The third part of Quentin Bauer's notes on doing a mythos sandbox (http://raidersofrlyeh.com/sandboxing-the-mythos-three/)(in Raiders of R'lyeh but applicable in general). What do you think?
RPGPundit
I think "sandbox" isn't quite being used the way I think of it.
QuoteLooking generally at how an investigative scenario may be structured, we see the following as an assumed paradigm in many types of play. Characters are hired to investigate a mystery (in our example scenario, a purportedly haunted house with a malevolent pattern of historical tragedies.
But if the players are being hired to investigate a haunted house, it's not a sandbox in my book, because they are reacting to a set scenario. It doesn't matter if they can solve the problem non-linearly, that they have to solve the problem in the first place means it's not a sandbox.
I realize sandbox can have different meanings. Like on one hand, you have Minecraft. On the other, you have the Elder Scrolls games. Both are considered sandbox, but in TES, you at least have a set story line and a lot of side quests.
Or in D&D. You can explore the local dungeon. But you can also do other things. Build you own dungeon. Just wander around aimless and meet people.
But reading that page it doesn't seem any different than plain old CoC. You're foiling evil plots, rather than making your own plots.
Quote from: JeremyRI think "sandbox" isn't quite being used the way I think of it.
Seconded.
Quote from: JeremyR;679228But if the players are being hired to investigate a haunted house, it's not a sandbox in my book, because they are reacting to a set scenario. It doesn't matter if they can solve the problem non-linearly, that they have to solve the problem in the first place means it's not a sandbox.
It's a sandbox if the players do not have accept the job(s) without the session having to shut down because said job was the adventure the GM planned.
In my fantasy sandboxes there are often npcs in towns and cities willing to hire the PCs for a job, but the PCs may not be interested. If they aren't, the session goes on with whatever the PCs do decide to do.
In my experience, it's possible to have a mission-based sandbox, but "mission" and "sandbox" need to operate at different levels of the campaign. Individual missions may have the conventions of a standard storyline-based adventure, but the acceptance or rejection of any given mission can make room for a sandboxy sort of self-determination.
Horror and intrigue games are particularly tough to do sandbox-style because very few GMs are capable of whipping up an ad-hoc mystery or extemporaneous intrigue. Any GM with a blank map sheet and a few random tables can produce a dungeon in ten minutes if the players aren't too picky, but a half-assed dungeon is playable in a way a half-assed intrigue isn't. Even with good tools and a nice library of resources, most GMs need the downtime between sessions to brew up something worth playing.
This necessity means you need to control the campaign's pacing more tightly than you would in a standard hexcrawl campaign. You start things with a short intro adventure to help the group gel and get them used to the setting. You wrap the adventure up by the end of the first session with a few clearly-labeled hooks for potential further involvement. You let the players pick the hook they want to follow, and then you spend the downtime between sessions building out that adventure. If you have any energy left over, you start creating "blank" adventure templates that you can drop NPCs into later.
The next session rolls around and the players get to involve themselves in the hook they've chosen. If they decide to abort the mission halfway through for whatever reason, you hopefully have a blank adventure template you can slot some NPCs in quickly to give them something else to do with the evening. If not, you pick a prior adventure they had, briefly work out whatever problematic consequences might've followed from the PCs' choices, and then throw that at the party as something they can wrestle with for the rest of the session. If you don't have a template or adventure prepped, you don't try to get fancy with things unless you're very confident in your ability to extemporize the kind of play a horror/intrigue campaign involves.
As time goes on, you'll start to build up a library of templates and have something suitable for most occasions. Complex conspiracies or intricate crimes are still tough to fashion except as specific setpieces for the evening, but most players understand that if they start charging in random directions on the map, they shouldn't expect intensely byzantine material to crop up on demand.
Quote from: JeremyR;679228But if the players are being hired to investigate a haunted house, it's not a sandbox in my book, because they are reacting to a set scenario. It doesn't matter if they can solve the problem non-linearly, that they have to solve the problem in the first place means it's not a sandbox.
