Quote from: thedungeondelver;856698Yah; 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.

Oh, yes.  
This is why my PCs hate leaving and hate staying...

Quote from: Ravenswing;856690Just by way of curiosity, does anyone have one of those random regional events tables bookmarked?  (As in online, free.)

As to that, just after posting this, I started to compile my own, based around significant possibilities that came to mind.  I'll post them anon, and see what others can add to them.

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.

This is very important advice. Do not over-prep, or you may end up 1) seeing most of your prep going to the trash bin as the players pick different places and routes to follow, and 2) you may end up forcing the players through your prep in a subcounscious way. Both alternatives are bad, in my opinion.

Quote from: Ravenswing;856714As to that, just after posting this, I started to compile my own, based around significant possibilities that came to mind.  I'll post them anon, and see what others can add to them.

noisms wrote up one on his Monsters and Manuals blogs, but I just can't seem to find it no matter what keyword I use.

Great thread, am enjoying the responses greatly and have started to dig through some of the old threads mentioned by people here.

The faction-level game in the Sine Nomine products sounds great and I've been a member of alternate history.com for years so I know that well, great stuff there especially the Disney presidency timeline.

The only hard part of a lot of this is if the world is changing enough then setting canon is getting constantly replaced which could be a big pain to keep up to date. Probably the easiest way to deal with this is to keep the sandbox restricted either in size or amount of information. I think it'd also help to have a setting that you know really well, for example in a campaign set in Westeros at the start of the War of the Five kings I'd be able to track the consequences of a lot of PC action but with the Forgotten Realms I'd have a hard time knowing where to start.

One reason I mentioned cyclical events is if things run in circles you can prep them out once and then leave them be. For example having things like lunar cycles, seasons or even things like the fiscal year (having something like the devşirme be exacted at a certain time each year) matter a lot makes time matter without requiring much prep once things are already set in motion. Making these things more extreme than on Earth could also serve to get more attention from the PCs.

Changing gears, when I talked about astrology in the OP I didn't mean so much fortune telling but rather the constant cycling of the heavens having an effect on the world weather anybody's looking at the stars or no. For example certain spells only being able to be cast during certain alignments.

One astrology system I sketched out with a friend went like this:

There are twelve gods/signs of the setting, each corresponding to a month of the year (and one of the twelve face cards in a pack of cards) plus a Janus-faced "joker" god of life and death who'd sometimes be the thirteenth month (as with a lunar calendar you sometimes need a thirteenth month as twelve lunar months don't add up to one solar year).

Each day of the (long) week would also correspond to a god, as would each year, each "cycle" of 14 years (12 normal years plus two years of the two faces of the joker god), each "era" of 196 years, etc. etc.

Things that relate to each god would be favorable on that god's day and this would be increased if the days/months/years/etc. lined up.

Quote from: Daztur;856716Changing gears, when I talked about astrology in the OP I didn't mean so much fortune telling but rather the constant cycling of the heavens having an effect on the world weather anybody's looking at the stars or no. For example certain spells only being able to be cast during certain alignments.

I think that first edition Chivalry & Sorcery used astrology in that and a few other ways.

QuoteOne astrology system I sketched out with a friend went like this:

I can see where you could do something with this. Maybe even tie certain natural disasters or benefices to the cycles. So earthquakes occur during Poseidon's year and week and punishing storms during Zeus'.

Seasons and weeks in Glorantha work like that.

Quote from: Daztur;856716Great thread, am enjoying the responses greatly and have started to dig through some of the old threads mentioned by people here.

Were you using something like cyclical events in the dwarf fortress game? Or planning on it?

It's a good rule because it forces players to approach time as a resource.
Suddenly, rules about week long recovery or crafting time make a bit more sense.

Quote from: Bren;856762I can see where you could do something with this. Maybe even tie certain natural disasters or benefices to the cycles. So earthquakes occur during Poseidon's year and week and punishing storms during Zeus'.

Seasons and weeks in Glorantha work like that.

