I am looking for some discussion on playing in and running a game where the players actions are playing a part in how the world develops.
This can only happen to a certain degree in modules. There are some things thare are set up that pretty much have to happen for the module to be usable.
What are some of the pros and cons of running a sandbox campaign (I am not sure if I am using that term correctly)? I want to develop some NPCs that are part of this world and that will take actions based on their own motivations, but also in reaction to the PCs if appropriate.
There is more I could add, but for discussion's sake, I will leave it at that.
Would anyone like to help me out?
Sounds cool. First step, I’d say, is to develop the ‘powers’ in the world. Start with only the ‘super powers’ – Gods, Empires, International Guilds, ect. Second thing I’d do is talk to the group and get them to decide on a general setting and theme. Based off that discussion, develop a rough map of the world around where the group will begin play. This discussion will also inform your initial NPC creation, who are basically your ‘lesser powers’. Once you have a setting and general theme, populating the world with people whose motivations coincide or contradict to the PCs becomes easier. The key then is to turn those motivations into actions and events that will hopefully collide with the PCs.
It’s really important in a sandbox game that the PCs have strong group ties and some common goals. Then you are better able to build a world around them that will facilitate and challenge their motivations in the funniest way possible. The pre-agreed on setting and theme will help the players stay a cohesive party and have the confidence to be proactive in creating the story.
It’s also helpful to have some type of end game in mind. Don’t become married to it, but having an ending loosely planned for the campaign gives you peace of mind and a go-to scenario if the time comes sooner than expected.
Sounds cool. First step, I’d say, is to develop the ‘powers’ in the world. Start with only the ‘super powers’ – Gods, Empires, International Guilds, ect. Second thing I’d do is talk to the group and get them to decide on a general setting and theme.
Really good advice. I really like a few of your suggestions. Starting your ideas and design with what the powers are in the world you are creating is a good idea. But even better, is gettin the group to come together to give their input and hopefully have some agreement on some of the attributes of the world. Also, understanding what your players think their characters might want to do will be something you can feed off of.
I was thinking that it would be good to plan out some encounters that would take place at some point and have some potential plot implications. Also, having some ideas on what your NPCs might do to make the story move in advance also seems like it might be important.
Thanks for the post.
Please realize that to a degree you are going to toss the concept of game balance out the window as the sand box will allow the party to tackle or run from encounters far tougher or far weaker than them.
your best bet is to use a flow chart of encounters based on a location a timeline and previous encounter results.
I ran a sandbox campaign in 3.5 that was a lot of fun. I started out with one town and three or four ideas of quests the PCs could go on out of it. I only ever got to two of my pre-conceived plot hooks because the story just evolved from there!
Depending on what level your PCs are, I'd consider starting with a small town. It's easier to know exactly who all the NPCs are in a smaller community than planning out a metropolis! My PCs started at level 1 and made it up to level 10 before the campaign ended. I started with my small town, a dot on a blank map, and then added features and settlements around it as the story called for it and the PCs traveled.
Some of the best long-term story arcs came from completely random encounters! At a joust, I rolled that they came across an NPC on a soapbox in the crowd, declaiming about politics. They took her seriously and said, "Hey, let's see what we can do about this injustice." So I whipped up some corrupt government officials, which led to a complete shakeup in the city bureaucracy. Another time, I rolled a random encounter with a vampire, which got the PCs (and the DM!) wondering what a vampire was up to out in the countryside. I added a dot to the map and said it was a village being terrorized by a vampire who had set himself up in a nearby tower. Of course, he ended up being connected to the group of slavers who had bribed the government official who had gotten the NPC so upset back in the city!
Figure out what the PCs want and find a way for them to go after it. One of my PCs was a fanatical worshipper of Pelor who ended up unearthing a long-buried ruined temple in the desert and resurrecting an ancient order (read: custom prestige class) of Pelor-worshipping warriors. Another was an aristocratic paladin who aspired to nobility. I gave him an orphaned young noblewoman in a mountain castle who worked with her butler to hire her own kidnapper so the temple of Heironeous would send a marriageable young paladin to rescue her and win her hand.
