The Difficulty in RPGs thread

[hogarth]

The real question is "what would you do as a DM if you had no control over PC perma-death?"

I mean, character-driven stories are right out. Your party's paladin's rivalry with the Thorn Knight stops being a motivator for a story the instant the party paladin dies. No one cares about avenging the burning of the Rogue's village by kobolds after the Rogue gets killed by some side-quest necromancer. NPC's that have relationships with PCs no longer work if that PC is perma-dead, so basically a bunch of NPc-based adventures are dead out because "my mentor asked me to help" will stop being worthwhile quest hook.

Character-driven plot elements are right out too.[etc.]

I'm always fascinated by posts where I can't tell if I agree or disagree with the poster's point of view.

In low-level D&D (which is where I do most of my playing), deaths are generally permanent. And I agree that it adds extra work to integrate a new PC into the party in a way so that the new PC cares about the plot so far. And that's why I don't like revolving door parties. Nevertheless, I don't agree that "character-driven stories are right out" or "character-driven plot elements are right out": in my experience, you still put those in, and when they fail, they fail (and that sucks), and that's the cost of doing business.

[K]

Basically, don't tailor the stories to the PCs. Just create an interesting setting and the players will make their own stories.

Yeh, that's not character-driven storytelling, but scenario creation. Sometimes stories come out of scenarios, but they are not designed to do that because they are character-agnostic.

The difference between a scenario and a story is in the dramatic impact. Continuing the rivalry with the Thorn Knight after the party paladin dies loses it's dramatic impact completely when it's not about two knights in a lifelong rivalry that began when they were entering their holy order. Now it only exists because it's about this guy who hates some other guys because they used to be friends with a guy he hated, and I think we can all agree that this is a lame hook for a story.

Sandbox design is the solution to not wanting to do character-based stories, or really any stories at all. Things happen and sometimes they qualify as stories and sometimes it's just nonsense.

[virgil]

Sandbox design is the solution to not wanting to do character-based stories, or really any stories at all. Things happen and sometimes they qualify as stories and sometimes it's just nonsense.

Where do character-based stories end and railroading begin?

[Schleiermacher]

Basically, don't tailor the stories to the PCs. Just create an interesting setting and the players will make their own stories.

Yeh, that's not character-driven storytelling, but scenario creation. Sometimes stories come out of scenarios, but they are not designed to do that because they are character-agnostic.

The difference between a scenario and a story is in the dramatic impact. Continuing the rivalry with the Thorn Knight after the party paladin dies loses it's dramatic impact completely when it's not about two knights in a lifelong rivalry that began when they were entering their holy order. Now it only exists because it's about this guy who hates some other guys because they used to be friends with a guy he hated, and I think we can all agree that this is a lame hook for a story.

Sandbox design is the solution to not wanting to do character-based stories, or really any stories at all. Things happen and sometimes they qualify as stories and sometimes it's just nonsense.

Okay, granted, but you have to admit that doesn't mean

you have to stop running adventures and start running wargame scenarios for a strategy game.

The PCs are still characters, not just playing pieces in a strategy game. They still have goals and relationships within the setting, those connections still drive play.

[echoVanguard]

Now it only exists because it's about this guy who hates some other guys because they used to be friends with a guy he hated, and I think we can all agree that this is a lame hook for a story.

We most definitely do not agree that that is a lame hook for a story. If I'm friends with Percy the Paladin and he hates Doug the Dastardly, he has assumedly told me all of the reasons why he hates Doug during our time together - so when Percy gets unfortunately killed by Random Encounter Hill Giant, I might feel it falls to me to take up his mission and wipe out Doug the Dastardly. That's not lame at all. It's interesting, because now Doug the Dastardly has no idea why I'm after him and provides a lot of avenues for new angles to the conflict that might not have existed before. Maybe Doug had no way of putting pressure on Percy because he had no family, but my character does, so the entire dynamic has changed.

This whole argument hinges on the assumption that any story which deviates sufficiently from its original intended form becomes somehow less interesting or good, and that argument is provably false. It becomes a different story, but there's no reason to believe it's any less engaging. More to the point, a lot of people are more engaged by stories that aren't set in stone, and by declaring that all stories that don't have fixed endpoints are awful, you're dismissing the viewpoints of those people.

