Sandbox gaming

[chaochou]

Quick thoughts on The Wire police style game set-up...

Thought 1. Assume every character has motives and goals created by the player.

Player A says: "Well, I'm a cop, a bit of an alcholic and livewire although I have moments of inspiration. And there's this big drugs crew and I've gotta take them down but no-one in the department seems to see the problem or want to see it. So I've got to do it by myself."
GM: "Who runs this crew?"
Player: "I dunno. A guy called, err, Avon Barksdale?"

So this cop's game is not about solving cases. It's about what he has to do to take down the Barksdale crew - maybe ducking cases, maybe ratting out the department to a judge in City Hall, maybe going over the edge and becoming nearly as bad as the guys he's after. That's the guy that player wants to be.

Thought 2: I don't see the need to assume that all the players are cops. Maybe one wants to be a councilman running for City Hall. Maybe one wants to be a preacher in the poorest part of town. One wants to be the shrewdest junky on the streets. Again, with their own goals, problems, threats.

Any thoughts?

 

[Umbran]

He'd probably tell you that I was trying to impose my idea of 'the story' on my players by providing clues to them...

I'd love to see the quotes you're basing that on.......

Yes, but doing so would be getting personal, and would cause me or some other moderator to have to step in. So, let's not do that, please. It is not as if his personal opinion and estimation needs to be justified to others.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Yes, but doing so would be getting personal, and would cause me or some other moderator to have to step in. So, let's not do that, please. It is not as if his personal opinion and estimation needs to be justified to others.

Then I retract the previous statement.

I would love to see this thread continue!

 

[cmrscorpio]

So I thought I’d try and write something to illustrate one way for a group to set up a sandbox game and to cut through some possible misconceptions.

Let’s start with the GM and players sitting down with a blank bit of paper and tossing ideas around about the world. What are the themes or ideas they want? The players say what they want in terms of setting, problems, factions, the importance of religion, politics, external threats, villains, goals, romance.

We get a bit of paper and some pencils and players start drawing. Cities, villages, swamps, mountains, rivers, trade routes, caves. A mile high mountain with a huge stone dragon carved on the peak. A natural honeycomb labyrinth. Whatever the players like.

Then they start tagging it with ideas. Orcus cult here. Vecna Cult there. My sister lives in this village. The guy that runs this town is up to no good, but no-one knows what exactly. People disappear on this road. Goblin raiders there. No-one’s explored that bit. And so on.

With a world that they’ve created, the PCs can now create characters that want to interact with it. That want to play it, explore it. That have goals directly related to the world they’ve created, that they care about.

This can make a fun game of that.

 

[nedjer]

Classic Traveller sector design meets player choice gameplay mashup

 

[Ariosto]

Different people mean different things by it, but I reckon most of us are interested chiefly in drawing a distinction from the heavily scripted type of scenario that gets published a lot.

The big problem with that approach from my own perspective -- especially when it comes to "D & D" -- is that part of what attracted me to the hobby was the scope of game play.

For some people who see the game less as a game and more as interactive fiction, the big problem may be that the pre-plotted action does not arise out of the character of the player-characters. One way to deal with that is to do biographical and psychological profiles of PCs prior to the game. This often involves either reading a briefing on expected world knowledge, or -- at the very start of a new game -- participating in a "world building" process. That's fun to some folks, but work rather than play to others.

Many, many computer games have borrowed the basic premises of the original D & D game. People of a certain age may recall Ultima by "Lord British". The underworlds were pretty shabby, but the basic concept of free movement among them and towns and castles across the wilderness map was the same. There is a world of difference between a game like that and something like a Lone Wolf "pick your path" book.

Regardless of the scope of a game, whether the same four PCs meeting just because it's a scheduled "game night" or a full-fledged campaign of a dozen or more players with Wizards, Lords and Patriarchs (as well as lower levels and hench-creatures) pursuing their own ends, what I have found most useful as Referee are

*** Well Developed Important/Ambitious Non Player Characters ***

Villains may come first to mind, but an NPC need not be villainous to have objectives that oppose or otherwise interact with the PCs' in interesting ways. One need not even know in advance precisely what motivations players will bring to the table in order to set up an engaging situation.

