Pathfinder 1E Sandboxes? Forked from Paizo reinvents hexcrawling

[ExploderWizard]

Not really. That was what kinds sparked the original question, and why I started the thread. To me, at least, a sandbox is nearly as negative as a railroad. It suggests a game that has no point, no purpose, no focus, no theme, and one that ultimately isn't going to be fun for very long.

Even in the computer gaming world, from whence came the term. I think of my copies of Hulk Ultimate Destruction or Ultimate Spiderman which have missions, but also have "sandbox mode" where you can ignore the missions and just wander around doing whatever you feel like. To a point, that can be kinda fun, but after a little while, it gets extremely boring, and so you go on and do the missions. The idea that the sandbox mode could support extended play is, to my mind, almost ludicrous.

Why is it ludicrous? Is it so unbelievable that a creative human being can maintain an exciting thriving campaign world for years on end?

One important aspect of sandbox play that cannot be downplayed is the campaign world and environment itself. If the gameworld is just seen as a generic backdrop for PC's to stomp around in then extended sandbox play does become more difficult. The game world is kind of like the ultimate DMPC that grows and develops much like a character. In this sense the exploration and discovery of the game world becomes the story.

Yet, that seems to be what a wave of folks is promoting, at least in regards to tabletop games. I'm curious where sandbox took on this overwhelmingly positive approach; this almost sanctification of the concept (yeah, a bit hyperbolic, but I'm struggling to find the words here) came from. To me, it's clearly a recent phenomena.

I dunno. Im kinda old and I would hardly call the better part of 40 years a recent phenomena. Trends and styles wax and wane in the popular consciousness.

 

[Hussar]

To be fair, the "Sandbox" approach has always been very, very healthy in RPG's. Look at just about every published setting for D&D. Almost without fail, the published settings are presented in Sandbox fashion - here is the geography, here is the people, here are the details - now go make your campaign.

In my mind, about the only publisher that bucks this trend currently is Paizo with its Pathfinder series, where each geographical area comes connected to a very strong adventure path. Granted, you could totally ignore the AP, but, then you're ignoring about half the stuff you buy. Presumably people buy the Pathfinder series because of the modules, not despite them.

But, outside of Pathfinder, and outside very early Greyhawk which was presented primarily through adventures, just about every campaign setting is presented as a Sandbox.

What I think has changed is there are a number of posters, like myself, who prefer the Pathfinder model to the standard model, and are pretty vocal about not liking the traditional presentation of worlds in D&D. That has sparked a fair bit of reaction from those who prefer the traditional model and this has just kept spinning. And, of course, it's also gotten rather tightly tied to Edition Wars as well, with some posters equating sandbox with older editions, despite the fact that newer editions present campaign worlds in the exact same way.

If anything, it's the "non-sandbox" approach that is fairly new and this has sparked the strong reactions.

 

[The Shaman]

To be fair, the "Sandbox" approach has always been very, very healthy in RPG's. Look at just about every published setting for D&D. Almost without fail, the published settings are presented in Sandbox fashion - here is the geography, here is the people, here are the details - now go make your campaign.

Next look at the adventures published for those settings. For the past twenty-five years, the idea that the goal of an adventure is to model something akin to a story is thriving as well.

 

[The Shaman]

This discussion would go a lot smoother if you'd quit telling me that I don't know what my own tastes are.

At no time have I said anything about what you like, or what you should like.

But if you want to offer personal anecdotes in support of an argument about a larger truth, you can expect your argument and its premises to be discussed.

 

[Ariosto]

If anything, it's the "non-sandbox" approach that is fairly new and this has sparked the strong reactions.

Well ...

Tournament scenarios by nature have at least an impenetrable boundary, and often are pretty linear (relative to certain other models) in the arrangement of predefined 'encounters' (so different groups' performances can be compared in a common context). Those go back nearly to the beginning at least of the commercial RPG field (promotion at Gen Con, Origins, etc.). The programmed solitaire scenario came along pretty early as well (e.g., Buffalo Castle by Rick Loomis, 1976).

Those were influential examples of "how to play" among an increasing number of people. The limited scenario was more accessible than the more complex game that pioneering Game Masters did not always convey very clearly in their handbooks.

