Hitting the nail on the head with that Critical Role and 🌽comparison. Far too many people are trying to imitate an entertainment product and it leads to disappointment. “Why don’t my players want to use silly voices and crack meta jokes with me? Why doesn’t my DM want to role play the shopkeep with a wacky quirky voice?”
I am prepping a Sandbox Pirate adventure for my players. Using an old pathfinder module, but stripping some of the "main story" as just optional content players can find next to trying to get rich and mighty.
My group has used two styles for gaming: 1) Sandboxing from a void. There is nothing but the room the characters start in at the beginning of a game. (my default style) 2) Sandboxing from a setting. Choose an established world setting at the beginning of a game and proceed to sandbox in it.
This is a big issue in 5ed when people just want to play any race. Not all settings have every race just because you'd like to play an owling. It messes whatever lore there may be.
My random encounter tables have become looser and looser the more I GM. When I design a hex it's generalized for what factors and relationships are relevant in that hex and the likelihood of incursions from nearby zones or situations which are already happening in the world... and I improvise after being informed and represent it in ways which affect the area (and try to foreshadow any unexpected Ancient Red Dragons)
The more tables I've looked at, the more I think the usefulness comes down to the quality of the designer. The tables in Cults of Chaos are *really* good imo. Some of the old DND books though... 🙂🔫
@@blacklodgegames The tables are too setting-specific... and those settings indeed tended to be relatively weak. And the situations in settings should change according to events and often to impact which the players may have (or there's no real engagement with the tensions of the setting)
@@hellsente7826 right, too often people treat the game world as static unless the players are directly involved in events. It's like the clock stops when they leave the room.
@@blacklodgegames Random encounter tables can be a good tool for setting exploration. "You're on mission, murdering the leader of a Sabat pack..." Could be the map of his hideout, or... there could be something going on. What? --roll-- an NPC. Ahh, plot connected Neutral NPC. Looks like something is going on between the and... a Tremere Magistrate. An unlikely roll becomes a really interesting conversation to improv, and engagement with the setting.
I dunno, lately i just want to make a dungeon and see how players go through the random bullshit, the fun comes from them fighting shit and exploring dangerous places
Yes, there is a lot of different things from Broadcast RPG and around the Table RPG. My prep in both cases is NPC's only. I know what they want, their goals, their loves and hates. I know their places of operation, I know how they are linked to everything in my game-world (of what little I know yet of this world) I might have a couple of "job" ideas. I have usually 1 page of ideas... my focus is NPC's I interact with the players via an NPC, or I'm in narrator form In the case of online-broadcast games, I usually fade to new locations due to our 90min limit, and I'm presenting a game in more cinematic mode having the action and pacing closer to a movie if I can. In person sessions, the players never get pushed to a new location, as those session are not time limited. So the players will push to new locations on their own volition. I attempt my best to stay in narrator form if I dont have an NPC. I want to avoid mother-may-i as much as possible. I usually stick to good-fast-resolution-mechanics, Cypher/Traveller/C&C
That's very similar to how I plan games. I usually construct a list of scenes that I think *may* happen in the session and rely on the NPCs and their relationships to the factions and PCs as the meat of the game. As long as you have your NPCs solidly defined, the game should pretty much run itself.
Narrative immersion and engaging settings ISN'T the same as a focus on production. If CR put authentic engagement above their own exercise of celebritism and relentless thinly-masked choreography, and wasn't compromised by politics... in other words, wasn't essentially made by Hollywood and its industries, then I don't think there would really be a lot to complain about it. I would even say that the injection of a bit of theatre sport into the videogamification of things would have been a beneficial antidote. I've given up on expecting "the modern audience" to have the span of psychology or attention for the depth of setting structure we had in the 90s due largely to Vampire. Rule -1 in 5e (85% of available players to draw from... 98% of what's available for online games) is fucking tough and I don't even hope for players to read one full page of setting details, let alone remember me reading those details to them. So then... the perils of gaming in a niche narrow pool of "elite" gamers, one's who'd run all around them like they're legionaires, or who're really uncompromising about representing the way they shon or are shonning. It's supersaturation of gaming and usually refined to what has happened at their own table over decades in really uncompromising and easily disappointed ways. Getting that youthful joy of exploration seems hard to imagine, and hoping that they will care at all about the details of other PCs seems like asking a favor of endurance and patience from them personally. ... I'm willing to take what I can get out of the hobby in spite of it all or I wouldn't still be doing it, but I don't know if I could if I didn't separate myself from the relentless unsatisfiable negativity that's always waiting, beast-like, to be invited in.
