Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;856602I'll use software to handle events happening if I need to.

Such as?

For astrology, why not give each character a birthday and star sign. Then, at the beginning of each session or series of sessions, check the newspaper's astrology section. Find a way to bring that into play.

Quote from: Simlasa;856604Such as?

Python code I've written over the years. Simulating things like space traffic. Border skirmishes (changing borders). Various patrols. Citizen/Patron travel. Merchant stock inventory and shortages. Tides/seasons/weather/meteor showers. Radio signals. Network News Broadcasts. Various visits by important people to a city coming/going. Ships arrive with trade-goods/fresh prisoners/plague.

Everything has its own schedule they follow. I have the app set at 24 hour days, divided into 5 or 10 minute chunks mostly. But I can set it for any hours per day, depending on what planet the players happen to be on.

If  you want to have a world that runs rather than sits and waits for the players, get Tony Bath's "Setting Up a Wargames Campaign," included in this:

http://www.nobleknight.com/productdetailsearch.asp_Q_ProductID_E_2147450710_A_InventoryID_E_2148234438

I don't see much point simulating NPC behaviour that can't possibly come to the notice of the players. If I'm doing events on the other continent I will only care about absolutely massive stuff, and then only if it might affect the PCs. The closer I get to the PCs the more detail I'll go into. But I don't much like the idea of a clockwork world.

Last night in my sandbox, the travel-weary PCs approached the village of Bratanis. There was a long building friction there between the Lady Aeschela and her lieutenant, the Weaponmaster Ruggio. I rolled a d6 to see if Ruggio had finally overthrown Aeschela and made himself Lord, 1-3 'yes'. I rolled a 3, and events proceeded from there. I didn't see any need to make the Schrodinger determination prior to the PCs getting there.

Other things may be on a timetable in-world, eg it's known that as the rainy season ends in M3 (it's early M2 now) an undead army of Neo-Nerath will be coming over the mountains to Hara. That will presumably happen unless the PCs or something else big stops it.

In general, stuff immediately around the PCs I'm looking at daily/weekly on a small scale, further away monthly & on a larger scale (eg Hara & the undead army), further still yearly and larger still (what are the Red Reavers of Grimalon up to) and even decadal (how are the Invincible Overlord and Green Emperor doing). This gives reasonable economy of effort - if my game's not set in the CSIO I may only be thinking about the CSIO every year or so of real-time. Most of it can be updated if/when the PCs go there, and yes a lot of it can be used frozen-time, NPC X is the way they are in the book whenever the PCs first meet X. My Karameikos game is 20 years in (1020 AC from 1000 AC start), major NPCs get aged 20 years (and some die of old age) but some I'll just change their backstory to be 20 years younger.

Vreeg and I talked about World in Motion a lot. (Vreeg came up with the term).

The basic gist is that it is a plan similar to a plan of battle. The plan is a writeup of the future of the setting without PCs doing anything. And like what a good general does with a battle plan during a conflict, once the PCs the plan gets altered.

Doing this helps because it organized and disciplines your thoughts when deciding the complications and consequences that arise from the PC's action. There can be future event that the PCs can't do nothing about (for example a natural earthquake). However in practice, it best to use those sparely.

Where things differ between referee is how that plan gets form and what goes into. There is no right answers as it is an aide specifically for that referee designed to be quickly referenced during play. And what format and content works is highly subjective.

I personally am a fan of alternate history and read a lot over on the alternate history forums (http://www.alternatehistory.com). The best alternate timelines are those that follow plausibly from event to event starting with a single point of a departure from our reality. Now plausibly doesn't mean probably although too many improbable consequences one after another can make for a poor timeline.

So incorporating random tables, astrology are all elements that could be used effectively to create a possible future timeline.

For incorporating Astrology, I would look at the techniques that fortune-tellers uses. When used effectively it makes the players think that the referee actually predicted the future however it leaves enough wiggle room so that their choices still matter.

