Sandboxing - story before, story now, story after
James_Nostack:
In his recent essay "Setting and Emergent Stories" (PDF), Ron includes an provocative afterthought about the term "sandbox play," and I'd like to talk about it.
Here's Ron:
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Problematic term: “sandbox”
Recent discussions among the self-described Old School Renaissance have revived and extended the term “sandbox play,” but have failed to define it.
As far as I can tell, it can mean anything but railroading, but that means it can include the whole range of Story Before, Now, or After, and the whole range of setting use from barely-any to all-encompassing. Which makes it pretty hard to talk about outside of a given group’s actual play experience. The term is also completely unconstructed regarding the size of a sandbox or if it’s supposed to have a size relative to the whole setting, regarding how changes to the setting procedurally occur.
In other words, the term means almost entirely nothing, and I think it’s kind of a shibboleth based on romantic notions of “Gygaxian play” (another everyone-knows but can’t-define term) and imagined notions of what it’s like, or must have been like, to play The Keep on the Borderlands.
I've been pretty active in this particular scene, and I agree with Ron on one point, which is that "sandbox" could use some scrutiny. So: a thread to do that!
A Quick Conditional[/u]
I'm writing about my own play, and I encourage you to write about your own. To the extent my wishes matter, what I absolutely do not want in this thread is (a) a denial of anyone's recitation of first-hand experience unless you were there, (b) saying that someone's play-preferences are wrong or irrational, (c) a first post that assumes a counter-factual and then draws an elaborate hypothetical from it.
What I would like is for people to share their actual experiences, to ask (and be asked) questions about it, and to see if there's a way to identify things that work well or poorly, or discrete techniques or features of play that need more real-world research.
(My own wishes are simply my personal preferences, of course, but I want to be up front about them.)
Actual Play "Certification"
For the past 3+ years, thirty of us have been playing in a self-identified "sandbox" style of play at the New York Red Box.
We have been playing the hell out of early-edition Dungeons & Dragons. We've logged about 142 sessions across two campaigns:
Tavis's White Box Game, 42 sessions of 1974 D&D (0e) plus eclectic supplements, approximately monthly. The setting is extremely gonzo, based on 1970's sword & sorcery and science-fantasy paperbacks. I've played in about 20 of these sessions.Eric's Glantri Game, 100 sessions using the 1981 Basic Rules (B/X), approximately weekly. The setting is fairly vanilla, lifting from Clark Ashton Smith's Averoigne in places. I've played in about 20 of these sessions.When we first got started, I ran six sessions of B/X in a self-consciously generic "don't bother me, I'm taking the bar exam" D&D fantasy world. I'll discuss its dissolution in a minute.
Beyond the D&D campaigns, we've got an aggressive program for one-shots and limited runs, including: Sorcerer, Trollbabe v1.0, Trollbabe v1.1, With Great Power..., Champions, Marvel Super Heroes, Mouse Guard, Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World, Starships & Spacemen, Tunnels & Trolls, RuneQuest, BrickQuest, Call of Cthulhu, and Traveller. Lately we've been playing a lot of Pendragon, which has been hilariously mock-heroic. I have played in virtually all of these "limited run" games.
Demographics: there are about 35 of us, maybe 15 of whom are regulars. About 90% of us are dudes, and the overwhelming majority of them are mid-30's to mid-40's. There's a decent amount of camaraderie among the regulars: movies, pizza, drinking, dinner parties, wedding invites, art shows, etc. With a group this big and this long-running, there's some interpersonal friction from time to time, but generally we all get along.
Sandboxing as Used in NYRB: Early Days in the Black Peaks[/u]
The Red Box group was an outgrowth of the NerdNYC social scene and Ben Robbins's West Marches style of just-in-time, no-fixed-group gaming. As Robbins explains it:
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There was no regular plot: The players decided where to go and what to do. It was a sandbox game in the sense that’s now used to describe video games like Grand Theft Auto, minus the missions. There was no mysterious old man sending them on quests. No overarching plot, just an overarching environment.
My motivation in setting things up this way was to overcome player apathy and mindless “plot following” by putting the players in charge of both scheduling and what they did in-game.