It's true that not all stories produced by a given scenario are good or even coherent, but there's no guarantee of that for planned stories either. You can't throw a rock without hitting a dozen threads of people complaining about their MC's amateur-hour railroad story littered with deus ex machina (itself a form of narrative incoherence).

echo

edit - typo

[Username17]

This whole argument hinges on the assumption that any story which deviates sufficiently from its original intended form becomes somehow less interesting or good, and that argument is provably false. It becomes a different story, but there's no reason to believe it's any less engaging. More to the point, a lot of people are more engaged by stories that aren't set in stone, and by declaring that all stories that don't have fixed endpoints are awful, you're dismissing the viewpoints of those people.

Basically this. The current insane tangent K is off on hinges on the idea that cooperative storytelling is somehow bad or fake, which is a frankly bizarre position to take in a discussion about cooperative storytelling games. In a cooperative storytelling game, you don't know how the story is going to come out or what the major plot twists are going to be because there are other authors. Whether you allow random chance to enter into it doesn't even matter, because if there are at least three people at the table the parts of the story you control are always going to be less than the parts you don't. A character living or dying unexpectedly isn't nearly as big a change in story direction as one of the players suggesting that the team go exploring the seas or invading Niefelheim.

Rolling with twists in the story you didn't expect, whether they come from a surprising die roll or the surprising contribution of another storyteller at the table is what cooperative storytelling is all about. If you don't consider that sort of story flexibility to be valid or interesting, you shouldn't even try to play a D&D game, you should read a book.

-Username17

[hogarth]

This whole argument hinges on the assumption that any story which deviates sufficiently from its original intended form becomes somehow less interesting or good, and that argument is provably false. It becomes a different story, but there's no reason to believe it's any less engaging.

My reason to believe that stories get less engaging after repeated party turnover is due to my personal experience playing RPGs. If your experience says otherwise, I wish I was playing at your table!

The worst culprit for the nonsensical revolving door party, in my experience, is Call of Cthulhu. My friends and I tried playing through Masks of Nyarlathotep, but constantly bringing in new PCs made it feel more like Paranoia than Lovecraft.

[Username17]

This whole argument hinges on the assumption that any story which deviates sufficiently from its original intended form becomes somehow less interesting or good, and that argument is provably false. It becomes a different story, but there's no reason to believe it's any less engaging.

My reason to believe that stories get less engaging after repeated party turnover is due to my personal experience playing RPGs. If your experience says otherwise, I wish I was playing at your table!

The worst culprit for the nonsensical revolving door party, in my experience, is Call of Cthulhu. My friends and I tried playing through Masks of Nyarlathotep, but constantly bringing in new PCs made it feel more like Paranoia than Lovecraft.

This is true. A rapidly revolving door for cast members can make stories incoherent. And Call of Cthulhu is a pretty major offender as far as that goes. But you're also Strawmanning EV, in that he didn't specify an optimal rate of character death, and your "repeated party turnover" scenario is not something derivable from what he said at all. It's like saying "You say you like chocolate, but in my experience having several tonnes of the stuff poured on me makes it hard to breathe!"

I don't think anyone on Team Character Death is advocating Paranoia or Call of Cthulhu levels of character death outside of one-shots or comedy slapstick adventures.

-Username17

[hogarth]

But you're also Strawmanning EV, in that he didn't specify an optimal rate of character death, and your "repeated party turnover" scenario is not something derivable from what he said at all.

If he wants to add a disclaimer to his previous remarks in the case of having iterated party turnover, he's free to add one of course.

I'll stick with my experience that a RPG campaign "which deviates sufficiently from its original intended form" through having to replace PCs (i.e. the context of the discussion) "becomes somehow less interesting or good" more often than not. Is that sufficiently derivable from his remarks for your taste, Frank?

[K]

This whole argument hinges on the assumption that any story which deviates sufficiently from its original intended form becomes somehow less interesting or good, and that argument is provably false. It becomes a different story, but there's no reason to believe it's any less engaging. More to the point, a lot of people are more engaged by stories that aren't set in stone, and by declaring that all stories that don't have fixed endpoints are awful, you're dismissing the viewpoints of those people.

No. You made a pile of assumptions and somehow didn't read anything that I wrote, so I can't even be angry because it's all failure.

Character-based stories requires you to do take actions because your character has a reason. That's it. It's not a complicated idea. There are no fixed plot points and you can do cooperative storytelling all you want.

So when the DM says that someone tells you where your father's murderer is, you then decide to grab your friends to go hunt that guy down because your character wants that and everyone's actions during that adventure forms the story. This gives out opportunities to RP for everyone as you emotionally react to the things happening to the character.

