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

[KorvinStarmast]

IMO the biggest difference between the traditional "linear vs sandbox" dichotomy was how active the world was. It isn't always true, but typically, a narrative game will have pretty clear stakes, where the players react to the threats made by the world (and the npcs that inhabit the world). A sandbox game will have more active players, and a more reactive world. The players are given a map (usually), and actively decide which part of the world they'll interact with, and the world reacts to their choices. So it is subtly different than your "emergent vs authored" dichotomy.

As I like to describe it, the world does some things as a consequence of player actions and decisions, and the world does some things despite player actions and decisions.

[KillianHawkeye]

Railroad and sandbox are metaphors. What do we gain by replacing them with more explicit terms like authored and emergent? The meaning is the same, either way. Now we're just having a discussion over semantics.

[LecternOfJasper]

I can think of one specific example in which a dimension hopping army secretly started invading, planning to take over the world. When the PCs discovered their plans, the odds seemed so overwhelming, that they decided to use their portals to try to evacuate their dimension, instead of fighting off the entire invading army. The GM readjusted his plans, and the campaign continued down this new route. That example really seems to bridge the line between authored and emergent, because the GM clearly did author a story, 90% of it even came to be, but the players drastically altered the direction of the story, so it would be pretty hard to say it was not an emergent game.

This tends to be my experience when it comes to games that I actually enjoy. Usually there's something major happening in the world that you can antagonize or roll with as you'd like, though the DM probably has come up with a few ideas down the most likely routes. It seems that the definitions used in the OP's comments indicate that this is emergent gameplay, as this counts as a "world set up before hand with things going on" more so than a set story path.

So, provided the ending and middling bits are not set in stone (as in, the players role in the world), then the larger story beats planned by the GM become more "huge existing piece of material" as in icefractal's second example than "definite plot in mind, with some gaps in between" as in icefractal's third example.

As I like to describe it, the world does some things as a consequence of player actions and decisions, and the world does some things despite player actions and decisions.

Release an ancient and vile yuan-ti king into the world, learn he has a bag of ancient and quite binding contracts with a bunch of arbitrary forces and peoples, show him to the nearest town, plan a coup in front of him, double cross him, steal the one arm he has left, get ran out of town by the local mercenary/dictator, and just leave it like that?

Those choices will definitely have some consequences. Meanwhile, of course, they can be interacting with other factions and people, forming alliances, hunting for immortality, or whatever, which will have their own consequences, while the yuan-ti king consolidates his own power. At the same time, the dwarves have their own issues... and so the world turns.

Railroad and sandbox are metaphors. What do we gain by replacing them with more explicit terms like authored and emergent? The meaning is the same, either way. Now we're just having a discussion over semantics.

The Playground's favorite game is and always has been Dungeons & Semantics. Some people just got confused and started talking about the other game sometimes

[Lord Raziere]

Railroad and sandbox are metaphors. What do we gain by replacing them with more explicit terms like authored and emergent? The meaning is the same, either way. Now we're just having a discussion over semantics.

metaphors are the problem. metaphors are indirect and often prone to miscommunication, since a metaphor can be interpreted in different ways. if you don't know the intended meaning of the metaphor or it can be used in different ways positively or negatively, your just causing conflict.

more explicit terms are clearer. I've seen railroading used too often as an insult and synonym for bad GMing. I've seen sandbox talked up way too positively. there is emotional attachment and history to these terms that make them difficult to use neutrally. authored and emergent sound more neutral.

[PhoenixPhyre]

metaphors are the problem. metaphors are indirect and often prone to miscommunication, since a metaphor can be interpreted in different ways. if you don't know the intended meaning of the metaphor or it can be used in different ways positively or negatively, your just causing conflict.

more explicit terms are clearer. I've seen railroading used too often as an insult and synonym for bad GMing. I've seen sandbox talked up way too positively. there is emotional attachment and history to these terms that make them difficult to use neutrally. authored and emergent sound more neutral.

If metaphors are the problem, the why use metaphorical terms like "authored" or "emergent" either? Even if everyone accepted those, the euphemism treadmill would guarantee that they'd be back to pejoratives/boosters real darn quick.

Better, in my mind at least, to break it down and talk about the specific expectations. Some people want substantial freedom to influence things at <insert list of arenas/levels/areas here>. Others are fine with mostly following someone else's lead, whether that's another player or the DM's lead.

Won't solve internet discussions, because nothing can solve those.

[Lord Raziere]

If metaphors are the problem, the why use metaphorical terms like "authored" or "emergent" either? Even if everyone accepted those, the euphemism treadmill would guarantee that they'd be back to pejoratives/boosters real darn quick.