Random tables are good because when creating content (whether for an adventure or a future timeline) most people I feel have a dozen good ideas and then have to really work at it to get the rest done. I found I can write and prepare much faster if I generate the rest using the appropriate random tables. Use the result as a idea generator and a skeleton to flesh things out. With the idea that if I get another idea that I throw out the result and substitute it instead. Or throw out any whacked out result and replace it.

For example one time when I was filling up a level of my megadungeon, the Majestic Wilderlands. I rolled up in three adjacent rooms, Giant Scorpions, Dwarves, and Evil Sorcerors.

What I decided that those rooms where the abode of Evil Sorcerors that captured dwarves and were doing magical experiments to turn them into Giant Scorpions.

I thought that was just OK but later when the player ran into afterward they said that was one of the creepiest parts of the level.

Quote from: S'mon;856650I don't see much point simulating NPC behaviour that can't possibly come to the notice of the players. If I'm doing events on the other continent I will only care about absolutely massive stuff, and then only if it might affect the PCs. The closer I get to the PCs the more detail I'll go into. But I don't much like the idea of a clockwork world.

A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and a tornado hits a home in Kansas several weeks later.

The saying as trite as it sounds is basically true. The cause for events could come from anywhere. So even if the player will never met the individuals or visit the locale that causes the event. It may be important for you the referee to understand the origins of the event that the PCs actually does get involved in.

Your general concept is correct. The specifics of "another continent" and "hidden stuff" is not. The referee should understand everything that causes events and effect the behavior of NPCs so that when it comes time to roleplay he has a full picture of why the NPCs act the way they do.

For example in our history a combination of the politics of the steppe tribes and climate changes in the center of Asia are the ultimate origins of the great migrations and invasions from the east to Europe. European will see any of that but those events shape the circumstances of the invading horde and more important how the NPCs the PCs interact behave.

So my advice is to figure out why NPCs is behave the way they do, figure out why locales are what they are even if they are "hidden". Then anything outside of that is what you can leave out.

Quote from: S'mon;856650Last night in my sandbox, the travel-weary PCs approached the village of Bratanis. There was a long building friction there between the Lady Aeschela and her lieutenant, the Weaponmaster Ruggio. I rolled a d6 to see if Ruggio had finally overthrown Aeschela and made himself Lord, 1-3 'yes'. I rolled a 3, and events proceeded from there. I didn't see any need to make the Schrodinger determination prior to the PCs getting there.

In my view in the end the referee managing a tabletop campaign is not a computer capable of storing and retrieving vast stores of information. A sandbox campaign is the ultimate test as it's focus is for the referee to handle the character wherever their players have them go or do.

A sandbox referee does need to keep a certain amount of details in his head. Beyond that the referee should do exactly what you do. Use random tables, charts, or whatever to come up with a fair way of determine the circumstances of the locale and the behavior of the NPCs.

Nobody I know of who advocate Sandbox campaign are advising that you have to details everything to the Nth detail. If you want too fine. A handful have done that successfully like M.A.R. Barker and his 1,500 NPCs of Tekemul. But most people don't have the time and more importantly the interest to do that. Nor it is essential to a successful sandbox campaign. So in that I am in agreement with you.

What I am not in agreement is to be dismissive of people who want to do attempt to managed 1,500 NPCs. I guess it is due in part in me being a classic Traveller fan and the fact that many of its subsystem can be used as solo mini-games. I don't look down on people who like to generate sector after sector or like to debate the intricacies of the Third Imperium.

Especially in light that an anal-tentative attention to detail can produce some really useful stuff from time to time like the Harnworld articles or the Traveller Map.

Quote from: S'mon;856650In general, stuff immediately around the PCs I'm looking at daily/weekly on a small scale, further away monthly & on a larger scale (eg Hara & the undead army), further still yearly and larger still (what are the Red Reavers of Grimalon up to) and even decadal (how are the Invincible Overlord and Green Emperor doing).

