Sandboxing - story before, story now, story after
contracycle:
Quote from: Tav_Behemoth on November 02, 2011, 07:00:17 AM
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.
No. That's just ridiculous. I mean, you're welcome to your Acid Fantasy if thats your thing, but to say it's necessary as a component of the sandbox is absurd. The sandbox is a particlar design methodology, it is not and should not be confused with a blanket welcome offered to any old shit. As above, and as the Gamasutra article indicates, the most effective sandboxes have become so by NOT being "anything goes".
Tav_Behemoth:
James: In the beginning (when I ran it at Recess, where Greengoat played) I had the town of Hruhrudingfallor with three higher-level NPCs who were looking for hirelings for expeditions; the random wilderness encounter charts; and then some classic modules on tap that the NPCs were trying to reach, which I correctly suspected wouldn't happen in a four-hour convention slot. One of those was Caverns of Thracia, which became the "tentpole dungeon".
Originally all the between-sessions stuff was based on the needs that came up in play - like creating the town of Belltower to be a closer home base - and on the module, like drawing parallels between dungeon factions and ones I created in town. Later I started making "wandering monster tables" for important dungeon personalities like the Patriarch of the Dark One; I'd roll 1 in 6 to see if they did something unexpected between sessions, and if so I'd consult a custom d6 table to say what it was. Now there are enough NPCs that I generalize this to a 1 in 6 chance that something is happening in the domains of Law, Neutrality, Chaos, or the Outer Planes, then if one of these turns up I get the players' help populating a table of the different personalities in that domain we care about; the sandbox is fleshed out enough that I usually know without further assistance what that personality might want to do with their backstage action.
I don't remember that folks were dissatisfied with finding the dungeon different each time, which probably means it wasn't something I felt responsible for. If I had been, I might have changed the procedure but I don't think that was overtly the case; more like a gradual evolution. The one time I remember really screwing up your plan was when y'all were endlessly talking about what you wanted to do in the dungeon, and the dice said that instead the Patriarch of the Dark One was going to launch a counter-attack while you were in town. Having that possibility on the chart expressed my feeling that your depredations against his cult would have repercussions; the rest of the chart was kind of "what might the Patriarch find a more pressing problem than you". Doing it this way made me feel more objective about having a NPC take vengeance, in the same way that in Apocalypse World a player's bad roll of the dice justifies making a hard move against them. To just decide that a NPC would seek to screw the party without a distancing mechanic like dice feels to me too difficult to separate from personal antagonism, whereas I am very happy to roleplay a Patriarch who sometimes is busy with internal rivals but then - 1 in 6 - comes after your asses like a Biblical plague.
contracycle, I don't know what to say other than that:
1) in my experience I would not find running a sandbox to be as satisfying if I said no to player input very often, so having an aesthetic that encourages saying yes to things and gives me a way to make sense of them around familiar sword & sorcery/SF/fantasy touchstones from an era when those genres weren't separate is directly useful to my methodology
2) computer games may have given rise to the term "sandbox" but the nature of their medium already restricts player input so severely that the comparison is like apples and oranges; even here I challenge you to show me a computer game that lets you name your own character but rejects ones it finds contradictory to the aesthetic
3) it is not cool to call my viewpoint ridiculous and conflate my aesthetic with "any old shit".
David Berg:
Gareth,
I think there's a spectrum between (a) a group of people randomly flinging shit at the wall and accepting every piece of it, and (b) a precise aesthetic that's been fully articulated. Somewhere in between those two poles, there's a line, where either people are enough on the same page about the game's style and color and content to achieve a coherent aesthetic, or they aren't. It sounds to me like, however far James' groups are from precision and articulation, they are at least on the right side of the line. It's not actually anything goes, it's just that a lot of stuff goes, and the players are tuned in enough to what doesn't belong that they aren't trying to force in inappropriate crap that must then be rejected.
I talked to Tavis about his game a while back and asked him how the disparate content produced by play manages to cohere into something that isn't a mishmash. He replied that, whatever the players get up to, he envisions the unfolding fiction as if Jack Vance were writing it, and plays accordingly. That, plus James' notes about acid fantasy, tells me pretty clearly that there is a something going on here. It's just a broad and flexible and low-maintenance something that doesn't get discussed at the table and may be hard to pin down afterward.
I agree with you that simply throwing Aragorn, Cthulhu, Conan, Martians and Mind-Flayers (e.g.) into a blender, with no standards at all for what comes out the other end, sucks. But I don't think it takes a ton of effort to avoid that. My personal sweet spot is more toward a tighter thematic aesthetic for my sandbox play (which I'll get to in a bit), but the stuff these guys are doing doesn't strike me as awful or broken -- just a matter of taste.
Ps,
-David
C. Edwards:
Tavis,
Personally, I can't reach the level of emotional investment I require to GM a game for very long if everyone is running around with joke names. It's also my experience that when people play in an ironic fashion that it creates a whole additional meta level to their play in that their play often becomes self-consciously about expressing that ironic distance. But I also realize that is an aesthetic decision and not relevant to the sandbox aspect of play. Same as whether you mix robots and godservers in to the mix. That's just fantasy before they took the chocolate out of the peanut butter.
As far as using a bunch of existing modules to fill a sandbox, I do think that it has the potential to appear like a jumble of junk. But as David points out, if done thoughtfully and given the appearance of coherence by the GM during play, what could have been a junkyard is perceived as a unified aesthetic. That doesn't help anybody that dislikes that particular aesthetic but then that's just another variable within a sandbox.
