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Talk to the players. Find out why they're doing this. Trying to deal with it in game without understanding what the players are thinking isn't going to work.
This of course.
It might help to get your players to tell you what their characters want. Are they adventuring for gold? Power? Revenge? The thrill of battle? Protecting the innocents?
It's quite possible that your players never really thought about it, that their characters don't have any motivation at all. It might as well be "I don't actually want to be a PC". Then you have to make it clear to the players that that's not acceptable. They have to be motivated by something.
Once the characters have motivations and desires, and you know them, things become a lot easier.
First off, you can absolutely always expect players to not do what you expect. Secondly, they will hardly ever uncover the rich deep back story you have painstakingly created.
That said, having the back story is still useful. It lets you easily determine what happens in response to the PCs actions (or inaction) and lets you keep the world running.
The big thing I think in running a sandbox is to make sure that the consequences happen. If they make enemies of someone powerful, their should be consequences. Hopefully you can arrange it so that those consequences don't kill everyone and end the game, but they have to be serious and realistic.
Secondly, even in a sandbox it works best if their is a defined goal and overarching plot. Sometimes it works best if this is a collaborative effort between the GM and the players outside the game itself. If you are wanting a murder mystery, but your players are focused on a just killing things, you probably won't have a successful game. Find out what your players want as a whole, make sure that everyone has a character that will more or less work toward similar goals, and then supply them with hints that will get them to the adventure they want. And make sure to have extra hints, because they will miss some.
The big though is make sure you are building the adventure they want to have, not trying to force them into the adventure you want them to have.
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So your players basically act like commoners?
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Talk to the players. Find out why they're doing this. Trying to deal with it in game without understanding what the players are thinking isn't going to work.
Agreed. However, there can still be an issue. My group continually says they want a sandbox campaign since that is what 'everyone' wants. But they are horrible at it and have no fun when they are in one. They dither around, make no progress at anything, get bored, start bickering, then PvP usually ensues. They actually enjoy a fairly railroad-ish plot that has quite a few options.
First, drop the terms sandbox and railroad. Don't let them use the terms either. Everyone seems to have a different idea of what the terms mean. Plus the community has established a false positive feeling for sandbox and a false negative feeling for railroad that really have no correlation with whichever definition is being used.
Second, ask them, "What do you want to do? No don't use an ill defined generic term. What specifically do you want the campaign to provide?"
Many players I know merely want choices. Not complete openness.
Sandbox games require more backstory from the characters. If you just let your players show up with already filled out character sheets and start them in a tavern it is gonna go poorly. As a GM you need to know who these people are and what they would be doing day to day, then the world can start reacting to them to get them used to the style and then have something dramatic happen to spur the action. As a player the most memorable sandbox characters dream big. I have played an Abjurer who had the goal of running the biggest trading company in the world, and he worked out great. I have seen other people flounder when their character motivations are simple like "I wanna get rich" or "I'm bored." Good Luck.
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I think most people are happier on a "sandpath" adventure than in either a sandbox or on a railroad.
Sandboxes are hyped a bit, because if you ask people if they'd rather be "an original thinker" or "a passive sheep", they're gonna pick the former. (Yes, we're all individuals.)
But a true sandbox requires players to make the story. They have to pick goals and push at them. That may mean that they invent a backstory full of story hooks, and then focus on pursuing those. Everything else in the sandbox will be interpreted based on whether it's relevant. This means players take charge a lot.
Some people I play with actually do that. But they're quite rare. And if they're in a sand-less game, they tend to get unhappy because the GM won't engage with their input, because the GM is focused on his own story.
Most people need some more "handholds". I myself find it hard to roll up a new character with goals and story direction, if I don't really know much about the campaign world. It's hard to fight against injustice if you don't know if there is any injustice going on and where it might be. Likewise, seeking treasure can be hard if the GM is on a "realism" kick with no obvious treasure-filled ruins lying around. It's a bit about handholds that the players can grab hold of, and handholding them as a GM.
And on the far spectrum there's railroad, in the nice and not-nice variety. A nice railroad is like a city trip, where you have some interesting scenery between stops. And when you reach another city there's some new tourist traps to stumble into. And then it's time to get on the train again. This is basically what PFS is like, and I imagine the APs too, especially if GM is ready to roll with PCs going on side-trips now and then.