@@hellsente7826 as a player if I'm coming in cold, I sort of like that. When players know every detail of a setting it makes it difficult for many to avoid meta gaming and it takes some of the mystery out of it. As a gm though, I love knowing as much as I can about the setting because it gives me so many ideas to bring into the game for them.
@@blacklodgegames I guess my problem with it (the repetitive introduction) is more than a little bit from some sort of unconscious will to finally get to read them my novel 😅😆 ....
Oh yeah... I played a fully procedural game. Oof. The game always seemed less than prepared. The towns felt just like rooms that you go in and are kind of empty. The things the characters did there didn't really matter more often than not. So... Yeah no. On the extreme end of that was a railroaded game where the DM wouldnt wven let my character help another climb up by guiding him thriugh handholds and using his equipment even if they were going to the only place they could go to so the story could progress. We did try checkng other places prior to going through a shiny magic door we knew was not that great and there was no connection to go in there. The story had just started so... Just dont do either of these things. Provide some objectives for the players to accomplish. For sure know how to set some rails every now and then, but find a way to make sure the players choices mean something. That if they spent so long trying to investigate something that its not just tossed aside and they get nothing. Been there. Super oof. But there have been some games with good DMs that provide thay illusion of choice while skillfully keeping objectives in the players mind as a constant hook to pull you in.
48:46 To me, this is the fun/challenging part of making a character. 50:49 Character-driven characters is all you need for story. 56:08 Yes. After a few game sessions with the right players at the table, this became automatic for me to do. For me, this is just the natural way of doing things. 58:44 It was buried for a reason. I'd even argue that OSR games have not aged well at all. They'd probably be just fine if used in the '70s. 1:00:08 DMs that argue for OSR do it primarily because they have some skin in the game. They are trying to sell games to nerds that don't know any better about the roleplay hobby.
Regarding it being buried for a reason, I partially agree but I think it's because so many of the old style ways of running games were done poorly (which should come as no shock given the people who play these games). If you have high quality tables for *certain* things, they can be very useful. Best example I've seen so far is in Cults of Chaos for L&D. Generating the structure of a cult for an adventure is great, but it's not something I'd do on the fly, ever. It seems like a great starting point for inspiration for a set of antagonists. I'm still pretty much entirely opposed to rolling up random monsters you meet in the woods.
@@blacklodgegames L&D is to D&D what Space-X is to NASA.I have all of the RPGPundit books. They are excellent setting books which I use for other RPG systems.
I really like a far away goal and a grand story, just chasing that horizon! I often feel lost in sandbox games, and there's usually not much there to motivate my character.
I'm always weird in my games. I like to start with a railroad. The DM KNOWS where the story is going for the first outing. Then once your party has gotten back from dealing with the first issue, they can start to spread their wings and explore the world. A hard start point removes the sandbox issue of "You could do anything, so you do nothing." IE: Paralyzed by choice. I find it also lets the group kind of bound, before you have to worry about each of them pulling the story in a different direction.
Yeah as long as they can still make choices, I don't see anything wrong with that. That sort of ties into what we were saying about the "story" that a GM has should work as a premise. It's all about using it as a jumping off point.