Better, in my mind at least, to break it down and talk about the specific expectations. Some people want substantial freedom to influence things at <insert list of arenas/levels/areas here>. Others are fine with mostly following someone else's lead, whether that's another player or the DM's lead.

Won't solve internet discussions, because nothing can solve those.

*roll eyes*

with that attitude nothing gets improved. you believe in the treadmill, you let it exist and control you. self-fulfilling prophecy logic: "it'll go back to being horrible anyways so why make it less horrible?"

[PhoenixPhyre]

*roll eyes*

with that attitude nothing gets improved. you believe in the treadmill, you let it exist and control you. self-fulfilling prophecy logic: "it'll go back to being horrible anyways so why make it less horrible?"

I've seen it happen too many times. In too many contexts. And I firmly believe that Internet discussions are secondary (in the TTRPG context)--all that matters is what happens at individual tables. And learning to communicate better there, without all the obscurantist jargon and metaphors does make that better.

No matter what terms are used, they'll be weaponized by people who want to. Nothing can stop that. So it's just best to ignore that facet entirely and use the plainest, clearest language possible.

[Lord Raziere]

I've seen it happen too many times. In too many contexts. And I firmly believe that Internet discussions are secondary (in the TTRPG context)--all that matters is what happens at individual tables. And learning to communicate better there, without all the obscurantist jargon and metaphors does make that better.

No matter what terms are used, they'll be weaponized by people who want to. Nothing can stop that. So it's just best to ignore that facet entirely and use the plainest, clearest language possible.

And I've seen too many naysayers say things like you do, to put up with this attitude that everything sucks and nothing can change. I don't care how hard won your "wisdom" is. the OP had a good idea in maybe redefining it so that its clearer, but apparently even the smallest change is bad and will only lead to the same.

I communicate just fine in the clear language you talk about at my tables yes, thats why I don't care your stating the obvious. therefore tables aren't the problem and don't need to be solved. therefore I'm not talking about solving tables.

[Tanarii]

Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Of course, I'm not big on how it kind of implies there's some story involved here, one way or the other. 😂

[icefractal]

"Authored" and "Emergent" are pretty high-level, especially if it's viewed as binary. As a component of describing a game? Sure. As the primary description? Not nearly sufficient.

Hell, even "Agency" is a pretty squishy term, really. Let's take a relatively common situation - the party is trying to do a fairly open-ended task like "get this defunct giant robot running (for at least a few hours)" or "convince the rulership of this city to form an alliance". There are at least two schools of thought on which way of resolving it gives the most player agency:

A) The components of the situation should be detailed out ahead of time, enough for emergent solutions to be possible. Then any action by the players should be evaluated as impartially as possible, so that it's as much like they're interacting with a real situation as it can be. This maximizes agency because they succeed or fail by the merits of their own plan, not by what the GM wants to happen. This fails to provide agency because it relies on the players being in-sync enough with the GM to perceive the same paths to success that said GM does.

B) The components of the situation should be detailed enough to give the players good grounds for inspiration. Then any action by the players should be evaluated as positively as possible, so that if it's at all plausible for it to work, it will work. This maximizes agency because the players can solve the situation in any plausible way, not constrained by what the GM happened to think of ahead of time. This fails to provide agency because regardless of the players plan, most paths will lead to the same (successful) outcome, making their choices less important.

[Quertus]

Railroad and sandbox are metaphors. What do we gain by replacing them with more explicit terms like authored and emergent? The meaning is the same, either way. Now we're just having a discussion over semantics.

Which metaphor we choose determines how people will abuse it. Note, for example, that I believe that "Railroading" is negative by definition, and use it as a pejorative, whereas I'm quite neutral on "Linear".

Also,

More or less, yes. However both "sandbox" and "linear" (or especially "railroad") have connotations that aren't useful. Specifically sandbox often implies a lack of things happening, which is not necessary - many if not most emergent games have various things in motion, but how they end up is not predetermined.

Precisely this.

Yet I would argue that I have played and run games that are even less authored. Well we still made them up, in fact we make them up during the game. And by "we" I do mean the table, the players usually participate in this indirectly but it still isn't a sandbox because the GM has prepared toys ahead of time. They are created from the character's drives and motives** and it is something that is also fundamentally different than a sandbox.

Yes, those are emergent games, and why I'm avoiding the term "sandbox". Amount of prep is fairly orthogonal.

I wasn't aware that "sandbox" carried the (False) connotation of "nothing's happening". It seems that, much like my CaS vs Caw example, we should work to refine our terms, to get to the heart of the matter, and rip out all the fat.

Which begs the question, does anyone believe "Authored" (or "Scripted") vs "Emergent" are better tied to this pure core than "Sandbox" and "Linear"?

