PAX Unplugged Days 2 + 3
So, this is a little late because I didn’t feel like I had enough to talk about for day 2, and then I was driving home on day 3 so I didn’t manage to write it that night either. Regardless though, here’s the rundown of days 2 and 3!
For the most part, days 2 and 3 were spent browsing the expo hall and shopping. On day 2, I bought some magic packs (including some collector packs for my current favorite set, Edge of Eternities), a new deck, and a playmat with the Edge of Eternities Godless Shrine art on it. Most of the rest of my time that day was spent either wandering the expo hall, talking to exhibitors about their games, or playing games with some of my friends (Magic or otherwise).
Day 3 was a fun one because it’s the day that had the panel I was interested in going to: Open Worldbuilding — Building Sandboxes, Not Railroads. For any unfamiliar with the TTRPG space, the idea behind this panel is how to create a world where you don’t feel inclined to force your players in a specific direction and can instead let them explore and make real decisions. This is related to the other project I’ve been working on lately (which I may or may not write a blog post about soon, I haven’t decided yet), so it was good information to absorb.
A lot of that panel was talking about how to design your worlds in such a way where you can be prepared to improvise and react to your players’ decisions on the fly. This includes things like designing nations and factions with specific interests and goals in mind. This idea in particular seems obvious but it really stood out to me as something that’s really important. Say, for example, you’re running a game and you dangle a plot hook in front of your players about one faction that seems to be gearing up for war with another faction. Generally speaking, good players will take that hook because the act of dangling it implies to them that that’s the content you’ve prepared for them. However, in a sandbox game, there’s a certain level of expectation that plot hooks will be ignored sometimes. Having specific goals and desires in mind for your faction helps this by creating consequences — if the players don’t take that hook and work against that faction, they’re eventually gonna invade the other one in the background, uncontested. It creates this really interesting situation where the players get to make these real choices about how the story evolves depending on what they do and don’t decide to engage with. On the other side of that same coin, I might in passing mention something that a random faction has been doing in the background, maybe through some kind of news outlet or a rumor. I might not intend for the players to immediately seek it out, but they very well could, and that would also influence the narrative in a real measurable way. Preparing my factions with goals and interests helps me as the Game Master be able to easily improvise and generate responses on the fly to what my players decide to engage with.
Another big takeaway from that panel was the idea of information drift. This is the idea that over time, facts tend to skew closer to fiction. It’s easy to sit here and world build exactly what happened at what time at what place as a writer, but that doesn’t feel right when you directly interface that with the story itself. In reality, no one in the entire universe knows exactly what happened when and where for the entirety of the universe’s existence. People forget things, information is lost, stories are misremembered, and people — intentionally or otherwise — inject bias into history all the time. Like with the goals and interests for my factions, it’s important to think about how different factions and nations perceive history. Now, the simplest way to start this is to come up with the generally accepted history; not necessarily the correct history, but what the average person would likely tell you if you asked. The next step from here is to determine what perspective in the world shaped that history. From that point, you can then start to pinpoint where disputed history could lie, who disputes it, why, etc. The goal here is to make people feel less like a monolith and more like people. Doing this to your history makes it easy to hook into from a plot perspective, especially when it comes down to why particular factions dislike each other — perhaps their differing accounts of history paint each other in a bad light, when in reality neither of them really did anything to the other. The final thing I realized was really useful about writing history this way is it gives you a really easy excuse to retcon things you said in the moment during a game session. It’s not uncommon for a player to ask someone in character something about history and just not have an answer prepared. However, when you frame history as a subjective thing while you’re prepping, you can sort of say anything in response to the player’s question. Then, between games, you can think about the response you gave and determine how true that information actually was. It doesn’t mean that the character was lying to the players, it’s just that the character knows a form of history that is less than correct and has become part of spreading that misinformation. If you then decide that the information the players received was less than accurate, finding out the truth behind that information can then become part of the story.
All in all, that panel was very informative and I’m really looking forward to using the things I learned from it.
Anyways, after that panel, I met back up with my friends and we wandered around the expo hall for a little bit before meeting up by the big X up front to take a picture together. Before leaving we did one last loop to pick up a couple more things we had been putting off then started on our way back home. All in all, PAX Unplugged was a great time and I’d definitely go again. It was great getting to see new faces and old alike at the convention and just hang out and play games together among thousands of others doing the same thing.
