"Sand Box" Adventures
Vulpinoid:
Quote from: opsneakie on October 15, 2008, 04:02:54 AM
Anyways, long post short, I think the trick is in detailed characters + detailed setting + knowing how to tug on those characters --> perfect game. I'm still working on making it all come together, but it's been getting closer and closer.
I was going to make a comment here saying that Sandboxing just requires a whole lot more preparation than regular play.
But re-reading through the posts, and reconsidering my thoughts on the topic, I'm not sure that this is the case at all.
Good sandbox play seems possible from a number of sources.
1. A very well detailed and mutually understood setting.
2. Players who are willing to take some initiative for themselves.
3. A GM who isn't too precious about where they want the plot to go.
4. Fully realised NPCs with their own agendas that could easily change based on the actions of the players.
Having more than one of these present seems to increase the potential and quality of the session. Having all of them would epitomise the concept.
Unless people think I'm missing something.
(And yes...I'd like to hear some responses on this, because I'd always considered this to be "my" style of GMing, but any ideas that could help improve a game are always welcome).
V
hoefer:
Quote from: Vulpinoid on October 16, 2008, 03:20:56 PM
Good sandbox play seems possible from a number of sources.
1. A very well detailed and mutually understood setting.
2. Players who are willing to take some initiative for themselves.
3. A GM who isn't too precious about where they want the plot to go.
4. Fully realised NPCs with their own agendas that could easily change based on the actions of the players.
Having more than one of these present seems to increase the potential and quality of the session. Having all of them would epitomise the concept.
Unless people think I'm missing something.
V
I would say (temper this with the fact that I am very narrativist in my style of GMing and my expectations of play), that there does have to be an understood nexis of the NPC's individual plots/motives. Perferably (this is what I'm going to be keying in on for this adventure) there will be several points of intersection (nexis...nexies...nexises...???) that can be pressure-cooked into a final climax. I know that there is the sentiment that the players should force the climax, but the more I play these kinds of scenarios and review them, it seems to me that they will typically shy away from large conflicts and thus the game bleeds out a slow death of intersting interactions and cool encounters that lead nowhere. Even if characters accomplish personal goals, they sort of feel like "Well, I did what I wanted... If you guys are ready, let's just mosey on to something new..." -Just my summative thoughts after working on this point for awhile.
Louis Hoefer
www.wholesumentertainment.com
Ron Edwards:
I swear, I've been following this thread very closely and have been repeatedly blocked by urgent other posting needs. I'll be weighing in as soon as I can. This isn't to say that the thread lacks anything if I'm not in it, but rather to say how much I want to participate and soon will.
Best, Ron
Ron Edwards:
Hi Louis,
I've been composing this post and getting interrupted for a long time. I'm finally able to get to it. (I wrote those sentences over a week ago! This is really embarassing.) I'm really glad you began it, because this thread topic is serious business. I've been seeing versions of this question appear over and over for a couple of years now, and it's a big part of my re-write for Trollbabe. One of the many delays for this reply has been my effort to get that portion of the new text written to my satisfaction.
I don't think there's been any confusion about your topic so far, but it might be helpful to define sandboxing as a technique, to distinguish it from techniques that might or might not be used within it. Let's call it play with a rich setting, with lots of situations and NPCs with strong roles in those situations, and without any specific linear planning for the events of play. That rules out a number of things: a single-track plotline as found in most adventure modules, a Roads to Rome approach which is pretty much a bunch of possible linear tracks, and any sort of play which dictates player-character actions based on withheld and then suddenly-provided information. If unknowns and secrets are present in the situation, as they often are, player-character actions are still left open to the players when the information is revealed.
That definition raises some questions for some other time. For instance, although I'm most familiar with sandboxing relying on a central GM with full Content Authority, I can't say for sure whether that's necessary for it to work at all. But that's getting experimental and off-topic.
Anyway, the question at hand seems to be, how do relevant and engaging crisis situations arise when sandboxing? Since the essence of those situations is part of how Creative Agenda gets expressed and satisfied for a given group, clearly we have to specify which CA is involved for them. You've done that here already, fortunately. The jargon is Story Now, or Narrativism. "Story games" isn't a defined term, in fact, it's left undefined by Andy Kitkowski's deliberate design. So that issue's settled for this thread. (I'm saying that sandboxing is great for the other agendas too, but the techniques for having relevant crises arise would be different. If someone wants to talk about sandboxing in other Creative Agendas, we can do that in other threads.)