Thank you. I'm trying to hit on the key parts of what "sandbox" people really want.

Either you know what's going to happen, or you don't. In Mass Effect 1, everybody's game ends up facing down Saren on the Citadel. In Civilization, everybody's game ends entirely differently, and different events will happen. Mass Effect has a cool story and setpiece encounters, Civilization has an unpredictable situation where your decisions ripple out and have long-lasting repercussions.

It's not the elements that determine if a game is authored or emergent - it's the path that the players take. You can have as well-defined of a setting as you want, if the players are still largely in control of how things play out, it's an emergent game.

To go back to the Civilization example, you could take a saved game on the first turn and hand it to five different players - each one would likely get a different game, and often significantly different. The "history" of their events would read very differently. And yet all of the elements of the game are set in that saved game.

OTOH, you can take those same five players and have them play Mass Effect - and they're still going to hit exactly the same major beats along their path. Some of the side effects may differ (do they save the Rachni or kill them?), but they're going to go on the same major five or six missions, and they'll share a subset of the side quests. Some of the orders may change, but they're essentially going through the same sequence of events, even if shuffled around a bit.

It's still a computer game. There are limitations.

Even if there are only certain win conditions, different players will go through very different paths to get to whatever end they choose to pursue, even starting from the same seed/save game. One player may war with England, make peace with India, and so on and so forth, while another player just huddles up and works on their tech tree. The "stories" of their game will be

This feels very disingenous to me. Computer games have inherent limitations, and if you can't see the difference between Civ and Mass Effect in terms of how emergent/plotted they are, then you're willfully ignoring them.

No, when I refer to "authored" I don't mean the world - I mean the path that hte players take.

Well, that's the thing - what I want out of a sandbox is for the entire path - including and especially the end - to not be pre-scripted.

And Civilization could do that, despite being a computer game. It's just a matter of, well, treating it like point buy instead of classes. Instead of "you win when you achieve one of these 5 classes", just set the win conditions to "you win when you have X points". Then the win conditions are, shock and surprise, Emergent.

Which was why I was arguing that Civilization must be called "Authored", at least insofar as its win conditions are concerned.

And, if we're talking about, as you put it, "the key parts of what "sandbox" people really want", then Civilization must be in the "not what I want", in the "Authored" camp.

This is the part I really wanted to address. I think you actually missed a step in 5.

5. If the scene is over, let the players decide their next move.
6. Start the next scene and return to 1.

or something like that.



So I think it's actually in step 6. In step 6, it's railroading if the choices made in 5 are irrelevant - either through outright negation or manipulation. That's an extreme level of railroading, of course, but it's the fundamental problem from my PoV as an emergent-preferred player. That negation can be through lack of choices (All exits but one are cut off) by inaction (nothing will progress until you do the right thing) by illusion (quantum ogre) or something else. And in less extreme versions, you can probably do some optional things or change up some ordering (again, see Mass Effect). But it's still primarily authored.

If this is what you really want to talk about... I'd say "talk about it more", but... I'm not sure that there's more to say?

Although I always thought of Railroading as something that would appear in this context as "only accepting a single way that a scene will end" ("the only way to..."), and negating any action that would run contrary to that intention.

Using the computer game examples:
Strict - you start at A, follow events B to C to D, and end up at Z. These are the scripted first person shooters.
Less strict - you start A, you may or may not do a number of different things from B C D, and you get ending X Y or Z based on those. The 'choose your mission' games with multiple endings.
Fairly Open - you may start A B or C, choose to do or not do stuff in the middle, and end at X Y or Z. The 'choose your mission' with different starts & endings, or the Civ style games I guess.
Way Open - choose from lots and lots of possible starting points, do anything possible in the game, no defined ending. DwarfFortress (mermaid farming, Turing comlete minecart & pressure plate computers), maybe Minecraft.

Funny thing, when I start a campaign it usually starts strict then walks quickly through the spectrum to fully open. Its like, run the first session strict, then less strict to fairly open during the first "mission"/mini-adventure, then fairly open next, and after the second mini-adventure it gets to fully open. Interesting, hadn't thought about it that way before.

Is there an existing example computer game that has the "way open" model, but doesn't end at X Y or Z, but simply when the user accumulates the required number of victory points? Or are you counting "victory" as "point X", regardless of whether you did so by rescuing the kidnapped dragon from the evil princess, selling the evil princess a copy of "how to train your dragon", or killing all the gods and letting you sort them out?

[Telok]

Is there an existing example computer game that has the "way open" model, but doesn't end at X Y or Z, but simply when the user accumulates the required number of victory points? Or are you counting "victory" as "point X", regardless of whether you did so by rescuing the kidnapped dragon from the evil princess, selling the evil princess a copy of "how to train your dragon", or killing all the gods and letting you sort them out?

