"Sand Box" Adventures
hoefer:
Over on Craig's site the topic of "Sand Box Adventures" was brought up. For this discussion the term meant game modules, adventures, story arcs, etc. where the GM was simply given a well described/mapped setting and the players "play" within this setting making of it what they will (like an old school dungeon exploration).
Last summer, during a run of my Century's Edge game I tried to develop one of these "sand box" adventures. This was a little out of my nature (I tend to like plot-driven stories/adventures as a GM). The adventure was entitled "Son of Nemo" (remember my game's set on a Victorian Earth). The basic synopsis was that the players were celebrating the launch of one character's "upper atmospheric weather observation station" (called "The Jacob's Ladder"). Through a espoused prologue and other events they learn of an escaped mental patient and come to find him stowed away (he was thought to be crazy because he believed in "atmospheric beasts" -invisible creatures living in the air. This was a real 1800s phenomenon, and used by Lovecraft...I know. Back to the point...). Well, of course, the mental patient in a deranged attempt to prove the existence of the air creatures sabotages the station and takes it up too high. The players fight to keep it together but finally have to succumb to the rescue of a strange airship (using anti-gravity "cavorite" material from Wells's The First Men in the Moon). Long and short, the whole lot of them are taken to a floating palace and subject under the protection of Sultan Quisquis (who they later learn is the remorseful prodigal son of the now dead Captain Nemo). The situation was a total homage to 20,000 Leagues, with the main contingency being that the PCs were ultimately captives and needed to escape, "but how?..."
When I wrote this adventure out I made full maps of everything, detailed all the pieces of the fortress and Quisquis men/court. I placed within it a wide collection of characters and conflicts that could be resolved (for instance, there were a set of Congo natives at the palace that were being treated as second class citizens. There was a harem of women being held by the sultan against their will in a well-guarded part of the complex, there were all sorts of mysterious technologies being implemented by the sultan that the players would want to muck around with -like the cavorite and the Herakleophorbia formula from the "Food of the Gods" book). On top of that, there was a series of a half dozen "happenings" that would stir the players to some kind of action if the session began to bog down -for example there were stop-overs in the African savanna for a safari, prison rescues of individuals Quisquis wanted from Devil's Island, experiments gone wild, an actual run in with the atmospheric beasts, even mysterious murders (did I mention one of the Jack the Ripper suspects was working as a surgeon on Quisquis fortress?).
So I got all this stuff and my players are all unleashed and doing all sorts of stuff on this place, and though there are lots of great moments of discovery and action, there is never a moment in which it seems like the adventure should climax. We played this one for around 2 months, and even though the PCs devised some explosives and a general plan to escape, they never once attempted to and never broke the "laws of the land" to the extent that I could justify the Sultan sentencing one of them to death (which might have triggered their escape plans). I finally had Dr. Gull (Jack) frame the PC doctor for the murder/disfigurement of a harem woman and set him to be executed. But instead of a rescue/escape attempt, the PCs decided to work through the problem of proving their friend's innocence and confronting Dr. Gull so they could stay aboard the palace. At that point I'm like d*mn! Finally by the end of the second month I had an experiment of Quisquis run a muck and destroy the fortress causing the PCs to HAVE to escape. It was a sensible ending and tied up some of the loose strings as it was played out but did not have the resonance I wanted after all the great vignettes played out prior to the end.
Now, I forced the hand -you can tell that I'm too plot-centric as a GM. But, is there a good way to bring a "Sand Box" adventure to a culmination? Or do they always risk the dead pan ending? I've played in several and ran several (especially all the old D&D stuff) and this seems like a pattern for this type of game. I am wanting to redo this adventure and offer it on my website, but I almost feel like it is broke as-is. Like there is nothing to put before the final period of the thing. Am I making any sense? Maybe its enough for the PCs to have toyed around (the game was by no means a disappointment, but I could tell the players were ready for a change of setting -and I wasn't going to wait for them to get bored and THEN start working toward it). Is an ending in gaming that important? I sort of think it is... How would/have you written the ending to a Sand Box adventure?