Something roughly prefiguring the Adventure Path also goes back to the linking of the several scenarios for different rounds of a tournament. However, those typically were still presented primarily as environments ("site structured" rather than "event structured") -- and without the attention to dramatic structure that has since become widely expected.

RPG rules books in the 1970s didn't give much help in that department (dramatic structure), either, or even in terms of setting up the carefully balanced engagements that the 'tactically' minded modern gamer is likely to expect. They were typically full of stuff such as the tables for "rolling up" on the fly this or that bit of a universe in Traveller (1977).

Jump-6 (sorry, inside joke) to 1983 and The Traveller Adventure. From the back cover:

The underground city of Leedor is just another stop on the interstellar trade route until the crew of the March Harrier comes to the aid of an alien Vargr. They soon discover that the alien's jewelled ornament is more than mere decoration, and the powers pursuing the ornament turn their trading voyage into a mission of danger.

This science fiction story is written in the form of a role-playing adventure in which readers assume the identities of the starship crew members. A referee, using the Traveller rules, guides the players from planet to planet as they uncover clues and seek the answer to the puzzle of the ornament.

The adventure is still pretty flexible in terms of how each chapter goes -- except that much is predicated on those chapters leading from one to the next. The overall "branch" structure might be considered as sort of like a chain of footballs <=><=><=> (if that makes any sense).

Also in the early 1980s, we had (just some things that come to my mind):
TSR's "Dragonlance Saga", begun in Dragons of Despair (1984)
TSR's Ravenloft (1983) - not a 'campaign' but a notably story-focused scenario
Chaosium's Shadows of Yog Sothoth (1982)
FASA's The Legend of the Sky Raiders (1981) - 1st part of trilogy
Palladium's The Mechanoid Invasion (1981) - 1st part of trilogy

I see Shadows of Yog-Sothoth as really starting the snowball rolling. By the late 1980s, the form was pretty well established. Games Workshop's The Enemy Within campaign is an example from that period that I greatly enjoyed.

What I think has changed is there are a number of posters, like myself, who prefer the Pathfinder model to the standard model, and are pretty vocal about not liking the traditional presentation of worlds in D&D. That has sparked a fair bit of reaction from those who prefer the traditional model and this has just kept spinning. And, of course, it's also gotten rather tightly tied to Edition Wars as well, with some posters equating sandbox with older editions, despite the fact that newer editions present campaign worlds in the exact same way.

Campaign worlds presented in thick tomes of background are not to my mind especially associated with the wide open mode -- more the opposite, really. I see the free range game more often associated with a "do it yourself" aesthetic. That goes back to how Judges Guild got the license that got it started. The pioneering RPGers didn't think many people would want to buy "canned" adventures or settings, because after all making it up was (to them) a big part of the fun.

The way individual scenarios are put together is, I think, where the shift is most evident. That is to some degree tied in a feedback loop with what people want in the game-mechanical systems, as well as the product presentation. Going back to the first edition of RuneQuest (1978), there were logistical considerations such as "stat blocks".

A "dungeon module" of 33 locations in 7 pages? That's sort of like the VisiCalc spreadsheet in 28 kilobytes, maybe.

Reading the thread on making WotC adventures better, I saw a lot of expressions of desire for things to loosen up a bit. Even without getting less linear, just backing off from the piling up of fights and getting in more frequents plot-developments (and a bit of flesh on the cardboard characters) would be something I would call an improvement!

I don't think the prevailing adventure and campaign models are going away any time soon. I don't see any great move to abandon them (still waiting for directions from Hobo as to where to find that). I do think a lot of people want a "better mousetrap", though, and some may be looking further afield than others for ideas they can adapt to their needs.

 

[Beginning of the End]

Lately, however, I see an awful lot of people toss out "sandbox" as if it were the Holy Grail of gaming. I'm trying to understand where this view came from, why it's become so suddenly very popular and ubiquitous on the internet, and... well, whatever else is going on with the idea of the sandbox.

The "Holy Grail" nature of the sandbox campaign, for me, lies in two things:

(1) It is the one thing that traditional RPGs offer that other forms of entertainment simply cannot compete with.

(2) What attracts me to the hobby is specifically roleplaying: Making choices as if you were a character and exploring the outcomes of those choices. The sandbox campaign is, in many ways, the purest form of what I'm looking for because it allows for any choice without artificially negating any of them.