This channel is amazing. I really love the content and position you take on everything. As somebody who was always curious about ttrpgs but never played I made the decision a couple of years ago to try. I went out and bought the starter set, started reading through it, packed it up and left it on the shelf for a year. Started watching TH-cam videos about the game and was met with things like mercer and various, let's just use the word progressive sorts and could not relate. My "idea" of these games was the caricature of what I'd heard about as a kid in the late 80s and 90s, not weird and wacky goblin good guys etc. As a gm for new players (who aren't going to be good, they've got as much idea as me), I really resonated with what you were saying about feeling obliged to create all this story for them as opposed to just having awesome concepts like the vampires needed to feed the beast and allowing thr stories to come from that. Anyway, this is great, going to go through all the content and hopefully find other based content creators like you.
My last campaign went about 2 1/2 years and recently sputtered out on my part. I had envisioned an episodic type game that would become more sand-box and player driven as it went. That didnt happen. The two main reasons were that I was 3d printing minis and terrain for our games (most would not get painted just a zenathil prime) so I would have to know where the party was going and stick to just a few predetermined locations and enemies, and the second is I only had a very vague Homebrew setting sketched out. You might think the latter would lead to less rail-road but when combined with the first meant I didnt have the time or flexibility to really organically develop the setting. In the end my players were still engaged and having fun but I was running out of steam and not having fun. Ive been on hiatus since late summer but Im prepping my next campaign now. Based on lessons learned I'm doing a hex crawl style sand-box. I have the initial adventure finished that brings the party into my starting area. I have two more adventures in the same general area around the starting town and a third in progress. From there they can venture out with several towns, quests and locations nearby to explore and discover. I have these roughly fleshed out with adventure hooks but not knowing what level the party might be when they get there Im not building out the full adventures in those regions yet. The full hex crawl map encompasses about 8-10 towns and villages so far connected by roads with a large amount of map hexes to explore between (I think its roughly 500 miles square-ish in 8 mile hexes) with locations and adventures to discover in the wildernesses. Even if a hex is empty there are still the random encounter table rolls. Im using AI to assist in generating a lot of this. I'll have everything printed and painted for at least the first 3-5 levels worth of play before we start (already 3/4 printed and half painted). Im hoping this will take enough pressure off of me between sessions to enjoy and look forward to the next game while still having the breathing room to do finishing prep for areas well before my players arrive as opposed to frantically scrambling to get everything done in the 2 weeks between games. We are a very tabletop-tactical miniature intensive group. We do use a fair amount of theatre of the mind for RP and setting but combats and dungeon crawls are all minis and terrain.
There is a meta plot and a BBEG (The Shadow Prince, a manipulating and conniving Rakshasa) but the players wont even realize that for several adventures. They will keep bumping into clues that someone is behind many of the woes and problems in the land as they travel about and as they level up will begin to uncover his goals and be able to make moves against the BBEGs schemes more directly, of course eventually leading to a showdown where the fate of the land (the Dutchy of Mystralis) hangs in the balance.
I really agree that the extremes (full railroading or full sandbox) are not ideal. In my experience as a GM, some nights the players really need some handholding (closer to railroading) and some nights the players are on fire pushing the story forward (sandbox). A good GM is able to adjust his approach towards one side or the other based on the what the players need that session. This flexibility comes by having a plot or two, some supporting material, and some good random tables ready while not investing so much into prep that he feels he waisted his time if the players don't follow the plots or see much of the prepped material. Players always have more fun when they feel they were participants in the story building. The best GMs are happy when their players are happy. Great conversation - felt well prepped, but the dynamic back-and-forth is awesome. Enjoying your channel.
Thank you so much for these words. We're having a great time making this show and hearing from people who get something out of it is very energizing. It's such a great hobby and I'm glad all you guys are along for the ride.
Hitting the nail on the head with that Critical Role and 🌽comparison. Far too many people are trying to imitate an entertainment product and it leads to disappointment. “Why don’t my players want to use silly voices and crack meta jokes with me? Why doesn’t my DM want to role play the shopkeep with a wacky quirky voice?”
