After 17 years of GMing, I'm bored of writing extensive plots that require me, far too often, to restrict my player's choices.
I'm sick of building a themepark where players sometimes never want to get on the rides.
Hence forth, at least for the time being, I reject the path. The plot. The ride.
Instead of a park, I want to build a sandbox.
What experiences do people have with more sandbox style play?
Does anyone know any good blogs/templates/guides to creating a good sandbox?
Any warnings from those who've had problems in the past?
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I find that the sandbox requires more work than creating a path. If players are presented with options and don't like them or refuse to partake. It might be time to either let them run the game or find new players that want to play rather than refuse their options.
Just an opinion and not really what you asked for but its a game for everyone and I think some players don't believe that the GM counts.
Funny, I was just reading another post by you. With 17 years XP you ought to be able to wing this.
A good GM winging things is not as good as a good GM with great notes.
Any GM alive becomes a superior GM with good documentation and an organized work flow.
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Check out the free version of Stars Without Number. It's got some good sandbox advice in it. This article is worth checking out: Bringing Some Old-School Principles Into Pathfinder. There's also this one: History in the Sandbox. What's more: Nonlinear (Sandbox) Games.
Thank you both. I had already done a lot of what gnomersy had suggested but those articles are exactly the type of thing I was looking for.
I use(d) a combination of the two when I use to write my own adventures. The players were never on a rail, but the story did have a plot, and it was never really restrictive. I put the task in front of the players, and let them figure out how to solve it. This would lead to the next plot hook, and they had another issue to take care of. Sometimes they would do something I never even thought of, but I knew they had _____ to take care of so they had to come back. :)
I would like to do a sandbox where a player gives me a background and I work with them on a quest, but it is hard to find players that motivated. If I were to that the players would basically decide what where the game went next.
Why is it that so often, discussions of sandboxing start with characterising plots as bad?
Where did I characterize plots as bad?
I simply said I was sick of them and outlined my own problems with using them.
Someone can become sick of a good thing.
I didn't say you did. It just seems to pop up in every one of those threads so I'm preempting it.
I didn't say you did. It just seems to pop up in every one of those threads so I'm preempting it.
You're preempting the start of a discussion that's already started and didn't include what you wanted to preempt until you mentioned it?
I forgot to mention this: Stars Without Number has a great section on factions. That part alone makes the rules worth a download.
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Bleh. I'm tired. I meant that it seems inevitable that someone will come in and strawman the thread to death. Plots can be nice. Sandboxes can be nice. This is not a thread about tearing down sandboxes.
Just want to say thanks for starting this thread. This is my wheelhouse. I'll be back with more to add.
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There is also the West Marches style of sandbox play. It seems, to me, to be a little less intense with regards to GM preparation (in that the GM doesn't have to do EVERYTHING upfront, but builds things as the players explore).
I like the West Marches idea.
I already did that by dropping my players in "the frontier".
Last night was my first experiment in "hands off" GMing (other than times where I had done like zero prep and had to wing it).
So, more accurately, this was my first experiment in hands off GMing that included good notes.
So far, so good. They went out of their way to go hunt a young white dragon not for some grand story but because some witch in the forest would trade them a magical sword for some of their old magic and a full mouth of white dragon teeth.
Now they're gearing up to fight a giant simply because I made mention of some very ornate shield on the mayor's wall which, under closer investigation, was magic. The mayor wants either 30k in gold for the town's coffers or for the players to clear out a frost giant from nearby (which is an APL+3 encounter, but it's a really good shield).
The gear was all rolled randomly as part of things that the settlement had in stock (as per the GameMastery settlement rules) and it's all working out really well.
It's given me a) the ability to do a lot less extensive prep and still run a good game and b) allows the players to pick their quests/fights a bit more, so it opens up options for them to plan and prepare for specific encounters.
Watching my players actually sit around the table (in game and in real life) and go over dragon slaying strategies and actually adjust spell preparation was something I'd rarely experienced as a GM.
West Marches was the first thing I was going to link to, but since someone beat me to it, here's the second:
This blog is incredible.
I linked to all the posts filtered for the tag "hex crawl" but there is way more sandbox relevant stuff on there besides just his hex crawl model. I just thought it was a good place to start. Also he uses 3.5, whereas the overwhelming majority of people blogging about sandbox campaigns use retro-clones. So that in itself makes his articles a little more PF friendly.
Sometimes when I'm running a sandbox style game, the player characters aren't the only ones sandboxing. NPC parties going after opportunities in the same wide open world can spice things up. Plot is not necessary, if they're simply adventurers like the party.
