Litterboxes: Tell us about your crappy Sandbox experiences

[wingsandsword]

I agree that is was a piece of minutia that I could have simply glossed over and said "OK, sit you sit down and this is what is in your bags" but I was hoping that they would take the initiative on this one. And in terms of them heading the correct direction - They purposefully headed south instead of east for some reason. Even when I asked "are you sure you want to head that way?" the 'leader' of the party said that he did in fact want to head towards the gnoll populated grasslands. At that point the adventure was botched and it was worth just hitting the restart button.

You just described a textbook railroad, not a sandbox.

"The adventure was botched and it was worth just hitting the restart button" meant you had a specific adventure that the PC's were supposed to follow, and didn't intend to have them do anything else. If the PC's in that game were sprung from jail, on the run, and had that clue about meeting a caravan. . .but could go any which way and then went in a different direction and found something else to get involved with, that would have been a sandbox. Instead of just saying "you're doing it wrong" and pressing the reset button, a sandbox method would have been to let the PC's encounter those gnolls. Maybe after some fights with them the PC's would have had some treasure and XP and equipment and be more able to travel on their own, or meet up with another caravan going in a different direction, or maybe if you still wanted to salvage much of your original plotline the caravan would be part of a long merchant route that was going in the same direction you intended the PC's to go in at first.

Remember, a sandbox is when the world is wide open to play in. The PC's can go anywhere, try anything (at least within the limits/rules of the game setting/system). The Grand Theft Auto video games are textbook sandboxes, because while there is a plot you can follow, if you don't want to follow the leads (or just ignore them for now) you can do many side quests, or just go exploring, or just go out and fight antagonists.

A railroad is where the GM has a single, set plotline for the PC's to follow and intends for them to follow it. Railroads turn bad when the GM uses obvious means to prevent the PC's from doing anything that's off the pathway. Think like those computer RPG's that make it crystal clear where you need to go next and make it very hard/impossible to deviate from that path.

Now for my Litterbox story:

It was a galactic-scale litterbox, a Star Wars game with a novice GM. He had only seen the movies and played a few video games, maybe read a comic book or two. He was not well steeped in the Expanded Universe of the Star Wars setting.

So, he starts us with a YT-1300 Freighter at the Mos Eisley Spaceport on Tatooine, shortly after the events of Episode IV, and just turns us loose. . .

We decide to go to Corellia. . .he's vaguely heard of it but doesn't know anything about it so he won't allow it. Okay, we'll go to Dac. . .and he's never heard of that one either. Ryloth? Never heard of that one either. Fondor? Nope.

Basically, we could go to Coruscant, Naboo, Tatooine, Geonosis, Kamino, Kashyyyk, Utapau, Mustafar, Dagobah, Yavin, Bespin, Hoth, and Endor, because those were the only planets he knew. . .never mind that at this point in the timeline that several of those planets are incredibly obscure and a random group of smugglers would have no reason to go there.

If we went to planets, all we could really do is visit the places from the movies. Go to Hoth? Well, Echo Base hasn't been built yet, so you can wander around in the snow and get attacked by Wampa. Go to Endor and wander around the forest and meet Ewoks. Go to Yavin and find a recently abandoned Rebel base. Go to Dagobah and find a big empty swamp (he wouldn't let us meet Yoda). Go to Mustafar and it's a big automated mining facility on a lava world that was uninhabited. Go to Kamino and there were boring cloners that really had no business for smugglers/traders. Stay on Tatooine and sit around the cantina and drink, but we got nobody looking to hire a ship, just a band in the background and spacers coming and going. Nobody was crazy enough to try to fly a smuggler ship to the Core Worlds to we figured Coruscant was right out.

Basically we could go on a tour of the places from the movies, but no plot or story.
At the end of the first session he was kind of befuddled that we didn't like it, he thought it was so cool to describe to us what it was like to really be standing on Endor, but he was surprised we weren't "doing more", and I don't know what he meant by that.

It didn't make it to a second session.

 

[chaochou]

A long time ago - the early 90s I think - Chaosium released a load of really thorough sourcepacks for Call of Cthulhu: Arkham, Kingsport, Innsmouth, Dunwich County...

Given this wealth of material, maps, NPCs, plot hooks and leads - and in my youthful exuberance - I decided it would be 'great' to run a Cthulhu sandbox.

Cthulhu kinda relies on the premise that the PC investigators will be determined to follow a succession of fairly explicit leads to their (fairly) inevitable doom.

Take away that strong lead and replace it with an open landscape of rumours and options and I found players erring on the side of sane self-preservation.

See that house on the cliff shrouded in mist and seemingly built out of all the wrong angles? That's where we're not going. That newspaper story about the hikers disappearing near Dunwich? We're staying a long way away from there too...

It was not a triumph.

 

[prosfilaes]

At this point, I'm not going to give them a detailed list of everything they have. After all, if someone hands me a bag the first thing I'm going to do once I'm not fearing for my life is check what supplies I've been given and see what I need to ration.

I don't understand the connection between these two statements. If it's something they're obviously going to do, then why not give them detailed list to start with? Especially here, where the issue seems to be metagame; I've had a number of DMs introduce a new character as a prisoner, but all the stuff he had written down on his sheet was conveniently there. Certainly if a DM let me waste the time adding items to my character sheet, I'd be a little surprised (and annoyed) that they had no connection to what I started the game with.

 

[steeldragons]

I'd chalk it up to a player experience thing. Even then, the most experienced gamer is entitled/likely at some point in their career to forget something at some point.

We had a similar thing happen, loooong time ago. We [the players] were all fairly experienced. The characters were all middling-to-high level. We entered a dark/lightless dungeon.

This was in a game where I was one of the players, someone else was DM. We had 7 players playing 9 PCs...and no-one/everyone forgot when we left town to stock up on torches. Torches!

One of the least experienced players mentioned meekly how they had a lantern on their sheet....No oil. No candles. But a lantern!

We'd been sure, since we knew we were going deep underground (probably involving a good deal of climbing/spelunkling) to have tons of rope...ten foot poles...you name it, we stocked up. Everyone had tinderboxes and not a single one of us had a torch.

Nor had any of the spellcasters (except a single cleric with ONE light spell) had bothered to take up any vaulable spell slots with anything so mundane as a "light" spell. This was back in the day where what spells you had, you had. There was no "trading out" of spells. You had to cast/open slots and rememorize...Which for whatever reason at the time we were unwilling to do, or maybe no one thought of it?

Yeah, we all felt pretty stupid. There was some simple arguing before the DM got annoyed at the time being wasted and acquiesced that we "experienced heroes" would not have undertaken the excursion without torches and retro'ed/let us have some (deducting the requisite gp, of course).

Just presenting as a lil' example, that it can happen to anyone.

I would agree that if the PCs were given/starting with pre-set "packs" then the contents of those packs should have been presented and clear to them before beginning...but again, everyone is entitled to forget from time to time and the DM, with everything else they are/have to keep track of, is no exception.

--SD

 

[Jon_Dahl]

There is a legend going around in our roleplaying club.

It tells about a certain fantasy-game that happened about 3-4 years ago. It was a free-form game and soon after everything had started, players were forced (?) to buy a tavern. After that they had to manage the caravans and the economy and all. Basically there was no fighting or adventuring at all. A new player joined the club and the game has handed to him. He had DM it for the rest of "campaign".

I can tell you that one of the players is still deeply and profoundly traumatized by the whole experience and the legend of that game still carries on today.

This style of gaming is known to us as "simming" (in reference to The Sims games).