Louis Hoefer
Whole Sum Entertainment
Vulpinoid:
I tend to run short stories, over a session or two, or sandbox play.
The thing I love about "Sandbox" adventures is that they can go anywhere, and everything comes down to the actions of the players. Places are designed, relation maps are laid out, agendas are deployed...then the characters are let loose.
I always try to ensure that in the background, there are events constantly underway. Stories that arc through the exploration in those vignette scenes, each momentary glimpse of the larger picture takes the back-story a step closer to resolution (or prolongs the effects, depending on the characters action/inaction).
Allowing the players to make decisions of their own, they can choose to affect the destiny of the world...and if they don't, the intertwined stories will unfold in a way that you've predetermined.
Villains will move toward completion of their grand goals, allies will aim toward thwarting them.
But one of the things many people have troubles with in Sandbox play is the notion that carefully crafted background plot may not be intersected by the exploration of the players. A story might unfold in the southern part of town when the predefined story is meant to occur in the north. The great scenes might revolve around development of character, rather than development of plot.
This is one of the talking points regarding the season finale for season 4 of the new Doctor Who. Heaps of background development, heaps of intersecting storylines...some would say that there is the presence of too many lesser characters...others would say that dormant parts of the mythos should have been left to rest in peace. While the episode had many detractors due to a mish-mash of plots, it had just as many critics praising it for the depth of characterisation and the revelations it brought to the screen.
Not all finales have to be about the conclusion of an epic plot. It's just as valid to wind things up by resolving a piece of character tension for each of the PCs...possibly to help lay out the groundwork for a later campaign, or even just to give a sense of closure to the players.
Well defined characters will always have something lacking about them, an area where they need improvement, a regret that they need to face, or something similar. Perhaps these issues have come up during the course of play, or maybe they were written into the character from the outset.
Either way, when the fire of the campaign has died and many of the players feel it's time to move on, it's probably a good idea to give a countdown. This week we're having the penultimate session, and next week we wind everything up. Consider the characters and the things they've encountered along the way. If you can weave them together in some way, good work. If you can weave them into one of the background stories that was encountered but never resolved, then that's even better.
End it with a bang, end it with a cliffhanger that pulls a new sense of focus to the setting (consider the ending to "lock-stock-and-two-smoking-barrels"), just don't let players get tired of it.
This isn't an easy way out, it takes a bit of work; but it will certainly make the campaign more memorable. If you pull it off right, you can even kill off all the characters and the players will thank you for a great campaign.
V
NN:
In an "old-school D&D sandbox" the reward system is telling the players "Get xp and gp. Go clobber the monsters (or the good guys!)". Generally theres a hierachy of monsters and sites, and the "climax" is pasting the nastiest monster. Id think about rewards and perhaps a different metaphor.
hoefer:
I always try to ensure that in the background, there are events constantly underway. Stories that arc through the exploration in those vignette scenes, each momentary glimpse of the larger picture takes the back-story a step closer to resolution (or prolongs the effects, depending on the characters action/inaction).
This is exactly how I set this thing up. Lots of sub plots whose basic beat amounted to “Sultan Quisquis is a narcissistic tyrant who runs by an ethical code that is contra to the player’s mores and culture.” There were at least 4 sub plots going, each of which were delved into by the players, but they never wanted to push any of them to the point of making them “boil over.” A for instance is the “damsels in distress” sub plot where the players learn of the Sultans harem of captive women (most of which were “paid to him” by other rulers for his help/intercession). They go through this whole sequence where they are awaken in the middle of the night to find a shadowy form being chase through the palace gardens by the sultan’s elite men. They go to investigate learning the form is a woman (the first one they had ran into during their month on the palace). She explains that she was traded to the sultan by her father for help rescuing him from a Siberian prison (she’s Russian). They learn from her that part of the “off limits” area in the palace is a tower containing the captive women. She begs for their help in escaping but a new thrush of elite guards intervenes and takes her away from the players. The Sultan summons them to his court the next day and explains to them how the woman is his rightful property and that the women must be locked up for their own safety (that the lesser guards would do unsavory things to them should they find out about them/be given access to them). With this the players were willing to “leave it alone until later.”