Yeah, I'm thinking of leading the PCs to eventually become members of a sort of "adventuring company" and I'll have other rival companies out there which will lead to some good conflict.
I'm thinking halfling assassins too at some point. One player is a tengu and in my world halfings HATE tengu.
A war going on can be another useful thing. The players can get involved in one side or the other, or try to benefit from the conflict opportunistically.
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An important thing to avoid is a sandbox world that is just a string of random encounters. It's fun to go out there, see something happen and do something about it, then watch the consequences propagate out into the world.
My own weakness with grand plots is that my experience with fantasy literature is almost entirely high-fantasy.
I have very little mental reference for low fantasy.
Hence my grand plots tend to be REALLY grand world ending stuff and I kind of want to try and hold off on that stuff until my player's characters are at a level where it would make more sense for them to be involved in such giant events.
I didn't say you did. It just seems to pop up in every one of those threads so I'm preempting it.You're preempting the start of a discussion that's already started and didn't include what you wanted to preempt until you mentioned it?
I would say Umbral Reavers point is well taken. There was enough implied even in the thread title to risk framing this discussion the wrong way.
I took it as a reminder to respect different styles of play. I could have easily become over-zealous about my love of open gaming, so I'll be careful to respect those who want to ride the rails. My own little brother tells me he wishes I had more over-arching meta-plot in my games.
Since you're saying you don't want a big overarching plot, I wouldn't necessarily recommend running Kingmaker (which, while sandboxy especially at the beginning, does have a common plot thread that it assumes the PCs eventually will find and follow), but if you can pick it up it definitely gives some advice for handling a sandbox, and some sample rivalries you could adapt (the Stag Lord's bandits, the neighboring kingdoms, the intelligent monsters in the region, etc. etc. etc.).
From Grognardia:
"D&D exposes the hidden theme within the DM. A spontaneous story evolves out of the dice rolls and lethal rules, the player's actions and personality, and the personality and interpretation of the DM."
"In OD&D characters carve out an emergent history action by action, roll by roll, with some awareness that they might be snuffed out at any time by the rules or a fickle DM...This creates a gameworld which is strange, does not conform to many bread&butter narrative tropes, and is often senseless in a cause/effect kind of way."
"The only books that I have read which felt like this were Jack Vance's Dying Earth writings.
As an example, seemingly major characters often appear and disappear in the story with little lasting impact and many seemingly important McGuffins are brought up and dropped with little lasting effect to the story.
Best of all, Vance's characters respond to important mind blowing things in a nonplussed and often irritated manner, EXACTLY LIKE SOME VETERAN PLAYERS DO!"
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I didn't like Dying Earth for exactly that reason. So much interesting stuff gets dropped and never revisited.
I have to admit, this is exactly why I have trouble sometimes killing my PCs off, at least prior to obtaining at least reincarnate. I'm far too much of a storyteller to be able to run a pure sandbox myself, and the characters are as much a part of my story as the setting is; losing them to a poorly-timed, anticlimactic combat scene (as compared to them doing something stupid, at which I have no qualms whatsoever) just seems story-ruining.
But dang if it doesn't keep people on their toes, not knowing what's around the next corner until the dice drop. =)
Look up Check For Traps on The Escapist Magazine's website. Fantastic set of articles on this very subject.
@Umbral Reaver:
It's an odd style. I thought he pulled it off better in Lyonesse.
Hopefully the point is not for events to be meaningless, but to let meaning emerge organically in less then obvious ways.
I'm excited about the narrative prospect of RPG's when no one has written the narrative in advance. It gives me chills.
I have to admit, this is exactly why I have trouble sometimes killing my PCs off, at least prior to obtaining at least reincarnate. I'm far too much of a storyteller to be able to run a pure sandbox myself, and the characters are as much a part of my story as the setting is; losing them to a poorly-timed, anticlimactic combat scene (as compared to them doing something stupid, at which I have no qualms whatsoever) just seems story-ruining.
But dang if it doesn't keep people on their toes, not knowing what's around the next corner until the dice drop. =)
I think the trick of the sandbox campaign is weaving the story into the world more and less into the character's themselves.
Think of a game like Skyrim.
Now, obviously, Skyrim's main plot doesn't live up to your average more linear RPG, but the sheer width of the world makes up for a lot of its lack of depth.
When you hear two people talk about Skyrim, you rarely hear stories about how they defeated some given quest, it's always stories about the random stuff that happens to them when they're NOT following the quest. The stories they stumble on.