So if in a D&D Sandbox the campaign starts with the GM saying "Ok, you guys are in Karameikos near the keep on the borderland.." then its instantly NOT a sandbox?
I would suggest that in order for a sandbox to even effectively exist, it must begin with the GM putting people somewhere, and there being a reason why they are there; be it because they were born there, or were sent there, or have been going away from or to something.
That's not a railroading scenario, that's just setting up the sandbox. Without that, there's no "box" at all.
RPGPundit
Right - we shouldn't mistake the swings, or the monkey bars set up in the sandbox for the sandbox itself.
That's the purpose of the Haunted House, or the Keep on the Borderlands - they're set-pieces within the "Sandbox" for the players to do with as they please for the most part.
That they hang upside down while another friend wires current to the monkey-bars to see how it will react doesn't mean that someone won't get hurt doing so.
The idea should be: this setpiece is here and there should be, for the GM, a good reason it's there (but there doesn't HAVE to be.)
Quote from: JeremyR;679228...that they have to solve the problem in the first place means it's not a sandbox
JeremyR, thank you for the comment and keep the feedback coming. For clarification, the scenario I am using as an illustration is the traditionally accepted type of setup in a horror investigation (in this example, a scenario loosely based on “The Haunted House” aka “The Haunting”), in which the scenario begins with the players already hired and expected to conclude the scripted plot. I am using it merely as a basis for comparison to what we are doing with RoR.
In Raiders of R’lyeh, the players would absolutely have the choice to either accept or not accept the investigation. The house in the example could be an “inert” set piece, remaining in stasis until players interact with it. OR, the house could be on a “timeline," so the act of players not investigating carries consequences. One consequence, for example, could be the following: the house contains a valuable artifact stashed in its cellar — a sorcerer’s gem — that may or may not be the source of malevolence. A third party with their own lead independent of the landlord, and hired by a criminal syndicate, moves in and steals the gem. Or alternatively, the gem is protected by a booby-trap and the house burns down with the burglars inside. If the keeper wanted to keep his timeline “lighter,” he could make this house an inert location. If he wanted the myriad of connecting threads and new potential leads that a timeline set piece offers, he could bring in the third party to complicate matters and introduce new hooks.
I’ll address more of these options in another post (and these comments are very helpful to me).
Note: some of the original copy of the “Sandboxing the Mythos” post may be slightly edited; the copy that originally stated, “Looking generally at how an investigative scenario may be structured,” which you quoted, has been changed to “Looking at a traditionally structured investigative scenario,” for clarification. I also changed “Structure of a Scenario” to “Structure of a Traditional Scenario.”
Quote from: TheRPGPunditSo if in a D&D Sandbox the campaign starts with the GM saying "Ok, you guys are in Karameikos near the keep on the borderland.." then its instantly NOT a sandbox?
What you are saying here is a set
premise, not a set adventure. But the example in your first post is a set adventure.
A set premise is not disruptive to sandbox (on the contrary, its a requirement for it, or any other kind of game, to exist in the first place). But a set adventure, specially one the group can´t refuse, is disruptive to a sandbox.
Quote from: Quentin BauerIn Raiders of R’lyeh, the players would absolutely have the choice to either accept or not accept the investigation.
Thanks, this clarifies the point.
But then we are back at the start: what kind of structure is provided to promote/organize the sandbox ? What tools or procedures are there to help with it ? Notice that the original post, and its linked article, didnt adress this question at all.
Quentin, please ignore Silva. He has this tactic that he's been using for some time trying to pretend that Storygames are actually "sandboxes", and trying to infuse storygame-discussion on Sandboxes.
Silva, cut it out.
RPGPundit
Premise does not negate sandbox. It does not remove player agency anymore than starting in a poorer part of the world negates agency. It's merely a justified place to share a mutual start.
Parting from there just leads to consequnces. If you're willing to accept such consequences, with your imperfect knowledge of the situation, then you're free to walk away. Such consequences are built into every setting beginning, even down to location and status.