I think this really "clicked" for me when I got Chaosium's Griffin Mountain book for RuneQuest. Even places can be "characters" in a sense, but the key here is that NPCs are up to things on their own. Griffin Mountain did not include a time-line of events, but I will always have some such schedule prepared on the basis of what happens if the PCs do not interfere.

This ties in with something Gygax emphasized in his Dungeon Masters Guide: keeping track of time. If players do nothing to change the course of events, then it proceeds day by day and week by week.

Players at loose ends are this presented with one or more obvious avenues for interaction. The dynamic environment offers a changing range of opportunities, and that can involve incentives to choose some course of action rather than just lie about.

Players with other interests are free to pursue those instead, and every choice has consequences. A good sketch of an NPC's desires and attitudes can make it very easy to assess responses to whatever players do, so that they arise quite naturally.

This kind of development work tends to be part of the fun for those of us who enjoy the job of GM, more I think than for players in general. There is nothing to keep a player who wants to write an essay about his or her character from doing so, and the Ref from using that information. At the same time, it's not a necessary imposition on the player who just wants to blow off steam with a not terribly demanding or serious pastime as a few hours' diversion from labor.

 

[Ariosto]

If one has in mind old D&D, C&S, Gangbusters, etc., then I think one factor worth noting is that the guys who ran the original campaigns had large numbers of players in them (although not necessarily in any given session).

Also, although they might have "same Bat-time, same Bat-place" groups, that was not the sole mode. Instead of "Here we are now, entertain us!", the players might be telling the GM what they want to undertake -- as the very basis for scheduling a session.

That kind of situation certainly places its own demands on the DM, but it also relieves some of the burden of providing opposition and "plot lines" as well as serving as Referee.

Absent a bunch of players making more trouble than the most dedicated DM could ever dream up, part of the task basically amounts to "simulating" their presence.

 

[rogueattorney]

I've mentioned before that I have a theory of a neat way to do a sandbox with a super hero or police detective type campaign. Basically, you'd have to have a Batman/Punisher style set up where corruption and organized crime have totally taken over a town. It would be the pcs' goal to "clean up the city." In a "target rich" environment with no single, clear, A#1 bad-guy, the players could pick and choose their targets, methods, and so on.

But this goes back to one of the basic issues with the sandbox in that it pretty much demands pcs with motivation. Now, in D&D that motivation can often simply be, "Get rich or die trying," and still result in a wonderful campaign. The sandbox is simply not a great campaign for the "reluctant hero" type.

 

[Ariosto]

The sandbox is simply not a great campaign for the "reluctant hero" type.

There is some wisdom. Showing up to play Dungeons & Dragons (as I know it, anyhow), one should not expect to play a role with the objectives of staying far away from dungeons and dragons and cultivating a vegetable garden.

Such an unambitious -- or at least homely -- persona would hardly do either for Monopoly or Risk!

Even in Call of Cthulhu, there is a reason that player-characters are conventionally called Investigators rather than (say) Victims. CoC is to my mind the classic "non-sandbox" FRP game. Warhammer is in essence CoC with D&D-ish trappings, at least as presented in The Enemy Within and so on.

Traveller, in Books 1 through 3, was marvelously spot on in utilizing the "sandbox" model of the original D&D booklets. Traveller adventures -- especially the campaign book The Traveller Adventure -- also made significant use of GM management of events. There is, I think, some pretty sophisticated blending of techniques to be found therein. A solid understanding of how a "sandbox" works may be an asset for someone who wants rather to create something more like an already visualized story but to do so as unobtrusively as possible.

 

[Umbran]

There is some wisdom. Showing up to play Dungeons & Dragons (as I know it, anyhow), one should not expect to play a role with the objectives of staying far away from dungeons and dragons and cultivating a vegetable garden.

That's an overstatement that seems to dismiss the whole by dismissing the extreme, and thus misses the likely problem cases, which are in the grey middle area.

The problem characters are not those who have an active objective of avoiding dungeons. Those are, I'd venture, largely mythical. The problem cases are the ones in which the character exists, but doesn't have particular goals they wish to pursue just this minute that would lead them to life and limb danger.

Such people are not an oddity. I'd expect them more to be the norm for humans.