The many types of Sandboxes and Open-World Campaigns

[payn]

Your response suggests you don't need any form of reward or advancement at all. Which is fair. Some people probably play that why, and I would LOVE to run a game without advancement -- or, at least, the very limited kind of advancement you see in episodic television and comic books. But I have run games for literally hundreds of players in total over many decades and I have never, ever encountered players that in a long term game don't want some form of advancement.

Give Traveller a try some time. No levels, no magic gear, just skills with very few increases. I find it pushes me to be a better GM because I dont have the crutch of treasure and XP to lean on. Of course, I also find this very attractive as a player because I see XP as very arbitrary on the GM's part anyways, so its certainly not for all gamers.

 

[Malmuria]

Basic structure like using their skills and abilities in the three pillars of social, exploration, and combat? I assumed that was all self explanatory. I am talking beyond just the typical D&D trad play and encompassing RPGs in general. I dont give out XP because I dont want to tell the players what to do. I want them to decide as the characters what they want to do. Now, I do often have campaign guides that explain the setting and points of interest to give them viable starting points. I think large all encompassing campaign end goals are important too. The players than explore the world and aim for those goals via the characters. Pursuing those goals in any way they see fit motivates them to action.

I think he means structure as a more defined style in a game. For example, a mystery could be a game structure. However, I can see the appeal of keeping everything diegetic, but in that case I wouldn't use a game that has level progression.

 

[John R Davis]

My favourite xp system was dragonquest. You get a set amount of xp per hour played. With bonus for success. This way you can play at whatever pace you wish ( high action, deeper roleplay, etc) and still get " reward"

 

[Yora]

Thats always been my issue with XP though. Earning is too meta, players go after the biggest prizes and often leave many activities behind.

XP are a deliberate metagame tool. They exist for the purpose of encouraging certain behavior and discouraging others. That is the whole point. Players doing whatever they feel like is not inherently desireable or good.
A good game is not all the things to all people. A good game has a focus. Rewards and incentives are a great tool to maintain focus in the campaign and staying within the campaign's premise. For one player it might be fun to play the game in whatever way seems most interesting at the moment, but when you have six people who are all interested in different things that doesn't really work. Also, in a campaign that is set up for a certain thing, the GM can prepare and create content accordingly. This becomes increasingly harder and less effective when the scope of the campaign is less defined. And when players can do anything, but nothing seems really pressing, it becomes hard to decide what to do to create new exciting situations.
A clear system that tells players "You'll always get rewarded for doing that thing" helps with all of that. It helps keeping thr campaign within its premise without having to set up invisible walls.

(That being said, D&D wants to be all things to all people and XP as a mechanic were copied over blindly out of tradition, without considering what they are supposed to incentivize.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

Your response suggests you don't need any form of reward or advancement at all.

"Need" is doing some heavy lifting here. My response is based on a game where everyone playing is being honest with themselves, the other players, and the GM about what they're there for. This is, to be generous, not universal. So sometimes you can very well "need" the reward to keep things moving forward because one or more players really aren't fully on-board the kind of campaign you're running, and without some of that intrinsic carrot, they'll tend to just coast to a stop.

But I don't think it does discussion any good to kid ourselves about why that is. And I'm kind of past the point of wanting to bother to run campaigns that people aren't really on board. But other people have other needs here.

Which is fair. Some people probably play that why, and I would LOVE to run a game without advancement -- or, at least, the very limited kind of advancement you see in episodic television and comic books. But I have run games for literally hundreds of players in total over many decades and I have never, ever encountered players that in a long term game don't want some form of advancement.

I think the desire for some kind of advancement is, while not completely unrelated, at least tangential to tying it to the campaign aims. A lot of people don't feel good about static character capability for any number of different reasons, but how dramatic it has to be, how frequent, and how much its being used as a carrot to make people engage with the campaign type are all different issues that can have different answers.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Give Traveller a try some time. No levels, no magic gear, just skills with very few increases. I find it pushes me to be a better GM because I dont have the crutch of treasure and XP to lean on. Of course, I also find this very attractive as a player because I see XP as very arbitrary on the GM's part anyways, so its certainly not for all gamers.

The issues I had with at least early Traveler is that it pretty much flat-out had people never learn by doing, which was a pretty hot take for a game otherwise at least half-concerned with simulating reality. You could argue that, given its assumptions in previous experience, that advancement should be slow, but that's still not the same thing as nonexistent. Fundamentally, if four years of running around in the merchant marine could yield you a handful of bonuses to various things, its hard to see why the sort of things you were doing as a PC shouldn't in the same period, even if some of the time was elided over.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My favourite xp system was dragonquest. You get a set amount of xp per hour played. With bonus for success. This way you can play at whatever pace you wish ( high action, deeper roleplay, etc) and still get " reward"

The only problem with that approach is it assumes a pretty unitary speed-of-activity by people which I'm not sure is at all warranted.

 

[dragoner]

Well milestone XP is still a form of XP, i.e. rewarding players for a particular activity. It's just xp per goal piece is very concrete, whereas xp for "adventure" is much more vague. I think milestones could still work, but most effective if the xp award is attached to something clear and realizable from the outset. Even better if these are variable to provide risk/reward options for players.

It is what I use, though in Cepheus Engine, at the end of an adventure or campaign arc, +1 to a stat or skill. There are some variables in there, trying and failing I'll let someone roll, studying too, and I look at time in general; it could almost be said that time is xp. Real world as well, if we are doing 2-3 sessions a month, then they should be getting rewarded at least every 2-3 months, maybe more.

 

[Yora]

The only problem with that approach is it assumes a pretty unitary speed-of-activity by people which I'm not sure is at all warranted.

The issue is that you're not rewarding anything, nor are you incentivizing anything. Characters level up regardless of the risks they take or the things they accomplish.

 

[Aldarc]

This is an aspect where system really starts to matter a lot. In theory, you can tell players that they can do whatever they want. But in practice the mechanics of the rules system influence what kinds of behaviors are beneficial or detrimental to the players. Character advancement being the obvious number one. Players will gravitate towards behaviors that increase the rate ot character advancement, like doing things that get them XP. Establishing clear rules for what will get them XP and how much is a very great tool to guide the campaign without ever giving the players any directions in where to go and what to do.

Another good one is supply consumption. In a campaign where food supplies are tracked for all PCs, hired NPC, and animals of the party, and running out of food has meaningful mechanical impact, many situations can play out very differently from a campaign in which food is not a mechanical factor. Lack of water or freezing or being burned to death outdoors are even more severe versions of that.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm playing a number of survival video games at the moment, including the early access V Rising game. My brain has been mulling over how to translate a lot of the survival game feel to TTRPGs. Survival Games, IMHO, provide a wide range of carrots for player goals.

A lot of progression in survival games is tied to activities like harvesting, hunting, crafting, cooking, or base-building, which are often neglected aspects of TTRPG play. Consumption and resupply of resources (e.g., building mats, food/water, etc.) are also important motivators for exploration. V Rising also blocks recipes and character powers behind killing open world bosses. But a big part of this requires the players having the knowledge about what they need next to progress: e.g., the player knows that they need iron to construct better weapons and armor, but they need to first (a) craft a forge, which may have additional resource components, and then (b) find a source of iron ore. All of this may lead to a series of open world random encounters.

This may be where having something like a "crew sheet" (see Blades in the Dark crew sheet below) would be beneficial. It lays out a sort of "what next" series of goals for players to pick what they want to do next in order to progress their base and expand their operation.

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