Sandboxing - story before, story now, story after
James_Nostack:
Dave wrote:
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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
That's actually more or less my pitch for my next Dictionary of Mu game.
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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.
That's very perceptive. I'd say that Tavis almost never says "No!" to someone's character concept or contribution, but he always interprets that contribution in a very specific way that looks totally ecumenical to casual observation, but is in fact a very specific thing. Namely, a story of half-assed murder-hobo's trying to bullshit their way to glory in a Weird Fantasy world.
Tavis wrote:
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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.
Tavis, here's a question for you.
Let's say we're playing a modern-day RPG that focuses on foreign news correspondents the same way Dungeons & Dragons focuses on dungeon-delving adventurers. We can call it Britishers & Broadcasters. And so a campaign gets started up, where we're the Lagos desk, stationed in Nigeria, reporting on the MEND guerrillas, Royal Dutch Shell's various mercenary groups, ecological destruction and impoverishment, and widespread corruption among a shifting web of law enforcement and political factions. Which story we take is totally up to us as players--we might even stray into the Cameroon or Liberia, or chase down some Shell executives in The Hague to get a quote. And there are subplots involving stress on marriages back home, affairs, moral compromises, and so on. As we work on stories, various principals try to put pressure on us to quit, pursue their own agendas, etc. behind the scenes.
Would you say that's a sandbox? If not, why not?
If it's a sandbox, do you think it is improved by player characters with names like "BEE-R-CAN" or "Zaxa of the City of Monuments"? What if one of the players had a normal name, like "Tavis St. James," but the player wanted him to be a three-headed bog-beast? If there's an understanding that this sort of thing is frowned upon, does the game stop being a sandbox?
One of the things that came out of the Forge sometime around 2005-2006, which like a lot of Forge ideas took a hell of a lot of effort, yet sounds obvious in hindsight, is that sometimes saying No in some situations can be more creatively empowering than saying Yes, because policing the aesthetic a little bit can help players immerse in the world.
Self-Dissent: Grousing About the Sandbox
I don't want to make it sound like sandboxes are perfect modes of play without any serious problems. A sandbox style of play has significant drawbacks.
There's no "main" storyline (neither pre-planned nor emergent). There a whole bunch of plot threads, some of which attract sustained attention and others which fall by the wayside.Without a main storyline, it's hard to say when the sandbox "ends." In theory, the world always "refreshes" itself and so there's no conclusion unless you get a TPK or the group splits up.Without a conclusion, the time commitment can become oppressive. Glantri has played for 100 sessions. Eric has put in about 400 hours, and I'd reckon each of the main players have played about 250-300 hours. And it will go on. Weekly. Forever.If the world doesn't "refresh" itself in response to player input, or if you can't be bothered to care about that stuff, the game can begin to look very self-similar, which is what Callan was alluding to before. To a certain extent, the prospect of killing monsters in a crossword puzzle is always gonna excite me, but it may not excite me enough to do it for 300 hours.if you're not able to make a serious time commitment, you become a far less effective player because you've missed all those evolutions of the setting, which is meat-and-drink to the high-commitment players. When I missed several sessions of Tavis's game, I felt really depressed because it was like a gamer version of Flowers for Algernon.
Tav_Behemoth:
Quote from: James_Nostack on November 02, 2011, 04:39:24 PM
Let's say we're playing a modern-day RPG that focuses on foreign news correspondents the same way Dungeons & Dragons focuses on dungeon-delving adventurers. We can call it Britishers & Broadcasters.... If it's a sandbox, do you think it is improved by player characters with names like "BEE-R-CAN" or "Zaxa of the City of Monuments"? What if one of the players had a normal name, like "Tavis St. James," but the player wanted him to be a three-headed bog-beast? If there's an understanding that this sort of thing is frowned upon, does the game stop being a sandbox? One of the things that came out of the Forge sometime around 2005-2006, which like a lot of Forge ideas took a hell of a lot of effort, yet sounds obvious in hindsight, is that sometimes saying No in some situations can be more creatively empowering than saying Yes, because policing the aesthetic a little bit can help players immerse in the world.