I found that scale doesn't matter. For me the focus of a RPG campaign is the player interacting with the setting as their character. What do they interact with? Locales and NPCs (including monsters). So what I found that works is to focus on why the Locale is the way it is, and why does the NPC behave the way it does. Anything outside of that, I relegate to the things I do outside of campaign prep. I also found, that I can't predict what will be important in determine the why of a locale of NPCs. Sometimes it all local, sometime it global event. I will say in general local circumstances plausibly connect more often than global. But that not always the case.

Quote from: Daztur;856570But even though it's been around from a while it's surprising how little you see it supported in published products. The OSR hexcrawls I've seen/bought don't have any specific content to support it. Pundy's Dark Albion has a future timeline which is good but I wish there was more of that out there.

Might want to take a look at some Sine Nomine publications.  (Stars Without Number is the best-known, and has a free version for download, but all of them are good for this sort of thing.)  All of the core games include some form of factional or other higher-level meta-game to provide a structured way of keeping events moving in the sandbox independently of the PCs.  Set up a half-dozen or so factions when you start the campaign, and then play out a faction turn (shouldn't take more than five minutes or so per faction) after each game session or once a game-month or whatever to determine world events.

It works very well for me, but, then, I'm allergic to "future timelines" or anything else that smells like prewritten plots, however faint that smell might be.

You may want to take a look at Apocalipse World and its hacks. Even if you're not into lighter/narrative RPGs, they are built as sandboxes from the get go and feature some nice tools for doing exactly what you're talking here.

 E.g: they use "countdown clocks" to track future events that will trigger if some factions and entities are left alone by the PCs. So, the local bandits' guild may have 1. Take out the competition, 2. Monopolize local drug market, and 3. Turn city into a drug infested den. The PCs can choose to intervene to deny this, or even help it out to take advantage of the situation (assuming the GM foreshadows these events in some way, which is also valid).

By the way, Blades in the Dark is coming out this year and will feat lots of good ideas related to this.

Even as teenage GM's in the 80's, we had events happening in our game worlds that had calendar dates, and happened then and there regardless of where the PCs were, unless the PCs actually intervened. Information about the more major events would also spread around appropriately. This was kind of an "of course this is how it works - stuff happens in our worlds" assumption rather than thinking it was anything special.

It developed as we got better at GM'ing, our worlds got more developed, and our tastes more complex. We used rules from wargames (I used Avalon Hill's system from Alesia), creating counters and army rosters for the armies in the game and playing out their battles when they happened, and recording the results and altering the maps as appropriate.

It did get to be a fair amount of work to generate history in advance and record it, especially as our game worlds got quite large. However we did that because we were into it. It is also possible to just look at the map and map notes and decide what's going on in regions, and decide that some regions that are distant from the players aren't really impacting much where the current action is, and so can be declared to be maintaining their status quo.

Some content can also be designed to be in a certain state when the players get there, as long as it's compatible with other events going on in the campaign (i.e. (not impacting or impacted by them) .

Quote from: estar;856668What I am not in agreement is to be dismissive of people who want to do attempt to managed 1,500 NPCs. I guess it is due in part in me being a classic Traveller fan and the fact that many of its subsystem can be used as solo mini-games. I don't look down on people who like to generate sector after sector or like to debate the intricacies of the Third Imperium.

I guess I'm a little bit dismissive because I used to be that sort of GM, who generated vast reams of material for its own sake, and eventually found that this was hurting the actual game at the table. Every detail I pre-determine takes away an opportunity to make it differently - and sometimes different would be better, but I can't know what would be best for the game. I don't have infinite inspiration; if fix too much too soon I am destroying possibilities. My current Ghinarian Hills setting is working brilliantly, but only because I detailed one or two locations at a time, over months, as inspiration came to me - and am still doing so. If I had tried to detail everything up front rather than incrementally it would be a much much weaker setting.

Just by way of curiosity, does anyone have one of those random regional events tables bookmarked?  (As in online, free.)

