Pathfinder 1E Sandboxes? Forked from Paizo reinvents hexcrawling

[Ariosto]

OTOH if the players are looking to participate in something which feels like a high fantasy novel trilogy, rather than to experience _being in_ a world of monsters and magic with maximum freedom of action, then sandbox may not be the best approach.

Quite so. Stories emerge, but there is no "The" there and so no guarantee of The Story in its particulars.

A world is big enough for all sorts of stories, including self-conscious ones. Frodo can say for himself, "Why, it is my Story to bear the Ring to Mount Doom, so I will do it" -- whether or not there is in fact an Author to redirect him (by whatever means) should he stray from the path.

Without Authorial intervention, though, Frodo's career is a Game the course of which is probabilistic. The future's uncertain and the end is always near.

 

[Transformer]

Why would the sandbox ever be non-reactive, except as the result of limitations in the programming code* for a CRPG? I understand why linear campaigns may need to negate player choice to reach a desired, prescripted end point on the adventure path, but why would a sandbox setting ever not be allowed to develop/change in response to player activity?

My idea was to pinpoint Hobo's theoretical endpoint opposite 'railroading.' I don't think you would ever actually see a game where the players have all the choices in the world but the world doesn't really change and a plot can't really develop. I imagine if you got close it would look a bit like a video game: you can go to various places and do some stuff, solve some quests, but cities and nations don't actually change.

Anyway, my main point was that the key idea here is that of an essentially GM-driven story vs. an essentially player-driven story. Hobo's original concept of the sandbox was just as a theoretical opposite of railroading, where the campaign is totally open but you don't get development or a plot or anything. I tried to describe what that might look like, and indeed, under that definition, a sandbox is a bad thing.

But then the pro-sandbox crowd said that isn't really what they mean by a sandbox. Rather, the defining feature of a sandbox is that instead of the GM essentially crafting the plot (still offering the players meaningful choices, of course), he presents the players with set pieces and NPCs and locations and the players create the plot by pursuing their characters goals.

The world is no narrower for any given inhabitant's choice of location within it.

Yes, I see that. I was having trouble expressing what I meant. What I really meant, I suppose, wasn't that in a good sandbox game the world is narrowed by the players' choices but that in a good sandbox game the campaign is focused by the player's choices. The GM presents the players with a whole world to interact with, but the point of the sandbox game isn't that the players interact with the whole thing or location hop; they might very well immediately focus on a single location and never leave it for the rest of the campaign. At the very least, they will eventually furnish a plot out of their character goals and so end up focusing on a particular corner of the campaign world. It's still a sandbox game as long as the whole world remains open to them and as long as its essentially the players who are creating the story.

Would you agree with the following, pro-sandbox people? Under this "GM-driven story vs. player-driven story" notion of a sandbox game, the size of the area presented to the players is almost irrelevant. A game in which the GM designs a whole big world and walks the players through most of it, even giving them lots of choices where to go, but in which it's basically the GM who is writing the plot is not a sandbox game. On the other hand, a game in which the players have one small frontier to explore, but the whole game is driven by the players and the whole plot grows out of their goals, is a sandbox game.

 

[Ariosto]

Someone utterly baffled by the popularity of free-range games might have the assumption that an RPG is "about telling a story" in a way that, for instance, Avalon Hill's War and Peace is not. That may be the preponderant assumption among gamers.

However, the RPG originated in the demographic of wargamers. A usual emphasis on combat rules is not the only legacy, and some games in particular appeal (or until recently have appealed) strongly to that demographic.

Since the passage of Avalon Hill into being but a trademark of Hasbro, there is a niche that RPGs fill to a greater extent than ever before.

 

[Ariosto]

A game in which the GM designs a whole big world and walks the players through most of it, even giving them lots of choices where to go, but in which it's basically the GM who is writing the plot is not a sandbox game. On the other hand, a game in which the players have one small frontier to explore, but the whole game is driven by the players and the whole plot grows out of their goals, is a sandbox game.

The road to sterile non-play is paved with a fetish for philosophy. Description, not prescription, is where it's at. Where I have encountered the term in an RPG context, there is not much use in trying to draw a line around some hypothetical "non-sandbox". When people get into talking about games they don't play, the conversation tends to shed more heat than light on the subject. Hypothetical games are as alive as hypothetical trees falling in hypothetical forests with hypothetical nobodies to hear them.

That said, I don't recall anyone ever calling, e.g., Shadows of Yog-Sothoth a "sandbox". On the other hand, the phenomenon that used simply to be called a dungeon, but nowadays gets distinguished as a "mega" dungeon, is contrasted with its stunted modern offspring.

 

[Transformer]

The road to sterile non-play is paved with a fetish for philosophy. Description, not prescription, is where it's at. Where I have encountered the term in an RPG context, there is not much use in trying to draw a line around some hypothetical "non-sandbox". When people get into talking about games they don't play, the conversation tends to shed more heat than light on the subject. Hypothetical games are as alive as hypothetical trees falling in hypothetical forests with hypothetical nobodies to hear them.