I only run sandbox style games (no offense to module-runners). So, being pretty well-versed in this style, I will offer you a couple tips:
1) How Powerful is the World?
Sure you got your gods, demons and other planar goodies (or baddies). But what about the leader of the local militia? Is he level 3...or level 9. What about the general of the army? What about a gladiator...or a soldier. You need to have a good idea of where these types of NPCs fall, so you can indicate to your players how they compare.
2) How much does magic play a roll in your world.
If everyone is running around blinking like a christmas tree, or are magic items rarer than black on the sun? Are there lots of high level casters...or are there few?
3) How important are the characters to the time line?
I once ran a campaign where the players were a bunch of heroes running around doing their thing...when they met the real movers/shakers of their "universe" They loved the fact that they weren't the main focus of the story, but were still a part of it (They couldn't be the main story...the author of the book would be upset with me if I rewrote the main story....but there is nothing wrong with running around in someone else's story...besides...meeting Belgarath was a neat encounter to Role-Play out as a GM)
These three questions allow you to form up the box you will be playing in. Without them, you will be scrambling to try and figure out what they can and can't do. Even though the world takes form around the actions and decisions of the players....they still need to be within a box.
After that...the rest of development is mostly written for you. Gods are gods...it doesn't really matter...use Forgotten Realms stuff...or Greyhawk...or Pathfinder basic. Rename them if you want. Heck...right now I am using Everquest gods. It really doesn't matter with them (at least if/until the PCs are much higher level).
So..how to keep it interesting:
NOTES!!! lots and lots of notes. Write down every npc the party wrongs / pisses off / cares about / saves. These notes will serve up adventures later on...and nothing says "great campaign" as when you have recurring allies and villains. This will also makes the players fell like they are part of the world...because they get to directly feel the impact of their decisions...because you took the notes on it.
Hope this helps. If you have any other questions, I would be happy to help out :)
In addition to the very good advice already given I would add:
Start bottom up instead of top down.
Flesh out a definite area (like a valley, a single province, a duchy) that is not too big. By doing this you can get really into the details and that is what makes a sandbox so great.
If you start out too big chances are the PCs will not get to know most of your NPCs/sites ever unless you railroad them.
Some of the best long-term story arcs came from completely random encounters! At a joust, I rolled that they came across an NPC on a soapbox in the crowd, declaiming about politics. They took her seriously and said, "Hey, let's see what we can do about this injustice." So I whipped up some corrupt government officials, which led to a complete shakeup in the city bureaucracy. Another time, I rolled a random encounter with a vampire, which got the PCs (and the DM!) wondering what a vampire was up to out in the countryside. I added a dot to the map and said it was a village being terrorized by a vampire who had set himself up in a nearby tower. Of course, he ended up being connected to the group of slavers who had bribed the government official who had gotten the NPC so upset back in the city!
Figure out what the PCs want and find a way for them to go after it.
I am impressed with this message board - what an awesome community we have here. Thanks for posting.
I have heard somewhat similar advice from the Happy Jacks podcast - some of the most fun encounters occur when the GM doesn't know what is going to happen either, events just develop.
I also love the idea of re-curring characters, whether they be villians or allies, or somewhere in between.
The kind of environment I was thinking of is maybe something out of The Blade Itself or The Game of Thrones. Something a little grittier. However, you have mentioned that I need to figure out what the players want - or maybe we just work together.
Thanks for the ideas, I love this.
I only run sandbox style games (no offense to module-runners). So, being pretty well-versed in this style, I will offer you a couple tips:
1) How Powerful is the World?
Sure you got your gods, demons and other planar goodies (or baddies). But what about the leader of the local militia? Is he level 3...or level 9. What about the general of the army? What about a gladiator...or a soldier. You need to have a good idea of where these types of NPCs fall, so you can indicate to your players how they compare.
2) How much does magic play a roll in your world.
If everyone is running around blinking like a christmas tree, or are magic items rarer than black on the sun? Are there lots of high level casters...or are there few?
3) How important are the characters to the time line?