But you can't do that if you remove the character. Avenging the Rogue's destroyed village stops being a interesting story when the Rogue dies. The story fails and it just becomes some fights you did.

A scenario is just excuses to have fights. "Exploring the sea" is not a story, but an excuse to fight krakens and collect pearls. No one has any emotional reaction to "exploring the sea," and so it doesn't meet the minimum criteria of being a story.

And that's what sandboxing is. It's just an excuse to have some fights, and maybe a story is created, but probably not. It's shallow and easy because the excuse that wargamers need to have a fight can be as shallow as "my units are on the same map as these other units" and they are happy.

Deciding "hey, let's go explore the ocean" is not a story. It's a scenario where random things will happen and maybe they make a story, but probably not because no one has any feelings about fights with krakens.

[echoVanguard]

But you're also Strawmanning EV, in that he didn't specify an optimal rate of character death, and your "repeated party turnover" scenario is not something derivable from what he said at all.

If he wants to add a disclaimer to his previous remarks in the case of having iterated party turnover, he's free to add one of course.

I'll stick with my experience that a RPG campaign "which deviates sufficiently from its original intended form" through having to replace PCs (i.e. the context of the discussion) "becomes somehow less interesting or good" more often than not. Is that sufficiently derivable from his remarks for your taste, Frank?

As Frank points out, there is a very large difference between the ideas that "iterated party turnover is generally not desirable" (your position) and "party turnover of any kind is intrinsically bad" (K's position). For one thing, adding iteration changes the nature of the argument a good deal, and there's a tremendous world of rhetorical difference between "generally not desirable" and "intrinsically bad". It's especially important to note that my post argues about one very specific case and disproves two general statements, neither of which are the ones you're talking about.

A lot of my discourse on this board in the pro-death/anti-death discussions have generally centered on the idea that there is no universal value judgment on character death in RPGs. It is an option, which is appropriate in some games, inappropriate in others, and variously desirable based on circumstances in most. There are some circumstances in which the inability of characters to die is deeply undesirable, mostly when it produces severe logical contradictions or tonal inconsistencies, but there are also some games where character death is unambiguously detrimental to the game's design paradigm. For example, nobody would play Paranoia without character death, but a Sherlock Holmes-eseque 1920s detective fiction game can entirely replace character death with "incapacitation" without any real problems. For generalist games, you need a system that is capable of producing both outputs - characters dying when they should, and not dying when they shouldn't. Nemesis Age's Luck Points (a mechanism solely dedicated to avoiding player death or loss of agency) are partially controlled by the Director and partially controlled by the Players, so all parties involved have some level of control over whether or not their characters can die.

echo

[echoVanguard]

Character-based stories requires you to do take actions because your character has a reason. That's it. It's not a complicated idea. There are no fixed plot points and you can do cooperative storytelling all you want.

So when the DM says that someone tells you where your father's murderer is, you then decide to grab your friends to go hunt that guy down because your character wants that and everyone's actions during that adventure forms the story. This gives out opportunities to RP for everyone as you emotionally react to the things happening to the character.

Everything you said up to this point seems pretty logical to me.

But you can't do that if you remove the character. Avenging the Rogue's destroyed village stops being a interesting story when the Rogue dies. The story fails and it just becomes some fights you did.

This, on the other hand, makes absolutely no sense. It is completely dissociated from everything you just said. If my character, Steve the mage, was the friend of Jimmy the Rogue who has just tragically perished from a failed saving throw against an asp in his bedroll, I have a legitimate in-character reason to want to do things because my friend wanted to do them. If Jimmy the Rogue was my friend and his village was destroyed, my character can very well be tremendously emotionally invested in exacting revenge for Jimmy's Village, even if Jimmy dies halfway through the process. Heck, I might be even more driven to complete it "so Jimmy didn't die for nothing". It's certainly not assumed - if Jimmy was a jerk and I didn't like him, or my character is generally indifferent to other people's concerns, then sure, I might decide that avenging that guy's stupid village is dumb and won't want to do it. And that's my choice as a character, being motivated by my character's rationales, and thus a perfectly valid story.

"Exploring the sea" is not a story, but an excuse to fight krakens and collect pearls. No one has any emotional reaction to "exploring the sea," and so it doesn't meet the minimum criteria of being a story.

And that's what sandboxing is. It's just an excuse to have some fights, and maybe a story is created, but probably not. It's shallow and easy because the excuse that wargamers need to have a fight can be as shallow as "my units are on the same map as these other units" and they are happy.

