Dungeons and Dragons arose in the 1970s, when gamers in Wisconsin decided to take the rules for a medieval war-game and modify them to govern not a unit of soldiers, but a single soldier. To this they added the idea of one player who served as the referee (the “dungeon master” in D&D lingo).
D&D is a role-playing game, which means that you create a character that you control in an imagined setting. I find the “role-playing” part of the label misleading, since most players spend little time doing anything that could be mistaken for playing a role in the thespian sense. Instead, “role-narrating” might be a better description for what most players do.
Players talk to the referee about the scene they find their characters in, and then they decide what they want their characters to do. Then—often, but not always—we use rules and dice rolls to determine the outcomes of those actions. Players tend to refer to their characters in the first-person (“I’m going to examine the door jamb to see if there’s any way to pry up that stone.”). Players with theatrical inclinations often talk “in character,” but few groups require this.
One difference between RPGs and other kinds of games is that there is no “winning” in most RPGs. A given problem or scenario might have victory conditions, determined either by non-player characters (e.g. capture the bandit alive to collect the Guild’s bounty) or by a hostile environment (e.g. loot a cursed mausoleum without getting eaten by its inhabitants) or some combination of the two. Player characters usually have to cooperate to succeed, but they can have independent or conflicting goals. Most RPGs have some kind of experience-point mechanic to track a character’s advancement.
Characters can get hurt, maimed, or killed. Some players regard death as a form of “losing,” but the beauty of RPGs is that you can then make up a new character and re-join the game. One character’s retirement or death is another’s narrative hook. (“We should hire some more muscle for our next trip to the ruins. And this time, let’s get a bigger boat and someone who knows how to steer it. And maybe a guide who knows the swamp.”)
Fantasy RPGs usually take place in a pre-modern or pseudo-medieval setting with supernatural elements. Most settings are “high fantasy” (set in a wholly fictional world) rather than “low fantasy” (set in our world, plus magic). Game companies sell books detailing licensed settings (J. R. R. Tolkein’s Middle-Earth, Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age), or proprietary settings (Greyhawk, Empire of the Petal Throne), but many referees make up their own.
My aim is to run (1) a high-fantasy (2) sword-and-sorcery (3) “sandbox” game.
To unpack that:
(1) The referee and players will develop an original setting. I tend to favor anthropological verisimilitude coupled with “weird” supernatural elements, where magic is arcane, spooky, and hazardous, rather than twee.
(2) Adventures will be human-scaled affairs. I’m opposing the pulp genre of “sword-and-sorcery,” where the short story and novella are the dominant forms, to “epic fantasy,” where the multi-novel series is the dominant form. Players in a sword-and-sorcery game should not expect continent-shaking battles between caricatures of Good (Ye Reluctant Chosen Ones) and caricatures of Evil (The Hordes of Häxän GorrDrinkur, Warwolf of Necroptomantic Tyranny).
(3) Finally, a referee running a “sandbox” game contrives opportunities for the characters to have adventures, but also encourages players set their own characters’ goals (i.e. their own victory conditions). Other player and non-player characters have their own goals, too, so not everybody in the sandbox wants to help you build your castle. Negotiating who accomplishes what, and how, becomes part of the game, not part of a script.
Note that a sandbox game is not “balanced” to make the world safe for new adventurers, so you have to be cautious. Since there is no “thwart the Dark Lord” plot that the referee is trying to herd the characters through, I won’t protect them for the sake of getting them to some Big Scene at the end. I will roll enemies’ hit and damage rolls where you can see them.
I plan to use the game Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Role-Playing. LotFP is an indie game that combines the simplicity and emphasis on player inventiveness of the early editions of D&D with the streamlined rules of later games. Its approach to fantasy gaming fits well enough with my own, though I have a number of “house rules” I’d like to try out.
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