And Sine Nomine has the right of it, you can sandbox mission-focused play. The level of GM prep or creative talent is higher, but nothing all that out of reach. In Nomine SJG and Vampire the Masquerade work off of a similar city/regional sandbox filled with subsumed mission content. Quite doable, I recommend others to try it.
I know that Crawford's writing on sandboxes has been a major influence on Bauer's perspective for Raiders of R'lyeh.
RPGPundit
Quote from: SineNomine;679340In my experience, it's possible to have a mission-based sandbox, but "mission" and "sandbox" need to operate at different levels of the campaign. Individual missions may have the conventions of a standard storyline-based adventure, but the acceptance or rejection of any given mission can make room for a sandboxy sort of self-determination.
Horror and intrigue games are particularly tough to do sandbox-style because very few GMs are capable of whipping up an ad-hoc mystery or extemporaneous intrigue. Any GM with a blank map sheet and a few random tables can produce a dungeon in ten minutes if the players aren't too picky, but a half-assed dungeon is playable in a way a half-assed intrigue isn't. Even with good tools and a nice library of resources, most GMs need the downtime between sessions to brew up something worth playing.
This necessity means you need to control the campaign's pacing more tightly than you would in a standard hexcrawl campaign. You start things with a short intro adventure to help the group gel and get them used to the setting. You wrap the adventure up by the end of the first session with a few clearly-labeled hooks for potential further involvement. You let the players pick the hook they want to follow, and then you spend the downtime between sessions building out that adventure. If you have any energy left over, you start creating "blank" adventure templates that you can drop NPCs into later.
The next session rolls around and the players get to involve themselves in the hook they've chosen. If they decide to abort the mission halfway through for whatever reason, you hopefully have a blank adventure template you can slot some NPCs in quickly to give them something else to do with the evening. If not, you pick a prior adventure they had, briefly work out whatever problematic consequences might've followed from the PCs' choices, and then throw that at the party as something they can wrestle with for the rest of the session. If you don't have a template or adventure prepped, you don't try to get fancy with things unless you're very confident in your ability to extemporize the kind of play a horror/intrigue campaign involves.
As time goes on, you'll start to build up a library of templates and have something suitable for most occasions. Complex conspiracies or intricate crimes are still tough to fashion except as specific setpieces for the evening, but most players understand that if they start charging in random directions on the map, they shouldn't expect intensely byzantine material to crop up on demand.
Agreed. Great post, btw. ;)
Nice idea, but the problem I have with the stuff I've seen so far is that it all seems to be based on abstract concepts of how such a campaign shoud work, rather than on actual in-game experience of a playing or running a sand-box Mythos campaign (unlike Kevin's post, for example, which reads like it is based on the hard-earned lessons of actual sand-box play). I could be wrong on both counts of course, but that is the way it comes across.
Glazer, yours is the exact point I made earlier. Pundit linked the article in the first post as "notes on doing a mythos sandbox", but the actual article show very little (if anything) towards it. What it showed is what Shadowrun calls "legwork", and is completely orthogonal to a sandbox, as I see it.
SineNomine managed to propose a much more clear and solid structure in its post for executing a sandbox, even if not adressing the Mythos related difficulties (which is my main interest about the project).
Quote from: Glazer;680793Nice idea, but the problem I have with the stuff I've seen so far is that it all seems to be based on abstract concepts of how such a campaign shoud work, rather than on actual in-game experience of a playing or running a sand-box Mythos campaign (unlike Kevin's post, for example, which reads like it is based on the hard-earned lessons of actual sand-box play). I could be wrong on both counts of course, but that is the way it comes across.
Well, I think the assumption here is we already HAVE Kevin's excellent material on sandboxes. Like I said, that's been a major influence for Quentin. So rather than assuming he somehow doesn't know about this, you could instead look at what he wrote from the point of view that everything Kevin has written about sandboxes is already taken as a given.
RPGPundit
Quote from: RPGPundit;681176Well, I think the assumption here is we already HAVE Kevin's excellent material on sandboxes. Like I said, that's been a major influence for Quentin. So rather than assuming he somehow doesn't know about this, you could instead look at what he wrote from the point of view that everything Kevin has written about sandboxes is already taken as a given.