Deciding "hey, let's go explore the ocean" is not a story. It's a scenario where random things will happen and maybe they make a story, but probably not because no one has any feelings about fights with krakens.

This is most definitely wrong. People write stories about exploration all the time. It's literally one of the seven basic plots - the Voyage and Return. If you really think that "let's explore the ocean" can't be an exciting story, a seminal author of science fiction would like to have a few words with you.

echo

[infected slut princess]

Character-based stories requires you to do take actions because your character has a reason. That's it. It's not a complicated idea. There are no fixed plot points and you can do cooperative storytelling all you want.

...

A scenario is just excuses to have fights. "Exploring the sea" is not a story, but an excuse to fight krakens and collect pearls. No one has any emotional reaction to "exploring the sea," and so it doesn't meet the minimum criteria of being a story.

...

Deciding "hey, let's go explore the ocean" is not a story. It's a scenario where random things will happen and maybe they make a story, but probably not because no one has any feelings about fights with krakens.

I do not believe these are meaningful distinctions. The only true "Scenario" by your definition is, I think, those games where it's like a character battle arena Street Fighter kind of setup, where you literally just have fights abstracted from any narrative.

I don't even think it's true for everyone that a character-driven story itself could not be an excuse to have fights. I'm pretty sure I have met players like that. Many people it seems prefer RPGs with fights rather than RPGs without fights. Some of those people are primarily interested in fights, and yet all their games are not non-story battle arena combat, and they play with the pretense that their character wants to do stuff in the story.

Most "scenarios" are just as easily character-driven stories. Your example is: "let's go explore the ocean". What! That sounds like a story. It could be a cool story! Exploration is cool. Fighting krakens is cool. You could be trying to hunt the biggest King Kraken! Or you could be trying to find your cool daddy-o, a great explorer who disappeared in the Ocean of Doom. Or a million other "random things" that could make a cool story about exploring an ocean. And whether the players are playing it as a "character-driven story" or a "scenario", they will probably complain if there are not enough fights!

[hogarth]

As Frank points out, there is a very large difference between the ideas that "iterated party turnover is generally not desirable" (your position) and "party turnover of any kind is intrinsically bad" (K's position).

I can't speak for K; as I noted above, I can't tell whether I agree with his position or not because it's worded with such hyperbole that I can't tell whether he's serious or not ("if you had no control over PC perma-death [..] character-driven stories are right out").

For one thing, adding iteration changes the nature of the argument a good deal[..]

Yes, but I think the difference is one of degree, not of type. I.e., replacing one character requires a moderate amount of work to avoid shitting on the campaign whereas replacing many characters requires a huge amount of work to do the same.

[Schleiermacher]

Most "scenarios" are just as easily character-driven stories. Your example is: "let's go explore the ocean". What! That sounds like a story. It could be a cool story! Exploration is cool. Fighting krakens is cool. You could be trying to hunt the biggest King Kraken! Or you could be trying to find your cool daddy-o, a great explorer who disappeared in the Ocean of Doom. Or a million other "random things" that could make a cool story about exploring an ocean.

This hits the nail on the head.

[K]

Most "scenarios" are just as easily character-driven stories. Your example is: "let's go explore the ocean". What! That sounds like a story. It could be a cool story! Exploration is cool. Fighting krakens is cool. You could be trying to hunt the biggest King Kraken! Or you could be trying to find your cool daddy-o, a great explorer who disappeared in the Ocean of Doom. Or a million other "random things" that could make a cool story about exploring an ocean.

This hits the nail on the head.

If it's not "exploring the ocean" any more and suddenly becomes about finding your father in that ocean, then it's not a scenario any more. It's a character-driven story.

It's a scenario when it's just an ocean map, some kraken lairs, and some sahaugin villages. That's the sandbox-style.

It's a story when you are exploring that ocean to find the man who has a cure to a poison that is killing the queen.

It's a character-driven story when that man is a PC's father and the PC's childhood rival The Red Pirate James is also racing to find that man so that he can sell the cure to the crown.

Kill the PC in a scenario, and literally nothing happens. Kill the PC in a story, and very little changes. Kill the PC in a character-driven story, and the story gets downgraded to a basic story that sucks.

In a perma-death world, there is no reason to make character-driven adventures about PCs because you risk wasting of your effort and creating deeply unsatisfying stories.