TL;DR: most people don't do well in a true sandbox, but they can fare well on a "sandpath" that doesn't lock them into a true railroad but does provide some structure and long-term goals.
HA! Just let them continue on their way and when like 5 sessions have gone by and they've done nothing and are scratching their heads wondering why they are still level 1's you can toss a fishing hook on the table and tell them you didn't realize how blatantly you were gonna have to show them the hook so that they would take it.
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I'd chip in for talking to your group and finding out what the characters, and the players, want from the game. It sounds like they don't want to do investigation, and you do. Figure out what everybody wants and then shift things about so that it works out, otherwise nobody is going to have fun. I actually just spent a few hours recently writing up what I want from a group I run for and the game I run, and realized that the campaign I was trying to run just wasn't working. Turns out it isn't working for the group either, which is why they aren't enjoying it, which is making the sessions suck, etc. I'm gearing up to start a new campaign and this time we'll be sitting down and discussing what we, as a group, want from the game. I have some ideas for stuff that will happen pretty much regardless (unless something better comes up) and some stylistic things that I want (because it's not just about the players)
I've also been struck by something about "sandbox" games while reading all of this. As far as I know it, the term comes from video games (and it may have originated in tabletop games, I'm not sure) and I think when people say it they're referring to games like Skyrim, or Fallout. The thing about those games is that, yeah, you can wander aimlessly and have fun, but the point is that you can go do things you should or can do in the order you want to. You can spend 80+ hours taking over the thieves' guild in Skyrim without ever doing a single storyline quest (I gotta do the assassin's guild next on my quest to run all crime in Skyrim). Or you can wander around finding things.
I think in a tabletop situation, because it will never, ever be worth your time to create as much stuff as you can find in Skyrim, you should create a few different adventure seeds and allow the players to choose where to go. Think of it more like a hub town system: the players have freedom to do things in the order they want, but not to do just any random thing. You aren't a computer, so you can't react to all of their crazy stuff, and those sandbox game have limits too. Try and make some (or all) of those seeds things that the players have expressed interest in doing, and it will feel more "sandbox" to them.
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I think most people are happier on a "sandpath" adventure than in either a sandbox or on a railroad.
Right, Give them quests. Give them several quests, and let them pick and choose. They can even ignore one.
This way they are on a path, but not a railroad.
Dont punish them. Talk to them like adults.
To the OP: I agree with other posters that this is something that should be discussed with the group ooc.
Simply asking them "what does your character want?" Or "what do you want from this game?" -Might do it.
If any of them answer any version of the sentiment "I dunno" then ask them why they are here.
Explain that this game is a joint effort and that it's not soley your job to entertain them - they aren't paying you, this is something you do for fun, not your job.
Be nice about it but strict.
Both as a player and a gm I get annoyed with "passive" players - if they're not contributing they are just wasting others time.
I actually have a similiar problem/situation with my group: they seem to prefer railroading almost more than I am comfortable with. As a result I've changed my playstyle:
1: cut down any form of "shopping"-time to the bare bones, this ain't diablo, I ain't a random item generator.
Once the group spent 4 hours shopping, and the result was a couple of alchemist fires, a composite longbow, some rations and 2 healing potions. WTH?!
2: Never let a plot run it's course to the end without having a new plot ready to jump directly to. Also having an overaching main plot can give the group a default direction to head once this chapters villian has been smited (smitten? Smoted?) Also don't be afraid to derail any plot you have with with an inspired sideplot.
Your princess is in another castle, the castle is on an island, look pirates!
3: make all quests and encounters in a modular fashion - meaning that anything that gets "walked past" or isn't even noticed by the players can be reskinned and inserted into a different part at a later point.
Turns out those evil cultist that they didn't even notice were killing ppl were taking them back to their underground temple - in the dungeoncrawl we just started.
I think I'd have to sit in on a "real" sandbox game someday. Or read an online PbP. Fundamentally, I don't get how they're supposed to work. Some odd combination of strongly driven character with their own goals and a complete willingness to drop anything that looks too dangerous.
I once had the pleasure of doing this with a group.
it was a Vampire game and by quirks of fate we had players dropping in and eventually out for good leaving just 2 core players abd the gm.the plot started with some basic "the sheriff needs you as right hand men to get info for him 'n stuff"-kinda plot.