Good question. I fell out of much of the computer game market a fair time ago... Ah, the old Railroad Tycoon perhaps? I don't recall the exact end point of that, may not have had one and my game strat was whack strange anyways (I won tho).

[Amidus Drexel]

I think "authored" and "emergent" are good at describing a scene - a single interaction or room might be pre-written or improvised (or both; a pre-planned interaction might go into an unexpected direction with player input).

At the scale of a campaign, though, I think you'd expect to see both in all but the most linear of authored games (here lie some significant portion of modules as well as the archetypical "firmly on the rails" game).

[Cheesegear]

An emergent game, on the other hand, doesn't have that. Sure, there can be some initial elements, but what the players do is fundamentally unknown, and how the world changes in response to their actions is also fundamentally unknown. Players can do basically whatever they want.

I wrote a post about something like this that I do, but it didn't really fit the threads I was in at the time, so I get it go.

But in this case I'll talk about Towns.

My Towns don't really start with much.
- They start with the size I want them to be
- A major industry that supports the economy around it
- And a method of government.

I don't have...:
- Named NPCs
- Names locations
- Maps
...Yet.

My players will then ask me questions about the town:
- Is there a smithy? What kind?
- Can someone silver my weapon?
- Is there a Wizard? Cleric? More specfically, a Druid?
- What's the roughest bar in the town where I can fight someone and the cops don't get called?
- Is there a nice pub nearby where merchants drink wine?
- I want something shadier
- My character is looking for a library
- I WANT TO FLIRT WITH THE CATBOI None of that.

In narrative, we usually waive it away as the characters asking questions about a place they've never been. Talking to the locals.

Out of game, I'm going with my gut. No, the town doesn't have that. Yes, the town has that. Based on how large I made the Town at the start, and sort of based on whether or not I can work such a thing into the economy.
- Agrarian farmland? Yes, there's a Druid who helps with crops and animals.
- Coastal fishing village? No. No Druid. But there is a Tempest Cleric.

My Towns effectively have Quantum elements.

If you don't ask for something, I might not think of it 'til much, much later. I'm making stuff up as I go along, and I'm not going to think of everything.

If you, in character, ask me something that it's something your character wants, something you want to rolepaly...I can put it there, if I feel like it. But if I don't feel like it, I can put it away for later. I react to what my players want, by how their characters react in the world that I've put them in. Emergent storytelling, I guess. Perfect words.

I have seen many, many people describe their world - on this forum, too - the geopolitics are fixed, the locations are all down. Full backstories everywhere. What's in what city is where. Demographics and geographics are fixed. The players actually get no say at all, and the DM has already decided everything there is to know about the world, before the players have even made a character. Sure, some players might have a good adventure hook. But ~90% of the world seems to have already been made.

But apparently making 90% of your world without player interaction...Isn't a railroad...That's just...Part of DMing, apparently.

[Yora]

What it ultimately comes down to is "do the actuons of the player meaningfully affect the outcome or not?"

If they do it's good, if they don't it's bad.

[Xervous]

Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Of course, I'm not big on how it kind of implies there's some story involved here, one way or the other. 😂

With my gaming background “emergent” just makes me think of the creative stuff that players end up doing with the tools they are given up until the devs change something and label it a bugfix

Fixed an issue that was sometimes giving players more agency than intended

[Thrudd]

I wrote a post about something like this that I do, but it didn't really fit the threads I was in at the time, so I get it go.

But in this case I'll talk about Towns.

My Towns don't really start with much.
- They start with the size I want them to be
- A major industry that supports the economy around it
- And a method of government.

I don't have...:
- Named NPCs
- Names locations
- Maps
...Yet.

My players will then ask me questions about the town:
- Is there a smithy? What kind?
- Can someone silver my weapon?
- Is there a Wizard? Cleric? More specfically, a Druid?
- What's the roughest bar in the town where I can fight someone and the cops don't get called?
- Is there a nice pub nearby where merchants drink wine?
- I want something shadier
- My character is looking for a library
- I WANT TO FLIRT WITH THE CATBOI None of that.

In narrative, we usually waive it away as the characters asking questions about a place they've never been. Talking to the locals.

Out of game, I'm going with my gut. No, the town doesn't have that. Yes, the town has that. Based on how large I made the Town at the start, and sort of based on whether or not I can work such a thing into the economy.
- Agrarian farmland? Yes, there's a Druid who helps with crops and animals.
- Coastal fishing village? No. No Druid. But there is a Tempest Cleric.

My Towns effectively have Quantum elements.