I'm trying to use the Bethesda/Black Isle method of weaving interesting stories into the world and allowing the players to become as integrated into the story as they want.
I want to create those moments of player driven play that stand out to them.
From Zak S of "I Hit it With My Axe":
"In Empire, George Lucas wanted it to go:
Leia: "I love you"
Han: "I love you, too."
(into the carbonite chamber.)
But, on the spur of the moment, just before the crew was supposed to break for lunch, they ran it and Leia said: "I love you."
and Han said "I know."
If you want a "meaning" to the Han Solo character it's more in that moment (a moment the "player" just threw in) than in that obviously pre-marital kiss he shares with Leia at the end of the Jedi (a moment of character development and plot resolution that'd been planned more-or-less since they first told Lucas he'd get to write a Star Wars sequel).
-And in the end, that surprise "meaning"--the revealed meaning of what's inside the people playing individually and as a group--the subtle differences between what they as people find compelling and interesting and generally effective even when they're not trying to is as real and meaningful a meaning (for those who care about looking around for such things once the blood's dry and the owlbears are dead) then any kind of meaning that a DM or storygamey consortium of players puts together on purpose."
Dot
I have to admit, this is exactly why I have trouble sometimes killing my PCs off, at least prior to obtaining at least reincarnate. I'm far too much of a storyteller to be able to run a pure sandbox myself, and the characters are as much a part of my story as the setting is; losing them to a poorly-timed, anticlimactic combat scene (as compared to them doing something stupid, at which I have no qualms whatsoever) just seems story-ruining.
But dang if it doesn't keep people on their toes, not knowing what's around the next corner until the dice drop. =)
This was huge, huge dilemma for me until I found out that I cared ten times more about it then my players did. After a PC death the party was brainstorming ways to pay for a Raise Dead and the player confessed that once a character had died he couldn't stay invested in that character if it was raised. He would rather roll up something new then have the party blow 1000 GP on diamond dust (or whatever it is). Everyone echoed the sentiment, to my dismay. What about the backstory? What about the plot? After a few weeks of reflecting on it I adjusted my expectations and the incident solved more problems then it raised (no pun intended.) My last reason to ever consider fudging dice-rolls is now obliterated.
Yeah, my new sandbox style of play has eliminated my desire/need to fudge dice.
Though I did "dumb up" a group of 4 ghasts that could have beat the party last night had I used Coup de Grace.
They still managed to knock out the ninja and wizard, but when the cleric finally unparalyzed after 5 rounds (got hit in the surprise round) she nuked them with one positive energy blast (sun domain, rolled well on top of that).
The wizard is still carrying his hand around in a pouch at this point too, so I'm finding this very entertaining as my players are finding that I'm not pulling punches anymore.
They pick up on it pretty quick don't they? Oh I'm liking it so much better.
Incidentally, I find a lot to emulate in Skyrim too. Particularly the various factions PC's can get involved with. Have you ever thought about how small the playable area of that game world is though? Compare that to a typical sandbox RPG setting and you find you can fit Skyrim in one or two hexes. I've concluded that procedurally generated content is a must.
I used Fractal Terrains 3 to create a world map, and I've been kind of filling in the blanks ever since.
Fractal Terrains helped a lot as it gives me climate and weather info, river locations, elevation of mountains and such which sort of lets my brain fill in logical encounters and city locations.
I found this place on my map where a river flowed through fertile farmlands and dumped out into the ocean, which just screamed "trade metropolis" at me and so that's what I put there.
It's nice looking at a map that appears real and going "Wow, that mountain pass is tiny, that would be highly defensible... someone should build a keep there.
It allowed me to create pretty natural nation borders as well by using natural land formations and soil fertility to figure out where these empires would have begun and spread.
It's got me very excited for world building, like I'm a new DM all over again.
That software looks great, I overlooked it because Campaign Cartographer from the same people has a steep learning curve and requires knowledge of CAD. I figured Fractal Terrain would be the same way, but I hear it's not.
I'm too far into my world development to use it now though. I might try it for something in the future. For this project I'm using hand drawn map elements scanned in and manipulated in Gimp. This is how it looks.
For procedurally generated content though, I mostly meant good random tables. Stuff like what you find in the Vornheim City Kit.
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My thoughts on running sandbox stuff, beyond the obvious "develop your world really well," is make sure you've got players ready to run with it.
