So… what is Complexity (or for that matter, its big brother, Chaos)? It seems the term(s) get thrown around a lot. You’ll find references to it in everything from economics, to meteorology, to ecology and even in horrible Ashton Kutcher movies. But what is this butterfly effect and how did it help the dinosaurs give Sam, Jeff and Newman such a hard time? And how does it impact on our RPG hobby?
Be warned, this post may contain Jurassic Park spoilers.
Well, in danger of providing an over-simplified definition (which is a bit odd to suggest when dealing with complexity), the more complex a system is, the more difficult it becomes to accurately predict the outcome of the interactions between the numerous parts of the system. Make sense? In Jurassic Park, dinosaurs were brought back to life by mixing the DNA harvested from fossilized mosquitoes (that fed off dinosaurs) with frog DNA. With so many variables in bringing the dinosaurs back to life, the only certainty was that the Park would lose control of the dinosaurs because they could not cover for all possible eventualities (like the dinosaurs overcoming their mono-gendered restriction and eventual breeding).
To avoid bloating this post’s word count, I’m going to assume all readers are familiar with the concepts of railroad and sandbox play. If not, here’s a link to a handy Wikipedia article. Right, so to continue with the Jurassic Park theme, a railroading GM can be likened to Hammond and InGen in JP. Initially, the dinosaurs (the players) will play along. Eventually, though, the players will derail the GM’s script as one cannot possibly predict the actions the PCs will attempt (or even what the variety of PC skills, spells, or powers would allow). Or (even worse) what the dice decide (Gasp! An element of randomness!). Sure, you, as railroading GM, may try to correct the course of the game, but this often entails anything from expecting extreme suspension of disbelief from the players to downright cheating. If you’re willing to deal with the tension that your course correction may fuel, by all means go for it. But, be warned, the PCs, like the dinosaurs, will find a way to breed derail your story again.
No, I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way.
This post was originally intended to form part of this month’s RPG blog carnival, with the topic of Dungeons and Dragons, hosted by 6d6 Fireball. The sub-topic I aimed to use in this post: You want to do what? But, as you can see, I’ve somehow managed to get myself sidetracked from writing about stories of awesome D&D WTF? moments. Those will still be coming though, just not today.
- jatori
PS – Who else is busy likening their players to dinosaurs? You always get that one velociraptor in each play group that figures out how to open doors.
I sometimes wonder if having a story is actually useful for players to springboard away from. From what I’ve heard, pure sandboxes are often dull – okay, there’s a world and…what? While having a story – it kind of means the players can grab the stories ball, and run with it in a direction that’s – well, very wild and playerish.
In other words, it could be very fruitful to have a railroaded story, that the players rebel and break out of.
The only issue is that it’s not fun to write such a story, as a GM, knowing it’s going to get dumped and forgotten about. I’ll grant you can find random story generators all over the place. The question is, would you guys feel cool if you broke free of what you knew was a randomly generated story, and did what you want to?
Comment by Callan — 8 July 2009 @ 6:19 am
In the purest of sandboxes, I can foresee problems arising because of the lack of guidance, the overwhelming number of options available and, thus, analysis paralysis.
When I try running something sandboxy, I rely on assigning goals to the players to motivate them to action and to help reduce the number of options they have to think about. Sometimes these goals are short-term (find food, shelter etc.) and sometimes long-term (become the pirate king). Hmm, very Maslow. Sometimes the goal gets handed down by me, but most of the time, I get the players to come up with their own goals.
Comment by jatori — 8 July 2009 @ 8:56 am
One of the campaigns I’m GMing is heavily ad lib. I have the overall conclusion worked out, but there is no pre-set path to achieve this conclusion. Some rather wild and unexpected things have happened – and I just try to run with it and make effort to provide compelling and interesting situations.
When was the last time that you were wrongfully accused in a court of law of “unlawful undeadness”? …lucky our heroes extricated themselves of that charge and got themselves a minor sentence involving 3 years in the silver mines. Whew. Except for the bit where one of the players *did* become unlawfully undead a little while later.
Comment by trashcondor — 8 July 2009 @ 10:19 am
I like the sandbox approach to running a game, and I try to “flesh out” (rumours, dungeons, etc…) the area my players are adventuring in, this normally results in the PC’s going off to explore something that they have heard about as opposed to following the planned adventure path.
Every now and then I railroad them back in the right direction, especially if they have chosen to explore an area that is generally populated with encounters of a much higher level than they are and of course if Im not in the mood of a TPK.
Comment by zarthon — 8 July 2009 @ 11:34 am
To Jatori – mmm, I’m not sure, about finding food or shelter. It’s like you have to do it, can’t just veer off – and once you’ve done it, if you didn’t have any idea what to do before, once its done you don’t either.
I think there’s something to “There’s a story over there in that village…but I’m up here, exploring a cave”. There’s a sort of osmotic transfer of story to the cave exploration – even if it means the mayors daught maries an orc (who knows, maybe she’ll like it?)
To Trashcondor – the overall ending figured out?
What if you took the wild stuff they did, and went with it – and kind of made some sort of ending out of it? If it goes lame, okay, default back to the ending you figured out. But if not, go with the wild stuff they do, work up some sort of climax, then pretend that’s what you had planned all along?
I’ve…just seen alot of stuff where there’s this wild bit in the middle, then it all ends up exactly as planned. I’ve had a GM say that to me. It seems…kind of pointless? I mean, if it seems to go limp, as I said, default to the ending you figured out. But if the wild stuff is wild, then it could make for a wild ending, right?
To zarthon – I’m kind of in two minds about that. Because typically I’d say players can see right through a GM when he railroads them out of a hotzone. And either they think thank goodness, or they’d tell you to stop railroading and let the TPK happen. But if they aren’t seeing through it – I’m kind of inclined to think you should tell them its a hotzone and no, you can’t go there unless you wrestle the GM to the ground (make the players be proactive if they want to TPK!)
Comment by Callan — 8 July 2009 @ 12:26 pm
@Callan: I think that I’ve been inspired to write a Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs approach to Sandbox play.
I do enjoy the concept of osmotic story transfer, as you put it, where ‘quests’ are sometimes mutually exclusive, portraying a living world.
@zarthon: I’m actually torn about this. Do I scale the world according to party level or not? In DnD, I tend to do that, within a certain range around the party level. In other games, like World of Darkness, I have no qualms about having super strong villains, as character progression isn’t tied as closely to slaughtering things.
@TC: Are there allowances for the legal undead? Like zombie lawyers?
Comment by jatori — 9 July 2009 @ 10:15 am
@Callan: You make a good point – but in doesn’t really apply in my case. I’ll try to not give away anything but the plan is as follows: a particular event concludes the campaign. The particular direction that the event takes is based on the story that unfolded beforehand. So if the characters got a bit wild… well that just directly influences the direction of the ending.
@jatori: Naturally the legal undead have concessions made in their favor – but keep in mind that the majority of them are mindless minor undead, they are afforded a status similar to pets and their owners are expected to “care” for them appropriately while making sure they don’t ooze onto the pavement and bite the pedestrians.
Comment by trashcondor — 10 July 2009 @ 9:48 am
[...] This post was inspired by the comments following a previous post, entitled: Complexity and why every game is a sandbox game. [...]
Pingback by Maslow’s Sandbox Game (or Needs-Based Player Hooks) « tenletter — 13 July 2009 @ 3:43 pm