from the viewpoint of people who do so and can easily spot the difference.

For contrast, if you are a player of an imperfect information game, there isn't necessarily an easy way to tell the difference. Quite often, the only way to tell the difference would be to play the same game multiple times, doing different things to see if they produce different results. If you aren't doing that, then it boils down to a matter of trust and faith.

That's the abstract, theoretical level. The obvious conclusion would be that having strong preferences of how a game is designed does not make much sense. A game being authored or a game being emergent are not terminal goals, they're instrumental ones: as a game master, you choose one over the other depending on which serves your overall design goals, and there isn't a strong incentive to make that choice once for the entire game. As a player, you only care about gameplay, not how it came to be.

There is a more practical level to it, though, which is where we get to those mindsets. A lot of game masters are stuck in an authorial mindset, meaning they don't utilize emergence in game design and may actively fight it during gameplay. Other game masters, based on the notion that players can't easily tell the difference, use that as an excuse to keep doing that (and various other questionable things). The joke is that players can sometimes tell the difference, but even when they don't, what they believe to be the case changes how they behave. People who think they have to follow the game master's premade plan act differently from people who feel free to pursue their own plans.

[kyoryu]

Okay, so you're really talking about planned vs freeform.

In that case, I see both linear and sandboxes as planned, and freeform (winging it) is it's own thing that is neither.

Although folks do like to call their winging it games "sandboxes".

I don't think so, really, since emergent games can involve a lot of planning. Just planning different types of things.

See, I think this is why I have a hard time trying to understand the dichotomy. To me, it looks like a bunch of people saying there's two types of DMs. Emergent DMs do <Thing A>, but Authored DMs do <Thing not mutually exclusive to A>. Nothing stops you from prepping a situation to be improvised on later and focus on a theoretical path you expect the players to take. I know when I DM, I draw out all the major forces so I can properly adapt to the players' actions at the table. And I try predict (to varying degrees of accuracy) what the players will do, so I can put more effort into those areas of the game. And I don't think I'm some outlier with a unique DMing style, that's how most people I know do it.

That sounds mostly emergent, though my experience is that usually when GMs start planning out a particular path, they end up putting their thumb on the scale.

I mean, I can't think of a single session I've run that's gone anywhere near the way I thought it might have. Part of that is also the fact that, the way I run things, I assume each encounter/scene can go poorly, so even if I guess right about what the players will do, I can't guess right about where they'll succeed and fail.

When I hear GMs talk about "I'm just really good at guessing what they'll do" I suspect that what's actually happening is the GM is breadcrumbing or softly discouraging the non-preferred path, and the players are assuming it's more linear/authored than maybe it is, and that combines to looking (to the GM) like they're really good at guessing and (to the players) like they're in a linear or authored game.

I'm not saying there's no distinction to be made, but the sentiment "I like authored games, not emergent games" or vise-versa really lose their meaning if the two "can have exactly the same gameplay".

I really, really don't think they do.

Is it theoretically possible? Sure, in the same way that it's theoretically possible that a chess club having ten matches will all play the same moves in each game, randomly.

[BRC]

I
That sounds mostly emergent, though my experience is that usually when GMs start planning out a particular path, they end up putting their thumb on the scale.

I mean, I can't think of a single session I've run that's gone anywhere near the way I thought it might have. Part of that is also the fact that, the way I run things, I assume each encounter/scene can go poorly, so even if I guess right about what the players will do, I can't guess right about where they'll succeed and fail.

When I hear GMs talk about "I'm just really good at guessing what they'll do" I suspect that what's actually happening is the GM is breadcrumbing or softly discouraging the non-preferred path, and the players are assuming it's more linear/authored than maybe it is, and that combines to looking (to the GM) like they're really good at guessing and (to the players) like they're in a linear or authored game.

The thing is, this depends so wildly on the scenario, and also how detailed the "Authoring" Goes.

In some scenarios, or if you asked your players last time what their plan is this time, it is infact quite easy to guess what they will do.