I remember an early campaign where, even after saying to my players that they were going to need to explore and stir stuff up, the particular group I had just kind of stared at me confused, wondering where the dungeon was and why I hadn't had the kindly wizard show up and tell them what and where to loot. It's hard to remember if you're used to more proactive players or are one, but sometimes players do prefer to be led by the plot--and it's not always easy to tell who's who.
Along with this, make sure you REWARD EXPLORATION, and be willing to come up with some stuff off the fly to make sure stuff happens when players go out of their way to explore. I'm in a campaign where my GM told us he wanted us to explore and look around and get into stuff, but several times I as a player would say, "Okay, we're in the big city, so I'm going to go to the merchant district, and I'm going to ask some people places they'd recommend I visit. I also want to keep an eye out for unusual items at the vendor stalls." I'd try to give as much information beyond that as I could--depending on how much the GM gave me to work with--but then the same GM who told me I should explore and get into things would then say, Okay, you look at stuff but there's nothing unusual and people just tell you to go look at the usual stuff like the big statue in town square and now it's dinner time." And I might even say, "Okay, I go visit the big statue," hoping it's some kind of hook, and he'd say, "It's a really big statue. That's all." After that happened a few times, I got discouraged from exploring, because no matter what I tried to express an interest in or go out and explore, nothing happened, so I just waited for him to throw us a recognizable plot hook as in a more typical linear campaign.
And the thing is, I'm sure in the big city, he had some stuff going on in the background, but he didn't give us any obvious clues to what those were and had no way of knowing what we could do to stumble on them. And so either you need to give clues or be willing to make anything happen anywhere--like make some "moveable" encounters, events that could happen anywhere, like a pickpocket targets the party or an influential couple has a lover's spat on the street or a dragon is seen flying off with a horse in its talons, etc. etc.
TL;DR when designing your sandbox, make sure the PCs have a bucket and spade.
That software looks great, I overlooked it because Campaign Cartographer from the same people has a steep learning curve and requires knowledge of CAD. I figured Fractal Terrain would be the same way, but I hear it's not.
Campaign Cartographer does NOT require knowledge of CAD. It is CAD-based, but it does not require knowledge of the engine to use. There can be a steep learning curve, but there are also TONS of tutorials and resources, plus a very helpful user community. If you get the program, load up a tutorial or two, and follow through, you'll be making lovely maps in no time. I am speaking as a former proofreader/now secretary with degrees in English and absolutely no formal computer or graphical training in anything.
I'm not a pro, as these images will attest, but with my entire lack of qualifications, I've been able to make stuff with it like a library floating on a rock in the Astral Plane, a map of a Manor house (based on the castle in Suikoden III), world maps (this particular one also based on Suikoden III; a couple effects added in the GIMP), amongst many other things (including better images) I don't have uploaded to my Website. Oh, here's another small, "localized" world map which I made in about in hour, for a sample world I random generated.
Sorry, I don't mean to derail this into a CC3 commercial, but while I get that both the cost and the starting-to-learn part can be daunting, I just want to get across that it is entirely possible to use with no advance training or foreknowledge. If it's not the program for you, that's fine, but it sounds like you've been fed some misinformation.
(Also yes, Fractal Terrains is awesome.)
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I think you can still have strong "theme" even when using randomness. I'm in the process of building up encounter tables, and I'm putting in a lot of wild beasts and plant monsters, but no outsiders, going for a sort of lush wilderness kind of feel.
I would like for the encounter table to have some synergy with druid and ranger animal attitude adjustment powers. If the level 1 party can convince the angry bear not to eat them, that would be cool. The nice thing about animals and similar "neutral" monsters is that encounters don't have to lead to combat, which makes high-CR monsters less likely to TPK. You can have a wilderness that doesn't feel like a kids' playground without it necessarily killing the party.
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Yeah, I think that's the trick to a good sandbox is having that logical consistency.
A cave within an hour of town probably wouldn't contain some horrible beast without the towns people knowing it's there, or knowing that SOMETHING is there.
That was what I did last night, I invented some encounters that made sense for areas they may go, and then if they want there I had an encounter ready to go that made perfect sense for the area.
I find that the best tool for building a sandbox is the simple question "why?"
Drop a town somewhere... why is it there? Why is it the size it is? Why does it have the qualities it does?
This allows a natural world to build up around a town and sometimes adventure locations will sort of build themselves.
Depends upon the group. Many groups say they want a 'sandbox' type game. But when I really give that to them, they don't know what to do and nothing much ever happens. Some groups seem to require pretty heavy rails to make any progress.