If you don't ask for something, I might not think of it 'til much, much later. I'm making stuff up as I go along, and I'm not going to think of everything.

If you, in character, ask me something that it's something your character wants, something you want to rolepaly...I can put it there, if I feel like it. But if I don't feel like it, I can put it away for later. I react to what my players want, by how their characters react in the world that I've put them in. Emergent storytelling, I guess. Perfect words.

I have seen many, many people describe their world - on this forum, too - the geopolitics are fixed, the locations are all down. Full backstories everywhere. What's in what city is where. Demographics and geographics are fixed. The players actually get no say at all, and the DM has already decided everything there is to know about the world, before the players have even made a character. Sure, some players might have a good adventure hook. But ~90% of the world seems to have already been made.

But apparently making 90% of your world without player interaction...Isn't a railroad...That's just...Part of DMing, apparently.

I think there's a problem completely equating "authoring" with "railroading", and your example shows that. The creation of any content at all is not "railroading".

Features of the world, like what sort of NPCs are in a given town or whether there is a mountain with a dragon inside, are not things players reasonably expect to control and there is nothing in the rules that says dice need to decide those things - therefore, whether you write those things months in advance or decide in the moment what's there, it can't be railroading.

I'm also not sure that those things can be said to be "emergent", either...you, the GM, are authoring them without real regard to what the players do and want (as it should be)- the world isn't formed by the will of the PCs, after all, their actions can't have any effect on whether there's a particular shop in the random town they just entered. Whether you wrote down last night the details of the town, or it's printed in a module, or you decided on the spot based on what makes sense to you...you're authoring that element of the game. The features of the world the PCs need to interact with can't be "emergent", because the game is about how they interact and react with the fictional world, not the creation of the world. The existence of a fictional world is an a priori necessity for the game to take place.

So, to borrow BRC's model from the previous thread, the authored/emergent property can only be rightly applied at the Macro, Micro and Super Micro levels of game design - deciding exactly what events will take place, in what order they will take place, and the exact actions of NPCs and the world in reaction to the PCs. Some GMs author all events and what order they take place in, and sometimes how a particular event needs to play out, which can be argued to be railroading. If you improvise what happens according to what the PC's do and how the dice fall, I'd call that emergent gameplay.

[Vahnavoi]

Railroad and sandbox are metaphors. What do we gain by replacing them with more explicit terms like authored and emergent? The meaning is the same, either way. Now we're just having a discussion over semantics.

Repeated threads on the subject have proven beyond reasonable doubt that a lot of people using said terms are metaphor illiterate and hence abuse the terms in a way that actively robs them of useful meaning. Abandoning such terms in favor of something more explicit avoids semantic discussions that go nowhere.

[KorvinStarmast]

Railroad and sandbox are metaphors. What do we gain by replacing them with more explicit terms like authored and emergent? The meaning is the same, either way. Now we're just having a discussion over semantics.

That's par for the course in an internet discussion about concepts, isn't it?

The Playground's favorite game is and always has been Dungeons & Semantics. Some people just got confused and started talking about the other game sometimes

I thought it was Swords and Semantics, or Spells and Semantics, depending on if it was a martial friendly game or a caster friendly game.

I think "authored" and "emergent" are good at describing a scene {snip} At the scale of a campaign, though, I think you'd expect to see both in all but the most linear of authored games

The world builder more or less bounds the problem, but what's in the middle, the juicy bits, usually calls for a lot of player action/decision to flesh out.

Repeated threads on the subject have proven beyond reasonable doubt that a lot of people using said terms are metaphor illiterate and hence abuse the terms in a way that actively robs them of useful meaning. Abandoning such terms in favor of something more explicit avoids semantic discussions that go nowhere.

Not sure this one is going anywhere different than the thread that inspired it, TBH.

[kyoryu]

I think there's a problem completely equating "authoring" with "railroading", and your example shows that. The creation of any content at all is not "railroading".

Features of the world, like what sort of NPCs are in a given town or whether there is a mountain with a dragon inside, are not things players reasonably expect to control and there is nothing in the rules that says dice need to decide those things - therefore, whether you write those things months in advance or decide in the moment what's there, it can't be railroading.

I'm also not sure that those things can be said to be "emergent", either...you, the GM, are authoring them without real regard to what the players do and want (as it should be)- the world isn't formed by the will of the PCs, after all, their actions can't have any effect on whether there's a particular shop in the random town they just entered. Whether you wrote down last night the details of the town, or it's printed in a module, or you decided on the spot based on what makes sense to you...you're authoring that element of the game. The features of the world the PCs need to interact with can't be "emergent", because the game is about how they interact and react with the fictional world, not the creation of the world. The existence of a fictional world is an a priori necessity for the game to take place.

