"Sand Box" Adventures
hoefer:
...Well...A lot to respond to here and Ron and James's posts have even made me question what CA I'm really operating from.
Let's start there...I've always assumed (possibly with through a misunderstanding of GNS) I (and the majority of players in the groups I'm in) was a narrativist gamer. That is, the priorities of our games center on "Story" after story comes the element of "character" and from there we slip into seeking realism and rule use. So now, what we want when we play is a sort of thrill-ride of plot, character development, and suspense found in good books and movies. In the same breathe we absolutely hate games where it's all about the "real-life" of your character, or GMs who just want to "wing it" and leave it to the players/characters to get things going. Again, we want "story," we want foreshadowing, development of NPCs and interplay with the PCs, and a plot that cycles up the further the PCs play into the story. Give us either a situation that begs to have action taken on it, or a situation we can react to. The plots come to a head, the game is resolved and the characters reprise their roles in another subsequent plot the next group of sessions. Relationships that the characters form are carried over (so far as they are necessary to the plot of the next game, or entertaining/expected). The plots, antagonists, and goals are typically directed toward the interests/abilities of the characters/players a head of time. However, we do (when playing games off the shelf) use adventure modules and just adapt the story to better integrate the characters the players are taking into the story.
...SOOO, is this narrativsit play?
Now, back to the regularly scheduled thread:
Ron, I would be very interested in reading a excerpt from your Haunted Ruins adventure or the Skullpoint one. I followed your threads there and have a vague idea of what the format might have been like, but some of it still seems mysterious. And that is my real interest here, How do you best present a sandbox adventure for publication and ensure it can be used by various players with varying CAs and ensure is can come to a nice climax?
I get what you're saying on the points of what doesn't work for sandbox games (this particular one ended with the "climatic scene drop" when we played it), but some of what you suggest will produce "real stories" such as the "commitment to the fiction-so-far and mindfulness to character breaking points" always leads to the split up of the PCs and the dreadful lag of running in-depth parallel stories for each PC. This has been my experience anyhow. You focus in too tightly on developing the character, the character's responsiveness to the environment/NPCs, and their interests and goals and pretty soon each player is waiting 30 minutes for their turn to "interact" with the story. It seems to wind up as simultaneous bits of fiction instead of a shared work. -This is not to say "railroading" is the only other option by the way. I'm not sure if it is the same thing as the HeroQuest Goal system, but in Century's Edge each character has a pressing goal they are trying to achieve so that the player may advance the character to the next Rank. These goals are set up by the Narrator and the Player individually so as to facilitate a plot-driven game while giving a nod to the player's interests in their character's development. In this particular case we used the generic goals offered up in the main rule book -which definitely added to the issue of characters' being "climax-shy." These generic goals should have helped push the climax (for instance one character's goal was to obtain a new piece of technology which he could have more than easily done within Quisquis's lab), but still the players would explorer to the point of realizing how these goals could be accomplished but not attempt to accomplish them (i.e. find a nifty new technology, decide how it might be removed from the sultan's workshop, but then not actually attempt to remove it).
I kinda think I used your screwdown model. I had several events going on, many underlying plots and self-motivated (yet flexible) NPCs. The PCs dabbled in a given area and those actions led to new problems or the revelations of new plots/encounters. As the plots were followed or time was invested in any given one, the intensity would increase -some were increasing whether the players involved themselves in them or not (all these things were the "Bangs"). The problem was, the players never got to the point of having to "leave their fence." I originally wrote the adventure so that the player's interests, motives, and convictions would be the force that drove any given plot into a final climax. But they all just wondered about involving themselves in plots to the point it was boiling up -but do all they could to keep them from boiling over. Eventually I had to tag the whole "large-scale event" on to the experience to bring it to an end.
On the point of it being "all about what is going on with one's character and their drive," I don't think my players and I would agree. "The Story" is our goal. Developing its rise, climax, and resolution with the reactions, interactions, and personalities of our players is what makes it enjoyable. Just wondering around being in-character and seeking out our own interests isn't enough for us. "The Story" is that unifying force that makes it a shared experience and keeps the pacing and tension in tandem for all the players. To try to make it clearer (by using a lame example) -it is not interesting to us to be "Luke Skywalker" and experiment with all his feelings, whimsies, abilities, and reactions within and open-ended and far stretching world that happens to have a Death Star in it. What is interesting to us is being Luke and applying his personna to the menace of the "Death Star" through a series of defined conflicts and situations that both the player and GM know are moving the story clock forward toward that point (I know this is a gut-wrenching example, but replace "Luke Skywalker" and the such with any PC in any story and it holds). Now, that doesn't mean the path to the Death Star should be narrow (we equally hate playing games where the PC's choices have no real effect). But there is a great medium out there where the players realize a plot and are able to act within a large swath to get to its climax and figure a way to resolve it. Without this, adventures seem to take too damn long or players feel they are in separate "cubicles" of play instead of on the same swath together...