I once ran a campaign where the players were a bunch of heroes running around doing their thing...when they met the real movers/shakers of their "universe" They loved the fact that they weren't the main focus of the story, but were still a part of it (They couldn't be the main story...the author of the book would be upset with me if I rewrote the main story....but there is nothing wrong with running around in someone else's story...besides...meeting Belgarath was a neat encounter to Role-Play out as a GM)
These three questions allow you to form up the box you will be playing in. Without them, you will be scrambling to try and figure out what they can and can't do. Even though the world takes form around the actions and decisions of the players....they still need to be within a box.
After that...the rest of development is mostly written for you. Gods are gods...it doesn't really matter...use Forgotten Realms stuff...or Greyhawk...or Pathfinder basic. Rename them if you want. Heck...right now I am using Everquest gods. It really doesn't matter with them (at least if/until the PCs are much higher level).
So..how to keep it interesting:
NOTES!!! lots and lots of notes. Write down every npc the party...
Great post - outstanding. Thank you. I do have a few questions for you.
Gods do not play much of a role at all in games I have played. How do Gods make your games more fun? How much impact do they have?
In your opinion, how much magic do you like in your world? Is it fun to have quite a number of NPCs with magic items and abilities? Or have you played where very few have magic and enjoyed that?
This is slightly off topic from sandbox - but how do you pace your games? I feel like our game (I am a Player) is too slow, so when it is my turn to take the chair, I want the pace to be quicker. I want to avoid too many encounters that don't have much meaning to the story or just going through a building, room after room and just clearing it out. I find that kind of boring at times.
Sounds cool. First step, I’d say, is to develop the ‘powers’ in the world. Start with only the ‘super powers’ – Gods, Empires, International Guilds, ect. Second thing I’d do is talk to the group and get them to decide on a general setting and theme. Based off that discussion, develop a rough map of the world around where the group will begin play. This discussion will also inform your initial NPC creation, who are basically your ‘lesser powers’. Once you have a setting and general theme, populating the world with people whose motivations coincide or contradict to the PCs becomes easier. The key then is to turn those motivations into actions and events that will hopefully collide with the PCs.
It’s really important in a sandbox game that the PCs have strong group ties and some common goals. Then you are better able to build a world around them that will facilitate and challenge their motivations in the funniest way possible. The pre-agreed on setting and theme will help the players stay a cohesive party and have the confidence to be proactive in creating the story.
+1 (emphasis mine)
GoldenOpal really summed up what I was going to say. I love playing sandbox games, and it's almost exclusively the way I GM. It's critically important that you talk to the players before characters are made, and get them (and you) all on the same page about the themes and direction of the game. When you give players the freedom to do whatever they want, they sometimes scatter, and really shouldn't be playing the same game as one another.
Also, goals. Goals GOALS GOALS
I've found that in running sandbox games, players' fun during play can be predicted fairly accurately by looking answering:
- Does the character have goals?
- Did the player communicate those goals to the gm?
- Are the character's goals compatible with the goals of their GM and the other characters?
One of the other important things is to know how sandy you want the sandbox to be. Remember that 'sandbox,' as a term, covers things from a West Marches style exploration game, where player discretion is to the point of sacrificing most traditional plot, to a Kingmaker style open world game, which is closer to a cunningly executed railroad, and through many, many different variations in the spectrum between. Your duties as a DM are much different in each.
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What's really important for sandbox play (in my opinion) is making sure that the players are really interested and involved in the process of building the world with you. Their characters really need to have big (or at least well-defined) ambitions as well as reasonably well-rounded backstories that you can work with.
I'm running an open-world campaign and have a couple of techniques to share.
1) Player containment: You want your players to be able to go anywhere -- it is a staple of the format -- but you can't realistically be prepared for them to go anywhere. The best way to handle this is to subtly surround them with speedbumps of one sort or another. Note that these can range from monster lairs in passes to dungeon sites to geographical barriers. None of them should be "hard" boundaries however; they should all be passable given some time, effort, and ingenuity.
