So, I have been reading a lot about this new genre of video games called "Survival Sandbox", a genre that combines many elements 0f the Survival Horror and Wide Open Sandbox genres. The games tend to be light on the narrative and instead emphasize survival and exploration. Notable examples include Day Z and Minecraft (Minecraft being the relatively family-friendly, cartoony version of Survival Sandbox) and I'll let the folks at TV Tropes explain this in more detail.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SurvivalSandbox

The point is, I'm wanting to implement a Survival Sandbox style campaign in Dungeons & Dragons. Your character starts out at Level 1 with limited resources and equipment and must simply do their best to survive in a hostile and vast world. This style of gameplay would work very well with One-on-One campaigns and solo gameplay as well, but could also theoretically work with a traditional party of PC's.

Has anyone ever ran a game in this style? I'd imagine it would take less prep than a traditional dungeon crawl or narrative-driven campaign. I'm wanting to run a game in this style and I'm not sure what edition or rules set to use. I could do an OD&D or Basic D&D Retro-Clone, AD&D 1E or 2E, 3.5/Pathfinder, or 5E. 4E is off the table mainly because I don't like 4E and its mechanical issues such as healing surges and highly durable starting-level PC's would be counter-productive to the Survival Sandbox gameplay I am wanting to implement.

Frankly, I'm leaning towards 3.5 for nostalgia's sake (D&D 3.5 was the system I started with) combined with some minor elements lifted from Pathfinder, but I am also open to OD&D by way of Microlite74 Basic, both editions of AD&D, and D&D 5E, since I own all of these games in hard copy form.

My campaign setting would be a very grimdark pseudo-Medieval fantasy setting inspired heavily by Dark Ages Europe (particularly the Sub-Roman Period of the Fifth and Sixth Centuries CE), Feudal Japan (particularly the Sengoku Period), and Late Medieval Europe (particularly during the time of the Black Death). The setting would have a lot of anime aesthetics (particularly dark and violent anime such as Hellsing Ultimate, Berserk, Elfen Lied, Urotsukidoji, etc.) It would be a semi-apocalyptic setting in which the world is in the early stages of a massive societal collapse. Think Dungeons & Dragons meets Stephen King's The Stand but styled like a gory seinen anime. But enough about my campaign, let's focus on the topic at large.

What D&D or OSR systems would you guys use for a Survival Sandbox campaign?

Dunno about a whole campaign, but my first adventure for a Dark Sun campaign has usually been a survival scenario based on the pack-in adventure.

I'm using 2nd ed, with a few pages of house rules.

One of the tweaks I made to the official adventure, is that I use piecemeal armor. I think it give a scavenger feel for the characters to have bits of armor cobbled together.
(House rule: Wearing any piecemeal armor gives a character at least +1 to AC, minimum. That way a sleeve that gives +0 AC improves AC a bit. If the total AC bonus for all piecemeal armor is greater than 0, use that value instead.)

Dark Sun, of course, has the rules for dehydration, and I try to make the adventure require the characters to ration their water and use survival proficiencies, spells and powers to make it through.
(Note: Water skins can be as valuable as the water they carry. Characters can't carry water in their pockets.)

Quote from: Ratman_tf;934372Dunno about a whole campaign, but my first adventure for a Dark Sun campaign has usually been a survival scenario based on the pack-in adventure.

I'm using 2nd ed, with a few pages of house rules.

One of the tweaks I made to the official adventure, is that I use piecemeal armor. I think it give a scavenger feel for the characters to have bits of armor cobbled together.
(House rule: Wearing any piecemeal armor gives a character at least +1 to AC, minimum. That way a sleeve that gives +0 AC improves AC a bit. If the total AC bonus for all piecemeal armor is greater than 0, use that value instead.)

Dark Sun, of course, has the rules for dehydration, and I try to make the adventure require the characters to ration their water and use survival proficiencies, spells and powers to make it through.
(Note: Water skins can be as valuable as the water they carry. Characters can't carry water in their pockets.)

Interesting, I might implement a piecemeal armor system in my game.

Whitebox recommends using Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival for outdoor rules. You could skip the D&D part, though I heard here (always having been curious, but never seen the rules) that Outdoor Survival is fairly basic and not great.

I still use house rules for travel and outdoor survival that include bits based partly on the old Gamelords 3rd party Traveller supplements, especially The Desert Environment. I combine them with the GURPS outdoor rules and house rules.

I played some limited survival games a long time ago, and some campaigns have had parts where such rules were very relevant, but not the survival sandbox that never ends like some of those computer games. In Minecraft, it's usually not long before (perhaps after a few deaths) the players are quite safe, unless mods are being used, since even with nothing you can dig a home with your hands, chop down trees and make tools with your hands, etc.