On the other hand, I have felt the pain of players refusing to take any of the options presented and trying to take the campaign off into unplanned territory. Not too long ago I had a campaign that began with saving then working for a decent but power hungry wizard. Group almost immediately decided to make it a crusade against slavery. I had to throw away 3 complete adventures.
Best I've been able to do is somewhere in between. Get the party to agree to some sort of long term goal or storyline.
Ex: The seers haave had visions that country X will find itself in some sort of holy war with the gods of Y. Intelligence indicates that nation R has access to some special magic weapons that would be of great help in the war. Your group has been hired to somehow get some of the weapons from R (without starting a another war). The people that hired you know this may take a long time to make friends with the movers and shakers that can grant this.
Get the group to agree to this PRIOR to doing anything else. Once they agree to that, you can make the first mission something fairly basic. Like saving one of R's trading caravans from bandits to start building the groups reputation and make a few low level contacts.
After the initial adventure, have them RP out how the group wants to proceed. Only make 1 or 2 adventures at a time so you can see where they are heading. Which may mean the game has to stop for a few weeks while you make a new adventure when they change direction unexpectedly.
Dufing that time you can still get together and play cards or someone else can GM for a bit.
I'm not a pro, as these images will attest, but with my entire lack of qualifications, I've been able to make stuff with it like a library floating on a rock in the Astral Plane, a map of a Manor house (based on the castle in Suikoden III), world maps (this particular one also based on Suikoden III; a couple effects added in the GIMP), amongst many other things (including better images) I don't have uploaded to my Website. Oh, here's another small, "localized" world map which I made in about in hour, for a sample world I random generated.
Those maps look really great! I guess to be more precise about what I heard about CC, I was only told that it being CAD based, the commands approached things from a different angle then raster or vector based software, making it unintuitive to those of us who aren't familiar with the CAD engine. That's a more fair representation of what I was told. Anyway I was a little put off by the pricing. I tried a demo of Dundjinni and found that really cool, and I'll definitely buy that if they ever get their act back together. I bought Fractal Mapper 8 as well, installed it on a netbook that could barely run it (it's PC only), and haven't touched it since :( I finally decided I wasn't going to find an easy way out and I've been grinding through Gimp and Inkscape tutorials for a couple months now. I'm a long way off from getting respectable results but I'll get there.
Thanks for sharing your images I love to see things like that.
Fleshgrinder if you have any of your maps from Fractal Terrains you don't mind sharing I would love to see those.
This was huge, huge dilemma for me until I found out that I cared ten times more about it then my players did. After a PC death the party was brainstorming ways to pay for a Raise Dead and the player confessed that once a character had died he couldn't stay invested in that character if it was raised. He would rather roll up something new then have the party blow 1000 GP on diamond dust (or whatever it is). Everyone echoed the sentiment, to my dismay. What about the backstory? What about the plot? After a few weeks of reflecting on it I adjusted my expectations and the incident solved more problems then it raised (no pun intended.) My last reason to ever consider fudging dice-rolls is now obliterated.I have to admit, this is exactly why I have trouble sometimes killing my PCs off, at least prior to obtaining at least reincarnate. I'm far too much of a storyteller to be able to run a pure sandbox myself, and the characters are as much a part of my story as the setting is; losing them to a poorly-timed, anticlimactic combat scene (as compared to them doing something stupid, at which I have no qualms whatsoever) just seems story-ruining.
But dang if it doesn't keep people on their toes, not knowing what's around the next corner until the dice drop. =)
I guess I should consider myself lucky that my players are the absolute opposite to that. In my Savage Tide game the ones that stayed dead did so because they were either too low level for revival magic (the rogue and healer in the first chapter, the bard in Journey's End), or something had occurred to make them not wish to return (the ninja on the isle); once they had access to Raise Dead, the two deaths we had after that very quickly reinstated those characters so they could continue on with their plot and their characters' stories.
It's been a blessing now that I see how few groups outside my own seem to take the game with the same attention. I'm not sure I could stand playing with players that disinterested in the plot, backstory, developments, and such like - that's what makes 9/10 of the game for me regardless which side of the GM screen I'm on.
Im the same way but the funny thing is, these players are not disinterested in the plot and backstory. They really want to find out more about the world, and see the impact of their actions in it. They really flesh out their characters too, and they're definitely trying not to die. It just turns out, for at least one of them, if the character dies he's dead to them. If he gets raised he feels like he shouldn't really be there. In fact I think his whole group feels this way, I just never caught on to it until one of them explained it to me point blank. I was pretty speechless at first but I'm cool with it now.