Quote from: S'mon;856687I guess I'm a little bit dismissive because I used to be that sort of GM, who generated vast reams of material for its own sake, and eventually found that this was hurting the actual game at the table. Every detail I pre-determine takes away an opportunity to make it differently - and sometimes different would be better, but I can't know what would be best for the game. I don't have infinite inspiration; if fix too much too soon I am destroying possibilities. My current Ghinarian Hills setting is working brilliantly, but only because I detailed one or two locations at a time, over months, as inspiration came to me - and am still doing so. If I had tried to detail everything up front rather than incrementally it would be a much much weaker setting.

There is no one right approach here. Some GMs find it helpful to work out these kinds of background details, others find it an interference. For me it is more handy to have that kind of information on hand for a variety of reasons. Even things that don't directly affect the players can come up in play, and I am more at ease as a GM when I've established these sorts of details in advance. They could come up peripherally (when players inquire about events in a distant capital for example) or they could come up directly (when players arrive in a town and decide to do some digging to find opportunities for wealth or whatnot).

That said, I don't think one can detail everything in advance. I look at a campaign as a skeleton, and I add meat on as I need it. If the players are in a given zone, I know I need a lot of meat there. But if there is a major capital well outside that zone that I know is important to the setting I am going to think about what is going on there. I won't map out every town, village and countryside until I feel it is needed but I will think of things like major events and political situations, trade networks, ongoing crisis and problems that can affect surrounding areas. When you do that over a long enough time, you end up with a pretty detailed world.

One thing I do now for things like future timelines is I always use a calendar in my campaign notebook and mark passage of time. I also use this to mark down future events. Most of these events are related to PC things (I.E. a player sent a spy to the Green Pagoda and I write down when he gets there, what he learns and when he reports back so I don't forget). I used to use a preplanned campaign timeline for world events. Now I use random tables and just roll once a month to see if anything significant occurs.

Quote from: One Horse Town;856562World in motion gaming.

Been around forever. Talked about it lots on here too. Lots of us oldies like that.

Yah; it kind of drove my players up the wall when they'd leave the "Castle Delve" megadungeon for a month to heal, level, learn new spells etc. then come back and find out that the bandits on the 1st level had hired new recruits, built new traps, secured the old entries, etc.

I pointed out that Roman Legions built entire fortresses in a single night when they were on the march as "camps", so "Aw how did the gnolls build up a whole palisade fort, we were only gone for three and a half weeks!" doesn't really reach my ears.

There is no such thing as over preparation, as long as the GM is willing to have his little machinations and plans crushed and changed at a heartbeat.    Helmuth Von Moltke is normally attributed with, " No battleplan survives contact with the enemy", and it is a truism in GMing, as well.  Your carefully detailed set pieces and intricate NPC relationships may end up somewhere you would never expect once the set piece goes live.

"Vreeg's Third Rule of Setting Design,
"The World In Motion is critical for Immersion, so create 'event chains' that happen at all levels of setting design. The players need to feel like things are happening and will happen with or without them. They need to feel like they can affect the outcome, but that these events have weight of their own. Event-chains need velocity, not just speed.
Cause and effect from an event-chain cements the feeling of setting-weight and the march of time to the players. It's not enough to have an election in a town, the effect of that election must be there when the players return to that town.  It is not enough that a band of trolls and giants is spotted, what devestation due they cauase and what actions do the locals take, and from there what wreckage and ruin?"
 
First Corrollary of the Third Rule
"It is the interesting task of the GM to create a feel in the world that everything, every event-chain,  is happening around the PCs without the least concern whether the PCs join or not, while in reality making sure the game and these event chains are actually predicated on PC volition.  The setting consistency should never be compromised, and a good GM should be able to keep both setting and PC needs logical at the same time "

As Estar mentions, this is true at every level. I enjoy creating a lot of detail and information, as it invariably makes my understanding of the setting more concrete and real, so the constant GM extrapolation makes more logical sense.  It doesn't mean the PCs don't mess

I also like the term 'story arcs', with macro arcs, mid arcs, and micro arcs layered beneath them. So many adventures are written around those, as well as the motivations on my NPCS.  

But again, you must be willing to rip out the threads and re-skein it (My god, I actually said that) as a GM who writes out all the deep and long intricate past and current and future.