Those are good questions, James. Yes, that does sound like a sandbox; here is my take on the subsequent questions:
1) If I don't think that B&B is improved by Zaxa the bog-beast, I won't create him as an NPC or put him in the world that the players are first confronted with. This kind of establishing the parameters - writing the advert text on the tin - is the kind of authority over tone and aesthetic I'm comfortable with.
2) If a player wants to play Zaxa and there is an understanding that this is frowned upon, I'll let someone else express that understanding. My feeling, maybe conditioned by lots of experience in a "trad" environment, is that many players tend to give the GM way more authority than I want; for me to be the one to say "that's a dumb name" will be a lot more likely to crush the delicate shoot of their agency than if it comes from a fellow-player.
3) If no one thinks Zaxa is dumb enough to speak up about it, who am I to say that this name doesn't belong in B&B? Maybe it's my reading of the text on the tin that is deficient. I have a reasonable confidence in my ability to make the world seem real and maintain a tone in what I present, because this is what I can control. I have no confidence in my ability to read minds - maybe the players want me to be a straight man while they provide comic relief, maybe they want these news correspondents to be Hunter Thompson and Raul Duke fighting ether-bats that don't exist except when they're around. Let's play and find out! I don't think the tone of the game is nearly as delicate as players' sense of agency. My experience is that a world in which players can do what they want is the same as a world they will want to engage with and take seriously. It's awesome to explore the character arc of someone who started out as a joke and now is fighting widespread corruption and the problems of being a bog beast; the fact that this kind of thing arises unplanned is what I find best about a sandbox, because how would I have ever come up with that or made it work in play?
4) To start the process of figuring out how we're going to take Zaxa seriously, I'd rather say "yes but" than "no." Cool, tell me about how you see a bog beast! Okay, we could do that but so far lots of the sessions have involved smoky back-room deals, if you introduce a bog beast then those are going to change to scenes of people screaming and running. What if you have some kind of disguise that lets you pass for human? Then I'd tell the other players that they see a guy wearing a nametag that says Tavis St. James, and then ask that guy "Okay, Zaxa, it looks like no one has seen through your cover identity to the bog beast underneath" - throwing the dissonance out there for the group to make of it what they will. If there is a group understanding that there is no such thing as a bog beast, and if Zaxa's player likes the game and the group enough to keep playing, my bet is that before long we will be taking seriously the awesome character of Mr. St. James and his psychotic delusions.
I'm not implying that saying NO is ridiculous; it works for what some people want to do, and the Glantri regulars get things out of a frequent-denial environment that I'm not going to be able to provide. I just think that the rules and the dice say no plenty often, and that a sandbox works best if my role is to say yes to all the player input that I can within the framework of the rules.
C. Edwards:
James wrote:
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There's no "main" storyline (neither pre-planned nor emergent). There a whole bunch of plot threads, some of which attract sustained attention and others which fall by the wayside.
Could you clarify a bit what you mean? For all intents and purposes isn't a plot thread given sustained attention equivalent to an emergent storyline? I'm inclined to say "yes", but I may not be grasping what you're saying.
Which brings me to..
James wrote
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Without a main storyline, it's hard to say when the sandbox "ends." In theory, the world always "refreshes" itself and so there's no conclusion unless you get a TPK or the group splits up.
My experience has actually been the opposite. At some point some aspect of play gets under the players' skin enough that they focus on that to almost the complete exclusion of everything else. It could be thwarting the plans of a particular villain, a situation they want to change, helping their favorite NPC, or whatever. Which usually results in a long chain of closely related events, adventures, and hijinks. When all is said and done and their goals have been reached those characters are usually retired. This is just speculation, but I think there may be a line where the satisfaction of what you've accomplished with a character outweighs the desire to keep adventuring with that character. A sort of mental and emotional "Ahh, that was enough. I'm full now."
That's not to say that you're not correct regarding most sandbox play. Just that I've been fortunate that hasn't been my personal experience. But it also has me wondering what dynamics tend to result in my experience vs. the endless sandbox.[/list]
stefoid:
Admission - I did not read every post in this thread due to time pressure.