Concerning reuse, I mainly use existing maps and then add in my own content. I make it a point not to run a game for more than a handful of players at a time though, so I can get away with smaller dungeon-y areas. If I was running a game with a dozen players at a time, or even something like the West Marches, then I'd likely use a lot more ready-to-go content.
David Berg:
Hi James,
I think one of the larger variables among sandbox campaigns is how play evolves, and how missions feed into each other. I think you and I agree that visiting a series of unrelated dungeons that happen to be in the same world is not in itself sufficient for cumulative satisfaction. Things need to change -- the characters, the world, the dungeons, or all of the above.
If each dungeon is a particularly cool challenge, and each session results in a win or loss, I could see that being a satisfying formula regardless of external factors. But that's not how you guys play, right? And that's not the traditional sandbox formula -- the traditional sandbox rewards you with stuff that's only cool if you get to use it later. So, yeah, a series of crawls better be adding up to something.
I played in an old-school D&D game called Telvar. The GM, Edwin, had plopped a bunch of modules of various levels onto a map, and then made up an extremely rich and detailed world around them. By the time I played with him, he was tracking weather and its effect on trade and travel, as well as tracking the rise and fall of various governments and currencies. All this off-screen maintenance allowed him to bring a living world to play, and even though most of his players were there to crack heads, solve puzzles, win loot and not die, they all fell in love with the world. They couldn't help it, because everything they did was plugged into everything else.
Looting a dungeon meant (1) paying a percentage to the fair-weather ally who'd tipped you off to it, (2) paying a salvage tax to the government who owned the land above the dungeon, (3) fighting other people with claims to the stuff you looted, (4) negotiating with creatures who might want to move into the dungeon, (5) surviving ambushes from your enemies, who found you easily after this big event, and on and on. And that doesn't even count loot management -- keep this, sell that, have this other thing forged into a weapon -- and recuperation. Every spell had its cost, and paying for a regeneration or resurrection was the biggest party expense.
From what I could tell, Edwin never set himself a clear goal to make the players' lives interesting. He just played the world as he saw it, and the players could engage with any given piece of it as they wished. This led to various cool moments, but also a lot of disunity. Between or en route to missions, it was not uncommon for two players to be off poking at different parts of the world, another to be doing personal character stuff, and the others getting irritated because they weren't in the dungeon yet. Some time after I left the game, I heard that the party became embroiled in local politics and minor war between various factions. That sounded like great fun.
One feature of the varied levels of dungeons was that you never knew what you were getting into until you were well into it. Edwin never calibrated anything for player convenience, so every new cave entrance was a potential cakewalk or TPK. Accordingly, there was a lot of, "Well, we've been at this for a full session, but ti looks like a friggin' death trap, so let's go away and come back when we're a few levels higher." This was frustrating on the immediate level, but fed into a longer-term reward cycle.
Short-term: "We spent all that time deciding and preparing and getting here, and we got psyched for the treasure, and we got just enough danger and violence to get the adrenaline pumping, and now it's back to square one. No loot, more travel, more decisions, and off to a different quest. Fuck."
Long-term: "When we finally got to 8th level, we looked at our spells and hit points and decided we were ready to tackle that dungeon from 2 years ago. Now, here we are! That Spectre we couldn't beat is going down, the mystery we never answered is just around the next bend, and the promised treasure will soon be ours! We fucking earned this one!"
Some of what I've done with Delve is taking the most functional parts of this experience and applying them to a different context. One of the places I like my continuity is with long-term characters, so Delve doesn't include missions that are likely to kill anyone who's playing attentively. Telvar definitely had long-term characters too, but the process for getting one was more than just "don't be an idiot". The first step was to cycle through a ton of first-level characters, most of whom would die on their first missions. Once your guy got to second level, everyone else started valuing him a little more, so his chances of survival improved. Once you got to the third level, you were able to start playing the way the long-term characters played: very cautiously. Poke every brick with a ten-foot pole, glean every scrap of info before entering a new situation, spell-shift to maximize resources, etc.
Maybe this added some suspense to the eventual attempts, but to me, most of it just seemed like boring accounting. The key was repetition and obviousness. New or clever plans never bored me! But taking ANOTHER nap to recover ANOTHER magic missile was just tedious.
Why did this group play through all the accounting details? Well, first, in a cutthroat challenge, every iota of advantage matters. And second, with the gameworld always alive and moving in Edwin's brain, every chunk of time the characters spent doing anything was an opportunity for him to work out what else was happening. Sometimes this "what else" impacted the players! But most of the time it did not.
All told, we played through a lot of crap that bored the hell out of me. I think it bored most of the others too, and they simply saw it as a necessary part of play and thus didn't consider trying to ditch it, but I'm not sure.
Delve is my solution to a lot of those problems. I'll start mentioning some techniques shortly, but this post is long enough.
James, a few questions:
1) Does my account of Telvar character death and survival sound like Eric's game? If not, what's the difference? What do players do when their characters die? (In Telvar, they'd go off by themselves to make a new character, or sit & watch.)
2) There were exactly two things we'd do with a Telvar dungeon: (1) beat it and never come back to it again, or (2) reach a point where it was about to kill you, and run away so it couldn't. Is there a third thing that's happened in your games? I was a bit confused by your talk of repeated trips to changing dungeons.
I ask party because a defeated Telvar dungeon served as a decent place to stop. Yeah, sticking around to advance and grow into the world was ideal; but killing the final boss monster, seeing how cool the treasure was, and saying, "Later guys, I can't play for the next month," wasn't half bad.
Ps,
-David
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