Ariosto--

I tried very hard to keep my description of what makes a sandbox game a sandbox game as grounded in reality as possible. In fact, my goal was to distill what people who do play sandbox games have been saying. It may not be possible to pin down a definition of what a sandbox game is, but surely it's at least possible to describe what makes a game a sandbox game, or to distinguish a sandbox game from a game that isn't? Is my description accurate, or am I mistaken?

That said, I don't recall anyone ever calling, e.g., Shadows of Yog-Sothoth a "sandbox". On the other hand, the phenomenon that used simply to be called a dungeon, but nowadays gets distinguished as a "mega" dungeon, is contrasted with its stunted modern offspring.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here, Ariosto. In fact, as I read through this thread it seems to me that your posts are the most esoteric and theorycraft-y of anyone's here. But maybe I'm missing some key context or just not understanding or something.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Yes, I see that. I was having trouble expressing what I meant. What I really meant, I suppose, wasn't that in a good sandbox game the world is narrowed by the players' choices but that in a good sandbox game the campaign is focused by the player's choices.

I kinda like this description, especially since one can probably turn it around for adventure paths. In an adventure path, the player's choices are focused by the adventure path.
The players have plenty of choices, but they focus their choices on stuff that feeds into prolonging the adventure path. If an element of the adventure path comes to a choice, the players have the choice of ignoring it, but usually they will focus on taking those choices that advance the plot of the adventure path. That doesn't mean the choice is always the same for every player and as such a "non-choice". There are usually many ways through a path, but they still lead through the path and not somewhere else.

 

[The Shaman]

I don't think you would ever actually see a game where the players have all the choices in the world but the world doesn't really change and a plot can't really develop. I imagine if you got close it would look a bit like a video game: you can go to various places and do some stuff, solve some quests, but cities and nations don't actually change.

In my games political entities can change. There may be big things going on in the setting; earlier in this thread I used the example of a war, plague, or famine. A regime change is a perfectly reasonable example of another such event.

The way I run a game, the setting may be changed by the adventurers, if they have the resources and good fortune to do so, but it may also change without specific regard for the adventurers.

For example, I'm prepping a historical campaign, which puts me in the position of knowing the 'metaplot' for the next 385 years of the game-world. That means the French will participate in the War of the Mantuan Succession, and the Imperial troops who arrive in Italy will bring the plague with them, and the plague will spread across northern Italy and southern France, and the city of Marseille will be quarantined at the same time the magistrates' rebellion is taking place in Aix. If the adventurers are in Italy or the south of France during this time, then they will be affected by the consequences of this, but it they're not, then it may simply be something about which they hear stories and rumors.

If the adventurers are in a position to affect change on the 'metaplot' of the campaign, then the metaplot changes. Same campaign example: in 1635, ten years after the start of the campaign, the 'metaplot' says that France will declare war on Spain. However, under the rules we're using for the game, it's entirely feasible for one or more characters to be in a position, such as a royal minister, to influence whether or not war is declared or to determine, as a marshal of the royal army, how the war is fought if it happens, both strategically and tactically.

Note that, while I'm using an example from a historical game, the same is true of other games I run. I developed a 'metaplot' for my Traveller game using the yearly and monthly events tables from 1e AD&D Oriental Adventures: I randomly generated results for each world in the subsector, for the subsector as a whole, and for the sector: the adventurers would hear about these events through Travellers Aid Society bulletins, rumors, and so forth, and I would use the information as color to flesh out random encounters with the adventurers during the course of play. At one point the adventurers jumped into a star system days after a major natural disaster (earthquake and tsunami); I knew before the game began that the natural disaster would occur and when, but I had no idea the adventurers would be there so close to when it happened. Serendipity is one of the reasons I enjoy random generation of setting details so much.

But then the pro-sandbox crowd said that isn't really what they mean by a sandbox. Rather, the defining feature of a sandbox is that instead of the GM essentially crafting the plot (still offering the players meaningful choices, of course), he presents the players with set pieces and NPCs and locations and the players create the plot by pursuing their characters goals.

With the caveat that I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "set pieces," I agree with this.

Would you agree with the following, pro-sandbox people? Under this "GM-driven story vs. player-driven story" notion of a sandbox game, the size of the area presented to the players is almost irrelevant. A game in which the GM designs a whole big world and walks the players through most of it, even giving them lots of choices where to go, but in which it's basically the GM who is writing the plot is not a sandbox game. On the other hand, a game in which the players have one small frontier to explore, but the whole game is driven by the players and the whole plot grows out of their goals, is a sandbox game.

I agree that, the way I play it, a sandbox is defined not by the size of the world, but rather if the world is large enough to provide for the ambitions of the players and their characters.

In my experience, sandbox play isn't about wandering aimlessly, and it's not necessarily about hexcrawling large swaths of countryside, either. It's about the players determining the scope of the game through their choices, and a big part of that is setting and pursuing goals for the adventurers.