Now, these are good players and they typically play in character, but I almost think that they were having too much fun dabbling in other parts of the game to push a resolution for any one conflict. Perhaps they were developing their own characters… I don’t know. Maybe the issue is that as a GM I wanted to take my characters (NPCs, setting, plots) and develope them beyond what the characters had explored…
Allowing the players to make decisions of their own, they can choose to affect the destiny of the world...and if they don't, the intertwined stories will unfold in a way that you've predetermined.
This was the reason I put these background plots in, I guess maybe the game needed one outlying plot that was a “world is at risk –must take action now” sort of pot just to use as a back up
But one of the things many people have troubles with in Sandbox play is the notion that carefully crafted background plot may not be intersected by the exploration of the players. A story might unfold in the southern part of town when the predefined story is meant to occur in the north. The great scenes might revolve around development of character, rather than development of plot.
This was a big factor. Now I want to market this game (not for sell, but for free on my site as a reason for people to buy the rules, and as a reward for doing so, etc…). How do you help narrators (through the adventure write up) deal with multiple “plot starters” that can be used/connected in multiple ways to build the game to a satisfying finish. Or how do you help the narrator to understand that the players just exploring and satisfying their own interests is enough of a culmination for the game. I thought maybe some kind of storyboard flowchart with “emergency exits” (do this to bring the game to a climax now –i.e. “Have the experiment run amuck and damage the hydrogen-fueled power generator”)
Either way, when the fire of the campaign has died and many of the players feel it's time to move on, it's probably a good idea to give a countdown. This week we're having the penultimate session, and next week we wind everything up. Consider the characters and the things they've encountered along the way. If you can weave them together in some way, good work. If you can weave them into one of the background stories that was encountered but never resolved, then that's even better.
I could have been better with this. I should have firmly said, “Hey guys there are other places in Century Earth to explore than just Quisquis’s palace. Let’s make this our final session and I’ll five bonus Plot Points to anyone who ties up any of the lose ends we have floating around.”
End it with a bang, end it with a cliffhanger that pulls a new sense of focus to the setting (consider the ending to "lock-stock-and-two-smoking-barrels"), just don't let players get tired of it.
This I did. The palace began crumbling apart and the players narrowly escaped leaving off stranded in the middle of the Amazon Plateau (the jungle from Doyle’s Dino-thriller The Lost World). Now the trick is communicating how to do this to narrators who run this sand box adventure –though you sound like you wouldn’t need any help there are many GMs who would, a non-linear game seems to challenge a lot of them, but it shouldn’t. Even with me, the game ended and had a climax of sorts, but seemed lacking compared to my more linear-plot games. This is true of most sand box games I’ve ran. Is it just the nature of the beast though?
Louis Hoefer
Whole Sum Entertainment
hoefer:
In an "old-school D&D sandbox" the reward system is telling the players "Get xp and gp. Go clobber the monsters (or the good guys!)". Generally theres a hierachy of monsters and sites, and the "climax" is pasting the nastiest monster. Id think about rewards and perhaps a different metaphor.
I will give you that the old D&D games seemed centric on XP and Gold, but if played under the right Creative Agenda its Sand Box adventures usually climaxed with some out-right siege on a "goblin race" or their master (the nastiest monster). I've only been in a few hack-n-slash D&D groups and found them to be the exception to the standard for the D&D games I've been it. Still, your point is taken, that finding the "metaphor" for "rewards" is important if you are going to draw a group through one of these games into a finale.
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