Sandboxing - story before, story now, story after
Callan S.:
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Unrelatedly, our experience with the Keep on the Borderlands suggests that sometimes, all of the choices on the menu are unappetizing. "Ugh, not an endless menu of poverty-stricken humanoids and bickering with the very uptight denizens of the Keep. Let's get out of here." So it's sometimes helpful to include an escape hatch, where you can jump one layer out and find some other sandbox to muck around in.
Doesn't this come across as an incredibly uninspiring basis on which to write material/create content? Just in case someone goes "Ugh", you have to write out a whole new sandbox? And maybe they'll go Ugh to that as well, so you need another one or if you didn't, somehow you didn't provide?
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I read that and think about the linear plots I've been run through by GMs, and for me, the point of a sandbox is to create an adventure that's a lot harder to "break". I'm sure a lot of us have been there - - we prep something, we sit down with some players, and then at some point during play, we all can sense the ... limits of pre-planned adventure.
What strikes me is that say, no one considers being a sorcerer, or a young zealot with a gun and a funny blanket on their back as some constricting limit. Presumably because it's written on the tin. While, although ostensibly the GM is supposed to go with his imagination and be creatively free as the wind, really he is incredibly constricted by any individual players sense of "this game isn't about that", which comes up as "Oh, we can feel a constricting limit here!" in the player. I mean, this even goes for D&D - why are dungeons not considered a constricting limit? Well, it's written on the tin. To me it points to the importance of indicating clearly, in advance, what things were doing now, with these people, in exclusion to anything else.
James_Nostack:
Quote from: Callan S. on October 31, 2011, 12:54:45 PM
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Unrelatedly, our experience with the Keep on the Borderlands suggests that sometimes, all of the choices on the menu are unappetizing. "Ugh, not an endless menu of poverty-stricken humanoids and bickering with the very uptight denizens of the Keep. Let's get out of here." So it's sometimes helpful to include an escape hatch, where you can jump one layer out and find some other sandbox to muck around in.
Doesn't this come across as an incredibly uninspiring basis on which to write material/create content? Just in case someone goes "Ugh", you have to write out a whole new sandbox? And maybe they'll go Ugh to that as well, so you need another one or if you didn't, somehow you didn't provide?Quote
In my experience this has never been a problem. Early-edition Dungeons & Dragons was designed in such a way that creating new content--dungeons, monsters, spells, NPC's, whatever--is dirt-simple and extremely low-investment. I'm typically noodling away on some side project in development. If the players say, "Eh, let's try our luck elsewhere," it gives me an excuse to finish it and parade it out. Alternately, at this point there are literally hundreds of one-page adventures not to mention dozens of classic modules. And all of that assumes that the players are totally passive, instead of actively scheming to do new things in the setting which lead to new hijinks. Coming up with new menu items has been trivially easy.
contracycle:
Well yeah, but that has the penalty of being disjointed and thematically contradictory. I mean, "sandbox" surely doesn't have to mean a randomised collection of junk you happen to have laying about. It would be a bit funny to be playing GTA and to find a mission to raid a kobold lair. So although there has been a history of unrelated content (vis. Barrier Peaks
) and genre-busting (gunpowder, dinosaurs), even getting slightly more coherent means that poetneital content has to be sifted and selected. So I don't think that it has been "trivially easy" at all; there may be a lot of stuff out there, but it may be that only a miniscule proportion of it is usable, and all too often the anything goes attitude has produced a lot of trash.
James_Nostack:
Gareth, all I can tell you is about my own experience. If you look at those modules, and at the one-pagers I mentioned, a whole big heaping helping of them assume a vanilla fantasy landscape. Some of the ones that don't--X1: Isle of Dread and X8: Drums on Fire Mountain plus one of the 2010 One-Page Entries Den of Villainy plus D3: Vault of the Drow plus B4: The Lost City plus C3: The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan all fit very well together if you wanted to do, say, a tropical island pulp adventure with ziggarauts built by a vanished, decadent civilization. But you can harmonize these with a vanilla fantasy world if, like Tavis's White Sandbox game, your setting explicitly includes everything that's ever existed in D&D.
I agree that you've got to sort through stuff, and occasionally rename some god or nation-state. But this is very low-impact work.
Callan S.:
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In my experience this has never been a problem. Early-edition Dungeons & Dragons was designed in such a way that creating new content--dungeons, monsters, spells, NPC's, whatever--is dirt-simple and extremely low-investment.
I have a strong instinct. And being an instinct, it could simply be firing in the wrong direction. But my instinct is that if it's dirt simple, then what you get is dirt simple? I mean, I can grab an old crossword and mark off where monsters are in the 'tunnels', sure. But it seems like alot of dice rolling and your done? And not necessarily with any sense of forfilling a win condition (I can, for example, play snakes and ladders just fine (which is alot of dice rolling), I feel some fun there, even though it's simple). I guess in terms of story after, ie picking the highlights of a whole session, it could fit with that?
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