I am prepping a Sandbox Pirate adventure for my players. Using an old pathfinder module, but stripping some of the "main story" as just optional content players can find next to trying to get rich and mighty.
My group has used two styles for gaming:
1) Sandboxing from a void. There is nothing but the room the characters start in at the beginning of a game. (my default style)
2) Sandboxing from a setting. Choose an established world setting at the beginning of a game and proceed to sandbox in it.
You guys are indeed on a mission from God. Keep up the great work!
Thanks! We're just getting started
This is a big issue in 5ed when people just want to play any race. Not all settings have every race just because you'd like to play an owling. It messes whatever lore there may be.
Awesome show!
Thanks for the shot out. Always fun to find your frens. (*’-‘)b
My random encounter tables have become looser and looser the more I GM. When I design a hex it's generalized for what factors and relationships are relevant in that hex and the likelihood of incursions from nearby zones or situations which are already happening in the world... and I improvise after being informed and represent it in ways which affect the area (and try to foreshadow any unexpected Ancient Red Dragons)
The more tables I've looked at, the more I think the usefulness comes down to the quality of the designer. The tables in Cults of Chaos are *really* good imo. Some of the old DND books though... 🙂🔫
@@blacklodgegames The tables are too setting-specific... and those settings indeed tended to be relatively weak. And the situations in settings should change according to events and often to impact which the players may have (or there's no real engagement with the tensions of the setting)
@@hellsente7826 right, too often people treat the game world as static unless the players are directly involved in events. It's like the clock stops when they leave the room.
@@blacklodgegames Random encounter tables can be a good tool for setting exploration.
"You're on mission, murdering the leader of a Sabat pack..." Could be the map of his hideout, or... there could be something going on. What? --roll-- an NPC. Ahh, plot connected Neutral NPC. Looks like something is going on between the and... a Tremere Magistrate.
An unlikely roll becomes a really interesting conversation to improv, and engagement with the setting.
I dunno, lately i just want to make a dungeon and see how players go through the random bullshit, the fun comes from them fighting shit and exploring dangerous places
I think I'm 60/40 when it comes to rails vs sandbox, but I like to tell grand stories.
Yes, there is a lot of different things from Broadcast RPG and around the Table RPG.
My prep in both cases is NPC's only. I know what they want, their goals, their loves and hates.
I know their places of operation, I know how they are linked to everything in my game-world (of what little I know yet of this world)
I might have a couple of "job" ideas. I have usually 1 page of ideas... my focus is NPC's
I interact with the players via an NPC, or I'm in narrator form
In the case of online-broadcast games, I usually fade to new locations due to our 90min limit, and I'm presenting a game in more cinematic mode
having the action and pacing closer to a movie if I can.
In person sessions, the players never get pushed to a new location, as those session are not time limited.
So the players will push to new locations on their own volition.
I attempt my best to stay in narrator form if I dont have an NPC. I want to avoid mother-may-i as much as possible.
I usually stick to good-fast-resolution-mechanics, Cypher/Traveller/C&C
That's very similar to how I plan games. I usually construct a list of scenes that I think *may* happen in the session and rely on the NPCs and their relationships to the factions and PCs as the meat of the game. As long as you have your NPCs solidly defined, the game should pretty much run itself.
@@blacklodgegames exactly.
Narrative immersion and engaging settings ISN'T the same as a focus on production. If CR put authentic engagement above their own exercise of celebritism and relentless thinly-masked choreography, and wasn't compromised by politics... in other words, wasn't essentially made by Hollywood and its industries, then I don't think there would really be a lot to complain about it. I would even say that the injection of a bit of theatre sport into the videogamification of things would have been a beneficial antidote.
I've given up on expecting "the modern audience" to have the span of psychology or attention for the depth of setting structure we had in the 90s due largely to Vampire. Rule -1 in 5e (85% of available players to draw from... 98% of what's available for online games) is fucking tough and I don't even hope for players to read one full page of setting details, let alone remember me reading those details to them.