I think tabletop RPGs only truly succeed when the narratives are created from the actions at the gaming table. In any other format, RPGs are playing a cheap second fiddle to other forms of entertainment.

Meanwhile, the other - I don't even understand how something can have "no plot" and be a game. So it's just a series of 'here be monster lair, enter and kill monster'? The PCs stumble across a cult who are doing something. THAT IS A PLOT.

The existence of the cult is a situation.

A plot, on the other hand, is a sequence of events.

The problem you're having is that you're looking at a session after it has already happened. And, from that POV, you're right: In retrospect, all game sessions have a plot. The game session has happened, and at that game session A happened, then B happened, and then C happened -- and that's a plot.

The distinction to be drawn between a railroaded scenario and a non-railroaded scenario, however, is not about plot -- it's about pre-plotting. Railroading happens when the GM negates a player choice in order to enforce a preconceived outcome.

It's inaccurate to describe "sandbox" as the opposite of "railroad", because you can have non-railroaded scenarios within a campaign structure that isn't a sandbox.

For example, let's imagine a Shadowrun campaign in which every session Mr. Johnson brings a new mission briefing: Everyone at the table understands that this is the mission the GM has prepared, and that's the mission the PCs are going to be playing through. But there's nothing stopping that mission from being designed in a non-linear fashion.

A sandbox, OTOH, is what happens when you extend the Don't Prep Plots methodology to the entire game world. Or, to put it another way, a sandbox is what happens when the freedom of PC choice is extended to include the selection of scenario. Or, to put it a third way, the entire campaign world is treated as a single non-linear scenario: It becomes a single situation to which the PCs are free to respond in any way they choose at any time.

Not really. That was what kinds sparked the original question, and why I started the thread. To me, at least, a sandbox is nearly as negative as a railroad. It suggests a game that has no point, no purpose, no focus, no theme, and one that ultimately isn't going to be fun for very long.

It is true that, in a sandbox campaign, the GM is not responsible for providing a purpose, focus, or theme.

However, you're forgetting that the GM is not the only one sitting at the table: In a sandbox campaign, the players are primarily responsible for providing purpose, focus, and theme.

(At least in general. In reality, it would be more accurate to say that the GM is not solely responsible for them. He will still have a collaborative impact on them.)

Even in the computer gaming world, from whence came the term. I think of my copies of Hulk Ultimate Destruction or Ultimate Spiderman which have missions, but also have "sandbox mode" where you can ignore the missions and just wander around doing whatever you feel like. To a point, that can be kinda fun, but after a little while, it gets extremely boring, and so you go on and do the missions. The idea that the sandbox mode could support extended play is, to my mind, almost ludicrous.

That's because computers are too stupid to respond to creative input from the players. Fortunately, tabletop RPGs are not run by computers: They're run by intelligent and creative GMs. (Or, at least, we can hope that that they'll prove to be intelligent and creative.)

Which circles me back around to my original point. This is precisely why non-linear design in general and the sandbox campaign in particular the Holy Grails of tabletop RPGs: They're the only form of play in which tabletop RPGs unquestionably reign supreme.

 

[Melan]

Wow, a casual look at ENWorld, and I don't just notice an interesting thread, but one with a lot of old associates. Hey there!

Some people keep insisting on such an ideal of "purity" or "truth". From what I have seen, they are not the ones actually running campaigns in the old style.

(The "grand" old style, with dozens of participants engaged in high-level strategy as well as in role-playing, does indeed seem vanishingly rare.)

This post serves as a good reminder in all gaming discussions. It is one thing to look at something as an external observer, but another thing to do it in practice - with compromises, "mistakes" that would seem out of place from a theoretical standpoint, temporary solutions and odd tangents. In fact, unplanned games are wholly in that spirit, sometimes even in some of their rules -- solutions developed to suit actual and specific problems, not general issues.

As I see it, the main thing in sandbox campaigns is that they emerge from the constant collision of GM and player agendas and constant adaptation within a relatively loosely defined framework. My campaigns since about 2002 or 2003 have all been more or less built on this idea. Not always completely successfully, but in the better cases, they made for a smooth and enjoyable experience.