I feel I've started to ramble too far on this post, but I'm going to post it anyway. I'll try to come back in a few days and get something more intelligible up that can explain my points/inquiries better...
Oh, James,
1) I did not write the adventure until after character creation was done (though if I want to figure out how to publish sandbox adventures I have to break the code of how to do it irrespective of the characters that might go on it). And just for the record, The "Son of Nemo" adventure took place in the sky, not the moon... His floating palace used Cavorite -a material described in Well's book, The First Men in the Moon -maybe that's were the confusion is, not that it matters... This was the 3rd adventure for these particular characters.
2). The players had no previous knowledge of the sultan or the adventure. Many bits of foreshadowing connecting to the plots offered in it were dropped throughout previous adventures, but I never blatantly told them X, Y, and Z are going to happen in this adventure.
3. The character's goals were fairly weak/thin (which is admittedly a problem with this running of the adventure). The players were 50/50 on the proactive thing. They would wait and react to some stuff, yet also proactively plan some things but then hold off fulfilling the plan (i.e. they made some explosives and gained access to a means of escape but didn't utilize either.)
-Your description of the screwdown is also how I perceive it and I felt I was almost accomplishing it.
-Oh, and I feel the setting has to be super-detailed for a sandbox to work (at least from a "published adventure" sort of view) -so NAH!
:-)
Louis Hoefer
www.wholesumentertainment.com
James_Nostack:
Hi Hoefer,
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So now, what we want when we play is a sort of thrill-ride of plot, character development, and suspense found in good books and movies. In the same breathe we absolutely hate games where it's all about the "real-life" of your character, or GMs who just want to "wing it" and leave it to the players/characters to get things going. Again, we want "story," we want foreshadowing, development of NPCs and interplay with the PCs, and a plot that cycles up the further the PCs play into the story.
I'm sure Ron, or some other Forge veteran, will say this more insightfully than I, but what your describing doesn't really have much to do with Narrativism as it's used in GNS-jargon. "Narrativism," as it's used on the Forge, is all about the development of what my literature teachers used to call "theme," and which Ron calls "premise." Generally, Narrativism is about forcing players, through their characters, to make very difficult moral decisions, and exploring the consequences of those decisions. "When you do X, ______ happens," and we're playing to find out what fills in the blank. It's about "relevant" play, play that makes a statement (by implication) about the people at the table and the world we live in.
What you're describing is great stuff--good pacing, excitement, characters who are "fit" for a particular set of challenges or the nature of a setting, nice use of continuity. But it has little to do with "Story Now" in the very specialized sense in which Narrativism is operating.
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I did not write the adventure until after character creation was done . . . (though if I want to figure out how to publish sandbox adventures I have to break the code of how to do it irrespective of the characters that might go on it). . . . This was the 3rd adventure for these particular characters.
Hoefer, can you explain a little bit about how you designed this adventure to be relevant to these particular PC's? In other words, is there something relating to these players or these heroes that led to the design of your sandbox / Situation thingy?
PS. I know nothing about publishing, particularly publishing RPG's. But if the goal is to have PC's for whom this adventure/sandbox/Situation is relevant, it would seem there are only two ways to guarantee this: either construct several pre-generated characters and include them in the scenario, or specifically instruct your readers to collectively create PC's designed to interface with the salient facts of the Situation.
Marshall Burns:
Regarding the CA issue, there's a thing here. If you take a fictional character, and put him into an untenable situation that demands his action, and he deals with the situation in a way that stems from who he is (whether that means falling in line with who he is or breaking from it, or any combination thereof), and the situation ends up with some manner of resolution due in some extent to the character's actions, you will create a theme. Whether you meant to or not.
Narrativism and story-heavy Sim both include the above dynamic; the question is, who has authority over the character's relevant (i.e. actually having an impact on the situation's resolution) actions? If it's the character's player, it's Narrativism. If it's the GM, or if it's frontloaded by the game's design, or a module, or a preset collection of tropes (y'know, that pastiche thing), it's Sim.
(Tropes and such can still be used in Story Now -- even if they frontload some thematic decisions -- as long as there's still thematic questions to be answered by player agency alone)
That's what made it click for me, at any rate. Louis, does that make anything clearer?
-Marshall
Vulpinoid:
That's just flipped a few of my preconceived notions by 90 degrees...I'll have to take some time to think about that comment.
V
Marshall Burns:
Er, it might be good to clarify that I was working from some assumptions in that last post. One being that Louis has reliably ruled out a Gamist agenda altogether, and another that his payoff for play is story-related, and therefore it's a question of whether it comes from collaboratively creating a story, now, at the table (Nar), or one of the many different flavors of story-based Sim.
'Cause, in Gamist play and some Sim play, the theme-creation process I described in my previous post can be present but incidental, so my previous post isn't quite true if you don't count the assumptions.
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