A Ghastly Mess

Continuing from yesterday, then.

I think we need an example of "giving way" and "pushing back."  As well, I suppose, an example of the way I run a "sandbox."  The online party's actions can be read by anyone, so they'll do.

In summation: ages ago, the party discovered a crashed airship in the wilderness and encountered an entitlement of a fiefdom in Norway in the name of Hamish Ross, a Scotsman who had fought with the King of Denmark and Norway during the Religious Wars.  The party had no knowledge of this person and no reason to care.  The party investigated the ship, found it full of giant spiders and let it be.  They did not know that long before their arrival, that a group of goblins had already plundered the ship and made off with the 12,000 gold pieces that was meant for Ross, to go along with his title.

Later, the party encountered the goblin lair while randomly searching the area, discovering it already destroyed by a powerful wight, one too powerful for the party to face.  However, the party did clear out two levels of the dungeon and discovered Ross's gold.  Here we have the true nature of the sandbox ideal.  The party learned it WAS the Scotsman's gold; they were able to learn through divination that he was alive and living in Norway, in fact in Bergen, three days sailing for the party.   Should they return the gold, or keep it?  The pieces were minted with the king's special emblem, but the party could have melted it down.  Did I care, one way or the other.  From the last post, it should be evident that I would not care.  It was the party's decision what to do.  So long as they acted wisely, the gold could have been melted down and kept (it would have been unwise to publicly spend it).  Had they taken those precautions, the push-back would have been minimal.  The gold had already been lost for nearly 3 years; and been in the hands of the goblins most of that time.  It was already stolen.

Here is a good first example of thinking rationally as a DM.  Don't put the gold in the party's hands unless it belongs in the party's hands!  Supposing the gold can be put there, and then cleverly taken back through some game story mechanisation, is a truly awful idea.  12,000 gold for a 3rd-4th level party is hardly gamebreaking.  Let them have it, let them keep it, don't stew about it, don't punish them for it and don't get petty!  If any amount of gold is too much for them to have, then DON'T PUT IT IN REACH.

There's an excellent scene in the series Band of Brothers, which I've linked.  The scene ends with the admonition, "Never put yourself in a position where you can take from these men."  As DMs, we're responsible for the player's welfare.  Like with war, that doesn't mean they can't get hurt or killed; it doesn't mean they get everything they want; it doesn't mean that they won't suffer and end up sacrificing wealth and status because of something they've done.  It means that of all the things against the players — monsters, selfish enemies, their own inability to solve puzzles, their doubts, the difficulty of the game's rules and knowing what to do next — what they DON'T need is a galdamned GOD mind-fucking with them.

Whatever I give, then, is properly and sincerely given.  It is not given with strings, it is not a part of some plot.  If it is given, there is a proper reason for it being found by the party.  12,000 g.p. is a proper number for gold being given by a King of a rich, important kingdom as part of an awarded fiefdom.

Likewise, whatever push back exists, it must be something the party can reasonably predict and potentially manage.  This doesn't mean they will manage it; only that it can be manageable.  If the party acts blindly, or incompetently, or dismisses the matter with phrases like, "Well, we're player characters, we'll be alright," then they're gonna die on D-Day.  But if they piece the details together carefully, keep a sharp eye and make preparations, there's a very good chance they will be alright.

This is a weakness with playing off the cuff, as many DMs will argue is the best way.  DMs are human.  They give too much and realize they can't take it back; so they have to engineer claw-backs and deus ex machina to restore the balance.  They kick too hard and realize they have; so they have to fudge and have the cavalry show up to restore the balance.  Then, while the players puzzle out the DM's concoction, the DM must parasitically steal ideas from the players ... until the players realize what's going on, whereupon they get hold of the DM's tail and wag the dog.  It's an unsustainable pattern.

I haven't met a DM yet who plays by the pant's seat, who isn't absurdly proud and righteous about the ability (I was, until I learned better); yet what is it when the DM spends two minutes inventing something and the players spend four hours sweating their thoughts on the same problem?  Cleverness?  Or Laziness?  And what have we got when pillars of the community, from the WOTC staff down to a blogger like Maliszewski, wear LAZINESS as a badge on their chest to argue their fucking virtue?  Is this, Dear Player, really what you want in a DM?

Between sessions, I have considerably more than four hours to pore over possibilities and reasons why the world might give way or push back against actions the players take; why shouldn't I use that time to their benefit, so that when the player makes a prediction about their first move, I'm three guesses ahead of them, thinking more clearly than they can (I have nothing riding on the answer), having given much more time to the problem than they've had during the night's running.  How can this not make me a better DM?  Especially, as I say, I'm not invested in any particular result.  I'm free to invent answers to questions on every side of the problem, as there is no side I'm banking on.  NO dungeon master playing on the fly has the wherewithal to do that during a game — AND manage the game as well.  Which means, every answer has to be on the fly as well.  Every answer has to be made without considering first if it's a good answer or not; and so who knows what the consequences of those answers will be?  Are they the best possible answers?  Probably not, being that they're the first answers, the most obvious answers, the answers with the least possible time given to invention.  These answers will reflect the DM's prejudices and the DM's gut instincts.

Too often, the game world's going to give way when it shouldn't; and push back when it shouldn't.  When the players get too much, they'll feel the game's too easy.  When they get thumped excessively hard, they'll scream injustice.  The middle ground, where the game is good, gets narrower until it's soiled completely from shit flying from the left and right.  And because the DM's making it up as we go along, we can expect overcompensation, impatience, sensitivity and desperation to cover up mistakes made, usually resulting in other mistakes.  In all, a ghastly mess.  This is why I said in the last post, when we try to run this way, we will fuck the game up.

Why, then, is no part of the sandbox intrinsically "better" than any other part?  I'll pick that up with the next post.