It needs to be more of a sandbox than a railroad?

[Emerikol]

There is something that people forget. Sandboxes are *boxes*. Boxes have sides. There is (implicilty or explicitly) an agreed upon play area, and your'e expected to stay within it. If you step out and go over to the basketball court, well, that's your wish, but you are clearly outside the sandbox.

An adventure is a sandbox if, within the context of the adventure, the players are free to do what they wish.

A campaign is a sandbox if, within the bounds of the campaign, the players are free to do what they wish.

So, the adventure can be a sandbox. If, however, they players can't say, "giants are dumb, let's go do something else", then the campaign is not a pure sandbox, even thought the adventure still is one.

Umbran beat me too it.

I would of course give some clues at character creation about the type of sandbox I was creating so that if an all rogue group didn't make sense the party would know that. A sandbox does not have to have everything in the universe in it. It just has to allow the PCs to do whatever they want within it.

I'm not even anti-designed adventures. I just prefer they be offered within the context of a sandbox setting and the players can opt in or out as they please and they can quit whenever they want too. Of course sometimes that means consequences inside the campaign but that is okay.

 

[gamerprinter]

For the Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (PFRPG), The Curse of the Golden Spear mini-AP (5th - 8th level) has both linear and sandbox elements. The base storyline is the delivery of a gift as part of a trade introduction, a merchant hires a band of PCs to escort him and his item to a noble lord in an exotic land. Thus taking an item from point A to B, makes it linear. However, 2 courses of getting from point A to B is included - one across the wilderness mountains through a little traveled mountain pass, and one along the coast requiring passage through several coastal towns. Circumstances make the trip through the mountain pass the most viable option, though instructions are included if the PCs take the other route. At the end of the first adventure, the PCs find themselves in a small town about to get hit by brigands. This is an event based action, since the town would get hit that day, whether the PCs were there or not. There are ramifications in modules 2 and 3, on whether the PCs chose to help defend the town, as well as the level of success attained if they do chose to defend the town. Allies may or may not be available in later modules depending on the actions of the PCs, thus this encounter is very sandboxy and event driven.

Once the PCs leave the gift with the noble at point B, its all about returning to port to get in their ship and go home. And there are several avenues open for such a return. While one way is more detailed in a linear return as written, included gray box text, discuss if the PCs choose a different route. Also the curse included in the title of the AP becomes apparent during the return trip. It will certainly help to have some allies on the PCs side, but as mentioned, based on the defense of the town hit by brigands in the first module determines whom and how much help the PCs can get - so prior PCs actions determine this part of the adventure. The rest of the modules are both escape from Kaidan combined with how to deal with the curse the PCs find themselves under.

So this mini-AP, as mentioned by many in this thread regarding most published adventures has elements of railroad and sandbox throughout the storyline, with additional instructions if the PC party chooses to be more sandbox than the included linear parts - the adventures are designed to accomodate either style depending on how the GM and PCs desires to run it. And as an introductory exploration of Kaidan, the land and its unique rules, this mini-AP is nothing like other adventures and campaign settings. Despite possible similarities with other pre-written adventures, The Curse of the Golden Spear is a very different kind of adventure - occuring in a place you've never likely experienced before.

 

[pemerton]

I figure try to look at what not to do as a GM, by what I think a player typically wants from a GM:

• I want my choice to matter
• I want my choice to not be active thwarted because it is outside of what the GM envisioned happening
• i want to have plausible choices
• I want to have meaningful choices
• I want what happens next to make sense in the context of my character, the NPCs and the setting
• I want opportunities that would be interesting to my PC, rather than what's in the module the G< bought
• I want reactions/outcomes to my previous activities to demonstrate an effect and change on the setting

As listed, I don't know that those points will help you make an adventure. But they will help identify when the adventure or the GMing is at risk of conflicting with all that.

I like your points. I think they make nearly any published adventure hard to run as published. Almost all published adventures either set out an area and its inhabitants, or set out a series of events/locations for the PCs to progress through.

With the former, it is very hard for "what happens next to make sense in the context of PCs, NPCs and setting" unless the GM injects most of that content. Or unless you count as "makes sense" nothing more elaborate than the orcs from room 2 rush in when they hear combat between the PCs and the orcs in room 1. That is a very narrow form of "meaningful choice" which is well-suited for a certain sort of classic D&D game but I think is different from what many contemporary players are after.

With the latter - event/travel-to-locations type adventures - the basic issue is that the story of the PCs is prescripted. Which is mostly at odds with "reactions/outcomes to previous activities demonstrating an effect and change on the setting".

I can think of a couple of published adventures that come pretty close to satisfying your desiderata without needing major revision. One is the Penumbra module Three Days to Kill. Provided the players buy the initial hook, the play will be driven by their choices, which can definitely make a difference. But I have seen criticism of this module (on rpg.net) for having too little material - the way it satisfies your desiderata is by presenting a single situation for the PCs to resolve. This takes about half-a-dozen pages. The other 20-odd pages are backstory and framing advice.