Adaptation may mean a change of tone and structure: my first Wilderlands campaign had a splinter group of evil/mercenary PCs, whose exploits first developed into a series of (mostly unsuccessful, but very enjoyable) heist stories, then suddenly and without warning, a sort of adventuring - domain management hybrid (the PCs freed some slaves, killed the evil cleric subjugating them, and decided to hang on to the village). In another campaign with different participants, what I first intended as a very casual playtest of Necromancer's Tegel Manor almost instantly turned into domain management and "feudal planning" by the careful players. To my chagrin, they never even entered the dungeon and I had to test it with others. My current Fomalhaut campaign, now in its fourth year and close to its conclusion, has changed multiple times in its approach and themes -- there were segments with forays into strange foreign worlds and a lot of city action, two large dungeons, island-hopping on the seas, city intrigue and - at the moment - more strangeness and tying up loose ends.

Playing sandbox campaigns did not mean it was all non-correlated freeform play all the time. It meant an open mind and adaptiveness, but some adventures were more free than others, some dungeons more linear than other dungeons. Playing in them also meant some losses had to be taken - mini-modules left unexplored, potentially cool adventure hooks left avoided (some of them could be reused for different campaigns, of course). But there were also tremendous advantages - player+GM ideas producing something more than the sum of their parts; unexpected twists, embracing a creative idea and running with it, and more.

To conclude, this is my main point: "sandboxing" is at best when it is an approach (as in "approaching something"), not a dogma.

 

[Melan]

But while most DM's building sandbox games assume this and I myself would try to make my sandbox world have these simulationist characteristics, I wouldn't necessarily suggest that internally consistant simulation of this sort is an inherent aspect of all styles of play that we could call 'sandboxish' or even that this aspect is the critically important goal in sandbox world creation. Personally, I think that the key aspect of sandbox style play is the willingness of the DM to improvise and shift the focus of his world building away from his preconcieved notions of what is important in response to player 'narrative' choices. That doesn't necessarily have to happen in a way that creates an internally consistant and independent world.

That is another good point. It is a common criticism of sandboxes that they are "false" if they
a) would not function as internally consistent worlds on closer scrutiny.
b) do not encompass the entirety of the playing area (i.e. the GM is "just playing Calvinball")
(See this thread on Hofrat for examples of both pro and con arguments, including a pessimistic view on how some people use Wilderlands of High Fantasy in their games);

But this is really only a problem in the critics' minds. Most people who run sandbox games do not want total internal consistency from their games, nor the totality of information on their sandbox settings (in fact, they tend to want the opposite - loose ideas to inspire them). The playstyle/genre of D&D ("adventurer fantasy") establishes what sort of information may be interesting for actually playing. I do not need information on the workings of a market in a fantasy city to run a good game set in it: I need an image of how it looks like, and if the players ask something that I did not think of previously, I can come up with an informed guess based on the image, my imagination and some basic common sense. It is possible to introduce questions to a detail where the setting stops making sense, but the proper response to that issue is that the players shouldn't be asking those questions - they should be asking adventurer questions. The thing that matters is that the actions of the players should always result in more adventure being created, and the sandbox should encourage and accommodate that. But my signature here sums it up better than I just did:

"5. If they do not wish to take a few risks, their characters should stay home and become shopkeepers and farmers.

Then wish them luck!"

In this interpretation, sandbox gaming is not realistic, but maybe impressionistic - it makes sense as a place to have adventures. I see how this answer can be unsatisfactory for many people, or theoretically inconsistent, but from a practical standpoint, it is serviceable.

With respect to point b), I will cite myself from the Hofrat thread:

The other dilemma, which you didn't discuss but which matters a lot, is full sandboxes vs. partial ones. A full sandbox is something like using Wilderlands of High Fantasy, where there is theoretically a full, pre-established world in every direction to play around in. It is a respectable approach, but unless you are using the Wilderlands yourself, such an incredible amount of work to even fill one campaign map with interesting, varied and creative content that it is beyond the means of people who don't have a lot of free time just to write and write. I tried to have one quarter-sized map in my Fomalhaut campaign, but it didn't work. In comparison, a partial sandbox is only fully detailed at the point where the operating characters come in contact with the world. There are multiple techniques to deal with the situation, including:
a) creating a "window" around the PCs where encounters, sites and actors are established to a satisfactory level of detail
b) seeding the game with adventure hooks that lead towards module type content (it is of course necessary to let PCs avoid them if they want to - I've had that happen multiple times, reusing the module in a later campaign or consigning it to a folder of archived material)
c) dropping pre-written modules and encounters in the PCs' way (this is always problematic, although developing modules in the way you expect them to proceed is fair enough)
d) improvisation based on pure imagination or "oracular" tables plus improvisation. The first post in this thread describes a game session that was purely improvisative on the basis of a few random rolls to establish the basics of the environment. In this case, it is good to have a basic "style guide" for the setting in your head, and important to stay a few steps ahead of the players, mercilessly creating consistency (or "realism") in the way we discussed in the Plamondon thread.

I am using a variety of a), b), c) and d); a) when I have the time , b) when I have had the time to create something of a larger scope, the milder form of c) in a lot of cases, and d) pretty much always. A bit sloppy here and there, but not particularly restrictive on the PCs.

(Naturally, not even the Wilderlands is a full sandbox - e.g. it tells you what is in Byrny, but only in extremely brief notes. If you are a theoretical purist, this will drive you up the wall, which, mind, serves you right.)

 

[Melan]

A classic example of a railroad is the classic 'A' series of AD&D modules, the Slaver series. Either at the end of A3 or the beginning of A4, the party is captured, robbed of all their equipment and then traps them in a prison beneath a volcano. If the DM uses the scenario as written (these were originally tournament modules), they have no say in the matter. The railroad removes all freedom.

That's a good one, but here is something else to consider: if the same thing ("you screwed up, got captured and thrown into the caves beneath the volcano") happened as a consequence of meaningful player choices, it would be an awesome development from a sandbox perspective. Not because of the exact content of the events, but rather in that it was earned.

Of course, another party might
a) just defeat the slave lords
b) lure them out one by one from their HQ and assassinate them
c) forment an uprising or civil war in the city and use that to deal with the slave lords on their own terms
d) convince some of the antagonists to join their side
e) remove themselves from the implied plot of taking the slave lords to justice and do something completely different (e.g. realise that a lot of profits are to be made in the city and seize it for themselves)
A GM who was running a good sandbox campaign would run with each of these potential developments and do something interesting with them. Some choices would lead to more risky situations than others, and feed back into more possible choices down the line - maybe in the same module, or maybe later - like, a few slave lords might get away to do something unpleasant to the players at a later date.

Naturally, these situations are not easy to translate into modules without
a) breaking the freedom of action;
b) overloading the GM/players with explicit information; or
c) generalising to a level that results in meaninglessness.
Some situations can be "bottled" if there is a limited set of agendas in play or the playing area is sensibly constrained (e.g. an island or a small city), but largely, you can only package the playing pieces and a few suggestions on the methods and what you could get out of them, not the adventure itself. In good circumstances, the adventure should just occur. This is not an easy thing; I have tried a variety of approaches in writing modules/mini-settings, and something it can be done, sometimes not. Most of the really enjoyable city adventures from my games would become horrible railroad-sessions if I presented them in a module.

 

[Melan]

On to the contentious part of the thread:

Not really. That was what kinds sparked the original question, and why I started the thread. To me, at least, a sandbox is nearly as negative as a railroad. It suggests a game that has no point, no purpose, no focus, no theme, and one that ultimately isn't going to be fun for very long.

Even in the computer gaming world, from whence came the term. I think of my copies of Hulk Ultimate Destruction or Ultimate Spiderman which have missions, but also have "sandbox mode" where you can ignore the missions and just wander around doing whatever you feel like. To a point, that can be kinda fun, but after a little while, it gets extremely boring, and so you go on and do the missions. The idea that the sandbox mode could support extended play is, to my mind, almost ludicrous.

It appears to me that your idea of "sandboxes" is largely at odds with that of the people who play and enjoy them, and you aren't prepared to accept what they have to say about it. Your interpretation certainly doesn't describe the campaigns I have had experiences with as a player or a GM. Instead of sticking with this negative and (I'd say) uncharitable reading of the concept, it may be more useful to approach it from a "so why do people like it?" perspective.

