I didn’t really expect to be interested in this book. “Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground”, by Stu Horvath (of the Vintage RPG podcast, among other things), is a book that looks at the history of tabletop roleplaying games “from D&D to Mothership”, as it says on the cover.
It’s not that I’m uninterested in the history of roleplaying games — I’m very much interested in it, and I have at least half a dozen books on the topic. I just wasn’t necessarily interested in having one more book on that topic. But I got it as a gift a couple months ago, and… I love it. It’s been sitting proudly on my living room table since then, ready to be picked up every now and then for a few minutes of reading some pages picked at random. Let’s dive in!
It’s always fun to catch up with online TTRPG discussions because every week or so there’s a hot debate taking my feed by storm. Most of the time I don’t know where it comes from, but this week’s was on topic for which I already had an old post draft, so I figured I would finish it and publish it.
The topic is “Sandbox vs Railroad“, where my take is that “Sandbox” is a largely useless term, and “Railroad” is a symptom.
“Sandbox” is Useless
When people setup “Sandbox” and “Railroad” as opposites, they use the term “Sandbox” as meaning “you can do whatever you want”. This is largely useless because it’s both an ambiguous assessment of the agreed upon domain of play, and a basic truth of all roleplaying games.
The first point relates to what’s expected of the players for a given game. For instance, a common Cyberpunk RED campaign framework starts each adventure with the PCs meeting a fixer, or other missing-giving NPC. That NPC introduces you to a client, gives you a mission briefing, maybe a few Eurobucks as an advance, and off you go on that mission. You’re expected to accept that mission because, well, that’s the scenario the GM prepared for tonight’s game. The mission itself might be what some people describe as a “Sandbox”, but Night City itself is not. In that sort of campaign, refusing the mission and declaring that your character goes to the next bar down the street to see what other missions are available would be considered a dick move. The sandbox is only as big as the playground it’s been built into.
The second point is the simple fact that roleplaying games have this advantage over board games and video games that the players’ and GM’s imagination are infinitely more vast. Even in a fairly constrained environment such as “steal the package from this train” or “find the magic sword at the end of this dungeon”, roleplaying games offer a near limitless array of options. You can approach the train on dirt bikes and jump on it, infiltrate or bribe the crew defending the package, or setup explosives down the tracks. You can fight your way through all 13 levels of the dungeon, use cunning political manipulation to set the dungeon’s factions to destroy each other, or infiltrate the last level through the astral planes. You don’t need to run a “Sandbox” game for this: that’s just a roleplaying game by definition to me… but remember the previous point: if the current game is all about knights delving into dungeons to smite evil, maybe don’t try to leave that sandbox, and just enjoy the toys in it.
In some cases, some people alternatively use the term “Sandbox” to describe a campaign framework where the players can follow different leads, pick their own missions, and so on. I personally find that a bit too vague, and often ask follow-up questions to figure out if, say, they’re playing a Hexcrawl or Pointcrawl or Plot Points Campaign or whatever else.
“Railroad” is a Symptom
The term “Railroad” is useful to help diagnose what went wrong with a game.
There are many ways a game session can go wrong: bad player or GM behaviour, bad pairing of rules and setting/genre, bad pairing of PCs and scenario, lack of dramatic tension, and so on. Two other ways that it can go wrong are “Railroading” and “Puppeteering”:
“Puppeteering” is effectively loss of player agency. It happens when the players cannot do, or attempt to do, what they want. Either the GM takes control of their character, or they just hit a wall that can’t be climbed — or, in fact, that can’t even be attempted to climb.
“Railroading” happens when the players can attempt to do whatever they want, but nothing works except the one sequence of events that the GM has prepared.
A simple example of the difference between the two is a situation where the players want to speak to the Captain of the City Guard to see if she knows anything about the Secret Order of the Crimson Scythe:
With Puppeteering, the GM simply says “no, the Captain is too busy, she won’t see you…. what else do you do?” The players cannot even attempt to get access to the NPC.
With Railroading, you do meet the Captain but she doesn’t know anything… which isn’t a problem per se (it might even lead to a great scene!), but in this case this is the tenth thing that the players have tried doing to advance the story, and none of them have led to anything because somehow the only thing that will achieve anything is to talk to the priest at the Temple of Angmar outside town. Worse, whatever the Captain does say could be taken as some sort of clue by the players, and they may end up on a wild goose chase for the rest of the session.
Of the two, Railroading is not just a flaw of a game session, but can also be a flaw of an adventure module. It does happen that a published scenario just assumes that the players will make specific decisions at specific points.
So there, “Sandbox” is useless, and “Railroad” is a symptom. I’m sure some of you will have different opinions about all this, but that’s mine for now!
