Shadowscast Episode 9
Posted by Runeslinger on November 7, 2012 · 2 Comments
This ninth episode of Shadowscast, presents two longer segments on Korea, and one segment on dealing with one of the pitfalls of winging events from behind the GM screen in a sandbox or “lazy-style” game .
I had intended to include an update to an error in last episode’s Leviathans segment on the torpedo phase, but that will have to wait until episode 10.
Enjoy~
Darken others' doors:
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Filed under Casting the Shadows, Playing in Games, Reports, Running Games, Shadowscast, The Blog · Tagged with Chuseok, gaming, Halloween, Korea, Role-playing game, roleplaying, RPG, setting development, Shadowscast, South Korea
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Casting Shadows 
Cool, that was the first shadowcast of yours I have watched. I’m often at work and prefer my interwebs delivered over text, but I am truly impressed how you managed to maintained a thought thread with so few cut scenes. I think I would have been talking about chipmunks by the end of thought that long…
I liked the bit on sandbox games. The one I did try to run was more of a scripted sandbox, and tried to organize my thoughts, characters and futures as sort of ‘potential timelines’. What could happen all else being equal. But it almost sounds like you are suggesting, to take a sandbox to the next level, you have to define your world in terms of constraints? by the actions and events that are not likely to take place? by NPC limitation instead of traits?
That is high praise, Mr. Wolfe. Thanks very much!
I do recall you once mentioned to our gaming group that all conversations would eventually come around to three-toed sloths…. and so it seems that they do.
In that last segment of Shadowscast 9, you are absolutely right about what I am saying. In the segment, I am suggesting that if our intent is to be true to the world we are creating, and truly allow for the PC freedom intended by a sandbox, that we have to fight or curtail the dramatic instinct of the ‘storyteller’ to meddle with event outcomes to get an exciting, important, or otherwise narratively powerful scene. I suggest that that can wind up producing negative feedback among the players over time, and limit or rob freedom of choice. When the world reacts to what the PCs are doing from that omniscient GM angle instead of from what the NPCs et al could realistically do, we step away from the premise that the PCs are free to act, and turn it into a story over which we are the primary author.
There are plenty of games where that is expected, and plenty of reasons to run things that way, but if the goal is the freedom to operate in a sandbox setting, I feel that that sort of reactionary improvisation needs to be recognized and monitored. You need to be as aware of what is happening, what is likely to happen, what is happening, and what cannot happen.