And if your "Authoring" is limited to something like "They will win this combat", then it's quite easy to have an Authored scenario without requiring your thumb on the scale at all. At least at the Micro level.

Other scenarios guessing player's actions is going to be nigh impossible without steering them towards one path or another.



Or, sometimes you know exactly what they'll do for the first chunk of the session (They will Fight the Bandits!) but have no idea what they'll do after that, so your prep is both Authored and Emergent.
"The PC's defeat the Bandits and then encounter [Scenario designed for Emergent Gameplay]"


I often use the pattern of

End a session with a scenario where the PC's are presented with a choice

Prepare the next session based on the choice they made/the intentions they stated

Spend at least the first chunk of the next session resolving the choice they made at the end of the previous session.


Which I'd call "Authored" (Especially if the choice they made was to start a combat encounter, which can eat like 60% of our play time easily), but I wouldn't call it Guessing, since, ya know, I just asked them and they told me

And I feel like the end result is pretty similar to if I built an Emergent scenario and started by presenting them with that choice, and was just really really good at improv/ had prepped everything.


Edit: I feel like there's a difference in mindset between

"This is what I plan to happen, but I'm cool if something else happens"

And "Here is the scenario, and I'm going to put a little extra effort into what I deem is the most likely outcome"

[kyoryu]

Edit: I feel like there's a difference in mindset between

"This is what I plan to happen, but I'm cool if something else happens"

And "Here is the scenario, and I'm going to put a little extra effort into what I deem is the most likely outcome"

Yes, exactly. Exactly this.

I even pointed out that even the most emergent GM might put extra time into certain events.

At some point, though, if you're cool if something else happens, and okay with it enough, and leave it open enough, then the prep you're putting into the predicted path becomes a waste of time most of the time and you stop doing that.

And if you're predicting/planning enough scenes, and the players are hitting them enough, at some point the game isn't really that emergent any more.

That's pretty much exactly what I meant by the phase transition analogy earlier. You can have ice with some water on it, or water with some ice in it. But in the vast majority of situations, you look at it and say "that's ice" or "that's water". We don't say something isn't water because it has a few ice cubes in it.

[Easy e]

Yes, exactly. Exactly this.

I even pointed out that even the most emergent GM might put extra time into certain events.

At some point, though, if you're cool if something else happens, and okay with it enough, and leave it open enough, then the prep you're putting into the predicted path becomes a waste of time most of the time and you stop doing that.

And if you're predicting/planning enough scenes, and the players are hitting them enough, at some point the game isn't really that emergent any more.

That's pretty much exactly what I meant by the phase transition analogy earlier. You can have ice with some water on it, or water with some ice in it. But in the vast majority of situations, you look at it and say "that's ice" or "that's water". We don't say something isn't water because it has a few ice cubes in it.

For gaming purposes, it seems like a distinction that is not relevant at all.

Let's look at Curse of Strahd as an example. Is this emergent or authored? On its face, it appears to be authored as it is a pre-made module, there has to be an authored path. Yet, it is also just a set of locations with stuff happening with no set way to "complete" the path.

You could also say that it is just a series of Nodes or a scaffold of information taking place in Barovia. I mean my group spent way too much time trying to set up a Multi-level marketing scheme centered around the Wizard of Wine instead of dealing with the actual plot.

A GM could choose to run CoS Authored or Emergent?

I think I can conceptually see the difference, BUT am having a hard time seeing how it is relevant information? So, if you were going to pitch a CoS game to your group how do you describe it? I guess it depends on how the GM intends to run it?

[Stonehead]

For contrast, if you are a player of an imperfect information game, there isn't necessarily an easy way to tell the difference. Quite often, the only way to tell the difference would be to play the same game multiple times, doing different things to see if they produce different results. If you aren't doing that, then it boils down to a matter of trust and faith.

That's the abstract, theoretical level. The obvious conclusion would be that having strong preferences of how a game is designed does not make much sense. A game being authored or a game being emergent are not terminal goals, they're instrumental ones: as a game master, you choose one over the other depending on which serves your overall design goals, and there isn't a strong incentive to make that choice once for the entire game. As a player, you only care about gameplay, not how it came to be.

