Sandboxing - story before, story now, story after
James_Nostack:
Callan,
To be polite: the complexity in a sandbox game doesn't come from GM prep. You are killing monsters in tunnels. It comes from players' hijinks, both in the tunnels and in-between delves as the world evolves. This is a story of people killing things in tunnels and what happens in between.
I would remind you that, as stated in my first post, I have no interest in discussing counter-factuals based on instincts and analogies where they directly contradict my stated personal experience. If others wish to do so, they are welcome.
I would, however, love for you to discuss your own actual experience of sandbox play, or your own history of non-sandbox play with "early RPG" systems (i.e., D&D, Traveller, something of that vintage). Or doing this with your actual play of indie games--I'm thinking that there's nothing exactly analogous on the indie scene, but Trollbabe and Apocalypse World come fairly close with some significant differences. Alternately, given your experience with D&D 3.5 and D&D 4e, whether those games facilitate this style of play, and if not, why not. The 4e "Points of Light" model, which many people were raving about in late 2008, has at least superficial elements of sandbox play: a large, hostile, perhaps unexplored wilderness, and players with hometown to which they have their own attachments. The Nentir Vale, for example, strikes me as a perfectly adequate starting point for a sandbox, though I'd be curious if anyone plays it in an entirely player-directed way. (The design of H2: Thunderspire Labyrinth seems to have some elements of this as well, but again, heavily shepherded through the GM's plot, at least as written.)
I think there's a lot to discuss here that involves actual play, rather than what must be true a priori, and I'm eager to have that discussion.
contracycle:
Fair enough, but I just want to say this: that sample game you;ve got there epitomises everything I grew to hate about D&D. You mention above that inability to go off the railroad prevented you from entering Exploration, in another game, but to me, introducing characters called Clamato and Chowder would have kicked me the hell out of exploration.
Now the point is this: none of this is inherently necessary to the sandbox style of play. As the Gamasutra article you linked pointed out, sandboxing is often used as an excuse to skimp on high level design, while in fact it benefits greatly from strong high level design. I think that was a big part of the development of the Ravenloft setting; it was still sandboxy, but it had a much stronger aesthetic running through it, established expectations more firmly.
I don't think "sandbox" should be conflated with "anything goes". That isn't necessarily true. I don't think it is true to say that complexity does not, in an absolute sense, arise from GM prep, and is all down to the "player's hijinks". That stuff is functional in that yes, you can get people to play it. If that floats your boat, cool. But it also produced the sub-Renfair culture of Python jokes and fratboy socialisation which many people found alienating and dull.
I'm wary of presenting this sort of thing as a good representation of sandboxy play. B2:KOTB is actually thematically very tight; a semi-random selection of modules and jokey monsters is not.
James_Nostack:
Gareth wrote:
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I just want to say this: that sample game you;ve got there epitomises everything I grew to hate about D&D. You mention above that inability to go off the railroad prevented you from entering Exploration, in another game, but to me, introducing characters called Clamato and Chowder would have kicked me the hell out of exploration.
Gareth, as you'd see, those characters left the Glantri game almost immediately. Eric, the DM, has told people, "You cannot name your character ________." I have some reservations about this approach: early edition D&D makes it extremely perilous to take your character too seriously, because they can die in an instant.
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Now the point is this: none of this is inherently necessary to the sandbox style of play. As the Gamasutra article you linked pointed out, sandboxing is often used as an excuse to skimp on high level design, while in fact it benefits greatly from strong high level design. I think that was a big part of the development of the Ravenloft setting; it was still sandboxy, but it had a much stronger aesthetic running through it, established expectations more firmly.
If I've given that impression, it wasn't intentional. I'm not saying design isn't important! I was explicitly responding to Callan's assertion that it would be difficult or aggravating to generate new material when the players get bored with their current options. It's super-duper-easy to generate stopgap stuff on your own in keeping with the aesthetic you established, or failing that to grab something off the shelf. You asserted that stuff from off the shelf isn't easily adapted. Well: so far it hasn't been too hard to adapt to aesthetics. And then you asserted that things need to either be designed in keeping with the aesthetic or adapted. I'm not sure what we're arguing about.
None of this is to say that sandboxes or the dungeons within them must be, or should be, simple affairs. There's a huge role for design if you want to design. I've got, like, 45 pages of hardcore design notes on a new project. High-level dominion play (operating your own kingdom, etc.) is largely hand-waved in most early versions of D&D. What I'm mucking away on is an attempt to do that--starting out at 300,000 XP. So typical things involve getting a land grant to explore and conquer unexplored territory, building a castle (subcontracting with Dwarves, finding them a supply of adamantite, dealing with a territorial dragon). Managing a Thieves Guild war. Researching magical items. Fielding armies. All that high-level stuff that is, at our present rate of advancement, decades away. Thinking about these types of adventures requires back-designing a world where that kind of thing is meaningful and fun--so thinking about cultures, and how Detect Evil might get used in an Inquisition, a Lawful Evil Elven aristocrat who uses good-natured but blindly obedient Blink Dogs as his assassins, that kind of stuff.
What you want to think about also is: geographical proximity,. Do you want to keep some stuff further away until later? What if you want to put a level in a nearby dungeon that you'll very likely only learn about from some adventurer's notebook squirreled away in some dungeon many miles away? (This is a bad example of "connective tissue" for several reasons, but hopefully gets the point across.)
