[gamist RPGs] Player Driven Games and
contracycle:
There is an interesting CRPG that is truly sandbox and has no overall goal, and so its an interesting comparator for this discussion. Warband (previously Mount & Blade) has no plot of any kind; the nearest that there is to this is that you might try to make yourself king. The main draw is entirely the gameplay itself, which is unique in several respects - proper mounted combat, developing your own mini-army, the eponymous warband, and fighting battles and sieges featuring large numbers of combatants. It also has dynamic factions whose fortunes wax and wane.
Now, these features certainly are enough to keep players engaged for a long time. This is pure challenge for its own sake (and of course the uniqueness value). But there is ultimately a question that all these games pose, including MMO's, which is, what really is the point of spending all this time making imaginary money?
The quest/pseudo-story structure provides a suitable answer to this almost "existential" question. It endows action with meaning beyond merely repeating the same actions over again for their own sake. If those actions are entertaining in themselves, you can do that for a long time, but ultimately there's a certain hollowness to it all. When there is a main quest line, and engagement with the sandox environment becomes a form of preperation for the main event, all that activity is endowed with a greater significance.
Natespank:
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The quest/pseudo-story structure provides a suitable answer to this almost "existential" question. It endows action with meaning beyond merely repeating the same actions over again for their own sake. If those actions are entertaining in themselves, you can do that for a long time, but ultimately there's a certain hollowness to it all. When there is a main quest line, and engagement with the sandox environment becomes a form of preperation for the main event, all that activity is endowed with a greater significance.
Agreed; most completely open sandbox games do feel hollow after a while. I think you need a goal like you said, and further, the player has to doubt he'll achieve the goal on some level. That makes it a challenge, a mystery, or at least a "let's find out" sort of thing.
I think the major goal in most MMOs and MMO style games is to hit the maximum level and raid the final dungeons. Character empowerment seems to be the drive- ever watch somebody play Diablo 2 for 6 weeks repeatedly killing Bael for the item drops and xp? I've known many who have...
You know what a great model for a sandbox campaign is... a typical dungeon adventure.
You're plopped in the dungeon with or without a goal; if there's no goal then your goal is probably to explore it until you wear out it's mystery and loot potential. You freely wander, make choices, accomplish sub objectives, explore, map things out; interact with some NPCs, plan out attacks... the dungeon adventure is extremely similar to a sandbox campaign if it's built the way I'm used to them- remember old modules from Gygax too? Keep on Borderlands? The dungeons are just location based, no DM forcing you to do this or that at all.
I think that looking into dungeon design a bit deeper might help my sandbox work; or, maybe I should leave the sandbox aspects in the dungeon and use more direction in the overall campaign...- hopefully the former.
Callan S.:
Nate, I think your avoiding just deciding the objective, like "You must kill diablo himself!", which is easy enough to do.
I think you've shown some interest in what the characters would choose to overall do before, with your example of the character who started building an empire in one of your games. Have you considered whether you like to see how characters act in various situations?
Natespank:
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Nate, I think your avoiding just deciding the objective, like "You must kill diablo himself!", which is easy enough to do.
Originally, when I envisioned the campaign, the end objective was "kill the evil red dragon from the north and his posse of bad asses." I'd opted out of an end objective though and I think that's no good. If nothing else inspires me that one well works as a functional arbitrary goal- with player-determined sub objectives (I think one wants to become a nobleman).
One of my favorite games, period, is the NES legend of Zelda. I wanted to recreate that a bit but it's tricky.
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I think you've shown some interest in what the characters would choose to overall do before, with your example of the character who started building an empire in one of your games. Have you considered whether you like to see how characters act in various situations?
Absolutely. Recall the bit about the princess who was meant to be fed to the dragon? I didn't know how they'd try to get her, whether they'd kill her, whether they'd team up with lizardmen, whether they'd feed her to the dragon, whether they'd team up with the princess... I like to incorporate gray moral dilemmas too. Give them some really interesting choices to make and no required response.
Are you suggesting a narrativist bent or something?
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Nate, I think your avoiding just deciding the objective
Not entirely: most of my dungeons had objectives like "Kill Skincleaver," or "get out alive," or "plunder the shit out of it before the army returns to properly sack it," or "recover the artifact."
Callan S.:
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Are you suggesting a narrativist bent or something?
Well, under a traditional design method, the GM doesn't get to compete against players (ironically great power makes him incapabable of doing that), so you don't really get a gamist thrill if you use the traditional designs. But in terms of narrativist play, that's available and maybe your gravitating toward...what's fun? It's not surprising to gravitate towards that.
In terms of breaking up traditional design and making sequences where you actually compete with the players with limmited power, I think that's entirely possible, but takes some design thought.
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