[Chamomile]

You know what's ironic, K? I've got a major NPC in the game I'm running right now. She's basically a draftee, and fatalistic and convinced she'll die fighting before the war (which has been going on for decades already) will come to an end. And I realized halfway through that my rather lenient rules for death, created for the benefit of the PCs but which work the same for NPCs because that's how rules work, made her character kind of hollow. An off-screen death would be lame and the odds of an on-screen death are basically nil, which makes her conviction that she's going to die pretty odd. So now I've changed up the death rules to be slightly more lethal and her character makes sense because there is an actual chance of death in any given battle, so she actually can argue that iterative probability will get her sooner or later. And the same applies to the PCs, for that matter, but they can back out whenever they want. If they're wise enough to retire before getting bumped off.

The death mechanics are the character arc.

EDIT: Elaborating:

Likewise if you have permadeath on the table, your stories need to be built with the possibility that people will actually die. And honestly I prefer those stories. I didn't like Dark Knight Rises as much as the others, and I thought it'd have been improved a lot if Bane killed Batman and then Robin took his place instead. Because Bruce Wayne had become more than a man, he became a symbol. When Bruce Wayne died, Batman lived on. And that was cool, and it's the kind of story you can only tell with permadeath, and which is actually better with randomized permadeath than with a cutscene death, if nothing else because the latter reeks of contrivance. You can run Saving Private Ryan, where the point of everyone's character arc is "stuff we want to do after the war if we make it that long (which most of us won't)." You can totally have character-driven stories that are built to withstand permadeath. Many of them rely on permadeath.

[K]

You know what's ironic, K? I've got a major NPC in the game I'm running right now. She's basically a draftee, and fatalistic and convinced she'll die fighting before the war (which has been going on for decades already) will come to an end. And I realized halfway through that my rather lenient rules for death, created for the benefit of the PCs but which work the same for NPCs because that's how rules work, made her character kind of hollow. An off-screen death would be lame and the odds of an on-screen death are basically nil, which makes her conviction that she's going to die pretty odd. So now I've changed up the death rules to be slightly more lethal and her character makes sense because there is an actual chance of death in any given battle, so she actually can argue that iterative probability will get her sooner or later. And the same applies to the PCs, for that matter, but they can back out whenever they want. If they're wise enough to retire before getting bumped off.

The death mechanics are the character arc.

Your NPC knows the game mechanics?

That's too meta for me, man.

[Chamomile]

Your NPC knows the game mechanics?

That's too meta for me, man.

My NPC isn't the audience of the story. She goes on talking about the inevitability of death even when mechanically speaking she's dead wrong. But my PCs, who are the audience (and also co-authors, RPGs are weird like that, but they are also the audience) know for a fact that she is completely wrong so long as the death mechanics operate on the "you never ever die unless you're sick of the character and want to get rid of them" mechanic. The character says the same thing either way, but having death mechanics that have some small chance of actually murdering you in the course of your adventures means that she comes off less like a whiny prick and more like someone's who's been dealt a bad hand by life and is playing it the best she can, but doesn't have any delusions about her odds of survival. Because those odds are ultimately zero, since she can never choose to take her winnings and leave.

[K]

Your NPC knows the game mechanics?

That's too meta for me, man.

My NPC isn't the audience of the story. She goes on talking about the inevitability of death even when mechanically speaking she's dead wrong. But my PCs, who are the audience (and also co-authors, RPGs are weird like that, but they are also the audience) know for a fact that she is completely wrong so long as the death mechanics operate on the "you never ever die unless you're sick of the character and want to get rid of them" mechanic. The character says the same thing either way, but having death mechanics that have some small chance of actually murdering you in the course of your adventures means that she comes off less like a whiny prick and more like someone's who's been dealt a bad hand by life and is playing it the best she can, but doesn't have any delusions about her odds of survival. Because those odds are ultimately zero, since she can never choose to take her winnings and leave.

Why are your NPCs using the same mechanics as PCs?

Does no NPC in your campaign world ever die? If that's not the case, your example is terrible and makes no sense.

[Schleiermacher]

If it's not "exploring the ocean" any more and suddenly becomes about finding your father in that ocean, then it's not a scenario any more. It's a character-driven story.

It's a scenario when it's just an ocean map, some kraken lairs, and some sahaugin villages. That's the sandbox-style.

It's a story when you are exploring that ocean to find the man who has a cure to a poison that is killing the queen.

It's a character-driven story when that man is a PC's father and the PC's childhood rival The Red Pirate James is also racing to find that man so that he can sell the cure to the crown.