Most Narrativist play benefits greatly from sandboxing; it's a key technique if not necessarily universal or required. It's also really hard to present as a textual
setting-situation package, and published adventures or settings that actively promote it are very rare. Probably the best example I can think of for a successful presentation is an old RuneQuest adventure called The Haunted Ruins. I had a rough time, although ultimately functional I think, adapting some of my sandboxing play to a HeroQuest adventure publication, as discussed in Designing Final Days at Skullpoint.
In my experience, probably the single worst way to try to sandbox but also "make story," is to alternate between irrelevant Brownian motion and brief instances of overwhelming railroading. Terry Gant called this the Panama Canal technique: let the player-characters wander all over and do whatever in the Atlantic Ocean, but when that becomes boring, herd them all through the Canal to get them in the Pacific, where they do what they're "supposed" to do. I described a version of this long ago in Narrativism and Bobby G, which got way up some people's asses for some reason.
Another way that doesn't work very well is to expect purely fictional input to prompt desired actions or especially insights on the part of player-characters. I wrote a bit about this in [trOS] Help! How to promote progress in discovery and [Rust Belt] Cruel cargo; also, more GM clumsiness; the latter also includes some recommendations which are relevant to this thread.
And finally, one way to make both of those problems worse, as GM, is to drop "climactic scene!!!" upon the players out of practically nowhere, expecting them to be as invested in every NPC and issue as you are even though they're only encountering most of them at this instant. There's a distinctive look of disappointment that can be seen on a GM's face when he springs the big bad villain upon the characters, finally, and the players are wholly unimpressed and treat what was supposed to be the climax as basically a wandering-monster encounter. I felt that look on my own face too many times, a couple of decades ago.
The only way for sandboxing to produce real stories rather than endless aimless wandering, then, is to play with full commitment to the richness and integrity of the fiction-so-far, and yet also with mindful attention to the breaking-points of characters in terms of drastic, responsive action. What promotes this mindfulness?
In Hero Wars/HeroQuest, the main intersection between character decisions and the setting-based situations is found at the stated character goals. I've found that this technique is unfortunately not very reliable, if the "Goal" blurb on the sheet is not treated as a vital part of the Positioning for the character. So as an isolated technique I don't think it's the answer. Here's what I think is the answer.
I'm currently calling it the Screwdown because I'm talking about an ongoing, heightening, ramping-up process rather than as a single "wham!" moment. It's best described as the developing, ongoing transitions of characters' attitudes, and thus their dialogue and actions, throughout the changing events of play. By "screwdown," I'm referring to the higher and higher likelihood of characters feeling as if they have less and less room for compromise. That doesn't mean less and less choice, but rather less and less option to stay sitting on the fence about various choices, or to wait and see what others do next.
From the GM's point of view, it's almost all about playing the NPCs as characters who can change their minds, and also to have enough conflict-rich material in the situation that removing a given NPC or changing a given NPC's mind about something does not drain the whole situation of available tensions. Another, perhaps optional element is any large-scale event or series of events that affect everyone, such as the threat of bandits attacking, or some kind of magic storm brewing, or whatever.
I developed two terms for some powerful techniques in exactly this type of GMing. In Sorcerer, I introduce the concept of Bangs, which are strong shifts in situations (basically, "this happens!") which demand action but do not dictate specific actions. The Screwdown has a way of generating Bangs with practically no prep and without any need to plan or hope for what might result from them. In The Sorcerer's Soul, I introduce the concept of Relationship Maps, which are notp organizational charts or emotions-connections, but rather ties of kinship and sexual contact. School me on relationship maps probably does the best job of explaining their use.
From the player's point of view, it's all about playing one's character with immense drive and yet also responsiveness. Not responsiveness to what the GM wants (often abominably called "the story" or "the plot"), but rather to what's going on with and to that character as of this particular moment in play. Instead of looking at the sheet and seeing a fixed entity with fixed responses listed and ready to be applied, one looks at the sheet as the door to discover for what this character will do after he or she encounters tensions and confrontations which are different and new. Many of the new independent games feature very powerful player-driven reward mechanics to facilitate this process, such as the Spiritual Attributes in The Riddle of Steel, which inspired the Keys system in The Shadow of Yesterday.