So the very first few sessions followed Robbins's model pretty closely.
There was no particular story at work beyond the one loosely assumed by D&D play: dungeons + dragons + adventurers in approximately medieval drag. I used the Grand Duchy of Karameikos, the default setting as presented in the Cook/Marsh Expert Rules, and seasoned it ever-so-lightly with Big Picture Situation (evil Dragon enslaved, its army regrouping, various forces of Law, Chaos and Neutrality trying to exploit the power vacuum). My goal at this point in time was just to play maybe 3 casual sessions; I wasn't trying to do anything too fancy.
I drew a map of a mountain valley and placed some small dungeons around the area. Some of the dungeons and local NPC's had connections that would maybe come to light, or maybe wouldn't, and a couple of the more feisty NPC's were busily pursuing their own agenda, occasionally meeting the PC's and usually regretting it. Players were free to drive whatever agenda they wanted in the setting.
Over a couple of months, my interest in running a long-form D&D game dwindled to zero, for a couple reasons.
6 sessions is really too short for a D&D campaign to really take on much of an identity or for characters to take on a life of their own. I didn't know that at the time.The setting was so generic that it didn't pique my interest sufficiently as DM. I'd just latched onto it as a time-saving device, without any regard to long-form play.My Big Picture Situation all involved NPC's of approximately 6-9th level. In early-edition D&D play, that is literally years off before you can deal with it as equals if you start at 0 XP as we did.Also, the geographic scope of the sandbox's Big Situation was too wide. Everything in the mountain valley--the hometown, the dungeon, the Dragon Army's remnants and the Dwarf diaspora--was solid, functional, and close at hand. But the Duke and his court politics was a good 200 miles away; the evil Bishop was even further away. So we'd be dealing with their proxies, henchmen, and so on. Bah, fuck that. I'm a sorcerer, I only deal with principals. (There was no reason for me to make things so far away, except that I just grabbed that published map as a way to save time prior to a session, without thinking of long-term effect.)I'd started a new job that prevented me from running both D&D and indie stuff, and so had to choose.
But also, and very importantly, early-edition D&D simply does not have very good procedures on stuff that doesn't involve dungeon-delving. In particular it does not have good rules on how the campaign world changes as a response to player action. As Ron puts it:
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[N]ow for my real point: [mechanics equivalent to the elaborate rules for how characters change over time, i.e., advancement] for the consequences upon setting are rare. . . . Whereas for setting, the historical default is for there to be little if any such things, so that’s what we see across the games today.
Now, the absence of those rules is pretty much universally regarded in the wider OSR as a design feature rather than a bug. Like role-playing the demons in Sorcerer, the long-term evolution of the campaign world in Dungeons & Dragons is exclusively the DM's province--not even the rule books get in the way. It's a very personal expression of the DM's creativity and outlook.
But it's also a pain in the ass if you're trying out a "new" game without a lot accumulated knowledge. Dungeons & Dragons at low-levels is so unbelievably cruel, you don't want to make the world so adversarial that the PC's lose heart. On the other hand, you want to always make the world . . . "interesting," in the sleep-with-one-eye-open sense. That's a fine line to walk, and I would have appreciated a crutch.
So that was it for the ol' Black Peaks game. Then the White Box and Glantri games got started, and I'll talk about them in the days ahead.
Value Added[/u]
Cutting to the chase a little bit, I think these procedures work pretty well, not necessarily in this order:
Create an environment, not a plot. A wilderness map, a dungeon, whatever. It should be big enough that the PC's can, with sustained effort, exhaust it, but not much bigger.Find a couple of zones in the environment that interest you. Who's there? What's something interesting going on there? It's probably best to think about these things individually, and then maybe lace them with some, but not a whole lot, of connective tissue.Give the players a home base. Put some NPC's in or around the home base, who want things.Plug the players into the setting. I.e., some Cleric belongs to a church that wants ________. A Magic-User is an apprentice to a Wizard who fled from _________ which pursues him. A Thieves Guild is enmeshed in a trade war with ______. These are specifically D&D examples, but every game has something like this. These things should be "colorful" in the Forge sense of the term, and act as "invitations to a situation." You're doing this only so that the characters have some minimal roots in the setting. The players may do this for you! If so, don't get in their way!Don't be coy about sharing rumors/gossip/news. Help the players get oriented on things to do here. You want a list of like 3-7 loose ideas for them to work with.If the players go for some of your suggested content, awesome, flesh that one out ahead of time and run with it. When you flesh it out, it should be like a house of cards, and which way it falls depends on the players' (witting or unwitting) actions.If the players start doing their own thing, cool. Hopefully your game gives you enough tools to generate mostly-meaningful random content on the fly. Just let them get deeper and deeper into a weird mess, and if they have an easy time of it, so be it. By next session, figure out an evolution of the prior content that bites them in the ass (not as punishment for going off-reservation, but as, "Hey, I know that looked random and you're feeling chuffed--but guess what, payback's a bitch.")