RPGPundit
No, I had assumed Quentin had read Kevin's work. However, the material written so far came across to me as theory based on that reading and how it might apply to a Mythos campaign, rather than a proposal for a game based on first-hand experience. This put me off a bit, because it made the proposals all seem a bit abstract. Your posts on your Dark Albion campaign have made me feel much more excited and interested in that game than this one, for example.
Fortunately, this is very easily fixed. You and Quentin just need to start running some Mythos sandbox campaigns! All I'm saying is that I would have had done this before posting any material about the game, rather than after. Hope that makes sense.
Quote from: Glazer;681183No, I had assumed Quentin had read Kevin's work. However, the material written so far came across to me as theory based on that reading and how it might apply to a Mythos campaign, rather than a proposal for a game based on first-hand experience. This put me off a bit, because it made the proposals all seem a bit abstract. Your posts on your Dark Albion campaign have made me feel much more excited and interested in that game than this one, for example.
Fortunately, this is very easily fixed. You and Quentin just need to start running some Mythos sandbox campaigns! All I'm saying is that I would have had done this before posting any material about the game, rather than after. Hope that makes sense.
It does make sense but I think you have to get that what Quentin was writing here was theory; this wasn't meant to be posts where he gives a bunch of practical material.
He's got a very long history of running CoC games of all kinds. I have less so than him, though I've run quite a few one shots, short campaigns and a couple of long campaigns in my decades of using CoC, so I'm no novice either. Not that it should matter because I'm not the one writing the game, just consulting.
RPGPundit
Unless you're playing a game like ToC, where there are the key clues of the story and players will find them, legwork Shadowrun Style is a sandbox. You may find info out, or not, you may make things easier or make them harder based on what you uncover. You're always blind about some aspect of a run, you don't know what you don't know.
No reason you can't run an Occult investigation the same way. It doesn't have to be Hercule Poirot.
Again, I think "sandbox" isn't quite being used the way I think of it. Shadowrun legwork is placed inside a stablished mission/adventure. As such, I see it as completely orthogonal to a sandbox.
Sandbox, for me, is not how you complete a given mission/adventure - its how that mission/adventure showed up in the first place.
So if I have the freedom to choose mission or not, but once I choose I'm locked into completing it a certain way, that's a sandbox? Of course not. A sandbox means literally creative freedom within a framework. Within the framework of the premise of the setting (for example Shadowrun and you're runners) a sandbox gives you freedom to choose your goals, or in the case of professional criminals - jobs/missions. Once you are within the smaller framework of the mission, a sandbox means having freedom to accomplish that mission how your group plans it, which includes legwork/research.
Yup. Sandbox macro means choose which hooks you like. Mission micro means choose how it resolves.
IN SJG has Superiors which give missions. And just like oWoD city campaigns, where princes give missions, you can resolve missions in both a sandbox macro and mission micro level. Basically all it is is upper management puts a priority upon a mission hook.
However, PCs are still free to select hooks in their own priority, and resolve them as they wish. Upper management prioritization does not stop a PC to accept the consequences of choosing missions in a different order, or skipping them entirely. Nor does it prevent PCs from resolving missions as they like either. You can have multiple missions opened at once, resolved piecemeal, even interconnected, and having timed consequences trigger as they are resolved according to PC choice.
It seems complicated, but it is far more open (and approachable) than assumed.
If you have a set objective that the players cant refuse or ignore - which is the case of any preset adventure - its not a sandbox.
YMMV and all that.
Define that. Because it sounds like your ideas of 'preset adventure' are ridiculously narrow. Not every mission is 'we have 4 minutes to save the world.'
Quote from: Opaopajr;681989Define that. Because it sounds like your ideas of 'preset adventure' are ridiculously narrow. Not every mission is 'we have 4 minutes to save the world.'
There's not a single game theory definition or term Silva doesn't have a ridiculous interpretation of.
