Quote from: Pierce Inverarity;258078On a related note, a few weeks ago Rob posted the IMO ideal starting set-up for a Traveller subsector sandbox along these lines.

Geez, I wish I would have seen that before doing my thread...

Quote from: Pierce Inverarity;258078As opposed to an "anarchist" sandbox a la original Wilderlands, where players careen through a world so thinly populated that the cultural/political coherence of any entity doesn't extend beyond a few hexes, nor does that matter much.

On a related note, a few weeks ago Rob posted the IMO ideal starting set-up for a Traveller subsector sandbox along these lines.

How about Jack Vance's Gaean Reach (as seen in The Demon Princes novels)? You have a combination of fairly regulated human civilisation with pretty good law and order through the Interworld Police Coordinating Corporation, and you have the Beyond, which is fragmented and either lawless or subject to arbitrary legal standards, where the only interworld organisation is the Deweaseling Corps - designed specifically to stamp out IPCC spies and operatives. I think that would be a tremendous sandbox setting with both concepts built in -- and, in fact, what original Traveller seems to be modelled on.

The Setting is a good fantasy version of this. Not nearly as depopulated as the Wilderlands, you can easily travel back and forth from a medieval cavalier state to a barbarian-occupied region filled with ruins and occupied towns, to a series of city-states with different levels of law and alignments.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;258065I would say the ability to "Get the Fuck Out of Dodge" is a feature, not a bug.

RPGPundit

Oh, agreed. It's not without its problems though.

Quote from: Melan;258126How about Jack Vance's Gaean Reach (as seen in The Demon Princes novels)? You have a combination of fairly regulated human civilisation with pretty good law and order through the Interworld Police Coordinating Corporation, and you have the Beyond, which is fragmented and either lawless or subject to arbitrary legal standards, where the only interworld organisation is the Deweaseling Corps - designed specifically to stamp out IPCC spies and operatives. I think that would be a tremendous sandbox setting with both concepts built in -- and, in fact, what original Traveller seems to be modelled on.

That would indeed be several shades of awesome.

Interestingly, there's a Traveller sector that's actually called the Beyond. But the DP adds a sandbox flavor all its own.

A Demon Princes RPG... man, that would be something. And it would sell, probably better than Dying Earth because it's more straightforwardly adventuresque.

Hmmm, from Clash's description it seems that I'm a "Situational GM". I've expressed it before as

"something is happening and will lead to something else if the PCs do nothing, but the PCs have a reason to care."

which is not very pretty-sounding but gets the point across, I think.

Like Clash, I set up the major NPCs and their motivations and resources and things happen from there. The billiard balls are scattering across the table, where they'll end up is hard to say, especially once the PCs start knocking one or two of them. But since each ball has its own motivation and resources, I know where it wants to go, so...

I found recently that this sort of approach works well in an espionage game where the PCs are constantly interfering with the conspiracy "Hmmm, they did that, A knows about it but B doesn't, what will A do differently?"

So I guess not a sandbox GM at all and I will go away now and mind my own business

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;258030Dude, just let everyone run a bunch of PCs, and swap them out or combine them as you need.

That's what we've started doing in Shadowrun, where it's easier for us to do loosely-connected adventures, as opposed to the highly-serial campaigns we do in fantasy games. We have a group of maybe 8-10 players, but only 4 or 5 are usually able to make it on any given day, which makes it tough to play the same group in a campaign. So now we have a "pool" of characters, and while the events of the last game influence the events of the next game, they're not highly-serial, so you can just grab any character out of the pool - there are a few dozen, now - and play whomever you want.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;258335Hmmm, from Clash's description it seems that I'm a "Situational GM". I've expressed it before as

"something is happening and will lead to something else if the PCs do nothing, but the PCs have a reason to care."

which is not very pretty-sounding but gets the point across, I think.

Like Clash, I set up the major NPCs and their motivations and resources and things happen from there. The billiard balls are scattering across the table, where they'll end up is hard to say, especially once the PCs start knocking one or two of them. But since each ball has its own motivation and resources, I know where it wants to go, so...

I found recently that this sort of approach works well in an espionage game where the PCs are constantly interfering with the conspiracy "Hmmm, they did that, A knows about it but B doesn't, what will A do differently?"

So I guess not a sandbox GM at all and I will go away now and mind my own business

Man, if that's not sandbox gaming, I don't know what is. I understand it's situation-based, but:
"things are happening, which will lead to other things happening, if we do nothing.  Plus, we care because we're part of the world.  It doesn't ignore us."  
Isn't that the situation everybody is in?  I know my life is kind of that way.  I've tons of responsibilities, but I don't have to fulfill them.  I can accept the consequences of ditching them.