Sandbox seems to imply working out the 'geography' first and foremost. I imagine a little box with a scale world in it with little cloud-ringed mountains and a sea. I suppose you odnt have to have an exact map of the sanbox, but a list of important locations and a list of potential things that might go on there should the PCs visit that location. Is that the general idea?
What would you call a setup where instead of concentrating primarilly on the geography, you expend that energy on the NPCs? i.e. have little to no pre-planned geography, but a large cast of significant characters that the PCs might run into, and detail these characters - their personalities and goals - to the same detail that you might have expended on locations.
I realize that with sandbox games you edvelop NPCs anyway, but what Im suggesting is devote all your energy to NPCs - invest more thought and detail into what maikes them tick and craete many more of them than you otherwise might do if you are also concentrating on world + situation construction.
Marshall Burns:
This stuff is fantastic. I've been thinking about this stuff lately too.
So, "sandbox." The first time I saw the term bandied about, I was like, "oh yeah, that." I dunno, it clicked in my brain with an automatic association. And, like every other term out there, there's a strong possibility that the click I got in my brain is entirely different from the click other people get (if they get one at all).
Man, lots to talk about here. Okay, let me tell you about Misadventures in Nowhere.
Starting in junior high, a few of my friends and I started designing roleplaying games, because we wanted to play them and we didn't have any. (We also had only the vaguest idea of what they were, which led to some very interesting things in those first designs -- things which, sadly, never bloomed or matured because of our own immaturity at the time.) I was the only one that stuck with it, and by sophomore year I had a functional and Coherent -- albeit baroque, unwieldy, and inelegant -- design called Misadventures in Nowhere. (Nowhere was a shared setting between most of the games we made, as well as stories and other shit we made. The games all focused on different regions of Nowhere, and basically they contained whatever we were into. Mine had skyscrapers and castles and guns and swords and cars and wizards.)
Ok, so, I had a map, dig? This map was of County Remington, and there were ostensibly other counties out there, but we never left County Remington for some reason. This map had four towns, a loose-knit agricultural community, a forest, the edge of a desert, a mountain range with a mostly-abandoned mine, a highway connecting to two other counties, a weird stretch of land with "unstable geography" called the Expanse, and a horrible, dark, twisted, walking-dead-infested wasteland called the Blacklands. To this day I can still draw this map from memory, almost the same way I drew it then.
We played one of four ways:
1. I prepped a scenario and we played it. Let me explain what this means. First, I would come up with a situation. This was either an opportunity (e.g. an earthquake has revealed ancient ruins in the forest, and word is there's gold in them thar hills) or a problem that needed solving for the good of the people or something (e.g. some crazy pop star called the Strawberry Man has been mind-controlling people through the TV with his concert footage, recruiting an army. Yes, that's a real example). Then we'd put the characters in and they'd try to deal with it.
Scenarios of the first type met with low to middling player interest and investment. Scenarios of the second type met with little to no interest. All in all, this mode of play was unsuccessful and shortly abandoned.
2. We basically killed each other and took each other's stuff, with little-to-no in-fiction reason. We did this a lot, mainly whenever we had twenty-odd minutes of free time.
3. The characters just kinda hung out until I realized that nothing was going to happen and I finally said something like, "Ok, the TV antenna's broken. What do you do?" and they formulated a plan to build a new antenna, which led to things like going to the closet to get a coat hanger only to be attacked by a possessed disco suit (which they killed with a torpedo -- a magical torpedo, the Torpedo of Spiraling Death -- destroying the coat hanger in the process).
This really only happened once, with players who were into silliness so I just went for it. A less-silly version nearly happened every time me and my cousin James played with just the two of us, but nothing ever happened because I failed to get that important realization that nothing was going to happen unless I introduced a conflict.
4. This is what I thought of when I first read the term "sandbox play." I put the aforementioned map on the table and asked, "So what do y'all want to do this time?" And somebody points at the map and says, "What's going on here?" and I'm like, "Uhhhhhhh.... they're having trouble with giants down there. Uhhhh..... There's a bounty on them giants if you can bring one down." And maybe a bunch of the characters decide to band up to go giant hunting because, even though they don't really like each other and are always back-stabbing, undercutting, and murder-looting each other, none of them are able to take down a giant solo.