Yes, but it's also a character-driven story even if that man is Miracle Max and the pirate is the Dread Pirate Roberts whom none of the PCs have ever met, if the characters are doing it for any reason more personal than "the crown hired them for a job". And that's the point: A sufficiently fertile sandbox gives rise to character-driven stories by allowing the players to get invested in the setting and set character goals. So you don't have to do a lot of wasted up-front work and setup. It happens in the course of the game! Sure, if PCs die those stories can be cut short, and it can feel like a waste of potential, but I'd call that the cost of doing business. And as echoVanguard says, that doesn't necessarily happen, if more than one PC is invested in them. Sometimes it even leads to interesting twists!

Kill the PC in a scenario, and literally nothing happens.

Well, except if the other factions in the scenario react to the death of the PC, but eh... granted.

Kill the PC in a story, and very little changes. Kill the PC in a character-driven story, and the story gets downgraded to a basic story that sucks.

No, kill the PC in a character-driven story, and the story is simply cut short, possibly causing fallout that leads to new stories. Of course the PCs won't be interested in doing things they're not interested in, so they'll do other stuff, that they are interested in, instead of suffering through a denouement they have no interest in and wasting everyone's time. This is practically a tautology, K!

In a perma-death world, there is no reason to make character-driven adventures about PCs because you risk wasting of your effort and creating deeply unsatisfying stories.

Sure you risk it, but it's low risk, high reward, so the "no reason" talk is silly hyperbole.[/i]

[MGuy]

I am fairly sure K and Frank must have played DnD at the same table before. It is odd to see K railing against something Frank is gung ho for, going as far as to decisively say that it just can't work. I'm not sure if K is even playing the same game as I am. I've had games break down because of life issues, location issues, attendance issues, and shit like that but I tend to avoid people who are too afraid to put effort into a character because they 'may' die.

I always have run permadeath as a thing that can happen in every game I've ever run since I started playing DnD at all and I am not lacking in stories of characters developing over long periods of time. I've had plenty of characters die off and I kept playing anyway. I've only once had a revolving door of death situation and that particular player (as only he died multiple times) was the jump off a "cliff just because I can take the damage" type of player.

[K]

Kill the PC in a story, and very little changes. Kill the PC in a character-driven story, and the story gets downgraded to a basic story that sucks.

No, kill the PC in a character-driven story, and the story is simply cut short, possibly causing fallout that leads to new stories. Of course the PCs won't be interested in doing things they're not interested in, so they'll do other stuff, that they are interested in, instead of suffering through a denouement they have no interest in and wasting everyone's time. This is practically a tautology, K!

Stories that get cut short suck.

Seriously, watch the first 30 mins of a 90 minute movie and then turn it off or read the first 100 pages of a 300 page book and you get a terrible excuse for a story that will be deeply unsatisfying.

Broken stories are actually less satisfying than no stories at all, thus people do sandboxes. Randomness without plot or theme or emotional hooks in a sandbox environment is a consistent, if mostly bland, experience that is made fun by things like cool dungeon design or cool encounter design.

[Omegonthesane]

Kill the PC in a story, and very little changes. Kill the PC in a character-driven story, and the story gets downgraded to a basic story that sucks.

No, kill the PC in a character-driven story, and the story is simply cut short, possibly causing fallout that leads to new stories. Of course the PCs won't be interested in doing things they're not interested in, so they'll do other stuff, that they are interested in, instead of suffering through a denouement they have no interest in and wasting everyone's time. This is practically a tautology, K!

Stories that get cut short suck.

Seriously, watch the first 30 mins of a 90 minute movie and then turn it off or read the first 100 pages of a 300 page book and you get a terrible excuse for a story that will be deeply unsatisfying.

Broken stories are actually less satisfying than no stories at all, thus people do sandboxes. Randomness without plot or theme or emotional hooks in a sandbox environment is a consistent, if mostly bland, experience that is made fun by things like cool dungeon design or cool encounter design.

It sucked so very much that the story of Robb Stark's grinding war against the Iron Throne was cut short by treachery, and in no way improved the tone of the whole piece as well as laying the groundwork for different stories.

It's late enough up here that I have an excuse not to be more coherent about the point, here.

[Schleiermacher]

Look, K, are you just wilfully ignoring the things I post? Or do you think I'm talking out of my ass? I'm talking about my experience with sandbox play or scenario play or whatever you want to call it, and it does not jibe with what you are describing. Plural of anecdote is not data and all that, but at least acknowledge what I am saying, don't just pick 20% of my post to quibble patronizingly about. It's irritating.