The point is to have them ready so that the PCs never wander off the defined map into "a great, blank expanse, featureless out to the farthest horizon" or, maybe worse, a reactionary hazard clearly dropped in their path to stop them from going somewhere. If the speedbump is well-conceived and executed, it will seem like a pre-planned part of the game world and they will not feel like they're hitting the infamous invisible walls of video game worlds. The speedbump becomes a challenge to which they must rise rather than a clear indication that the DM isn't ready to handle what the party wants to do.
The idea is that you can drop something in their path that will attract their attention long enough that you can spend time before the next session preparing the area for which they were headed. This kind of "on-demand" content generation is the only feasible way for a true open world setting to work, because fleshing out every location is so time consuming that if you waited until you were ready, you'd never start the campaign.
Having a policy that the players should file a "flight plan" for the next session can also be a life saver. They can either tell you at the end of each session or by email a day or two later, but the idea is that they give you a brief list of goals that they'll be trying to accomplish so that you're not caught with your pants down when they randomly decide to abandon their current objective and rush full-speed into something that isn't ready for them.
To some extent you will never get away from having to think on your feet to generate the world around the PCs on the fly, but there is a lot that you can do to be as prepared as possible.
2) Player activities
The players should never be out of things to do. In their home base you can seed a couple of plot hooks to get the PCs out into the world. Once you've done that the rest isn't hard to manage: on their way from site A to site B, they travel up a hillside and, from there, can see down into a hidden valley where they glimpse site C. But how to get there? In trying to find the way perhaps they will stumble across site D. And meanwhile site E is nearby sending out raiding parties/weird lights/mysterious crashing noises that are likely to draw the PCs back toward it at some point. The cool thing about this method is that everything happens very organically and the ball is (and should be) in the PCs' court as far as deciding where to go next is concerned. Every now and then it's a good change of pace to force some action by setting a time limit on something (e.g. there is a fey queen that is going to cause some serious trouble on the winter solstice if the PCs don't stop her first in my game). But even then, give them time to do it their way and set some sub-goals. They need to find her weakness and the method of entering her realm for example. A time limit can be months, but it's good to have one from time to time.
3) Snap-together sites and plots
There is some amount of criticism about how formulaic plots are in fantasy games, the idea being that there are only the same few plot devices used over and over again with different window dressing. While this can be a valid gripe, it can also be a big strength for you. You can flesh out a few plots and leave sections of them blank because they are so interchangeable. There is a vampire lair for example and the PCs will need to go recover something. Is it a family heirloom? A lost child? Who knows? It could be anything, and you don't have to decide until it "comes up" in the organically-proceeding plot. You don't know who the PCs are going to meet or when you'll need a plot hook, but you're ready with one when the time comes. A great side-effect of this is that you regain some of the enjoyment of discovering the plot along with the PCs instead of knowing in advance what's going to happen every time.
In your opinion, how much magic do you like in your world? Is it fun to have quite a number of NPCs with magic items and abilities? Or have you played where very few have magic and enjoyed that?
This is slightly off topic from sandbox - but how do you pace your games? I feel like our game (I am a Player) is too slow, so when it is my turn to take the chair, I want the pace to be quicker. I want to avoid too many encounters that don't have much meaning to the story or just going through a building, room after room and just clearing it out. I find that kind of boring at times.
The questions I provided should be looked at as a spectrum. You can have no magic items....you can have tons of magic items...or you can sit somewhere in between.
The campaign I will be running next is an Exploration Age Fantasy campagin (We are going to try out the new gun rules)..that takes place in a Ravenloft like setting. (Think 3 Musketeers meets Pirates of the Carribean in Strahd's Backyard). The rules for it are..magic items are rare, spellcasters are rare (anyone who wants to play a spellcaster has to roll for it, and there are pretty strict rules for it..including inticiment to the dark side...it is Ravenloft-ish after all. Lastly, npcs higher than lvl 5 are extremely rare...so the leader of a town militia will be around level 4-5 depending on experience. You can see how much of the sandbox gets set up by answering those questions.
Pacing... There is no formula for it, the GM must have a feel for the pace, and if the pace isn't good...to alter it. That comes with time in the chair, and paying attention to the players.
