Schrödinger’s Wallpaper
A friend of mine’s favourite story about That Guy is how he was running a game in a savannah. He mentioned a pride of lions lazing far away off-hand to enrich the environment. That Guy casts Fireball at the pride, wiping them out. My friend asks why the hell the player did that. That Guy says “Killing them is worth Experience, so how much XP did he get for wiping ‘em out?” My only response to that was that That Guy didn’t know he shot wallpaper.
Video Game Design Guard Rails
A subtle hint in The Stanley Parable (2013).
In video game design, there is a lot of time spent using various techniques to curate the player’s experience with an emphasis on the player being unaware of the manipulation. Lighting up paths in a dark environment, using yellow paint to draw the eye are two examples of giving a player a subtle hint on which path to seek out.
Games that allow socialization might have an NPC that will no longer respond after you’ve run through its dialogue. At least until something new has happened, such as completing the quest it sent you out on. Environments are built to keep the player contained without them realizing. If you want to ruin the magic of a game, come up with a random objective and attempt to complete that to see how quickly these invisible guard rails suddenly jump out. Tabletop RPGs do not have that luxury.
When you run a game, you are responsible for all of the things which includes when the players bump past guard rails. If you have ever muttered something offhand to finish describing the scene only to have your players become fascinated with the person or object, you know how quickly and surprising focus can shift. What would turn into a headache becomes joyful in a Hexcrawl as whatever or wherever your players end up exploring is exactly what they want to be doing.
Controversal — Let People Have Fun
A West Marches Sandbox is closer to the act of playing over your traditional Narrative game. You’re playing pretend but with rules so you don’t have to bend to the loudest kid on the playground. In fact, as the Director you get to decide where the spotlight lands, giving consideration to balance attention for each player. This means, for better or for worse, when the spotlight lands on a player, they get to decide what to do with the captive audience — that is you and their fellow players. Sometimes that means you need to suddenly fill in what was flat background detail.
Schrodinger’s Wallpaper is unlike the concept of ‘Quantum Ogres’; that is, it doesn’t matter if your players turn left or right, they will always fight an ogre in the next room. Schrodinger’s Wallpaper is whether something is background or foreground. The term came from combining the Schrodinger’s Box thought experiment and what some people do to places they intend to live in.
In the thought experiment, a cat is placed in a box that has a 50% chance of being poisoned. The idea is that until the cat’s state is observed, it is considered to be both alive and dead simultaneously.
Every location in your game world is boxed in into a room. Which every degree of how ‘Zoomed In’ you are is a separate level of focus, requiring different rules and attention. Whenever the player begins interacting with what you thought was a boundry, your duty as Director is to suddenly animate the Wallpaper to maintain your players suspension of disbelief. In the preposterous example of Fireballing a pride of lions, the player lit the perimeter of the stage ablaze but they do not gain Experience because there was no answer to the scenario’s dramatic question.
Prepare to be Unprepared
Since there is no derailing in a Sandbox, you need to be ready for players to unexpectedly focus on anything and everything. While it sounds daunting, it means that you need to have some ready-made tricks up your sleeve. For example, in my review of Ghostfire Gaming’s The Seeker’s Guide to Twisted Taverns, one of the aspects of the books is a list of five NPCs, including stat blocks, who can show up anywhere. If the party’s Face decides to carouse, it would be great to have The Seeker or one of the other memorable NPCs happen to be rattled off as part of the Wallpaper.
If the players ignore your carefully seeded background, that’s great! You get to reguritate it later. If they do start interacting with random NPCs, you’ll look like a complete genius who has planned for all eventualities. Paradoxically, the more prepared you are, the easier it is to improvise. Part of the myth of being a ‘great’ Director is to never let them see you sweat; no matter what harebrained insanity, you’re game to give it a go. So when the party starts talking to random people, you’re ready because you’ve Jacquaysed your Stat Blocks. Give ‘basic’ stat blocks an extra mental skill or two; I pinkie promise it won’t break your games’ balance.
Better Over Than Under
You may be able to direct your players as the Director but when the spotlight lands on them, you have to roll with how they’ve decided to change the composition of the box. This is why, in addition to a robust Stat Block, I highly recommend Hex Features have maps. They can be as simple as a Pointcrawl, there’s no need to shell out for whichever company is pushing ads for their map making services. You may have focused the Zoom on what you thought was a role-play story beat but players can throw you a curve ball. For example, in my Ode to One Page Dungeon Contests, I had a map ready to go for Yusef Shari'ati’s 2021 OPDC entry The Unholy Hall of the Huntsman King. The antagonist is a bloodthirsty warlord and the players decided to turn him into an ally.
Rushing River for Magic: The Gathering by Don Hazeltine
This sounds like a lot of prep but as I need to continually remind myself, the reason why we write things down is so that we do not need to remember them. One of the most fascinating elements of researching managing human development is a Japanese idea called Kaizen. The idea is to always aim for small but continuous improvements. People are creatures of habit. If you give them a big thing to do, they resist not out of malice but because it isn’t within their behavioural groove. If you make a tiny request, it can easily be accomodated because you’re not trying to weather a torrent of habits. Keep making small, imperceptible changes and you would be surprised how quickly you can divert a river with barely any erosion.
This includes yourself.
Once you set a standard to execute to, it is easy to punch in the values. As the art world says, a piece isn’t finished so much but abandoned. You can keep improving as you discover superior methods, making tiny adjustments and iterating. Justin Gary, the lead designer for the Ascension: Deckbuilding Game shares his insights with game design in a newsletter. He and many designers in his podcasts agree that iteration is the most important powerful part of polishing a product.
Again, if you overprepare that means you can re-use the material, like when your players take a sharp left into rando-ville and you need to suddenly turn a piece of Wallpaper into a dungeon, NPC or Skill Challenge. That is what gives you the confidence to appear unflappable.