Personally, I think that's how you get sandbox games going.  Give the PCs a little bit of responsibility and let them go.  Put them in charge. Whether of places, people, items, or a duty/mission.  It's not hard to give a group a reason to be together if you don't want them to make one up themselves.

As I understand it, the "sandbox" is a place so large, and your characters are such that they don't care, they can just walk away. If the PCs are tied to a place and its people then they're not free to walk away and play in some other part of the sandbox. They don't care, really.

Sometimes they'll choose to care, but it's deliberately left very open.

Whereas the approach I take when GMing is to create the campaign world for this season at the same time as the players are creating the characters, each influences the other - so I know they'll care about this and that. For example, in one campaign a player created a compassionate healer - so the thing that kicked it all off was a baby abandoned on the side of a hill to die. However, another PC had been created as a staunch warrior defending the interests of the realm, and an evil sorceror was going to come and steal the baby.

Whatever the party did, they'd get involved in things somehow, because I tied it to what they as individual PCs were interested in. If the player creates a compassionate healer it's because they want the chance for them to be compassionate and heal people; if a player creates a staunch warrior defending the realm they want the chance to defend the realm against evil and high odds.

It wasn't a railroad, because I never said, "there's nothing else you can do", instead it was the players saying, "we have to do this! It's what my character would do." But it wasn't a sandbox, either, because the PCs were tied to a place and people.

Quote from: One Horse Town;257503One thing I've noticed about them that can crop up is what I call 'dip & run'. The characters investigate an area until things get a bit too challenging and then leg it, quite often never to return. Who cares right, we've got these pretty gems that we can use to live like kings for a few weeks, why risk our lives further? So what, as a DM, do you do about that? I don't mean techniques to lead them by the nose or forcing them into finishing the area you've put all that work into- this is sandbox play. I mean, how do you try to ensure that your work isn't wasted. Do you even bother? Do you only lightly populate areas and do the rest on the fly as it crops up, don't bother at all and improvise it all, or just forget about the stuff that was ignored and move on? Do you create stuff that can be transposed to another area, thus keeping your work useful? Any other tips and techniques in running this style of game?

Kyle's suggestion above is probably better, but here's another: make the world such that the PCs have to engage with it or die.

For example you could do it by money: if the PCs don't get money somehow, they'll either starve to death, or have to steal (in which case someone will be after them), or have to hunt in the wilderness (where wild creatures might find them). And people who get taken in by the charitable order of monks keep mysteriously disappearing...

On the "dip and run", another thread comes to mind, about what PCs spend their money on. Many players will insist their characters live in conditions which would make a Spartan complain to hotel management, and in the other thread one guy asked, "which makes you wonder what they're so keen on loot for."

And then there was talk of old Arneson's thing of GP becoming XP once you spent them, and people were talking about giving tribute to nobles to make connections and so on.

So perhaps you could counter PCs' tendency to wander aimlessly in some way like this,

• they win loot
• they can turn loot into XP by spending up big on parties and gifts to nobles
• roleplay out the parties and gifts to nobles
• this then gives PCs a connection to a particular area

Even without XP for GP spending you can do it, in just suggesting that's a good thing to spend your loot on. If a town is just "the town of Bogville", then why should any PC care about it?

But if it's

"Bogville, ruled by that Baron Bob that we had the party with and he has that great wine, and he has this scheming wife Jen who we were at the party hinted she'd like to off Bob and rule alone, but with the assistance of the mighty warrior the PC Jim,"

well then Bogville starts to look more interesting to the PCs as they take sides and scheme and so on.

I mean, maybe your players aren't interested in that. But they'll be interested in something. What is it? Ask 'em. "What toys would you like to find in the sandbox?"

Quote from: Age of Fable;258905Make the world such that the PCs have to engage with it or die.

I'm not sure I'd go that far. Just as useful, to me, is that if they fail to engage things continue to happen, which could result in them dying, or in other things. When  they see other people getting the treasure, the rewards, and the glory-maybe they'll decide they want some.

But if they never engage, they never advance-or rather maybe they advance in odd fashion. (They get really good at hiding, but no better at say sword fighting or social interaction.)

It should only take the average group a few minutes to get bored of that shit real quick.

Quote from: Age of Fable;258905... make the world such that the PCs have to engage with it or die.

I just ask my players to set their own goals or objectives and work from there. IMO it so much more easier then trying to discover what they find interesting. I don't know if this is situational or sandbox or plain old fashioned laziness.

Regards,
David R

The game with the biggest Dip and Run problem I ever played in was Ringworld.  WE came, we touristed, we got on the hoppers and flew on. We had no reason to hang around, especially when things got dangerous.

The GM was sandboxing the world but we weren't even engaging. He was so frustrated he did the obvious (to me). He pulled out the Star Trek solution. He broke the transporter, errr, our hoppers. Without the ability to conviently "get out of dodge" we had to deal with the issues at hand. Given time we were able to repair the hoppers and go on. But darn, those air intakes were constantly getting clogged for the rest of the campaign.