So designing a sandbox can be a huge pain, but doesn't have to be. (I'm doing it because I find it an entertaining set of design puzzles to solve in its own right, not because it's necessary to do it this elaborately.) Remember: we're only talking about plucking (not-so-)random things off the internet because of a chain of nested hypotheticals about what do you do if players get bored of one part of the campaign.
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I don't think it is true to say that complexity does not, in an absolute sense, arise from GM prep, and is all down to the "player's hijinks". That stuff is functional in that yes, you can get people to play it. If that floats your boat, cool. But it also produced the sub-Renfair culture of Python jokes and fratboy socialisation which many people found alienating and dull.
I should have been more clear about "players hijinks."
In Tavis's White Sandbox game, our favorite Magic-User PC, Maldoor, got killed. Specifically: while leaving a dungeon we had a wandering encounter with a group of NPC's. One of them polymorphed into a gargantuan Purple Worm, swallowed Maldoor, and digested him utterly. (This is almost the very best thing you can do with a polymorph spell in 0e. Maldoor became worm-poop--"super-killed" because you can't get resurrected from that, all due to the simple act of rolling a bunch of dice while bumping into monsters in a crossword puzzle.
Maldoor's fate became a rallying cry for the rest of the party, because our next-best Magic-User is an inept doofus (played by me), and we really needed the guy back. So we spent a lot of time in-game and on-line researching where Maldoor's soul had ended up, and what in the world we might do to retrieve it. One of our Elves scored some fantasy-LSD to take us into the Astral Plane, and another researched an ancient goddess of dreams, introducing a new religion into the campaign world. We'd rescued an extra-dimensional demi-urge several sessions ago, who helped us construct a return-portal once we found Maldoor's soul. Along the way through the various planes, we defeated a couple of demons (which we'd never done before!) and I got humiliated in a riddle contest by a pair of Shedu (you have made a powerless enemy today, Shedu!)
But more importantly, in the process of retrieving Maldoor, my inept Magic-User gradually assumed increasing responsibility in the party, and as a role-playing experience I ended up showing how he grew into the role of the primary Wizard--putting aside his usual scrambling to make "bad" spells useful, and going with raw power. Meanwhile when we ran into some Astral Dragon Riders or something guarding Maldoor's soul, our Paladin leader was the only one who would joust them without cheating--and lost. The conditions of the bet were that he would lose all of his magical items.
So in the process of overcoming a bad roll of the dice, we (a) traveled to dimensions we'd never been before, (b) revived an ancient religion, (c) overcame extremely dangerous foes, (d) I made some lasting enemes, (e) I got to role-play a significant shift in my character's personality, (f) our "good guy" suffered serious consequences along the way. So the campaign was vastly enriched by players' response to a single unlucky die roll. If the Purple Worm had rolled a 13 instead of a 14, Maldoor could have been raised by conventional means and none of this would have happened.
James_Nostack:
And then in the very next session Maldoor got backstabbed by an invisible Giantess and died.
Caldis:
My experience with those old D&D modules is markedly different. I dont think it would count as sandboxy more like episodic, we have a bunch of characters they're all ready to go let's go hit this adventure, I think it was pretty much up to the DM which adventure we'd be going through but I sometimes remember a list of options and a kind of vote taking place.
A bit of background first. We were pretty young when D&D came out, most of our groups born in 1969 or 1970. I was first introduced at a friends place when a slightly older group of guys were running a game (one of the Against the Giants series of modules in 1980 or so?) handed a premade dwarven multiclass character and pretty much followed along. Never played regularly with those guys again but we had enough fun that we started doing our own thing and picking up the books as they showed up on local store shelves, wasnt much at first but it became a lot soon enough.
So episodic adventures with whoever we could get to play usually about 4-6 players including the DM. I dont think anybody really loved they idea of DMing and saw it more of a necessary evil so we tended to swap out the dm fairly frequently. There was nothing in the way of an ongoing world ar at least nothing that had any relevance to play. We played straight through an adventure until we completed it. We rarely left a dungeon to resupply or anything, we'd sleep to heal setup camp and watches and the dm would roll for wandering monsters, which would provoke a fight and possibly more rest afterwards but was rarely deadly. The C series of modules were pretty big for us and didnt really give you an option of running away and coming back later, Ghost tower of Inverness and Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan were a couple early ones that we liked.
We definitely didnt play the opposition as very smart. The wandering monsters tended to stumble on to the party and just start fighting, no going back and getting reinforcements or anything like that (not sure that any modules made suggestions to do so).
Rather than learning the game from any specific module (I'm sure at one point I read most of that stuff in Keep on the Borderlands) we had the DM's Guide and the Players handbook, various Dragon Magazines, and a hodge podge of modules many of them for higher level characters. I think this clutter had a big influence on our play style. For one the DM's guide had the various methods of character generation. Roll 4d6 drop the lowest was popular, when unearthed Arcana came out and the gonzo dice rolling method it brought came out things went mad. Dragon magazines had a lot of nifty ideas and a lot of them added power to characters, making them better at surviving. Magic users were always a bit wonky with their spell book restrictions and that table in the dm's guide for what spells were in their book to start.
We definitely didnt play as adversarial a game as the new OSR is advocating. I dont think we were missing anything rather I think a mix of influences was swirling about that made the D&D scene at the time rather confusing. The two modules that really stand out as examples of the sandbox play are B2 Keep on the Borderlands and T1 the Village of Hommlet but they were just a couple in a swarm of different influences.
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