To address specific points:

It suggests a game that has no point, no purpose, no focus, no theme, and one that ultimately isn't going to be fun for very long.

The point is adventure. Context, theme and complexity are created not outside of, but through play. The central entity is probably not the "game world" but the campaign; that is, the collected consequences and collective memories of the gaming that has taken place. Hence: Greyhawk the D&D campaign vs. Greyhawk the D&D setting. One is a set of experiences, the other is a document. Fun comes from testing oneself against the milieu and seeing the consequences; it comes from the content that is generated by the table. A "sandbox" computer game is a bad model for understanding a "sandbox" tabletop campaign because the computer can only give you what it was previously told it can do and you can only give it back what the user interface allows you (hint: it allows you very little). There is exchange but there is no growth, no added value. You can change things in the world but you can't really shape/co-build it. When you stand up from the screen, you haven't accomplished anything lasting.

Now in a tabletop campaign, you can also play this way: if you only receive a narrow range of stimuli and only give back a narrow range of responses, there is indeed going to be no point to the process: it may be better to play an adventure path, since it comes packed with a lot of conflict, context and action pre-imagined for your conveniance. On the other hand, if we deviate from this and add an action-->reaction-->action-->reaction flow in which multiple player characters and GM-controlled NPCs/situations/agendas/settings can provide their feedback, even relatively simple individual choices can generate a lot of interesting new content. This is a very simple and straightforward creative/imaginative process which benefits from the setup based on multiple complex and more or less unpredictable actors. It takes a lot of man hours to teach a computer to do something unexpected and interesting; in even a moderately imaginative human individual with an interest in roleplaying games, the same thing comes naturally and easily. You don't need, as it is sometimes proposed, a game world with a lot of complex NPCs and lots of detail to achieve complexity or establish a focus; you can get it painlessly from the process of play in a game based on regular adventuring.

Which brings us to:

Yet, that seems to be what a wave of folks is promoting, at least in regards to tabletop games. I'm curious where sandbox took on this overwhelmingly positive approach; this almost sanctification of the concept (yeah, a bit hyperbolic, but I'm struggling to find the words here) came from. To me, it's clearly a recent phenomena.

I would say it comes entirely naturally from the original (historic) sense of playing roleplaying games: "what happens if I do this?" (Which is somewhat, although not necessarily different from "what happens if my character does this?" even if the consequences are identical) You have action, then reaction, then more action, then yet more reaction. Since others around the table are pitching in, including the GM (who of course serves to direct and "catalyse" the process), the results have a lot of pleasantly unpredictable variety, can go in a lot of interesting ways, and over the course of play, produce a sort of direction to the entire campaign. This may mean the players take all the GM's plot hooks, or none of them (although beyond a certain point, this can be rude - surprise, don't subvert). Is there a plot? Yes, there may be. The fundamental issue is that which plot out of a dozen possibilities emerges is up in the air at the time of play, and you, the player, or you, the GM, are making it happen together with your friends.

The dilemma of snadboxing is, do the players want a creative process where they contribute a lot to the direction of the game (note, this isn't "co-DMing" in the way indie style games are), or do they prefer a more passive form of entertainment where they don't have to do that (not a value judgement)? But Beginning of the End put it well:

(1) It is the one thing that traditional RPGs offer that other forms of entertainment simply cannot compete with.

(2) What attracts me to the hobby is specifically roleplaying: Making choices as if you were a character and exploring the outcomes of those choices. The sandbox campaign is, in many ways, the purest form of what I'm looking for because it allows for any choice without artificially negating any of them.
...
Which circles me back around to my original point. This is precisely why non-linear design in general and the sandbox campaign in particular the Holy Grails of tabletop RPGs: They're the only form of play in which tabletop RPGs unquestionably reign supreme.

...which is my arguably subjective personal opinion as well.

Also, FWIW:

*sigh* My only effort to define things is to put into common usage the definitions that I've seen many, many times over the years and get out of the way up front any confusion about what exactly is meant by the terms.

In my experience, discussions about definitions go nowhere and rarely produce better understanding - usually only more misunderstanding. Therefore, I would prefer to stay away from the precise meaning of definitions; the same goes for debates built on a lot of framing.

Thanks.