why would a SuperHero campaign need a sandbox?

[Janx]

Off in the media thread, [MENTION=3398]jaerdaph[/MENTION]'s got a pretty snazzy city map he's making for his superhero campaign. He asked if it was a big enough sandbox.

That got me thinking back in the RPG space, rather than map space.

Why would you need to run a superhero campaign as a sandbox?

I'm not saying there's not good ideas to mine from sandbox style.


Here's my train of thought:

assume the party consists of actual super heroes, that is people who want to fight crime, stop evil, etc.

Crime fighting adventures seem to come in 2 formats: discovered on patrol or learned about and you rush to the scene.

Once crime happens and the PCs know about it, they are inherently hooked. Something of higher urgency would have to come up to justify them NOT lending a hand.

So, you might not need to prepare material for multiple crimes for any given session, because they are not inclined to be choosing to ignore the first crime, in order to find a better crime to fight.

Now, there could be some caveats to this, even with my mindset.

If the team is just patrolling, I reckon you could ask what area of town they patrol, and have crime ready for each area.

Or you could ask pre-game what their approach is (crime hotline, news watching, going on patrol in a certain area or pattern) and then announce crime has happened.

You might want to give them a simul-crime dilemma that they have to choose between.

But generically speaking, a good superhero party has little choice over what plot hook to bite. The same goes for good D&D parties. Dangle a princess over a ledge and they have to come running.

As compared to a more neutral party or one that you are not presenting critical problems in front of. Do we go to the Dungeon of Easy Pickings or the Tower of Moderate Challenge?

Super heroes fight criticial problems and thus MUST act. How they act is their choice.

I just don't think they need a full blown sandbox to run the genre true to type.

What do other folks think?

 

[S'mon]

I think a sandbox can be an excellent content-creation mechanism especially for long-term, episodic play. I think though it more resembles the "Dominion Management" phase of high level D&D, not the "wilderness exploration"sandbox.

You create a city. You create a starting menagerie of NPCs - supervillains, crime bosses, friendly NPCs, authority figures, other superheroes.

You have an events table, each (eg) week you roll to see what happens, from crime sprees to natural disasters to alien invasions. Mob wars. Villains get released from prison. A new superhero on the block. The PCs can then respond appropriately.

I would not normally do an hour-by-hour city block encounter table for a superhero game. I would use the sandbox to generate multiple plot threads. Some will be wham-bam over & done, others will bubble under long-term.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I think that specifically with superheroes, there's a strong impetus towards what we call a sandbox, because the attraction of the genre is largely from the superhero's powers. We like to imagine what we would do with super-strength, telepathy, web-shooters, or bat-gadgets, so when given the chance, our first instinct is to take the character out for a spin. Give a player Superman, and he'll punch a wall just for fun or fly into space just to see what happens.

Certainly, video games like the latest Arkham game have gone more and more sandbox and been more successful for precisely this reason. Even the most successful superhero movies have given fanservice and created a sense of verisimilitude by showing the heroes using their powers in gratuitous, random ways and not focusing solely on one plot.

If I were playing a superhero rpg, I would expect the chance to creatively use my powers on all sorts of things at my own discretion outside of any specific mission.

 

[Janx]

S'mon's ideas for generating events/challenges randomly are interesting.

I could however, simply roll them up during my prep time.

Because once I announce that Vinny the Fish is out of jail and up to his old tricks, the chase is on.

I don't think I need to fully map out the entire city (though it's not that hard to steal a real city map and use it to look up anywhere anybody needs to go).

I don't think the PCs need to RP wandering block by block through the city.

And nothing stops the PCs from going on a test run out in the harbor district. A good GM should be able to whip up a purse snatcher ad hoc, should the PCs want to go looking for some first time trouble.

In point of fact, the first crime of the campaign should probably be something minor that lets them explore their powers, do a good deed successfully.

From my perspective, a sandbox is not the first style I would turn to because I'm running a Supers game.

