Sandboxing - story before, story now, story after
C. Edwards:
James wrote:
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...while leaving a dungeon we had a wandering encounter with a group of NPC's.
Encounter tables are important in so many ways. For one, and this goes to some of Callan's concerns about prep time and players deciding to do something else, they can buy the GM a lot of time. They can increase the play time it takes for the PCs to reach their next destination, giving the GM more time for at least minimal prep during play or delaying the journey long enough so that the next destination can be readied between sessions. They're also random injections of complexity and can end up generating whole swaths of play all on their own. James' example is a great showcase of that. You never know just how much complexity a random encounter will spawn until after it happens.
Callan wrote:
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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?
While things may look simple on paper, the real complexity is injected when you add in people. The GM's contributions and the players' contributions turn two dimensions into three. This is pretty much how most roleplaying games I'm aware of function in play. If the players approach play in a non-ironic manner and the GM is doing the whole "make the world seem real" thing that GMs do, then "a few monsters in a tunnel" becomes pregnant with possibilities.
James wrote:
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And then in the very next session Maldoor got backstabbed by an invisible Giantess and died.
Sounds like Maldoor was the weakest link. :)
contracycle:
Quote from: James_Nostack on November 01, 2011, 06:44:31 AM
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.
Well, I'm disagreeing that it is super duper easy, except where the kitchen sink aesthetic applies. Now of course there's no accounting for taste, but there is very little useful to my taste (social realism) out there. The form to date has not IMO produced a wide range of aesthetics, it's just had a fairly consistent junkyard one; it looks easy only becuase its not being seriously attempted.
Now as you say, we're only talking about this because of a hypothetical that was raised, but I came in on that to make a slightly different specific point. The basis of the thread was that the sandbox hasn't been sufficiently defined. I'm suggesting is that part of the reason for that lack of definition is because of the junkyard aesthetic, which has operated in much the same way as the "golden rule" to muddy the waters. I mean the very fact that someone could write and print and sell a module like Barrier Peaks, with its spaceship elements, shooting the hell out of any kind of pseudo-historical consistency, speaks volumes - and yet this is a bona fide Gygax module, introduced at a convention.
So this junkyard thing has always been about, has some authoritative basis, and so on. I'm suggesting think that to define sandbox more precisely the junkyard aesthetic has to be separated out from the method of sandbox play, and not assumed to be folded into it, as it often is.
Tav_Behemoth:
Contracycle, my experience as the GM of the White Sandbox is that the gonzo Acid Fantasy kitchen-sink approach James describes is indeed a necessary part of the method of sandbox play. When a player says "I want to be 23, a robot cleric who gets his spells from worshipping the Server, a vast computer at the center of the earth", for me to say yes to this - the aesthetic decision that anything can potentially fit into the setting - is part and parcel of me saying yes to the idea that if you go far enough down into a dungeon, you might be able to douse the Server's memory banks with flaming oil - the sandbox method that leaving the edges of everything undefined and having robust tools for creating what's there procedurally provides infinite scope to handle player-driven exploration.
As a player in the Glantri campaign, when I've been allowed to name a cleric the Boss and have him inspire his own religion, the sandbox sings for me - even though the result is essentially silly, I enjoy taking it seriously, and the fact that it runs contrary to the tone of the game is part of the point: having GM Eric provide seriousness and drama is a necessary foil for our comic relief. When other players have been told that they can't name a character Sosexia, this to me feels like my agency and scope of action in the sandbox is limited; there aren't rails exactly, but now there are walls on the sandbox that will keep us from ever traveling to wherever Sosexia comes from and learning about a land where that's a normal name.
Acid fantasy is to my tastes, for sure, but I take issue with the idea that the only alternative aesthetic to social realism or pseudo-historical consistency is a dog's barf lowest-common denominator. A lot of work in the OSR and the Forge alike has gone into establishing how the original swords and sorcery canon makes a crashed spaceship a valid and exciting aesthetic vehicle for exploration; count the number of works in the reading guides of AD&D's Appendix N or Edward's Sword and Sorcerer where this would fit in just fine. Personally neither Dernyi Rising/Harn realism nor Shannara/3E D&D vanilla fantasy are to my taste, but factually both these movements come later in genre fiction and gaming than the boundaryless mix of the fantastic that preceded them.
But I totally agree with you about encounter tables and players adding the third dimension. I just disagree that it's a problem if the players start out with an ironic distance; I think a sandbox works best when both the goofiest thing the players come up with and the weirdest flumph in the canon of the game you're playing are part of what the GM is mandated to make seem real. As James says, characters that survive will inevitably be taken seriously; the trick is to encourage player input so they can make characters whose survival they start out caring for.
Tav_Behemoth:
Oops, that was C. Edwards I was agreeing with about encounter tables and disagreeing with about irony.
On strong high level design: I'm writing at the Autarch blog about all the work that goes into designing random tables for wandering monsters and random treasures and procedural dungeon stocking, and our lead designer is are posting about designing the economic frameworks within which these make sense, and yeah it's a lot of work to create a new game designed to make it easy to do sandboxing because this work is done for the GM. (OD&D makes it easy for me to run the White Sandbox because it represents three+ years of playtesting such a framework by Arneson's group, plus Gygax adding a layer of systematization of the game mechanics that makes it easier to run and a layer of prismatic obfuscation of its intent and vision that makes it easier to customize.)
A sandbox certainly benefits from additional work by the GM, even if it doesn't require it. The random encounter table you make for your dungeon is automatically going to be better than mine because it's meaningful to your campaign; both are going to look like crosswords to an outsider, just like a musical score looks like gibberish to me because I don't read music.
James_Nostack:
Hey Tavis, thanks for dropping by. If you feel like it, would you care to explain how you set up the White Sandbox in its early days, and how you've been "refreshing" that environment between play? I know one input is our carousing results. I suspect you've also got a bunch of random charts describing what dungeon-denizens do next. I know that as a player, sometimes I got frustrated because it seemed like the Caverns of Thracia changed so much between delves that essentially our previous recon missions had been for nothing. Was that just bad luck of the dice? Did you trim back major changes later? Were you deliberately offering some resistance at that point so that we would have a delicious feeling of frustration? Could loudly voiced, and widely shared, player dissatisfaction cause you to override the dice?
I guess I'm wondering about how you update the sandbox from a procedural standpoint, even if that standpoint is simply, "I squint at this NPC and ask myself, 'What would he like to do, and how much of it can he reasonably accomplish by next session?'"
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