I love outdoor survival and travel rules and always want them around and to be considered if they apply during travel, etc. Sooner or later I want other things to think about, though.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;934371The point is, I'm wanting to implement a Survival Sandbox style campaign in Dungeons & Dragons. Your character starts out at Level 1 with limited resources and equipment and must simply do their best to survive in a hostile and vast world. This style of gameplay would work very well with One-on-One campaigns and solo gameplay as well, but could also theoretically work with a traditional party of PC's.

Most players would hate this. How do I know this because back when the boxed set of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy was published we, the authors and contributors, attempted to explain how a sandbox campaign was to be run. Then we started getting back reports of many campaigns failing. Yeah some found it fun but the reports of failures were abnormally high.

When I looked at it, I found what happened is that we failed to explain the necessity of an initial context. That the character has some type of minimal background with friends, allies, enemies, and rumors to allow them to figure out what they wanted to do first. The campaigns that failed had the character start in a village in the middle of a blank hex map with the commandment of "Go forth and explore!"

As turned out, many (but not all) felt that their choice had no more meaning than throwing a dart onto the map. Thus were unhappy. That most players want enough of a background so they can properly weigh the options and get on with the adventure.

The Survival Sandbox starts out with putting the players in the middle of a blank map. You are going to run into the exact same problem. This doesn't mean you can't have a successful campaign only that there is a good chance that your group may not like it. I would put the odds at 50-50.

And as a fan of survival sandbox computer games, one of the big appeal is the player versus player combat. Rust, Dayz, and even Minecraft has that part of the gameplay. The challenge in these games is not just exploration, crafting, and survival is doing this while competing against dozens of others. PvP is something that is not well liked, if at all, in today RPG hobby*.

*It was more prevalent in the 70s and 80s but since the 90s with the development of first person shooters and MMORPGs 95% of those players migrated away from tabletop RPG.

Quote from: estar;934383When I looked at it, I found what happened is that we failed to explain the necessity of an initial context. That the character has some type of minimal background with friends, allies, enemies, and rumors to allow them to figure out what they wanted to do first. The campaigns that failed had the character start in a village in the middle of a blank hex map with the commandment of "Go forth and explore!"

As turned out, many (but not all) felt that their choice had no more meaning than throwing a dart onto the map. Thus were unhappy. That most players want enough of a background so they can properly weigh the options and get on with the adventure.

I think context can be pretty simple and still get the job done. When my bro was running an AD&D hexcrawl, the context was that the local Lord wanted the frontier mapped. So we went hex by hex, revealing stuff and having encounters.

But yeah. Having some kind of context to the get the ball rolling makes a huge difference.

Agreed. Even if its as simple as "Map the unknown!" or "Open trade routes" or "The area is whats left of a vast advanced kingdom now in ruin. Go out and find and loot all that stuff left behind before someone else does!" and so on.

Some players really love that sort of openness. Others really need at least something to kick off from.

Gamma World and BX D&D were my introductions to these wide open wilderness exploration campaigns. And then AD&D's DMG opened the gates further. SPI's Universe was another on the space theme.

Personally when playing these sorts of games I set myself some sort of goal once I have a basic understanding. That might be simple at first and change later. Or it might be long term. My fallback is "travel and explore!" if there isnt some immideately apparent problem that needs solving. My other fallback is to hit up the nearest tavern or quest wall and see what sorts of calls for help are posted. If any

I do intend to include some side quests and minor plots in my survival sandbox game, even if the main focus would be survival and exploration.

What you have described is Gary Gygax' "Greyhawk" as he ran it from 1972 - 1976.  He had a dungeon, but all exploration of the world was done entirely because the players wanted to explore.

I love the idea.

In the very first Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story, originally titled "Two Sought Adventure," they see a tower poking up through the woods, have locals tell them it's horrible and haunted and deadly, and promptly decide they will go explore it in the morning.  And they do.

It is also noteworthy that when they got their they did not go goobering in with their thumbs up their asses, but had tools and equipment and an attitude appropriate to exploring a dangerous ruin.

Have your players read that story.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;934405What you have described is Gary Gygax' "Greyhawk" as he ran it from 1972 - 1976.  He had a dungeon, but all exploration of the world was done entirely because the players wanted to explore.

I love the idea.

In the very first Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story, originally titled "Two Sought Adventure," they see a tower poking up through the woods, have locals tell them it's horrible and haunted and deadly, and promptly decide they will go explore it in the morning.  And they do.