In my recent post about the passing of Jennell Jaquays, I mentioned how “Jaquaying the dungeon” had become fairly common parlance to refer to Jennell’s innovative dungeon design from the early 1980s. While researching/fact-checking that, I had found that Justin Alexander (who coined the term) had recently changed the term to “Xandering”. That new term sounded a bit weird and self-aggrandizing to me but the accompanying note seemed OK, if a bit vague about what Jennell actually wanted.
Now a pretty detailed essay called “Xandering is Slandering” has been making the rounds. It gathers a lot of evidence that doesn’t give Justin Alexander a good look (his response so far has been underwhelming). I’m not going to go into that whole thing, but I want to note that in the future I’ll be at least careful to keep the “S” in “Jaquaysing the dungeon”.
Jennell is of course a legendary roleplaying games designer and artist, whom various people will associate with various famous adventure modules such as Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia. Not being much of a D&D player, I mostly associate her with RuneQuest’s Griffin Mountainand Legendary Duck Tower & Other Tales. I was also looking forward to her current work revamping her old Central Casting books.
A few years ago I was also made aware of the term “Jaquaying the Dungeon“, which referred to emulating the non-linear aspects of the dungeons Jennell became famous for at the turn of the 1980s. I realized today that Justin Alexander went back and changed the term to “Xandering the Dungeon” a couple months ago, at Jennell’s request. The article that introduced this term has now been edited and renamed, and you can find the details and reasons of this renaming here… so, well, something to keep in mind.
It’s that time of the year when we reflect on our twelve months of TTRPG’ing! You might know that I love stats and spreadsheets and graphs, but once again you won’t see any here: I find that social gaming circles get a bit too much into a contest about who played more sessions and systems. But compared to previous years, I want to get into a more detailed reflection this year.
Columbia Games usually runs simple, straight-to-the-point, and fast-shipping Kickstarters. This latest one wasn’t any different: the 40th Anniversary HarnWorld hardcover showed up on my doorstep last week, a few months after it was successfully funded. Let’s have a look!
“Metaplot” is often a dirty word around TTRPG players, and I just don’t understand this negative attitude. Here are some ways to deal with them (the metaplots, not the players with a negative attitude), all of which I’ve done to some degree or another except the last option.
Last year my Friday-evening group played a short campaign of Blades in the Dark (BitD), so I figured I’d share some notes about it — mostly the bits that we did wrong or that I didn’t like, with some actionable recommendations that will hopefully improve your experience should you play BitD yourself.
We played weekly for about six months, going through many adventures. For once in a long while, I was actually simply a player, instead of being the gamemaster! I had wanted to play BitD for a while, and when one of the players said he had the rulebook, I jumped on the occasion to make him run it. So unlike many other TTRPG posts here, this one is exceptionally from my perspective as a player.
Overall the campaign was quite good. Our gamemaster portrayed a few memorable NPCs, and we got into a lot of fun trouble. My main problem with the game was a slightly-too-crunchy system, and our messing up character progression. I doubt that we’ll get back to BitD, not necessarily because we didn’t like it, but mostly because we’ve got so many other games to play and so little time.
There’s this preconception in roleplaying circles that game settings are easy to get into if they have a book or movie about them. Middle Earth is “easy to grasp”, people say, because you “just” need to read a couple of (overly long) books, or watch a couple of (overly long) movies.
Hey I know at least three of these names! Map from Tolkien Gateway by Steven White Jr.
But I was watching my first Actual Play of The One Ring recently and it was set in the Second Age of Middle Earth: the coastal line of the game map looked familiar but all the names were “wrong”. I didn’t know where the player characters were from, who their allegiances were to, or where they were going. It was just a bunch of random Tolkienesque names to me. But I was familiar with the tropes, and I understood their simple short-term adventure goal. And that’s all I needed to follow along.
The last episode of Ken & Robin Talk About Stuff had a great little segment on crunch, and what it means especially when it is, in practice, vastly left unused. I didn’t really agree with Robin’s theory on self-identification as “someone who plays crunchy games”, but I was definitely behind Ken’s take about the option to bring meaningful mechanics when they fit the narrative and the fun, while leaving them aside the rest of the time. You could see this as a story-driven way of handling crunch: nobody cares what kind of gas the Batmobile runs on except in that one episode in which the Joker plans to blow up Batman in his car. Nobody cares about fatigue and encumbrance rules until that one adventure that features a dangerous trek through the Endless Pits of Lava. Well… assuming you want that episode to be about perseverance and choices, of course. Like Ken, I have a fondness for GURPS and its sliding crunch scale, so that’s probably why I’m behind him on this.
But as I’ve been playing and chatting about more games in the past couple years than I ever did in the previous fifteen, I’ve been thinking about crunch a bit. And the more I think about it, the less I think it’s a simple sliding scale from “light-weight” to “crunchy”. In fact, so far, I’ve boiled it down to three axes: system crunch, silo crunch, and option crunch.