If a player can choose whether to engage with the preset adventure or not, it can easily be plugged into a sandbox as one of the options. That should be obvious.
I think that this thread, like most he's involved with, generally works better if you assume Silva isn't posting in good faith.
RPGPundit
Quote from: CRKrueger;682139There's not a single game theory definition or term Silva doesn't have a ridiculous interpretation of.
If a player can choose whether to engage with the preset adventure or not, it can easily be plugged into a sandbox as one of the options. That should be obvious.
yeah, this. It sounds like Silva's idea of a sandbox is a game where the DM creates everything randomly on the fly based on the last choice the players made - which to me sounds like a clusterfuck, not a sandbox.
Quote from: RPGPundit;682598I think that this thread, like most he's involved with, generally works better if you assume Silva isn't posting in good faith.
RPGPundit
Funny how the same applies to you, no ?
Quote from: Zevious Zoquisyeah, this. It sounds like Silva's idea of a sandbox is a game where the DM creates everything randomly on the fly based on the last choice the players made - which to me sounds like a clusterfuck, not a sandbox.
Not at all. I dont see a problem in the preparation of plots and adventures beforehand, if its informed by players input and can be ignored if they choose so. My point is that the quality of "sandboxness" can only be applied to a macro-level, because its the only level that allows a gamestate fully open to creative player input ( = player-agency).
When you have an "adventure" - specially the ones in investigative games like CoC - the tendency is that the creative player-input gets capped by the adventure closed environment of small variables as subjected to its pre-planned plot and micro-premise. And no matter how big its "fluxogram" or how many branches each decision-point has, the player-agency is already capped. If all the players can do is to choose which entry point and which branching they will pick for each decision-point in the adventures fluxogram, then its not a sandbox, its a branching/non-linear plot.
I understand though, that this could be seen as a matter of scale. I just dont like to use the label "sandbox" for the micro-scale - I prefer "non-linear adventure", or "branching-plot adventure" - as I think the resulting experience has enough differences as to result in a significant different gaming experience. In other words: the "sandbox experience" one can have from a pre-plotted non-linear adventure is significantly different from the one from an open macro-scale environment like Griffin Mountain or Wilderlands of High Fantasy.
Does it make sense ? (Im a non-native speaker and Im lazy today :p )
Why should the "game state" be open to "player agency?" Oh wait, story gamer...never mind. Lol...
The only player agency I want for my character is whether or not I choose to enter that dungeon over there or go back to town and find something else to do. It's up to the DM to tell me if there's a town or city nearby or if there's a castle or wizard tower beyond yonder hill...or in the case of the mythos, is there a strange dude trying to withdraw forbidden tomes from the local library or stories of bizarre dead "things" washing up on shore after a huge storm...
Quote from: Zevious ZoquisWhy should the "game state" be open to "player agency?" Oh wait, story gamer...never mind. Lol...
Player-agency can be manifested regardless of in-character or out-of-character stances. So its perfectly valid both to trad games or otherwise.
QuoteThe only player agency I want for my character is whether or not I choose to enter that dungeon over there or go back to town and find something else to do.
And how will you do that in a environment where the clock is ticking for you to complete an investigation or the world ends ?
Thats my point.
The more micro- the scale, the less player-agency. The less player-agency, the less sandbox. To the point where all the players can do is choose entry through points A or B, follow routes C or D, and reach endings E or F. Non-linear ? Yes. A Sandbox? No. Definitely no.
How did you get stuck on this circular logic -- where missions mean "closed plots," as if disconnected microcosms -- when just above we are talking about how players can choose their approach to a prioritized mission? Of which includes the potential for investigating multiple missions at once, traveling between them, and accepting their consequences for disengagement?
Are you reading only what you want to read?
Yeah seriously, its quite the cute strawman: "you're totally free to choose whatever you want until you start a "mission" and then you're utterly trapped in a railroad until its done".
Well sure, that would not be a real sandbox. How fortunate that none of the ZERO people who are suggesting the above are in any way involved with Raiders of R'lyeh.
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