Or they point to the Expanse and say, "Ghost towns and abandoned buildings show up there, right? Let's go find an abandoned building and loot it." So I make up a haunted mansion for them to find, with the haunted-ness concentrated in the basement and when they go down there the boiler will become animated and try to eat them. On the second visit, anyway. The first time there was a dispute over loot distribution, leading to me shooting Seth's guy to get my point across, my guy getting crushed with a bathtub by Matt's guy, and Gary's guy collapsing the floor on top of the few who were still alive at this point by cutting through a crucial upright support with a circular saw.
Or a bunch of Dean's characters and a bunch of my characters decide to band together to form a mercenary company, so we start building a compound just outside of local legal jurisdictions, steal a bus, some guns and heavy explosives, and a Humvee, and start selling our services to, say, the farmers in the north of the county whose children have been getting snatched by gorillabears ("You may think that a gorillabear looks like a cross between a gorilla and a bear, but, like most Things that crawl out of the Blacklands, it mostly just looks like something you don't want to see"). This is some of the most fun I can remember having with this game, especially with regard to gathering the resources to build the compound and pad our armory. Stealing the bus in particular was an adventure, and we announced the opening of our company by slaughtering the flesh-eating nightowls that lived in the clocktower of one of the towns. One of my characters started wearing a headdress made out of their feathers. It was cool.
So, basically, there was this setting, barely fleshed-out though it may be, and the players went where they wanted and did what they wanted. Eventually, I stopped improvising the things that were going on at the various locations on the map, and started prepping things, trying to get away from the "Oh there's a bunch of X there that need killin', and folks'll pay you for it" formula, but before that could get interesting we graduated and I never really played that game again until it had been rewritten into an entirely different game that pretty much focused on the Expanse and not much else.
Lately, I've been trying to recreate that game in a less baroque, more elegant fashion, with a better fictional component. System-wise it's mostly the same as my dungeon game MADcorp, and it's pretty much the same setting too, but more of it. I've been tooling around with the point-at-the-map situations involving things like wars between some penny-ante daimyos here, a famine here, a succession battle over there, and so on, with a unifying principle: all of the situations are situations that the characters can insert themselves in and then leverage toward personal gain. I'm also tooling around with a multi-pronged advancement system by which characters can advance in terms of experience, wealth, fame, infamy, and recognizance of deeds by powers that be. Advancements in these areas increase the players' options (e.g. get famous and maybe you can get a corporate sponsorship; gain enough infamy and you'll have an "in" with such-and-such mob; with enough deeds you can become right-hand man of Hammurabi Musashi II, ruler of all of New Mexico and parts of Arizona), with the long-term goal to be to retire your character in the manner of your desiring -- whether that means getting to live out your days on your own private island, or becoming king of Kansas, or just getting a patch of land and the resources to start a farm, whatever. If you can retire your guy in the way you were hoping to, you win. Inspiration-wise, I've mainly been looking at 0e D&D (particularly the rules for building a castle and shit), Vornheim, and Eero's Primitive D&D stuff.
What I've figured is I can prep the situations for the start of the game, and after that it's going to depend on the PCs. Which situations do they resolve and how, which do they fail to resolve, which do they ignore? Their advancement tracks cover their benefits, but what happens to the world now? I want the players to be able to chew the setting up and spit it out, but it also needs to keep going. To that end I've been trying to think of Techniques for managing that. I've been thinking about some kind of checklist of conditionals for the GM to run through between sessions. Like, "Did the players kill a dude? Or two or five? Yeah, probably. Who's pissed off about that? Who's happy about it?" and "Is there a power vacuum now? Choose or create an NPC to fill it," but I haven't got far with it.
I've also been thinking about the oh-crap-I-wasn't-ready-for-the-players-to-go-there effect, and how it can be prevented or circumvented so as to avoid the "Um, there's an X that needs killin'" happening every damn time. One thing that has occurred to me is retrofitting modules for other games. I don't haven any of those, so I can't speak to how easy or feasible that really is. Another solution that I've thought about is having a brief pre-session session for the GM and players to get together, have a coffee, and then the GM puts the map on the table, armed with some sketchy, proto-ideas of what's happening in each place. The players pick one, and then the GM prepares for it in detail.
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