Yeah real world astrology is pretty damn opaque so the idea was to make something really simple and transparent so players would actually use it as in "you went uo the mountain during the first Zeusday of Zeusmonth of Zeusyear and you`re SURPRIZED you got hit by lightning? You idiot."

Also the idea was to give people corresponding birth signs. Was thinking of have one culture literally tattoo people`s birth signs on their foreheads and have them function as fairly restrictive castes but that`s probably going to far.

Cavebear: not really, the setting of that campaign was a single 6 mile hex so I could easily just keep track of everything. I did have three d30 tables of random events (one for weather, one for outside NPCs and one for fortress events) as well as an extended dwarf NPC downtime morale table that covered them going crazy if they didn`t have good lives and other wacky stuff.

Also for some reason EVERY time I put in goblin NPCs the PCs always end up allying with them. It never fails.

Quote from: Itachi;856715This is very important advice. Do not over-prep, or you may end up 1) seeing most of your prep going to the trash bin as the players pick different places and routes to follow, and 2) you may end up forcing the players through your prep in a subcounscious way. Both alternatives are bad, in my opinion.

Getting back on topic, this is a good reason not to have a detailed future timeline - either it gets wasted (#1) or you railroad players through it (#2). Random but judicious event determination works much much better IME, as in my "3 in 6 chance of a coup here" example.

Random event tables can be used, but I haven't done so much recently (except wandering monster charts and rolling for the weather). Generally I find the Free Kriegsspiel approach of thinking what might happen, set a probability on d6, and roll for it, gives the best combination of random & adjudicated.

Quote from: S'mon;856778Getting back on topic, this is a good reason not to have a detailed future timeline - either it gets wasted (#1) or you railroad players through it (#2).

I find a real timeline works even better and it already contains far more detail that I could ever invent or keep track of and manage. But I have the advantage of playing two games that are mostly actual history. And I like creating things and don't mind if they never get seen by the players. Mileage on both of those aspects varies.

And equally clear from threads like this is the fact that creation for the joy of creating is not something every one shares.

If your prep or historical events are useless unless the players do X, or visit Y at Z time, then the prep sounds like it wasn't particularly appropriate prep for a sandbox campaign.

I rarely prep anything that don't either enjoy doing even if it doesn't get directly used by the players, or it is useful in other ways or can be used at some point anyway. I prepare locations with the expectation that they may be adjusted by the actual circumstances at the time the players arrive. I prepare NPCs that are either useful to know what they're like even if the PC's never meet them, or NPCs who will provide details for people whom the PCs do at some point interact with, but aren't tied down to a specific place/time/circumstance. I also have some generic NPC types which can be the "first face" of typical types of people, if the PCs just interact with someone briefly and then quickly move on. E.g. Man Of The Crowd, Typical Dranning City Guard, Merchant's Guild Clerk, Butcher, etc.

I'm certainly not going to prep the kind of thing I see in many published games where it says something like "As soon as the players get to the bridge, a messenger rides up with news that Duke Findlefutt is coming to attend the tourney in Bloodnettle Fields... and just at this moment, there happens to be... [contrived coincidence now linked to PC travel, requiring major politicians to appear at same location]."

For example, if I playing out a battle that the players will not see, it's probably because I enjoy doing that or I want to see the actual results without deciding what it is by fiat. If the players are there and participate, I may need to replay it anyway, so I'd never play it out if I was doing it with the expectation they'd show up and watch but not participate, and/or if I wasn't getting something out of it. Part of what I enjoy about running a sandbox game is that it's a game universe where things happen for consistent reasons, and one system I enjoy having be an actual system (not just something I invent and control by my direct imagination), where the military situation is actually at play. I.e. I'm not just bullshitting that that castle has walls and towers and a map layout, and that the army has certain number, quality, morale, equipment, and location - there's a wargame that gives those details actual effects. This means it can actually be somewhat relevant to listen to the descriptions, and not just to try to predict what the GM is going to force to happen with his imagination.