Don't hold me to any of that, because I'm tired of writing, but something akin to those elements has proven very workable.
I wanna talk about White Sandbox, Glantri, and failed attempts at Story Before Traveller and Story Now Marvel Super Heroes, but this post is too damn long.
C. Edwards:
The procedure summary at the end of your post is pretty solid in my experience. Just adhering to an Apocalypse World like insistence to "make the world seem real" will get you through half the battle. Cause and effect, action and reaction, in the short and the long term is at the core of sandbox play in my opinion.
My introduction to rpgs was using the Moldvay Basic Set (pink box) to run module B2: The Keep on the Borderlands when I was thirteen. While not being explicit in many ways regarding technique and procedure, I think it made a pretty decent road map for learning how sandbox play operates. B2 contains many, if not most, of the elements you mention and there are brief guidelines concerning the way many of the factions and individuals may react to interference or other actions of the PCs and how the area may change over time.
I should probably note that no one taught my friends and I how to play nor was D&D anywhere on our radar as a cultural thing (except maybe for the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, which I had no idea at the time had anything to do with an actual game). This was in 1988 and for us "gaming" could only mean playing Nintendo. Which is actually the reason I discovered D&D at all. While a friend and I were digging through every nook and cranny in his room looking for the RF adapter for his Nintendo I came across this odd pinkish-purple box in a drawer where it was buried beneath a bunch of junk. My friend had put it there, unopened, after his grandmother had given it to him and basically forgot about it. He let me take it home to check it out and a few days later we were playing.
As for "sandbox play" as a term and an idea I think Ron is mostly correct, but that's because I don't think the basic elements and techniques of sandbox play have much of anything to do with things like setting size, how or when story is created, or set and standard procedures for setting change. My experience is that the core of the whole idea is "make the world seem real" and "let the players decide what is important". Those are your primary priorities as a sandbox GM. The rest is mostly a combination of flavoring to taste and the proclivities of the players. Oh, and improvisation. Lots of improvisation.
I'm looking forward to your further posts, James.
James_Nostack:
Thanks C.! I hope to talk about my own experiences with Keep on the Borderlands in a couple of posts' time. It's worth discussing, but I want to do a data dump too!
Phase Two: The Glantri Game
As my own Black Peaks game wound down, one of my players, Eric, began his own campaign, set in the Principalities of Glantri, a canonical piece of the Basic D&D sample setting. It was introduced in a single paragraph in X1: The Isle of Dread, written by Cook and Moldvay, which shipped with the Blue Expert rules just as B2 shipped with most of the Basic rules. As introduced here, Glantri is a bunch of minor princedoms ruled by a magocracy--sort of like the petty wizard kingdoms you'd expect in The Dying Earth. (Curiously, Eric had no knowledge that Glantri had been turned into a 100-page setting book late in Basic D&D's product lifecycle, and I believe he disregarded all of it.) Eric described the Principalities as decadent wizardlings recovering from a magical civil war that left much of the place in ruins, with a culture similar to medieval France.
As a player, I don't have a lot of insight into how Eric set up his sandbox, though I suspect he was thinking along the lines I outlined above. From a player's point of view, at first we had a town, and a nearby ruined Wizard's Tower. Eric hinted at some other options, but we knew the Wizard's Tower a little bit, so we wanted to leverage that knowledge for profit. Sometimes the setting's evolution resulted in classic stories that became legendary in our group.
