The many types of Sandboxes and Open-World Campaigns

[Yora]

In sci-fi and Star Wars, you don't generally deal with planets. You're really only dealing with towns. The other 99.999% of the planet remain unexplored and undefined.

 

[niklinna]

In sci-fi and Star Wars, you don't generally deal with planets. You're really only dealing with towns. The other 99.999% of the planet remain unexplored and undefined.

Unless you're on Volturnus!

 

[Aldarc]

In sci-fi and Star Wars, you don't generally deal with planets. You're really only dealing with towns. The other 99.999% of the planet remain unexplored and undefined.

Maybe someday will see planets other than Tatooine for the umteenth billion time.

 

[Malmuria]

That's what I also concluded. The size of a sandbox is defined by the number of marked sites and the amount of random encounter checks between the sites.
Distances and geography are window dressing.

I guess one way one could approach filling out the sites roster would be to consider the amount of XP that characters could reasonably get from exploring a site, and the average party level to which each site is calibrated.
If there were only one dungeon aimed at 1st level parties and that dungeon doesn't have enough XP in total to get 1st level characters to 2nd level, that would be a good definition of "too small". In fact, I think there should be at least double as many XP in level 1 dungeons as the PCs would need to get to 2nd level, simply because they players won't accomplish anything they could and some characters might be lost throughout the course of the campaign. And we also want the players to have real options what they want to check out.
Since it's completely impractical to fully create all the dungeons that the players might or might not get to see in advance for the campaign, there is always room to adjust as you go. You can simply make dungeons larger with more opportunities to get XP, or you can adjust a yet unvisited dungeon to be for a level lower than originally planned. But this does have its limits. You can't really go straight from small goblin holes to the Black Fortress of Doom where dragons circle the spires and demons prowl the street. You need some sense of progression with the players going into slowly but increasingly more dangerous looking places and work their way up to the big nasty ones.
You can always add more sites to unvisted areas of the wilderness when it becomes neccessary, but then you'll not be having any forshadowing for those places, which in some context might appear a bit random and disconnected if the other sites are integrated really well.

I see that last part as a feature not a bug. Roll on a random table or come up with things as the players get there, or just before the players get there. This will allow the dm to be surprised by what happens. The other benefit of a smaller geography is that the players establish connections through their actions between different parts of the setting that the dm might not have expected.

 

[Yora]

Maybe someday will see planets other than Tatooine for the umteenth billion time.

Have you heard of Jakku?

(original planet, do not steal)

 

[Aldarc]

Have you heard of Jakku?

(original planet, do not steal)

Jakku? I barely Knowu.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's what I also concluded. The size of a sandbox is defined by the number of marked sites and the amount of random encounter checks between the sites.
Distances and geography are window dressing.

Eh. I can only partly go there; travel times and difficulty will at some point function as braking mechanism on how far people are willing to go, too. Unless there's absolutely nothing to do in shorter areas, most people aren't going to be in a big hurry to travel six months and deal with a bunch of portage and travel management issues just to get to theoretically more interesting ones. You can, of course, make that moot by your setup, but unless you actively do so, that sort of thing will kick in at some point.

 

[Thomas Shey]

In sci-fi and Star Wars, you don't generally deal with planets. You're really only dealing with towns. The other 99.999% of the planet remain unexplored and undefined.

There's plenty of SF that deals with a lot of outdoor locations, expecially in exploratory SF.

 

[Yora]

When I am not working on setting up my Classic Dungeon Crawling fantasy sandbox, I am exploring ideas for a Scoundrels with a Space Ship campaign. Stars Without Number and Scum and Villainy are both popular systems for these kinds of campaigns (though Traveller also still gets mentioned, but I don't know anything about it), and while they are on very different ends of the spectrum as game mechanics are concerned, I think they both aim for pretty similar styles of campaigns and adventures. Travel the galaxy and see what happens. I guess most Star Wars games should also work decently well with that premise, but they also very much promote scripted stories as a campaign format.

I think a big thing about open world campaigns in a space setting is that you don't need maps. Even a relatively small section of space has hundreds of stars with thousands of planets, and almost all of them will be of absolutely no interest to the players or any NPCs. The stars themselves don't matter either, it's only a few planets, and these planets are too big to map comprehensively. Travel around a planet is usually by air or the very least by fast cars, and in the few occasions that it is not, the players are most likely trying to get out of the wilderness as fast as possible with no time to roam around and explore. Significant ground travel will usually be in basically a straight line.
The one situation in which maps for space become meaningful is when the ships have limited range and must take stops for refuling if they go for longer distances. In that case it does become relevant for the game to have the players decide which planets and stations they want to stop at, because things might happen while the players refuel their ship or wait for repairs. In a setting where any ship can go from any planet to any planet in one go, like in Star Wars, there is no practical use for space maps at all.

The only maps that really matter in such a campaign a person scale maps used to determine cover and plan tactics in gunfights. For some campaigns, it might actually be useful to have a couple of generic maps prepared for military bases, criminal hideouts, sections of spaceports, warehouses, or bars. Any kind of place where the PCs might run into their enemies.

The question that I have is, how do you set up a sandbox like this?

I guess the big points to consider even more so than in other open world campaigns are developing factions and creating conflicts between them. Creating some influential NPCs in advance might also help to some degree, but I think it would be difficult to determine who really might make appearances during actual play as the campaign is developing. Faction leaders and their preferred people to send out to other planets to deal with trouble hurting their interests would be the most useful. The later are quite likely to come to the PCs, and the former have some chance to have the PCs come to them. Some generic faction members could also come useful at some point, but I wouldn't assign them to any specific location or position. They would make for good quantum ogers that the players could encounter anywhere and whose home is only determined when the players actually meet them.

 

[Aldarc]

The question that I have is, how do you set up a sandbox like this?

I guess the big points to consider even more so than in other open world campaigns are developing factions and creating conflicts between them. Creating some influential NPCs in advance might also help to some degree, but I think it would be difficult to determine who really might make appearances during actual play as the campaign is developing. Faction leaders and their preferred people to send out to other planets to deal with trouble hurting their interests would be the most useful. The later are quite likely to come to the PCs, and the former have some chance to have the PCs come to them. Some generic faction members could also come useful at some point, but I wouldn't assign them to any specific location or position. They would make for good quantum ogers that the players could encounter anywhere and whose home is only determined when the players actually meet them.

Star Without Numbers has guidelines for creating and using factions. These guidelines were direct inspirations, and explicitly cited as such, for John Harper when creating Blades in the Dark.

Kevin Crawford recommends only bothering with running a max of six factions. Others can exist, but trying to operate all of them at once is usually not worth the effort. Also while factions can be as large or small as you need them to be, I find that localized factions work better, particularly for introducing the game world and contexualizing larger issues/conflicts. So I suggest starting with local NPCs or factions that the PCs are likely to encounter (or you may want to encounter) in the vicinity where the action starts or the home base area. Build from there based on PC engagement. Start small. Start immediate. Start in the faces of the PCs and the slice of the faction that they can see.

If we are talking Star Wars, for example, what the criminal Pyke Syndicate wants on the macro-level may differ from what the Pyke Syndicate wants at the local level of Tatooine or even Anchorage. This may be because the head of the local faction wants to rise through the ranks or represents a rival to the top.