So, to borrow BRC's model from the previous thread, the authored/emergent property can only be rightly applied at the Macro, Micro and Super Micro levels of game design - deciding exactly what events will take place, in what order they will take place, and the exact actions of NPCs and the world in reaction to the PCs. Some GMs author all events and what order they take place in, and sometimes how a particular event needs to play out, which can be argued to be railroading. If you improvise what happens according to what the PC's do and how the dice fall, I'd call that emergent gameplay.

I think I was fairly clear that "authored" refers specifically to the path that the players take, rather than the setting elements.

[Cheesegear]

I think there's a problem completely equating "authoring" with "railroading", and your example shows that. The creation of any content at all is not "railroading".

Strong disagree.

DM: You start of in a tavern, it's late afternoon. This late in the aftern-
Player: Bulls*. I woke up with the Sun, I already travelled 10 miles by late afternoon and I'm already at the next town. I ain't in no tavern. And I'm not even in the town you want me to be in. I'm not on your railroad.

This is why I said in the last thread that every DM railroads. You kind of have to, at some point.

I'm also not sure that those things can be said to be "emergent", either...you, the GM, are authoring them without real regard to what the players do and want (as it should be)- the world isn't formed by the will of the PCs, after all, their actions can't have any effect on whether there's a particular shop in the random town they just entered. Whether you wrote down last night the details of the town, or it's printed in a module, or you decided on the spot based on what makes sense to you...you're authoring that element of the game.

Right. The DM has all the power, all the time.

The features of the world the PCs need to interact with can't be "emergent", because the game is about how they interact and react with the fictional world, not the creation of the world.

Again. Strong disagree. We even have a current thread about backstories where players can create entire locations within the narrative, inlcuding NPCs complete with quasi-history and the DM runs with it. The emergent narrative, drives the emergent gameplay.

The existence of a fictional world is an a priori necessity for the game to take place.

The world must exist. Sure. I think we can agree on that. There must be a rock that you can stand on with breathable atmosphere, and you can move in an X and Y axis - and maybe Z.

But if you start filling out that plane without the players' input, then you're already creating stories...Without their input.

That's why as I said, I create the minimum amount possible:
There is a town. It has an economy. With a government. With people. Where would you like to be, and what doing, within said town?

[kyoryu]

Not sure this one is going anywhere different than the thread that inspired it, TBH.

There's a conversation pattern happening in these that annoys me, and I'm not sure what causes it.

To me, a lot of this sounds like this:

Non-linear-gamers: "Hey, I really prefer games like this, and not like this. I've played both."
Others: "What you're saying isn't real. See, linear games do that too!"
NLG: "Uh, no, they don't. That's totally not my experience, and I don't like the thing you're talking about."
Others: "There's no difference, really."

... with some people going "well if I hide it it doesn't count" as a side dish.

It also feels like there's a lot of erasure of more emergent styles, or at least dismissal of the preference for them. "Well, if that's emergent, then this qualifies too." A lot of the "spectrum" arguments feel like this to me - I'm sitting there saying "no, that's not the thing I want" and I'm getting back "yeah, it kind of is." or "well your definition of linear is impossible, no games are like that" (when I've absolutely played a lot of games like that - nearly every adventure path, nearly every organized play group, and a lot of "regular" games. Or "haha, here's an element that proves that everything is really authored, so your preference doesn't exist! May as well just admit you enjoy authored stuff."

I'm not sure what causes this. I have a few hypotheses:

1. They haven't really played fully emergent games, so they just assume that's how things must be. There's no mapping from what I'm talking about to things they've experienced. You also see things like "well if you don't want a linear game, you can't have story".
2. They somehow take authored or linear as an insult, and so want to justify that they're not. (Some of this falls on NLGs, who are often very vocal. Both styles are valid, and people have preferences for both).
3. They're trying to make soap-definitions for things

I read a thing about how people define things - some things are defined in a soap-like way. Soap has certain things necessary to be soap, including ingredients. And you can have something that looks very much like soap and does similar things, but if it doesn't meet those requirements, it's not soap. On the other hand, you have sandwiches. What is and is not a sandwich is... not cut and dried. We mostly learn by example of what sandwiches are, and things that are sandwich-like but have specific names generally aren't sandwiches. Hamburgers and hot dogs aren't sandwich, but a roast beef sandwich or a sub are. Trying to make a concrete set of rules for "sandwich" vs "not sandwich" is nearly impossible, and would be so full of exceptions as to be unusable. And ultimately I think that this difference is like that - it's fuzzy. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a spectrum, but it does mean that you can't point to particular traits and say "this clearly makes this emergent" vs. "this clearly makes this authored".