Sometime around Session 12, things got busy for me and I stopped coming to the weekly games, and there was almost a complete turnover of players. The new guys have now played for 90 sessions--sometimes dropping out, sometimes dropping back in--and have built up impressive accomplishments that I don't totally understand. Major locales in the game involve the Keep on the Borderlands, Quasqueton, and Eric's home-made "mega-dungeon" the Chateau d'Amberville (no relation to X2). The players are free to move between these locations, often deciding their next moves based on how hot things are in town.
One recent subplot involved a Throne of Gender-Bending and some kind of curse that shrank a Fighter into a Halfling. This led to an epic overland and nautical journey to find a goddess who could grant a wish, while other allies stayed behind and got mixed up in political intrigues relating to the mega-dungeon. These plotlines converged recently, and for Session 100 the party was finally reunited.
Eric's game has a reputation. Low-level D&D, by the book, is brutal as hell. (Look up the stats for the Killer Bee! Who the hell designs something like that?) But Eric, as DM, is often very adversarial. I suspect this is an instinct from Story Games, where for a while many games encouraged players to look for the conflict of interest in a scene and play toward that. Frankly, when I'm kicking back in a D&D town, I don't want to take guff from the bartender, when I've just delivered the carcass of a 6 HD crocodile-demon that can be hung over the bar--that's not the time for the dude to deny me a free drink. The upside, however, is that the dudes who have stuck it out are men. They are shivering in the cold and rain, amid the howling of wolves, telling each other encouraging tales of the White Boxers zipping between dimensions to argue with Death.
Value Added
So here's a thing I've noticed in my own game, and in both of the longer-running D&D games. Despite being ostensibly "go anywhere" games, players want to go to the same dungeon, over and over again. In the early Glantri game, we could not get enough of that Wizard Tower. The n00bs (who have been playing like 9 times longer than me by this point) usually can't get enough of the Chateau. Same's true in Tavis's 0e game. I think what happens is that the most dangerous thing in D&D is ignorance. Once you know something, you can exploit that knowledge if you're clever enough, so there's this feedback loop that encourages repeated delving. Once the looting begins to peter out, people get anxious to find richer plunder.
Theory Wrangling[/u]
C. Edwards wrote:
Quote
Just adhering to an Apocalypse World like insistence to "make the world seem real" will get you through half the battle. Cause and effect, action and reaction, in the short and the long term is at the core of sandbox play in my opinion. . . . My experience is that the core of the [sandbox] idea is "make the world seem real" and "let the players decide what is important". Those are your primary priorities as a sandbox GM. The rest is mostly a combination of flavoring to taste and the proclivities of the players. Oh, and improvisation. Lots of improvisation.
I am not sure that I would phrase it that broadly. For me, "make the world seem real," free will, and fictional cause-and-effect are practically the definition of imagining yourself as another person in another place. To use Forge jargon, I think it's the essence of Exploration itself. I hope to talk about a Traveller game, railroaded to hell, where the inability to explore beyond the railroad pretty much prevented me from playing the game at all. (I think in terms of Ron's essay, this type of Story Before play stomped all over my free will and complicated the act of playing. I realize this can be finessed, but usually by getting the players to agree that free will isn't all it's cracked up to be, at least on important issues.)
So I think sandboxing is more than just "Exploration" in the Forge sense. In theory every RPG is delivering that if it's functioning at all. I suspect sandboxing is a particular technique within that broader framework. More at some later time.
C. Edwards:
Quote from: James_Nostack on October 28, 2011, 09:46:37 PM
So here's a thing I've noticed in my own game, and in both of the longer-running D&D games. Despite being ostensibly "go anywhere" games, players want to go to the same dungeon, over and over again. In the early Glantri game, we could not get enough of that Wizard Tower. The n00bs (who have been playing like 9 times longer than me by this point) usually can't get enough of the Chateau. Same's true in Tavis's 0e game. I think what happens is that the most dangerous thing in D&D is ignorance. Once you know something, you can exploit that knowledge if you're clever enough, so there's this feedback loop that encourages repeated delving. Once the looting begins to peter out, people get anxious to find richer plunder.