But as we played and got comfortable we started going outside the set tracks and picking our own enemies and allies.
Eventually the gm admitted that he had stopped making quests a good while ago and was more than busy enough with following the agendas and quirks we made for our characters.
A combination of a small group, veteran players who trusted each other, regular gaming and a setting that everybody liked led to an awesome gane.
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When I GM either it is published material with no changes, or I only write encounters, no plots. I figure that if the players spent hours making their characters, they know what those characters want to do. I get heavy handed at character generation making everyone figure out how they know each other and why they are together, no exceptions. It is not my responsibility to keep the game from turning into 5 solo adventures, I can split time so they each are onscreen 20% of the time, many players hate this so we always talk it over before the game. Reacting to all their crazy stuff is most of the fun of being the GM for me. I love it when I set them up for something and they get fixated on a red herring, or take an unexpected heel turn, or basically anything that doesn't anger the other players. Sandboxes aren't for everyone, but that's how we grew up playing and I still feel more comfortable that way. I do have to say I am starting to get into scenarios and modules more as I play them under good GM's.
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...or I only write encounters, no plots. I figure that if the players spent hours making their characters, they know what those characters want to do. I get heavy handed at character generation making everyone figure out how they know each other and why they are together, no exceptions. It is not my responsibility to keep the game from turning into 5 solo adventures...
This is pretty appealing to me (or at least using it to some extent). What's your character creation process like? Any tips on running this kind of reactive game? Or good articles, blogs, or whatever about the same?
The call knows where they live.
If you don't go out adventuring the adventure finds you.
I'm all for that option. Unless you can talk them into acting more to your liking then anything requiring investigation will end up like you already mentionned.
What you need is not a "mystery" adventure, but a "cataclism" one - they try to avoid things? Make that the right thing to do - make things try to come after them.Enemy nation invading? Incursion from some horrid beast host? Panic on the streets? You can even have it be a consequence of their passiveness - they had a chance of stopping it from happening, they could be heroes, but they wasted their chance. Now The Unspeakable will come and they will be the victims. Now they will have to keep running and hiding just to stay alive and find a solution before there's nowhere left to run or hide.
If they try to derail that they'll just run into something WAY out of their league.
I wonder how fast would that campaign about the Worldwound Incursion end if the players insisted of charging the head demon head on instead of panic and run
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Everything LuxuriantOak said is spot on in my experience. I put together a sandbox where there was a city in really bad shape and the PCs had opportunities to explore and repair the town. Every time I threw them a plot hook they acted like I was confusing their primary and being a pain in the neck. Some guys just like to have one objective on the list at any given time.
Start by limiting certain feats/class abilities that can be learned by the players, that is if they want to learn them when they level up or retrain, that they have to find your NPC trainer who may or may not have a mission for them to do first.
I think this is a fantastic idea, and personally enjoy stories with built in restrictions and rewards, but make sure your PCs are comfortable with it first. In my experience, players can feel pretty entitled to being able to multiclass/train/buy however they want, and your katana-wielder might get real ticked off if you tell him he has to rescue the sandbox's sensei before he can take weapon focus.
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They beat off these ninjas...
*chuckles*
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I've done a sandbox campaign (set in a superhero university) that is coming to an end. Part of the reason that it is coming to an end is that the plot is fairly complex, and a lot of our players have had trouble keeping track of stuff. The other issue is that I have a couple of players willing to take initiative and follow things up, and a bunch of other players who just follow along for the ride. The followers ignore and avoid every clue and story hook that comes their way, but then they feel annoyed when the story becomes all about the people who are actually doing stuff and interacting with the world.
So here are the lessons that I've learned.
- We required a backstory and gave them extra points for it.
- We built plothooks into people's backstory and disadvantages.
- We had every plot interlink with at least two other plots, so if people did not follow up with one hook, we had another way of progressing the story.
- We had a mechanism that required everybody to participate in certain class exercises. It worked a bit like your agency, but it was a superhero class called "TEAM: Targeted Exercises and Missions."
- We made things too complicated. The only players tracking the plots were also the only people who were proactive. The followers were lost.
- We did this with too many players.