Another module that comes reasonably close is OA3 Ochimo - the Spirit Warrior. (I'm sure there are other modules, from the latter part of the 80s through to the d20 era, that are similar in structure, but I don't know them off the top of my head.) At it's core this is similar to Three Days to Kill - it presents the PCs with a single situation to resolve - but it pads it out a lot more, to generate more content for play at the cost of diluting the in-play frequency of meaningful choices. It does this in two ways: to get from the foreshadowing to the location of the crunch you have to hack through a wilderness, which has some interesting foreshadowing of its own but perhaps not enough to warrant the amount of material; and then the crunch location is a fairly traditional dungeon-esque adventure which again involves elements of padding/dilution of meaningful choice.

I enjoyed Ochimo when I ran it (adapted to Rolemaster) 15-odd years ago (though even then I compressed some of the exploration aspects). But these days I think I prefer the pith of something like Three Days to Kill. When I use longer published modules I pick out the key situations/crunch points and use them in the same sort of style as Three Days to Kill. I just ignore all the filler, or repurpose it as crunch points for some future episode of play.

 

[Janx]

I like your points. I think they make nearly any published adventure hard to run as published. Almost all published adventures either set out an area and its inhabitants, or set out a series of events/locations for the PCs to progress through.

With the former, it is very hard for "what happens next to make sense in the context of PCs, NPCs and setting" unless the GM injects most of that content. Or unless you count as "makes sense" nothing more elaborate than the orcs from room 2 rush in when they hear combat between the PCs and the orcs in room 1. That is a very narrow form of "meaningful choice" which is well-suited for a certain sort of classic D&D game but I think is different from what many contemporary players are after.

..snip...Three Days to Kill...snip...

I absolutely despise Three Days to Kill. A GM of mine ran it and it violated our party Meta-game rule to Bite the Plot Hook on the basis that we trust the Plot Hook is not an obvious screw job. We took the plot hook, knowing it sounded like a trap. And it was. And it cratered the campaign.

Personally, I have run ONE published adventure, an RA Salvatore one. Otherwise, I don't use them. I write my material during the week before the next session and I write enough material for 4-6 hours and that's it.

Thus, it's easier for me to meet those "What I think most players like to see" points. And if I accidentally make a railroad, it's a 4-6 hour ride, based on best guess of what the players wanted to pursue and at the end, I can make course corrections for the next session if I wasn't able to realize my mistake during the session.

 

[the Jester]

Those words are synonyms in my vocabulary.

Not to me! The key difference is that, when you override a player's decision, you tell her what she thinks or does.

When you force a player's decision, you ask her what she thinks or does.

That, right there, encapsulates the difference (to me).

 

[pemerton]

I absolutely despise Three Days to Kill. A GM of mine ran it and it violated our party Meta-game rule to Bite the Plot Hook on the basis that we trust the Plot Hook is not an obvious screw job. We took the plot hook, knowing it sounded like a trap. And it was. And it cratered the campaign.

As written, I'm not sure what the trap is in Three Days to Kill - are you referring to the diabolical mirror?

 

[Janx]

As written, I'm not sure what the trap is in Three Days to Kill - are you referring to the diabolical mirror?

As we played it, we got hired to go to a house in the country and kill a leader there. If he wakes up, he sounds the alarm. The alarm summons a world ending amount of demons. We thought the job smelled fishy, but it was obviously the plot hook and we didn't see any other options, so off we went. I don't think we even saw the rest of the carnival. I did a great job of sneaking in while the rest of the party waited. Then my halfling rogue computed his expected coup de grace damage and saw the whole thing fall apart.

 

[pemerton]

As we played it, we got hired to go to a house in the country and kill a leader there. If he wakes up, he sounds the alarm. The alarm summons a world ending amount of demons.

That's not how the module is written. The job is disruption, not assassination; there is no alarm; and the amount of demons is expressly described as up to the GM (to modulate encounter difficulty and pacing), and not as world-ending (the module expressly canvasses a follow-up to close the gate to Hell).

 

[mcbobbo]

Not to me! The key difference is that, when you override a player's decision, you tell her what she thinks or does.

When you force a player's decision, you ask her what she thinks or does.

That, right there, encapsulates the difference (to me).

There's no difference between a choice and a false choice, from a railroading perspective.

 

[Janx]

There's no difference between a choice and a false choice, from a railroading perspective.

I don't know if a false choice matters but if I'm told the low road has rats and the high road has bandits and I choose the Low Road, I expect to see rats.

the choice is meaningful because I am choosing a route based on time to finish it, and danger level.

If I see rats, my choice is my own.

if I see bandits, the choice was Railroaded by the GM.

Conversely, if I hit a T junction in a dungeon, to go right or left, it doesn't really matter what's on the left or right to me if I don't have any indication on what the difference is. As such, it's not really a choice.