When I run a game, every player has three plotlines (minimum) attached to them and has some defined goals that they want to achieve.  Some of the scenes attatched to these plotlines require specific geograpy to solve. So when they go to "the city/ the Gas Mine/ the speakeasy" these scenes (and their scene plots) are triggered.  But these are carried around by the players.

Others plotlines are "floating". A location has a plotline associated with it. Usually it is made up with a character (and their goals or psych issues) in mind. The players are checking out a beautiful old church in the town while they looking for a place to eat, just because they can. Something happens. The Dedicated Fighter will help out the Church in trouble (the plot line) and able to pull in his friend who hates The Mob (who are trying to move the church out to snatch up the property). The rest come because they can. This wasn't the plotline at hand. We had some free time (lacking a key player and the other plotline was not pressing in terms of time) and they were actually looking for a restaurant. They find the church and trigger that plotline.  They will eventually get back to what they were doing. Or they will be in the Restaurant when the Tong and Mob go at it.

Another example. Peter hits the bar and tiggers that plotline of the locked room mystery (which the player enjoys, even though his character would have not reason to be involved with).

I make the locks, the players are the keys.  Sure there are other plotlines I could make "There are millions of people in the city, and each one has a plot...er story.". However the players will only engage the ones that interest their characters (or players). These are not specific things or part of the story arc of the campaign. These are "kids playing in the sandbox" between the main campaign scenes.

There are other plotlines that are running while the players are engaged doing other things. These "actions" eventually impact the players, so they respond. So while they are kicking around the town, the Evil Mastermind and his two minion's plotlines are advancing.

Since each player in my campaigns has one or more specific reasons to be adventuring, things they need to do (goals), and some psych needs (easier to do in games with disadvantages).  It makes it easy for them to fit the "allegedly" random locks ...er plots I have sprinked through the setting and open them up.

Quote from: Engine;258639That's what we've started doing in Shadowrun, where it's easier for us to do loosely-connected adventures, as opposed to the highly-serial campaigns we do in fantasy games. We have a group of maybe 8-10 players, but only 4 or 5 are usually able to make it on any given day, which makes it tough to play the same group in a campaign. So now we have a "pool" of characters, and while the events of the last game influence the events of the next game, they're not highly-serial, so you can just grab any character out of the pool - there are a few dozen, now - and play whomever you want.

For us, it came about for opposite reasons. For a while, we only had 3 PCs and 1 DM, and we ran a fairly gritty, violent game, so TPKs or almost-TPKs were more common than in groups with larger numbers of PCs, and continuity could occasionally suffer. We also ran highly dynamic stories with lots of PvP, where PCs could be working at cross-purposes, splitting apart from one another for extended periods of time in and out of game, etc.

Expanding the cast of player-controlled characters allowed us to turn those from weaknesses into strengths. Rather than basing the playability of a character on his loyalty to the rest of the party, we began prioritising characters based on their narrative importance, and organising supporting casts for those characters to handle breaks and splits in the narrative.

Some examples from our campaigns:

1) In our Dessinger family game where the initial three PCs were three brothers in a noble family, the middle brother ran away from his family to become an expert swordsman. Rather than remove him from the plot, the other two PCs played characters who he was thrust into contact with.

The two supporting characters were well-characterised, and eventually became independent, with the middle brother returning to his family while they continued on with their story. When the Dessingers were temporarily neutralised (One was imprisoned, one was laying low to avoid capture or assassination, and the last was possessed by an alien ghost), we took over the story from the supporting characters' point of view, until sufficient time had passed for a plausible resolution to the Dessinger storylines (Escapes were planned, their enemies' concerns waned, the possession was cast off).

In fact, from that point on, whenever the Dessingers would be traveling for an extended period of time, or were laying low and avoiding adventuring, we would flash to the adventures of Louis Roseche and Gil (the supporting characters). The middle brother PC himself created a supporting character for their story. By the end of the game, this party was getting as much screen time as the original party was. When my Dessinger brother died, I was able to simply swap Gil into the Dessinger party to replace him without more than minimal effort required.

2) In our current campaign, there was a confrontation between two authority figures over whether they should seize control of, or destroy, a meteorite coursing with unknown magical power. Two PCs (we now have four) immediately sided with the "bad guy" in this situation, while one PC sided with the "good guy" and I stood myself out, because my character was in moral crisis and couldn't figure out who to obey in this situation.

Rather than try to reconcile the PCs in this situation, the relevant PCs simply went their own way, turning into two separate parties. Presumably the next time they see one another, they might even try to kill one another. We simply started drawing up new PCs immediately to fill out each of the parties.