I'm not interested in making soap-definitions here. I don't think they are helpful. What I am interested in is explaining why I like certain things, and that I do see a difference, and what that difference is - even if it is a bit vague. And the best sandwich-definition I have is something like "if you ran two groups through the game, they'd probably go through roughly the same encounters."

Anyway, getting a bit meta on the discussion here.

[PhoenixPhyre]

What it ultimately comes down to is "do the actuons of the player meaningfully affect the outcome or not?"

If they do it's good, if they don't it's bad.

Except that there are people who are perfectly fine with only tactical control (ie at the round-to-round level), even when success is guaranteed (or failure, depending on the situation) at the scenario/encounter level and there's no control at all beyond that. That's the JRPG way. And it's quite popular, even at the table-top.

There are people who don't want large-scale control/influence, strangely enough. There are people who demand it. As long as people are getting what they want, it's all fine. The biggest difficulty comes in when
* people don't know what they want
* people lie to others about what they're giving/what they want
* people who want fundamentally incompatible things are playing together
* etc.

[kyoryu]

Except that there are people who are perfectly fine with only tactical control (ie at the round-to-round level), even when success is guaranteed (or failure, depending on the situation) at the scenario/encounter level and there's no control at all beyond that. That's the JRPG way. And it's quite popular, even at the table-top.

There are people who don't want large-scale control/influence, strangely enough. There are people who demand it. As long as people are getting what they want, it's all fine. The biggest difficulty comes in when
* people don't know what they want
* people lie to others about what they're giving/what they want
* people who want fundamentally incompatible things are playing together
* etc.

Well, yes. I'd even say that's the dominant way of playing, in my experience.

In no way do I disparage that. It's just not my preference

[PhoenixPhyre]

Well, yes. I'd even say that's the dominant way of playing, in my experience.

In no way do I disparage that. It's just not my preference

Note that I was responding to someone who seemed (they can speak for themselves) to be saying that "actions have substantial effects on outcomes == good" and "actions don't have substantial effects on outcomes == bad". It was that blanket statement (which is a common one on these forums) that I was cautioning against, saying it's more complicated than that.

And why boiling it down to binaries/dichotomies doesn't work for me--there's a huge variety (not spectrum, it's neither linear nor continuous nor one-dimensional) of desires here. Each one's going to be a negotiation.

[Satinavian]

A lot of the "spectrum" arguments feel like this to me -

Well, but they are certainly not. If a spectrum exists, there is not only a middle, there also recognized extremes. So i don't see why that would deny purely emergent games at all. Or require that someone who likes one of the extremes must also like the things in the middle because those share some aspects.

But when you tell other people that there is no spectrum, that all games are either emergent or authored with no middle ground, you are telling other people that the games they play don't really exist. Or that they don't really understand their own games and thus classify them wrong (assuming that they just don't know enough games for contrast). It is pretty much the same condescending attitude that annoys yourself and also arises all the time from adherents of roleplaying theory constructs whenever something doesn't fit. It certainly won't do you any good.

I'm not interested in making soap-definitions here. I don't think they are helpful. What I am interested in is explaining why I like certain things, and that I do see a difference, and what that difference is - even if it is a bit vague. And the best sandwich-definition I have is something like "if you ran two groups through the game, they'd probably go through roughly the same encounters."

If you want to talk about games you like, talk about games you like.


This thread however is only providing an abstract description of a game you like and the absolute antithesis of it and then proposing that those two options cover all of RPGs. How would that help you at all ? Do you want to boil down the discussion to those archetypes alone to then explain why you like one better than the other ? This will only end with pretty much every reader answering "well, i don't play either so the whole analysis is useless for me".

There are people who don't want large-scale control/influence, strangely enough. There are people who demand it. As long as people are getting what they want, it's all fine. The biggest difficulty comes in when
* people don't know what they want
* people lie to others about what they're giving/what they want

Now, one thing i absolutely despise are GMs believing that they know better than their players what those players want. That is both nearly always wrong and a lack of the minimum respect a GM should have for their players. I absolutely would not play with such a person and i certainly never thought such of of my players though all of my many decades of gaming.

[KillianHawkeye]

Repeated threads on the subject have proven beyond reasonable doubt that a lot of people using said terms are metaphor illiterate and hence abuse the terms in a way that actively robs them of useful meaning. Abandoning such terms in favor of something more explicit avoids semantic discussions that go nowhere.

How does yet another discussion of semantics help us avoid semantic discussions that go nowhere?

[Thrudd]

Strong disagree.