This is my experience as well, and I think it helps add some predictability and manageability (for the GM) to the otherwise free-roaming nature of sandbox play. Curiosity and the desire to overcome a particular challenge may also account for part of this behavior. I've always associated this incremental player knowledge gain with platformers like Megaman. For every time you lose a life you learn something new about your environment and how to interact with it successfully. This knowledge results in you being able to go farther each time before losing a life. Eventually you learn enough to make it to the big boss. Beating the boss may take several cycles of life loss and knowledge gain. That association is probably part of the reason that the lethality of the older versions of D&D doesn't bother me.
Quote from: James_Nostack on October 28, 2011, 09:46:37 PM
C. Edwards wrote:
Quote
Just adhering to an Apocalypse World like insistence to "make the world seem real" will get you through half the battle. Cause and effect, action and reaction, in the short and the long term is at the core of sandbox play in my opinion. . . . My experience is that the core of the [sandbox] idea is "make the world seem real" and "let the players decide what is important". Those are your primary priorities as a sandbox GM. The rest is mostly a combination of flavoring to taste and the proclivities of the players. Oh, and improvisation. Lots of improvisation.
I am not sure that I would phrase it that broadly. For me, "make the world seem real," free will, and fictional cause-and-effect are practically the definition of imagining yourself as another person in another place. To use Forge jargon, I think it's the essence of Exploration itself. I hope to talk about a Traveller game, railroaded to hell, where the inability to explore beyond the railroad pretty much prevented me from playing the game at all. (I think in terms of Ron's essay, this type of Story Before play stomped all over my free will and complicated the act of playing. I realize this can be finessed, but usually by getting the players to agree that free will isn't all it's cracked up to be, at least on important issues.)
So I think sandboxing is more than just "Exploration" in the Forge sense. In theory every RPG is delivering that if it's functioning at all. I suspect sandboxing is a particular technique within that broader framework. More at some later time.
You're right, that's some pretty broad phrasing. Let me see if I can narrow down what I mean. In my mind it's like the difference between filming a movie on location or filming it on a set. On location: during play you know there is a wider, functioning world out there even if you never make an effort to learn about it. On set: during play you know that straying too far outside the frame of what is relevant to "the adventure" (even if you don't exactly know what "the adventure" entails) will reveal the limits of the facade that confine your character. It's not so much about exercising the freedom of going anywhere or doing anything as it is about simply having that freedom. It's the freedom of all your choices as a player being relevant. Maybe not exciting, maybe not smart, maybe not dramatic, but relevant. That can only happen if the GM is committed to portraying a (hopefully) complex world no matter where the PCs go or what they do, instead of creating an adventure path for the PCs to trundle down like a blind man with a cane.
I think the idea of sandbox play sounds overwhelming to a lot of people but, as you've pointed out, there are emergent properties that tend to confine the bounds of play. Throw in some useful procedures or techniques and away you go.
Abkajud:
I always took "Make the world seem real" to mean "The world must have its own logic; when the GM declares that X occurs, it must appear that there is good reason, or at least a reason, for X to occur, rather than X coming out of the blue or feeling contrived."
It goes back to being able to trust the GM to faithfully referee your game - is zhe just cribbing from some hidden notes and forcing plot to happen because zhe came up with it on hir lunch break on Friday and is now invested in seeing it realized in play? Or is zhe just taking notes on play as it happens, and thinking about how to introduce these elements again later?
This also goes back to issues of whether a pre-made plot is acceptable to the group, or not. Pre-made stuff can definitely make the world feel more complex, but in my experience only a really skillful GM can take something devised in isolation from actual play and make it feel alive. I'm not talking about having blurbs or writeups for locations along the course of the adventure, or even having ideas and stat-blocks for encounters in the adventure. I'm talking about being able to use such elements independent of the passage of in-game time, of the course of in-game events, etc.
In Apocalypse World, "Make the world seem real" is about gaining credibility with the players so that when you pull a Hard Move on them, they aren't upset and confused at this turn of events, but rather they say, "Yeah, haha, I should have seen that one coming!" Best of all, you don't have to be a master MC to pull it off - the Moves help you become good at MCing.
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