I've no experience with the latest Arkham game. I have played the old Spiderman2 on PS2. That was a sandbox. In the sense that Spidey could go anywhere in NYC. And thwart random encounter crimes. That were repetitive and ultimately got stale. The real story was NOT part of the sandbox. Mysterio attacks at a very specific theatre. It's scripted. You even initiated the event by choosing to go to a certain Story marker on the map.

Going back to Smon's random tables, as a GM, I'd rather roll up the next problem and flesh it out before the game, than roll it up in game and have to race to make it seem complete during the session.

And given that from the player's perspective, there's no real difference in freedom, only potential quality of experience.

I'd rather not flesh out a bunch of "potential" problems when in reality, I'm only going to need one for the players to solve tonight.

Obviously, a sandbox CAN work just fine for a Supers came.

I just don't see it as the go to "duh, of course it's gotta be a sandbox" tool for the job.

Sandboxes involve creating lots of content in different directions that the players can explore.

A Supers game involves PCs going in the direction of trouble. You only need 1 trouble at a time to get that to work.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I agree with Janx (I think), in that I think that the superhero genre is probably the one least amenable to sandbox play. Within their genre, superheroes are typically pretty reactive to events/criminals. That isn't to say it is ALWAYS true - maybe Daredevil wants to take on the kingpin rather than continually clean up the drug dealers on the street - but it seems to me to be more characteristic of superhero adventures than other genre.

Cheers

 

[S'mon]

S'mon's ideas for generating events/challenges randomly are interesting.

I could however, simply roll them up during my prep time.
.

I would do the events table rolls during prep time. However I want to be able to handle the game going off in unexpected directions, for which a sandbox is very useful.

Eg: Superhero genre often has fights the good guys are supposed to lose. What happens if they win instead? If I have a developed world, I can handle that. Maybe the Supervillains go get help from other bad guys.

What if the Good Guys lose when they're supposed to win? Maybe there are other good guys they can seek aid from.

And so on. With a sandbox I'm never stuck on the rails of a linear adventure.

 

[Piratecat]

Interesting. A sandbox is directly antithetical to how I like my superhero adventures. Superheroes for me are always emulating the feel of a comic book, and it'd be a pretty dull comic that had "let's patrol and beat up minor threat after minor threat without any driving plot or villain." I find the effectiveness of a superhero game to be directly linked to the villain and his or her nefarious scheme.

That's not to say that you can't have interweaving plot lines, and villains (or villainous conspiracies) in the background pulling the strings and working on their goals. The TV show Young Justice does this really effectively. But for me, this sort of a game is about story, and a sandbox approach feels less effective.

 

[S'mon]

There is also the traditional sort of exploratory hostile dungeon/wilderness sandbox, of course. In Superhero genre this normally arises due to the PCs visiting other planets full of monsters and bad guys, or an alternate universe where Earth is dominated by Fascists/Skynet/Alien Invaders. In those cases you may well want a random encounter table to roll on - "1d6 T-101 series Terminators" sort of stuff.

 

[S'mon]

I agree with Janx (I think), in that I think that the superhero genre is probably the one least amenable to sandbox play. Within their genre, superheroes are typically pretty reactive to events/criminals. That isn't to say it is ALWAYS true - maybe Daredevil wants to take on the kingpin rather than continually clean up the drug dealers on the street - but it seems to me to be more characteristic of superhero adventures than other genre.

Cheers

I agree about the reactive nature of the genre - the superheroes normally strive to maintain the status quo. That's why I said that in D&D terms it more resembles the "dominion rulership" game than the "wilderness exploration" game.

 

[S'mon]

Interesting. A sandbox is directly antithetical to how I like my superhero adventures. Superheroes for me are always emulating the feel of a comic book, and it'd be a pretty dull comic that had "let's patrol and beat up minor threat after minor threat without any driving plot or villain." I find the effectiveness of a superhero game to be directly linked to the villain and his or her nefarious scheme.

I would certainly have major villains in my sandbox! Why not? And they would naturally be scheming and doing stuff. The idea would be to emulate an episodic city-based superhero TV show, Batman of the Future for instance. Even the first 3 seasons of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer have this feel, with nested BBEGs, some having long-term plots. But story & plot would be dynamically generated in play rather than pre-written.