Pathfinder 1E Sandboxes? Forked from Paizo reinvents hexcrawling

[Glyfair]

What I think is missing is what I call the "Adventure Creation Kit" -- a "module" that's really just a collection of related people, places and things. Everything the DM needs -- maps, NPCs, adversaries, etc... -- to craft and adventure in an hour or so or even on the fly. Kind of the shovels and toy trucks in the sandbox, as it were.

Hammerfast. Not quite as many NPCs as in the old days (when the stats for every commoner might be listed, since it was typically just AC and HP), but pretty much covers the main bases without a pure side dungeon listed.

 

[Hussar]

There can certainly be a thread just on the discussion of this. I would suggest there are a lot of reasons.

A few suggestions:

1) Story driven adventures are easier to fit in a smallish space (especially with today's rules sets requiring larger statblocks).

2) Most non-story driven adventures are site based, and site based modules haven't been popular recently

or....

2b) Site based adventures aren't considered adventures as much any more. Site based products are more sourcebooks now than adventures (Hammerfall was probably an adventure in the old days, and Sharn City of Towers might have been written as one as well).

I agree with this. Take something like the old Hommlet module. That would likely be presented as a mini-campaign setting now, not an adventure module. Like you said the Hammerfast "setting" is pretty much how Hommlet was presented.

Now, here's a question though, does the inclusion of a meta-plot preclude a setting from being "sandbox"? Scarred Lands had a meta-plot in the setting, but, you could ignore it pretty much entirely if you wanted with no problems.

Or, Forgotten Realms had a bajillion different plots in it. Is that really a "story based" setting? After all, we've been told that sandboxes most certainly can have active plots by the NPC's. The FR meta-plots generally weren't directed at the PC's. How is this different from a sandbox or status-quo campaign?

Since setting meta-plots are almost never directed at the PC's, how can they be considered railroading? What's the difference between having a campaign meta-plot that runs through several supplements and a homebrew sandbox campaign that has scheming NPC's that are attempting various nefarious things independent of the PC's?

 

[Raven Crowking]

Now, here's a question though, does the inclusion of a meta-plot preclude a setting from being "sandbox"?

Not in my books.

An expected end-state of the PCs in relationship to that meta-plot does, however.

RC

 

[Umbran]

I assume by "the game" you're referring to D&D, but while that may be true of some editions, it's most decidedly not true of all editions. 1e AD&D had strongholds and henchmen and followers awaiting high-level characters, with rules in the DMG for maintaining same. BD&D took this even further. It was also typical of the way OD&D was played in its earliest days, as described by the participants.

I don't have copies of earlier rulebooks, so I cannot speak to them.

In 1e, followers were a class feature, not a goal. Strongholds were a list of structure prices in the DMG. There's noting about incorporating your new stronghold into the existing politics of the game world, and there was nothing about how adventurers should do governance of populations, rise in the national power hierarchy - nothing telling you what you had do or could do with the thing once you had it. There is no "game" in that area - at that point it drifts off into collaborative storytelling.

Player characters begin the game with an opportunity to be immediately grounded in the structures of the game-world, with contacts, secret loyalties, property, and so on.

Connection to structures of the game-world is in no way equivalent to having strategic game options. We are still talking about tactical-level interactions.

It doesn't take elaborate rules to make this happen, however. All it takes, in my experience, is a bit of encouragement by the referee.

Quite correct.

I was playing in a campaign larp last year. There were clear mechanics for combat, magic, and engineering. The players had some concept of what was possible and what wasn't, so they could set goals, and drive their own plot thereby. Politics was also an explicitly available route, but the mechanic for it was a black box - the inside of the political GM's head. With no ability to predict how much of what kind of effort was required to achieve results, most players stayed well away from the political arena.

This portion of the discussion arose from folks noting that sometimes, players seem to not take initiative, and not set such things as goals. My point is that if you give them a PHB, they don't see support of such goals. They see the rules for combat, and making magic. They have no clues as to what mechanics are in other arenas, what difficulties there might be, so they cannot reasonably construct a plan, so they'll tend to pass on this as a goal.

If the GM wants to present alternatives outside the rules, that's great. But you cannot expect the players to take such a path direction until after the alternatives have been presented.

 

[Desdichado]

Well, the thread has become somewhat tiresome to try and maintain on course, so I'm going to let it go its own way at this point. But before I do, I'll offer up some observations. Probably just so they can be picked apart and criticized, but oh well.

1) I like the idea of there being a pendulum of sorts, which makes the current resurgence of the sandbox playstyle as a popular mode a bit of a Thermidorian reaction. However, it does strike me as curious that you'd normally expect pendulum swings to gradually slow down and settle into a middle ground, and looking at playstyle fads over the years, I'm not convinced that that is what's happening here. Then again, that may be a false positive because of the fact that the internet magnifies reality in a way. Something may seem to have a lot more currency than it really does, because a relatively few people are very vocal about a particular topic and it gets more visibility than its actual popularity would lead you to believe.