DM: You start of in a tavern, it's late afternoon. This late in the aftern-
Player: Bulls*. I woke up with the Sun, I already travelled 10 miles by late afternoon and I'm already at the next town. I ain't in no tavern. And I'm not even in the town you want me to be in. I'm not on your railroad.

This is why I said in the last thread that every DM railroads. You kind of have to, at some point.

Right. The DM has all the power, all the time.

Again. Strong disagree. We even have a current thread about backstories where players can create entire locations within the narrative, inlcuding NPCs complete with quasi-history and the DM runs with it. The emergent narrative, drives the emergent gameplay.

The world must exist. Sure. I think we can agree on that. There must be a rock that you can stand on with breathable atmosphere, and you can move in an X and Y axis - and maybe Z.

But if you start filling out that plane without the players' input, then you're already creating stories...Without their input.

That's why as I said, I create the minimum amount possible:
There is a town. It has an economy. With a government. With people. Where would you like to be, and what doing, within said town?

If players create things in their backstories that the GM chooses to use in the game...it is still authored. It just isn't completely authored by the GM. The things they write into backstories are created pre-game, and once the game starts they don't get to change it - those are now facts about the fictional world. Some systems do allow the setting to be partially "emergent", with rules that actually codify how players can introduce certain elements into the world during play, that is true. Most systems, however, have no such codification, D&D certainly doesn't. In a game where the GM has all the power, as you say, the setting isn't really emergent. Also, creating the setting isn't creating "stories" - it is creating an environment in which stories can happen, the parameters and conflicts that will define the potential directions a story can take, but a story itself doesn't need to be authored. If you don't decide what happens after the players get involved, it isn't authoring a story. A game needs a starting point.

Deciding when and where the game starts, and where all the PCs are located at the beginning of the campaign is not "railroading", no matter how much a player misuses that term. It's an out-of-game discussion the group needs to have, if the players have very specific requests or expectations regarding exactly where their characters will be located at the start of the campaign. Only what happens after the game starts can be analyzed according to any "player agency" metric. Now, if, at the beginning of every session, the GM narrates how the PCs are in a new place and have decided to pursue a mission that the players didn't actually decide on...yes, you could call that railroading. Not all GMs do that, it certainly isn't necessary, although it may be appropriate for certain game formats. If you tell the players what their characters are doing at a point in the game when they are expected to be in control, this is when you are "removing agency".

A linear, authored story/campaign might justifiably be called a "railroad" by the players, if they had good reason to think that the game would be more emergent exploration. Yes, this is exactly what the other thread was about, sorry. That's why you tell them beforehand if they are going to be playing an "authored" adventure path with a definite sequence of events or an "emergent" open-world exploration game, or a little of both (like open-world emergent narrative, but if you agree to start down an adventure path placed before you, the next session might seem like it has some "rails" as events unfold). If you know the players don't care or have any expectations regarding their agency, then it might not be necessary. But as soon as people start grumbling about stuff, a discussion might need to be had.

[Tanarii]

Deciding when and where the game starts, and where all the PCs are located at the beginning of the campaign is not "railroading", no matter how much a player misuses that term.

It's a term which gets misused a lot. Which is kinda the point of the OP trying to come up with alternative terms, less likely to be misused.

[KorvinStarmast]

There's a conversation pattern happening in these that annoys me, and I'm not sure what causes it.

The internet.

To me, a lot of this sounds like this:

Non-linear-gamers: "Hey, I really prefer games like this, and not like this. I've played both."
Others: "What you're saying isn't real. See, linear games do that too!"
NLG: "Uh, no, they don't. That's totally not my experience, and I don't like the thing you're talking about."
Others: "There's no difference, really."

My, how insistent you are that battle lines must be drawn between two sides. Maybe there are more than two sides in this whole thing.
As to your opening gambit, that isn't how it necessarily starts and I am not sure that making the artificial distinction, the line in the sand, is helpful given all of the baggage that has accrued to the conversation in the past two decades. (Thank you, Forge, for all that).

It also feels like there's a lot of erasure of more emergent styles, or at least dismissal of the preference for them. stuff."

You may be counting the hits and ignoring the misses.

1. They haven't really played fully emergent games

Are we wandering into a no true game, or a no true gamer, position here? The level of immersion that any player prefers varies with that player. I like immersion more than some of the people I play with, but I still play with them.

I'm not interested in making soap-definitions here. I don't think they are helpful. What I am interested in is explaining why I like certain things, and that I do see a difference, and what that difference is - even if it is a bit vague.

It seems to me that like the infamous railroad / sandbox dichotomy, you are attempting to make a distinction that does not necessarily exist, except at an esoteric level.

Here's what I see happening in this thread: it's (in part) a repackaging of that same troublesome argument with new terms, and that thin veneer of difference was rapidly peeled away.