So then... the perils of gaming in a niche narrow pool of "elite" gamers, one's who'd run all around them like they're legionaires, or who're really uncompromising about representing the way they shon or are shonning. It's supersaturation of gaming and usually refined to what has happened at their own table over decades in really uncompromising and easily disappointed ways. Getting that youthful joy of exploration seems hard to imagine, and hoping that they will care at all about the details of other PCs seems like asking a favor of endurance and patience from them personally.
... I'm willing to take what I can get out of the hobby in spite of it all or I wouldn't still be doing it, but I don't know if I could if I didn't separate myself from the relentless unsatisfiable negativity that's always waiting, beast-like, to be invited in.
It's brutal out there, no doubt.
I have to show the setting step by step... every time... instead of telling about it.
@@hellsente7826 as a player if I'm coming in cold, I sort of like that. When players know every detail of a setting it makes it difficult for many to avoid meta gaming and it takes some of the mystery out of it.
As a gm though, I love knowing as much as I can about the setting because it gives me so many ideas to bring into the game for them.
@@blacklodgegames I guess my problem with it (the repetitive introduction) is more than a little bit from some sort of unconscious will to finally get to read them my novel 😅😆 ....
@@hellsente7826 haha
Oh yeah... I played a fully procedural game. Oof. The game always seemed less than prepared. The towns felt just like rooms that you go in and are kind of empty. The things the characters did there didn't really matter more often than not. So... Yeah no.
On the extreme end of that was a railroaded game where the DM wouldnt wven let my character help another climb up by guiding him thriugh handholds and using his equipment even if they were going to the only place they could go to so the story could progress. We did try checkng other places prior to going through a shiny magic door we knew was not that great and there was no connection to go in there. The story had just started so...
Just dont do either of these things. Provide some objectives for the players to accomplish. For sure know how to set some rails every now and then, but find a way to make sure the players choices mean something. That if they spent so long trying to investigate something that its not just tossed aside and they get nothing. Been there. Super oof.
But there have been some games with good DMs that provide thay illusion of choice while skillfully keeping objectives in the players mind as a constant hook to pull you in.
48:46 To me, this is the fun/challenging part of making a character.
50:49 Character-driven characters is all you need for story.
56:08 Yes. After a few game sessions with the right players at the table, this became automatic for me to do. For me, this is just the natural way of doing things.
58:44 It was buried for a reason. I'd even argue that OSR games have not aged well at all. They'd probably be just fine if used in the '70s.
1:00:08 DMs that argue for OSR do it primarily because they have some skin in the game. They are trying to sell games to nerds that don't know any better about the roleplay hobby.
Regarding it being buried for a reason, I partially agree but I think it's because so many of the old style ways of running games were done poorly (which should come as no shock given the people who play these games). If you have high quality tables for *certain* things, they can be very useful. Best example I've seen so far is in Cults of Chaos for L&D. Generating the structure of a cult for an adventure is great, but it's not something I'd do on the fly, ever. It seems like a great starting point for inspiration for a set of antagonists. I'm still pretty much entirely opposed to rolling up random monsters you meet in the woods.
@@blacklodgegames L&D is to D&D what Space-X is to NASA.I have all of the RPGPundit books. They are excellent setting books which I use for other RPG systems.
That is an excellent analogy
Braunstein: The Masquerade. 😉
I really like a far away goal and a grand story, just chasing that horizon! I often feel lost in sandbox games, and there's usually not much there to motivate my character.
I would suggest creating a character with their own motivations.
I'm always weird in my games. I like to start with a railroad. The DM KNOWS where the story is going for the first outing. Then once your party has gotten back from dealing with the first issue, they can start to spread their wings and explore the world. A hard start point removes the sandbox issue of "You could do anything, so you do nothing." IE: Paralyzed by choice. I find it also lets the group kind of bound, before you have to worry about each of them pulling the story in a different direction.
Yeah as long as they can still make choices, I don't see anything wrong with that. That sort of ties into what we were saying about the "story" that a GM has should work as a premise. It's all about using it as a jumping off point.