Adventures: You must have 4 adventures prepared for each session. Don't worry, the 3 the players don't do..get recycled into next week, so its a lot of initial work, but is better after things get rolling.
All adventures fall into one of 3 categories: Save something, Find something, or Kill something. Prepare one of each of these types of adventures...3/4 done. Create a dungeon map....last adventure planned. From here it becomes plug and play..pick whatever is most appropriate to what the characters say they are going to do..and implement it.
The wonderful thing about this style is, as you master it...you don't need to prepare anymore. I just show up at sessions with books, sit in the GM chair, and we start playing. Granted, i have been doing this a long time, but the players always think I spend hours and hours crafting such an intricate adventure..where the only thing I do is take good notes, and have a stock of 25 dungeon maps (They still haven't noticed that I recycle them...of course 25 dungeons is about a year of crawl adventure for my group, they enjoy role-playing stuff a lot more)
Lastly (as if this novella was long enough), the character do not need to know that they are doing a quest. They could come across a cave in their travels...forced into it by a rain storm...and lo-n-behold its a dungeon crawl, with a strange item in it. Even though they did the retrieve part of the quest...now the fun comes from determining what it is they have, and what they should do with it. Just another tidbit that alot of GMs don't think about...its ok to do adventures in reverse..sometimes its more fun!
First step, I’d say, is to develop the ‘powers’ in the world. Start with only the ‘super powers’ – Gods, Empires, International Guilds, ect.
I wanted to expound on my reasoning behind this being a good first step.
It is true the PCs are not generally going to actually be RPing with any gods, emperors, or guild bosses, but I suggest starting there for a few reasons. (Just to be clear, I’m not advising making super detailed notes with stat blocks and everything at this point. All you need is a solid concept and a name.)
It is really hard to retcon that type of thing in smoothly, and the longer the game goes on the harder it can be. Beings and organizations that powerful can conceal themselves, but generally don’t – quite the opposite actually :P Even if we are talking about a secret society; the longer the game progresses the less believable it is that the PCs have never had any clue of its existence.
It gives the players something to start from when deciding the setting and theme. It is a framework that, hopefully, insures their choices won’t be too far out of your comfort zone.
These powers are great in your back pocket for when you need to guide the players or increase the pacing to help the story. They also make for perfect reoccurring villains/allies at all levels – everybody needs some mooks, middle management, top leadership and lots of resources.
3) Snap-together sites and plots
There is some amount of criticism about how formulaic plots are in fantasy games, the idea being that there are only the same few plot devices used over and over again with different window dressing.
What do you mean by this? Are you referring to the find something, kill something, or save something plots mentioned before? Even if you could boil down plots into these categories, can't they still have a lot of twists and turns that make them interesting and unique?
Thanks for the help
3) Snap-together sites and plots
There is some amount of criticism about how formulaic plots are in fantasy games, the idea being that there are only the same few plot devices used over and over again with different window dressing.What do you mean by this? Are you referring to the find something, kill something, or save something plots mentioned before? Even if you could boil down plots into these categories, can't they still have a lot of twists and turns that make them interesting and unique?
Thanks for the help
I think that's the point the poster was looking to make. Plots have very unique qualities, but they also have some very generic ones, and that's the way they're supposed to be. Basically, you can get various environmental ready - dungeons, if you will - like the dragon's lair, the kobold warrens, the decayed keep of the Lizard Men, and leave them in the proverbial fridge. Then, whenever it springs up as relevant for that particular plot point, it's merely a matter of pulling it out and tweaking it to meet the specifics of why you need it.
I think that's the point the poster was looking to make. Plots have very unique qualities, but they also have some very generic ones, and that's the way they're supposed to be. Basically, you can get various environmental ready - dungeons, if you will - like the dragon's lair, the kobold warrens, the decayed keep of the Lizard Men, and leave them in the proverbial fridge. Then, whenever it springs up as relevant for that particular plot point, it's merely a matter of pulling it out and tweaking it to meet the specifics of why you need it.
Precisely. And the really fun stuff is made up on the fly anyway. The point is just to have some easily-adaptable content ready at all times.