There is a more practical level to it, though, which is where we get to those mindsets. A lot of game masters are stuck in an authorial mindset, meaning they don't utilize emergence in game design and may actively fight it during gameplay. Other game masters, based on the notion that players can't easily tell the difference, use that as an excuse to keep doing that (and various other questionable things). The joke is that players can sometimes tell the difference, but even when they don't, what they believe to be the case changes how they behave. People who think they have to follow the game master's premade plan act differently from people who feel free to pursue their own plans.

I'm not saying there's no distinction to be made, but the sentiment "I like authored games, not emergent games" or vise-versa really lose their meaning if the two "can have exactly the same gameplay".

I really, really don't think they do.

Is it theoretically possible? Sure, in the same way that it's theoretically possible that a chess club having ten matches will all play the same moves in each game, randomly.

Maybe I'm having a hard time understanding it, because I'm getting what seems to be conflicting information.

One group seems to be saying the dichotomy is between trends of DM mindset and that the intentions and perceptions are important, because the actual gameplay doesn't always differ very much, while the other group seems to be saying they're different classes of games with completely different structures and audiences.

The "I like X games, not Y games" sentiment, and the "X and Y are really about the mindset of the people involved, and the gameplay is sometimes indistinguishable" sentiment seem (to me at least) to be conflicting with each other.

The "X and Y are discrete categories without overlap" sentiment, and the "X and Y are about mindset" sentiment also seem conflicting. It's true that the DM's mindset will influence the gameplay, but human beings' mindsets don't fall into clean, discrete categories. In fact, in most aspects I've seen, human beings tend to fall into a bell curve centered at the average. Not even two mostly separate groups with a few strange edge cases.

[Vahnavoi]

Let's go even simpler, then:

Two distinct processes with different underlying structure can sometimes produce the same outcome. People who are fixated on the outcome and don't know the processes might neither notice nor care. People who know the processes will have a stronger opinion because they understand the processes don't always lead to the same outcome.

Does that clear the conflict?

[kyoryu]

Let's go even simpler, then:

Two distinct processes can sometimes produce the same outcome. People who are fixated on the outcome and don't know the processes might neither notice or care. People who

I think there's a slight modification I'd make.

Two distinct processes can sometimes produce the same outcome - however, they often (or usually) will not.

The range of outcomes produced by these processes may have overlap, but that does not mean that they are the same range. Or, more concretely, Process A may output results A, B, C, D, E, F. Process B may output results F, G, H, I, J, K, L.

If my preference is the results in the F-L range, I will prefer Process B, even though either one of them can produce result F.

Since clearly there are people that do prefer Emergent games over Authored games, and vice versa, it seems a bit difficult from my PoV to claim that they're the same thing. There is an apparent difference to some people. I think it leads to more interesting discussion if we take people at face value on that, and try to figure out what those perceived differences are, rather than assert that they do not exist.

My daughter prefers Mint Chocolate Chip Blizzards at Dairy Queen to the Thin Mint Blizzards. I don't see how those can really be different, but she does. Telling her that she's wrong and there's no difference seems counter-productive. Taking her at her word makes sense, and if I really care, asking her about the difference makes a lot of sense.

[KorvinStarmast]

My daughter prefers Mint Chocolate Chip Blizzards at Dairy Queen to the Thin Mint Blizzards. I don't see how those can really be different, but she does. Telling her that she's wrong and there's no difference seems counter-productive. Taking her at her word makes sense, and if I really care, asking her about the difference makes a lot of sense.

Which takes us back to
(1) I {think that I} know it when I see it.
(2) Arguing about taste.
(3) Something like the problem when having an argument, or discussion, with one's spouse where what someone feels becomes more important than anything factual.

It isn't just me who is finding the attempt at a distinction, from the title and the OP, both elusive and a little bit frustrating. But I do believe you when you tell me that those labels have meaning for you.

In and amongst the noise in this thread there is some useful signal.