With both, or rather all of this, going on ("all of this" because the GM plays multiple characters and usually there're multiple players too), many of the conflicts that arise after a certain point in the Screwdown will have tremendous resolving power for the in-setting, in-situation concerns of some of the characters. And furthermore, to arrive at those conflicts and also to see them resolved serves to fulfill what I, at least, informally call "story" - fictional conflicts that genuinely resonate with us, the real people, and whose resolutions produce a degree of catharsis for us. That doesn't have to be a highbrow thing; I consider Die Hard movie to be one of the clearest examples available, for instance.
Whew. What a bitch that post was to write, and yet how important it felt, to me anyway. Louis, I apologize again for the ridiculous delay, and I'm really interested in what you think of what I've written here.
Best, Ron
James_Nostack:
Hi hoefer,
I have two questions about scenario design for you.
1. Did you come up with this idea--"Son of Nemo, on the Moon"--before or after players created their characters?
2. Were the players told about the overall situation before making characters? (Something like, "Your characters are going to get yoinked onto the Moon, and have to make the best of it/go home" or even, "Naughty Nemo Jr. is on the Moon causing problems on Earth")
3. How extensive are each player's goals/motivations/desires in this scenario? Are these characters just hanging out, trying to see what comes next, or have some of the players really gotten involved in a particular area (even if it isn't one you expected) so that, for example, someone has decided to help train Nemo's army and is now elaborately plotting to overthrow him? In other words: how reactive / pro-active are your players?
===========
Because it seems like what's happening here is that you created a really cool Setting: Fin de Siecle Moon + Nemo, with several very weak Situations. Meanwhile, it sounds like your players have created characters with weak Situations too. So: the players sort of explore stuff, having a fun time interacting with your cool Setting, but they don't have any goals beyond this, and aren't too keen on interacting with your side of the Situation (the big plot you want them to interact with.)
Just to clarify: a Situation has three elements:
1. The status quo
2. A serious change to the status quo which opens up a whole can of worms
3. A reason for the players to care what happens
Thus, the fundamental Situation in your sandbox is this:
1. You guys were having fun on Earth
2. Oh no! You're on the Moon!
3. The King of the Moon will execute you on the next "full Earth" (Alternately: Something you care about on Earth will go awry.)
With #3, the players are under pressure, and they have to explore for a purpose. Trying to fulfill that purpose, and the challenges/obstacles/whatever, puts everything the players encounter into a larger story, which concludes with the creation of a new, stable status quo. (You can generally sense when the players are reaching the crucial point, then supply the opposition as needed, and that's your climax.) But without #3, there's no purpose beyond what the players bring on their own. So there's sort of an aimless non-story wandering going on.
Note that you've tried to supply several smaller Situations, but based on your description there's no #3 either:
1. There were these nice girls on Earth
2. Oh no! They're in a harem! (On the Moon!)
3. ______________.
Players generally aren't going to care about injustice "just because." It has to sit up and bite them.
None of this directly relates to sandboxes in the abstract, but I think they're relevant to some of your frustrations with this particular game.
==============
Regarding sandboxes in the abstract, I think you guys are maybe getting off-track with your "detailed Setting" requirement. I think sandbox play does not require a detailed Setting, though the two often go together.
It's entirely possible to create a great sandbox game that uses one Big Situation, 3-4 Little Situations which are like spokes out of a hub, and that's it. As the players explore any particular Situation, add more Situations onto it, with the necessary Setting Elements. In other words, it's a "dynamically expanding sandbox" (this is a stupid name) with the players' activities always on center stage. Situations can be contributed by the GM or players, either prior to play or in play. I'm doing this now with my current D&D sandbox game.
The main GM skill comes from slowly advancing the Big Situation to the point where the players become highly aware of it--and then--cannot safely ignore it. (I think this is what Ron's talking about by the "screwdown" but it's also related to really hammering the #3 aspect of Situations in general.)
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