It is also noteworthy that when they got their they did not go goobering in with their thumbs up their asses, but had tools and equipment and an attitude appropriate to exploring a dangerous ruin.

Have your players read that story.

Did they bring a small group of porters and cannon fodder? Make sure they had a priest/healer?

Quote from: Christopher Brady;934419Did they bring a small group of porters and cannon fodder? Make sure they had a priest/healer?

The title of the story is " Two Sought Adventure". If you knew nothing at all about the story, what could you infer from that title?

I know reading comprehension has gone downhill in this country, but damn.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;934405What you have described is Gary Gygax' "Greyhawk" as he ran it from 1972 - 1976.  He had a dungeon, but all exploration of the world was done entirely because the players wanted to explore.

I love the idea.

In the very first Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story, originally titled "Two Sought Adventure," they see a tower poking up through the woods, have locals tell them it's horrible and haunted and deadly, and promptly decide they will go explore it in the morning.  And they do.

It is also noteworthy that when they got their they did not go goobering in with their thumbs up their asses, but had tools and equipment and an attitude appropriate to exploring a dangerous ruin.

Have your players read that story.

I'll check it out. Thanks.

Also, this tidbit of information provided by Gronan has got me thinking.

I've been wanting to make an OSR retro-clone game for a long, long time now and have tossed around multiple ideas, even made two abandoned threads in the Design board of this very site, but now I have a more clear vision of what I want my OSR game to look like. Since a lot of the early Greyhawk OD&D games were essentially Survival Sandbox, I think I will make my OSR game Survival Sandbox. I had vaguely mentioned a similar idea in my old Design thread idea titled "Into The Darkness", but Into The Darkness was envisioned to be more along the lines of a vague D&D version of the early Resident Evil games but I did not define it well enough nor did the idea actually go anywhere.

But now that I have an actual clear vision for my game, I can work on it and actually design it to be a great Survival Sandbox game with a bleak anime-inspired and semi-apocalyptic atmosphere (One of my major literary influences is The Stand, and my main historical inspirations come from Sub-Roman Britain, Sengoku Era Japan, and the friggin' Black Death).

Obviously, I'm no longer going to use 3.5/Pathfinder, but I need to find a classic rules-set to base my OSR game on. And I'm thinking either OD&D or AD&D.

I own AD&D 1E and 2E on hard copy, and I do know of some good retro-clones of OD&D such as Swords & Wizardry, Delving Deeper, and my personal favorite, the rules-lite Microlite74. I am leaning a little more towards OD&D because it is so much simpler than either edition of AD&D.

I did come up with a kickass title for it just mere minutes ago, the game would be titled Chainmail Hearts.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;934479The title of the story is " Two Sought Adventure". If you knew nothing at all about the story, what could you infer from that title?

I know reading comprehension has gone downhill in this country, but damn.

I was just wondering just how prepared the Grey Mouser and Fafrd were, compared to how D&D needed you to be.  Because I've read the story, and none of the players I've had in the last 30 some years, have ever been less prepared to go dungeon delving than they were.  In fact, I dare say they were MORE prepared, and would have laughed those two out of an inn for go in without half of what was believed to be needed.

And then there's the older players in my area, who cut their teeth on earlier editions, like Rules Cyclopedia and earlier, the ones that force players to get the 10 ft poles and wire meshed listening cones, clubs and soft leather armour for the inevitable Rust Monsters.

Would anyone be interested in some online OSR Survival Sandbox gaming? I'm working on my rough draft of the aforementioned Chainmail Hearts (I have decided to base it off of OD&D and other similar retro-clones) and once I get the crude rough draft completed and posted to Google Docs, I'll share it with you guys and we can do some alpha playtesting.

I could see Sandbox Survival working better as a boardgame than as a RPG.

I've run Survival campaigns, but the context was everything.

In the original Mechanoids Invasion, the PCs need to find a way for the planet to survive the onslaught long enough for rescue to arrive, or to escape onto their mothership and fight from the inside. In my games, the Mechanoids have the insane planet sized mega-motherships and smaller planet killer ships (still immense) and the PCs are up against something that could be defeated by a human fleet. Of course, that was the thin-hope that kept the PCs and NPCs going against immense odds.

In OD&D, I've done short campaigns where the PCs had to survive X weeks or months or year during a massive onslaught. I ran a "Year of the Dragon" campaign where a horde of dragons had migrated to the kingdom and the PCs had to help towns survive and keep civilization intact until the horde moved on.

Rifts' Chaos Earth sub-game spinoff is very much this Survival Sandbox. It's all about the tropes listed and if PB had done a better job, I believe Chaos Earth would have a much larger audience because the thematic elements are strong.