So, while I get the suggestion that over-prep may be wasted, and that if you don't prep, then you are more free to ad-lib interesting things during play, I would say that doing so is a different sort of sandbox than I run. If the GM is going to decide that things exist or are a certain way during play, based on what happens during play, then that's a world where things are called into existence at that time because they seem interesting or it seems like they'll make a more fun session, then it's a sandbox where the cause & effect going on is a metaphysical force for fun and interesting stuff, which is ok/cool and I do that too to some degree, but a different sort of thing than what I generally like to do.

Apart from just liking to geek out with a massive game world, I do find it helps to actually develop to some degree what's going on in the world, because (I have had very curious analytical-minded players and) it _helps_ me develop more and more content, and content that makes sense, because it gives context which eventually means I have a sense of understanding my world and what's happening, so I can generate and infer content details much more easily than if I hadn't, and more importantly (to me) the content I come up with (either in advance or on the fly) will tend to make far more sense and be internally consistent, compared to what I'd come up with if I had little idea of what existed and what was going on.

Of course I started out preparing very little, and even using maps and settings published by others. Even though what I started with was actually remarkably logical and geared to a sense-making sandbox (Metagaming's In the Labyrinth and Tollenkar's Lair), because I was inexperienced and hadn't fully digested all of it, I didn't fully understand much about the world and what was going on, and I made stuff up for fun, and that was how I approached making new maps, with the result that I started having more and more things in my game world that didn't make a lot of sense, and then trying to invent more stuff consistent with that, even though it wasn't very well thought out, which was a bit annoying to me. I much prefer to have thought _enough_ about what's going on and what exists and so on, that I'm far less likely to include things that don't make sense.

Quote from: Daztur;856771Also for some reason EVERY time I put in goblin NPCs the PCs always end up allying with them. It never fails.

Well, your goblins are adorable. I liked the tree-affinity your goblins had.
You should just make goblins a player-character race. Make gnomes the bad guys instead. Nobody likes gnomes.

Quote from: Cave Bear;856803Well, your goblins are adorable. I liked the tree-affinity your goblins had.
You should just make goblins a player-character race. Make gnomes the bad guys instead. Nobody likes gnomes.

Especially Gnobody, Lord of the  Gnefarious Gnecromancer Gnomes.

Much closer to Skarg's viewpoint.

I overprep gratuitously.  For my own head and for for the campaign.  Especially in the big, complex, long term game, this makes it all hang together better and infuses the game with more internal logic.  Even when I end up writing something and not using it, it still adds onto the logical infrastructure of the setting.


Run your games the way you want, have fun the way you want,  but I know one of the reasons my games seem to go on and on.  If you build it, they will come.

Quote from: LordVreeg;856832Much closer to Skarg's viewpoint.

I overprep gratuitously.  For my own head and for for the campaign.  Especially in the big, complex, long term game, this makes it all hang together better and infuses the game with more internal logic.  Even when I end up writing something and not using it, it still adds onto the logical infrastructure of the setting.


Run your games the way you want, have fun the way you want,  but I know one of the reasons my games seem to go on and on.  If you build it, they will come.

Also prep like that can come into play down the road. If I have the time and interest in working on something, then I will happily do so. Sometimes it is stuff that will directly affect play, sometimes it never comes up, sometimes it comes up later on either directly or just as background. It almost always helps contribute a sense of depth to the setting. Even if the players don't see the material itself, somehow for me as a GM, knowing about it, helps me visualize the setting as a more complete thing. This ultimately helps me with stuff like ad libbing and managing unexpected events on the fly.

"Generally it matters very much WHERE the PCs go but not at all WHEN they go there."

If that's how it is in your neighborhood, might it be at least in part because generally "the PCs" are a monolithic group? What's over the event horizon to one is so to all, effectively just the GM playing with himself?

This is one of those things that's much less an issue when you have the kind of multi-player, multi-character, multi-axis game originally played.