@SJohnRoss Your GM advice has been a touchstone of mine for quite a while. I would beat someone with my own severed arm if they tried to take my Risus Companion away from me. It pulled me out of quite a funk/burnout that I was having as forever GM once. So thank you!!!
@SJohnRoss I'm not sure I understand what you mean.
Would you consider PbtA games (where no rolls are made and people just roleplay until a roll just happens to be triggered by the fiction) to be more in this direction than, for example, your typical D&D 5e game?
The way I read this (and I may be wrong) is the general sentiment from more narrative games that "I don't have to be a tactical genius, my character is"
@SJohnRoss So after binging Toast of the Town (which is an absolute joy, by the way, can't wait to drag some people into playing it!) I have some comments and questions to make sure I understand your approach correctly :)
First off, I would call these sorts of adventure modules "sandboxes", where the focus is on giving the GM a very detailed and rich setup and then sort of leaving the actual resulting storyline for the GM and players to create during the game.
In general, I find these sorts of modules to be "the best" simply because... players will go and do unhinged things whether you want them to or not, so I find that adventure modules that try to be too rigid quickly end up in a spot where they become irrelevant to the actual sessions.
This might come from me being a very story-based and improv-heavy GM, so I'm probably highly biased in this assessment.
Secondly, I do believe this sort of approach is not really that uncommon nowadays! Although most games exist on a spectrum between "linear" and "sandbox" I just recently was going over the Pathfinder 2e Strength of Thousands module for a future campaign and was really getting excited about how sandboxy some parts of it got.
Do you agree with this comparison between High Trust games and sandboxes? Or are there additional nuances I'm missing?
Also, I do agree that a lot of the most prominent modules tend to fall more towards the linear side, by I think there are some gems in modern RPGs that would be to your liking as well!
So basically I think there is a market for these games, it's mostly suffered a change of "branding" in my opinion :)
In any case, that was highly enjoyable and I will definitely post about it as soon as I get some people together to run Toast of the Town, highly recommend it to any GMs that like more freeform modules!
I think there's absolutely a market for these sort of adventures, but I suspect they're hard to make, and hard to run. Linear is easy to write and prep, so that's what GMs with too little time and publishers with too little money tend to go for. I suspect these adventures require perfectionists who do it for the love of the art.
@mcv@SJohnRoss I disagree on linear being easier to prep, it's just that sandbox is more frontloaded effort, but prepping a bit more at the start when you're full hype mode in exchange for prepping less later on is a good trade-off in my mind.
Could you guys take the sandbox vs. linear chatter to another thread? Turns out I can't mute a thread I started and I'd rather not mute you both as posters, but sandboxes make me nauseous and linearity isn't a topic I care about (HTT adventures can be linear or nonlinear).
And while I loathe sandboxes, I disagree that they're hard to make or run. IMO, sandboxes are the hobby's most profound expression of laziness and giving no shits.
But I agree that the perfectionists often like them, because they tend to treat setting like a model railroad set, and it's teeeeedious. 😬
@Kenan Toast of the Town is not a sandbox. Obviously, I'm painfully familiar with sandboxes. They are not intrinsically low-trust, but all of the many sandboxes I've studied have been either low-trust or DnD.
There is no storyline in HTT play. At no point in HTT does the GM, or the players, or the PCs, create a storyline.
I'm glad you enjoyed reading Toast, but I feel you've mischaracterized it.
@SJohnRoss I feel I don't understand the concept of "at no point create a storyline".
I don't see that as even being possible unless... nothing happens? Anything happening by definition creates a storyline simply by virtue of events happening in some sequence, whether player-originated or GM-originated