"Sandbox"

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Dr. Gerard
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Re: "Sandbox"

Post by Dr. Gerard » Mon Oct 28, 2013 6:36 pm

Totally fun to talk about, yes. And I think some useful idea can come out of such discussions, even if no agreement is reached.

It's a bit different in investigative games, but there's room for sandbox-ness and open-world-osity here and there. In a CoC campaign, for example, I think you can drop lots of plot hooks on the table, but then close off some roads as the investigators follow their curiosity into a cohesive plot. You could have your party encounter the inciting incidents of a half-dozen different Arkham scenarios, and see which one the PCs respond most strongly to. But when they go down one alley, it's probably best to dry up leads for parallel scenarios. The problem with this approach is that most good published scenarios have a strong hook that's hard to justify ignoring. I guess the solution would be to offer softer plot hooks before committing to the more intense incidents that often signal the start of an investigation. Usually there's an "involving the investigators" section of a published scenario that might be of use here.

Example: The dilettante player-character gets a call from a friend who is worried about the strange behavior of their son. On the same day, the party's journalist player-character has been assigned to cover the unveiling of a time capsule from 1793. Meanwhile, the PI gets a message from his secretary from a whistle blower who thinks his boss is involved in an insurance fraud scheme up in Foxfield.

Obviously, you don't really want your players to follow up on all of these leads at the same time. But you have the power to allow each of these things to be safely shelved for some amount of game time while the group decides on a particular direction to go in. If everyone is overwhelmingly curious about the time capsule, then they can all show up for that event. If called, the whistle blower will say he found someone else to handle the assignment and the dilettante's friend will sheepishly say they're probably imagining things. I think this kind of game requires agreement from your players about where to start first, and a healthy dose of suspension in their disbelief. They're trading a little verisimilitude for choices.

I suppose you could truly allow the group to follow their curiosity, and simply make the choice for them if they try to cover every lead. The PI meets with the whistle blower, but their case seems pretty weak. The journalist covers the time capsule, but it's postponed due to a freak thunderstorm. Meanwhile, the dilettante's friend receives a call concerning gunshots at a party in Arkham, where her son had planned to go. Et cetera.

Then there are sandbox elements you can introduce on a larger scale to frame your campaign. In your Forgotten Realm example, the "sandbox" is mostly geographical. The PCs can wander where they want and pick up quests along the way. But another way to introduce choices is to give players an overarching task or something to manage, and then allow them to invent their own ways to handle it. If the campaign framework is a paranormal investigation group like Dan's MAPS, you could introduce threats to the organization that may or may not be tied to the Mythos. Perhaps some conservative members of the faculty are trying to get MAPS evicted from campus, and have circulated rumors that they're practicing witchcraft. Or it could be a church youth group. Or maybe an unhappy NPC from a previous scenario has started spying on them, and even stealing files. This gives the players something to respond to other than the normal scenario hooks, and a problem they can solve in whatever way they see fit.

Note: I'm not suggesting that Dan run his game this way. The trade off is it takes up a lot of game time, and you don't get to finish as many scenarios.

I ran a Kingsport campaign (please stop me when you're tired of hearing about that campaign -- it just happens to be the longest campaign I've run) in which my "sandbox" plot was the fate of the Kingsport Historical Society. As written in one of the scenarios I ran, the aging director of the KHS was starting to lose his memory and the place was in decline. I asked one of my players if she wanted to be a board member of the KHS, and then made her privy to a political fight about whether to replace the old man. Some of the figures in town wanted the place closed because it was going derelict. So the party was faced with choices about how to handle the situation. Meanwhile, some of the plot hooks in the campaign made it increasingly obvious that the KHS was an important repository of the town's collective knowledge about the Mythos. Better to save the place and try to do a better job? Do they shut the place down and to secretly seize the uncatalogued items in storage? Do they throw the old man out on his ear? What do they do when he suffers a stroke and starts speaking a language no one has ever heard? Et cetera.

As another example, the New World D&D campaign that Role Playing Public Radio ran provided a lot of inspiration for me. In that game, the PCs start out as guardians of a new colony in a fantasy version of South America. The PCs have to improve fortifications, establish trade with indigenous frog-people tribes and competing colonies, explore uncharted areas, contend with giant barbarian invaders, and also manage the political and religious factions within the colony at the same time. So while they go on some classic dungeon-delving quests, they're also shaping the whole development of the colony, making alliances and getting caught up in intrigue. And the party did not agree about many of these things, so it created a lot of opportunities for role play.

So, perhaps it would help to think of "sandbox" as a continuous spectrum and a tool that you can use in many ways, instead of thinking of it as one extreme style that is the opposite of a railroad.
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trevlix
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Re: "Sandbox"

Post by trevlix » Tue Oct 29, 2013 12:30 am

I like your scenarios. I think I'm stuck in the mindset of one-shots, because thats was I mostly play. To me, its harder to justify an open world or large sandbox with multiple leads going to different scenarios which the PCs will choose one of. This also doesn't take into account Keeper prep-time - if I want to allow the players the opportunity to go down the rabbit hole of 1 of a number of different scenarios, then I need to prep for each of them. If any (or multiple) of them are complicated, that could be an issue. Although I could see taking a number of short scenarios (like from Secrets) and using those.
Dr. Gerard wrote: I think this kind of game requires agreement from your players about where to start first, and a healthy dose of suspension in their disbelief. They're trading a little verisimilitude for choices.
I think this is key. You need to make some type of agreement with your players that they won't all be going down separate paths to investigate each lead that goes to a different scenario. Additionally, if you don't let them know ahead of time this is what is going on, they may think they are all related somehow.
Dr. Gerard wrote:I ran a Kingsport campaign...
I see where you are going with that, and the MAPS example. (See, I'm already starting to break out of my mindset of what a sandbox is/could be. :) )
Dr. Gerard wrote:So, perhaps it would help to think of "sandbox" as a continuous spectrum and a tool that you can use in many ways, instead of thinking of it as one extreme style that is the opposite of a railroad.
Good point. I still think that its very much the opposite of a railroad, but I see how the two can be combined to work together well. And please don't interpret what I'm saying as being against railroad plots. They have their place and I've run/created many railroad plots that have worked well. In fact, I think you can have a scenario that very "rail-roady" and the players still have fun doing it. But thats a different discussion.
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Dr. Gerard
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Re: "Sandbox"

Post by Dr. Gerard » Tue Oct 29, 2013 5:06 am

Oh, I totally agree that a scenario that might be considered to be "on rails" can be just as much fun as something encrusted with sand. One shots, especially single-session games that have to fit time limitations, most certainly work better with a strong dose of GM influence. And even in those constrained cases, I think some sandbox tools can be of use.

One of the best gaming experiences I've ever had was as a player in a famous scenario called Grace Under Pressure. It has a very strong gravitational pull toward a particular inevitable linear narrative, though there are choices that affect the PCs fates in subtle but interesting ways. I'd say it's a scenario on rails, but the ride is fantastic.
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