2) It seems to me that possibly the seeds for the sandbox zeitgeist were actually laid a long time ago, but it took the combination of a number of other factors to really bring it to the fore. I struggle with sandboxes being a reaction to Adventure Paths when Adventure Paths are less, in some ways, story intensive than a lot of the stuff that preceded them. The Dragonlance modules are the most notorious, but since then, and all through the 2e era of D&D, modules that were clearly meant and presented to be played in a railroady fashion were highly popular. Looking at some of the later 2e modules like Dead Gods, March of the Modrons or others shows this to be true. 3e was billed as "back to the dungeon" and guys like Goodman Games and Necromancer games made a lot of hay while the sun shined with site-based non linear modules.

3) That said, the sandbox paradigm still didn't become highly visible, and didn't even yet have that label used commonly, until many years later. It may have been a reaction against Adventure Paths, but I personally think its more likely that its association with "old school" play, whether actually true or percieved, is at least as responsible if not moreso. That was a zeitgeist that was a long time coming, but it started with Necromancer Games' famous first edition feel, third edition rules mantra. As additional products purposefully stoked the old school flames, Castles & Crusades, OSRIC, and later the entire retro-clone OSR movement, a sandboxy playstyle became more prominent. Is it coincidence (or even true, for that matter) that there seems to be a strong correllation between sandbox and OSR fans? I don't think so. I think the prevalence of sandbox in online discussions is tied to the rising fortunes of the OSR movement, maybe indirectly in a similar sense that a rising tide raises all the boats in the harbor, but maybe even more explicitly because of the percieved link an to old school playstyle.

4) This is maybe just me, but I doubt it, because I've had conversations with other people who seem to read this same vibe, but when a discussion heads into sandbox territory, there's often a preachy vibe to the discussion. Sometimes this is benevolent "I'm really excited about this and want to share it" but it's not at all infrequent that it turns into BadWrongFunVille. Maybe it's only a perception because of the actors who are frequent in both types of discussions are often the same, but I think the playstyle discussion that often comes up around sandbox has developed into a front of sorts for the edition wars. Because of the link between the playstyle and certain older editions of D&D (again, whether real or percieved the effect is the same) this was perhaps inevitable. This leads me to wonder if the edition wars themselves are merely the front for some other, more core division within the hobby, but that's way beyond the scope of this thread, and meta-discussion of edition wars has been frowned upon recently, so I won't really pursue that at all.

Anyway, thanks to all, even those with whom I strongly disagreed, for your feedback. It was useful to me in formulating my half-baked theories on the original question that I asked regardless of what you said.

 

[Umbran]

A game like that would not be my first choice for a feudalistic "sandbox" -- but I don't get how "sufficient support starts looking like a linear model". At what have you been looking?

Some time ago, the rallying cry for sandbox play was "In a sandbox game, player decisions have meaning!" if the GM (with his ultimate power) weighed in, the player decision was not meaningful. The notion seemed to be that the sandbox is a thing against which the players must test themselves. The GM is a neutral arbiter in this testing, not an active participant in the direction things go. Encounters are not tailored to match (or specifically mismatch) the party level, and things in the sandbox do not happen for "dramatic necessity" or to otherwise meet player desires.

The world is what it is. The rules are what they are. The players are supposed to make their choices based upon those. The sandbox GM most certainly does not alter rewards to encourage one set of goals or another. That is the slippery slope to the linear railroad.

So, other than creating a rules-set to govern such things before play begins, how much "support" can a GM give for this goal before it ceases to be a sandbox?

 

[Raven Crowking]

Umbran, are you being deliberately comic?



How does "The world is what it is. The rules are what they are. The players are supposed to make their choices based upon those. The sandbox GM most certainly does not alter rewards to encourage one set of goals or another. " lead somehow into "Player goals do not matter, unless specifically provided for in the rules", which seems to be the way that you are going here?

Obviously, it is up to the players to determine what they do, and it is up to the GM to determine how the world responds, as in any other case. The consistency of the world's response is "The world is what it is".

The greatest value of any tabletop rpg, in opposition to computer simulations thereof, is that the GM can (and should) react to player goals/decisions that are not "pre-programed".

Is that really so hard to understand?

Or shall a sandbox be redefined as "Player decisions don't matter....unless the ruleset or GM anticipated them first!"



RC

 

[cildarith]

A stray thought in response to Hobo's four points above:

Might the current popularity of sandbox play be in response to the release of 4E, rather than the comparitively small OSR?

A sandbox requires the DM have a lot of material prepped for play and one of the supposed strengths of the new ruleset is that DM prep time is greatly reduced. This should allow the DM with a lot of time on his hands to prep a lot material that simply would not have been possible with 3.x, making sandbox play more feasible than it has been in the past.

 

[Desdichado]

Hmm... Hadn't thought of that.

That's an interesting idea.

 

[The Shaman]

*snipped*

Y'know, I just don't have the interest to go through your post point-by-point, so I'll simply say I disagree and leave it at that.