Here we go.
This channel is amazing. I really love the content and position you take on everything. As somebody who was always curious about ttrpgs but never played I made the decision a couple of years ago to try. I went out and bought the starter set, started reading through it, packed it up and left it on the shelf for a year. Started watching TH-cam videos about the game and was met with things like mercer and various, let's just use the word progressive sorts and could not relate. My "idea" of these games was the caricature of what I'd heard about as a kid in the late 80s and 90s, not weird and wacky goblin good guys etc.
As a gm for new players (who aren't going to be good, they've got as much idea as me), I really resonated with what you were saying about feeling obliged to create all this story for them as opposed to just having awesome concepts like the vampires needed to feed the beast and allowing thr stories to come from that. Anyway, this is great, going to go through all the content and hopefully find other based content creators like you.
Its because of RPGPundit that i found your channel
My last campaign went about 2 1/2 years and recently sputtered out on my part. I had envisioned an episodic type game that would become more sand-box and player driven as it went. That didnt happen. The two main reasons were that I was 3d printing minis and terrain for our games (most would not get painted just a zenathil prime) so I would have to know where the party was going and stick to just a few predetermined locations and enemies, and the second is I only had a very vague Homebrew setting sketched out. You might think the latter would lead to less rail-road but when combined with the first meant I didnt have the time or flexibility to really organically develop the setting.
In the end my players were still engaged and having fun but I was running out of steam and not having fun. Ive been on hiatus since late summer but Im prepping my next campaign now. Based on lessons learned I'm doing a hex crawl style sand-box. I have the initial adventure finished that brings the party into my starting area. I have two more adventures in the same general area around the starting town and a third in progress. From there they can venture out with several towns, quests and locations nearby to explore and discover. I have these roughly fleshed out with adventure hooks but not knowing what level the party might be when they get there Im not building out the full adventures in those regions yet.
The full hex crawl map encompasses about 8-10 towns and villages so far connected by roads with a large amount of map hexes to explore between (I think its roughly 500 miles square-ish in 8 mile hexes) with locations and adventures to discover in the wildernesses. Even if a hex is empty there are still the random encounter table rolls. Im using AI to assist in generating a lot of this. I'll have everything printed and painted for at least the first 3-5 levels worth of play before we start (already 3/4 printed and half painted). Im hoping this will take enough pressure off of me between sessions to enjoy and look forward to the next game while still having the breathing room to do finishing prep for areas well before my players arrive as opposed to frantically scrambling to get everything done in the 2 weeks between games. We are a very tabletop-tactical miniature intensive group. We do use a fair amount of theatre of the mind for RP and setting but combats and dungeon crawls are all minis and terrain.
There is a meta plot and a BBEG (The Shadow Prince, a manipulating and conniving Rakshasa) but the players wont even realize that for several adventures. They will keep bumping into clues that someone is behind many of the woes and problems in the land as they travel about and as they level up will begin to uncover his goals and be able to make moves against the BBEGs schemes more directly, of course eventually leading to a showdown where the fate of the land (the Dutchy of Mystralis) hangs in the balance.
I really agree that the extremes (full railroading or full sandbox) are not ideal.
In my experience as a GM, some nights the players really need some handholding (closer to railroading) and some nights the players are on fire pushing the story forward (sandbox). A good GM is able to adjust his approach towards one side or the other based on the what the players need that session. This flexibility comes by having a plot or two, some supporting material, and some good random tables ready while not investing so much into prep that he feels he waisted his time if the players don't follow the plots or see much of the prepped material.
Players always have more fun when they feel they were participants in the story building. The best GMs are happy when their players are happy.
Great conversation - felt well prepped, but the dynamic back-and-forth is awesome. Enjoying your channel.
Thank you so much for these words. We're having a great time making this show and hearing from people who get something out of it is very energizing. It's such a great hobby and I'm glad all you guys are along for the ride.