It may be that a game-world in which adventurers can go anywhere they can get to and try anything then can imagine may facilitate that, but I've run successful sandbox games using much smaller settings. El Dorado County in Boot Hill comes to mind.

 

[Ariosto]

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here, Ariosto.

What part is so hard to understand? That Shadows of Yog-Sothoth ("A Global Campaign to Save Mankind") is not what people have meant by sandbox? Or that "mega" dungeons are?

The size of the area presented to the players is almost irrelevant.

That much is accurate.

In an RPGA "Living Forgotten Realms" scenario, the limitation on player choice does not depend on whether the scenes are all set in the environs of the sleepy town of Sawlogs, or range across the Planes to the Semidemiplane of Slush. It depends on the constant of the game being seen as consisting of already defined scenes.

It's a "finite game" or "solvable puzzle". I know of people who are happy to go through the same scenario all over again with a different character, but it looks to me as if once through tends to leave very little of strategic interest to find. There may still be a lot of tactical interest in some of the scenes, and it may be sound "meta-game" strategy to run this character through and pick up that magic item along with so many XP.

The purpose of the design is to restrict player options to a very few paths from an already defined beginning to an already defined end. The same is true in the run of the mill that I have seen of WotC and Goodman Games output. It is true of that classic gauntlet, The Tomb of Horrors. It is severely true, in my experience, of most event-structured scenarios.

The purpose of an old-fashioned "campaign", or "mega", or "sandbox" dungeon is to give players at each point a number of clearly defined options -- but to make it nearly impossible to predict, just by looking at the map and key, which points an expedition will encounter even if one knows where it starts.

Even if static, such a dungeon would probably take several expeditions to clear out and so "solve"; preferably, to my mind, one has at least so much scope (as opposed to something one could even reconnoiter completely in one go). As a dynamically reacting, reconfiguring, and even growing entity, it is meant not to be "solved".

The growing part is especially key at first, as I think it usually better to start sooner rather than to wait until one has "at least half a dozen maps" (the original recommendation). Sketch some sort of "home base" for the players (Keep, Village, Free City), and note a few sites in the nearer reaches of the Wilderness.

The "mega" dungeon is in itself a "sandbox", which can in turn be set in another level of "sandbox". Really, though, it is not in being vast in an architectural sense that its critical depth lies. What is critical is scope of possibilities. A small space with a few people complexly related to each other can also offer a lot of possibilities -- and relationships with other such sites and populations can multiply those.

"Dungeon map" on graph paper and "wilderness map" on hex grid are tools a referee can apply to other situations. Apply the dungeon technique to an event structure rather than a site structure, and you get a "flow chart". (I think it will be inherently shallower in possibilities than the site map, though.)

There is a world in a drop of pond water. There is almost infinite coastline. Fantasy fans may recall the time Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were afflicted with the Curse of the Stars and the Smalls.

At any given moment in play, only a few elements are immediately relevant. A given player (including the DM) can keep only so many in mind! So, where to put one's focus depends on what is important at the time.

The most critical distinction here is whether or not there is such a thing as "the plot" or "the story" apart from the players' decisions and their consequences. The "sandbox" story does not exist beforehand, but is created by and of those decisions and consequences and so can be told only afterward.

 

[S'mon]

Would you agree with the following, pro-sandbox people? Under this "GM-driven story vs. player-driven story" notion of a sandbox game, the size of the area presented to the players is almost irrelevant. A game in which the GM designs a whole big world and walks the players through most of it, even giving them lots of choices where to go, but in which it's basically the GM who is writing the plot is not a sandbox game. On the other hand, a game in which the players have one small frontier to explore, but the whole game is driven by the players and the whole plot grows out of their goals, is a sandbox game.

I agree with that - you can have globe-trotting linear campaigns, and you can have small-area sandbox games; I've run several. However I think a truly 'Open' campaign cannot be a small-area sandbox, because 'Open' campaigns develop in whatever direction the PCs choose to go, whereas a sandbox has a box. However I've seen people appropriate the sandbox term for unboxed, fully-Open gaming.

 

[Ariosto]

Decidedly non-"sandbox" games may "wander" more rather than less. Not all GMs with plots offer epic novels; others work in episodic form. I recall a D&Der's reference a while ago to "a string of Brigadoons" (places that seem to appear for just one adventure, hardly even heard of before and never mentioned again).

I've seen a few campaigns like that, mostly made of series of published scenarios. When the GM is directing the action, characters are in my experience a lot more likely suddenly to shift operations to a different country, continent, planet, star system, or galactic sector (as applicable).

The GM knows that The Adventure of the Automatons' Rebellion is waiting there, but the players may not have had any reason to consider embarking for that place.

Left to their own ends, players are in my experience a lot more likely to seek to expand on what they know. Exploration fills in blanks at the edge of their geographic map, and also adds levels of detail to locales and relationships already familiar in broad strokes.