- The stories kept tilting naturally towards the proactive players, and no matter what we did, we couldn't prevent the followers from feeling left out.
Oddly enough, all our problems are with the adult group that we are running through the world. We are running a separate game for teens that is going great because they leap into every storyline and follow stuff up. They're not cautious like the adults. They just go forward.
Hmm
I don't have any advice, but learned what sandbox and railroad mean, and for that, I'm glad I read 1/2 of the thread.
Don't put work into the game if they won't do the same. Ask them if they really want to play the game or just have character sheets to oogle at.
Are your players relatively young? Have they ever had characters die in a campaign before? I remember during my first days of DnD and other paper/pencil RPGs, it was sometimes easy to have all the fun just making some characters and not really wanting anything to happen to them.
And/Or the players may be the kind that treat the game as a kind of passive challenge by the party to the GM to "do" something to them and see how well they can avoid what you're "doing" to them. That's probably why they treat the guides/mission NPCs badly - they're eliminating any chance of being tricked or backstabbed, however small it may be. The fact that they devolve into PvP and avoid GM-generated combat tells me that they are overly protective of their characters and personalizing it all too much.
Like others have said - ask "What is it you want to do?"
Derailing a sandbox, huh? Interesting choice of words. Though it sounds more like their dodging than derailing. Ask them what they want from the game.
For sandboxy play player investment is crucial. Detailed and interwoven backstories help. They need to connect with the world. Giving an anchor from the start helps here, like having them running an inn together
Also have stuff happen to them that can't be completely dodged. NPC friend dies, zombie attacks, war in the land. Or think about the effects that their dodging could have, and later present them the results. Neighboring town wiped out. PCs sister kidnapped or sick.
It's [gold] tied to anything that is a game with power growth. Which is nearly all games. Aaaand anything that's a sandbox instead of a direct-thread plot. Even if you have an overarching goal of "overthrow the evil empire" you tend to have a lot of "gather resources/win territory/gain allies" quests. ...
That is mostly an example of gold as the means-to-an-end rather than the goal it self.
The goal "overthrow the evil empire" and gold is just one of those resources needed to accomplish that goal.Some players/PC's the gold is the prize. As in "Want to be the richest person in Magnimar. I want everyone to know it and envy me."
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I would also say really complex plots are more difficult for me now than they used to be.
When I was a teenager we played at least once a week for about 6 hours, I had more time to think about it between game times, and we as a group would talk about it outside of the game.
As an adult we play about once every 3 weeks for 3-4 hours, don't usually give it that much thought between sessions, and it almost never comes up in conversation.
So the stuff that my PC learned and experienced happened to him over the course of 2 days AND it is critical to his survival. So yes, he remembers it.
On the other hand I learned it over the course of the last 6 months of gaming and it is an enjoyable pastime. So no, I don't remember all of it.
I have an active sandbox game and this is what I have done. I've created a unique NPC character for each storyline I have. I run that npc in the group to help guide them through. Each storyline I break into episodes, and each storyline can have 3-5 episodes.
From their hub town they meet or are contacted by various npcs for each storyline and they go where they feel like. Initially they didn't look for things to do and expected me to feed them quests, but as I established 5-6 unique npcs each with their own storyline they slowly worked out of it.
One player is highly interested in my lesbian Paladin who is excommunicated from her church. (religious villians/zealots and demons)
One is interested in the Alchemist who is researching an ancient civilization. (travelling an "unexplored" land discovering mage towers)
One is interested in the Archeologist Bard who has discovered an ancient dam full of clockwork. (related to the ancient mage towers)
And about 3 or 4 more...
Now when they get back to town after each episode they've begun checking in with their "friends" and getting updates on the last few day/weeks that they've been out. They vote on what sounds the most interesting and pursue it from session to session. My "playlist" currently looks something like this:
Portals 1
Towers 1
Church 1
Portals 2
Ancients 1
Towers 2
Portals 3
Dam 1
Towers 3
Church 2
Ancients 2
I only plan each storyline about 1 episode ahead and just bank on them never wanting to do any in a row. I wave the time discrepancy between stories as nothing is ever time critical so nothing disappears or becomes unavailable.
To the OP: If your players don't have the initiative to play a sandbox game, the best advice I can offer is to not run a sandbox game. That's basically setting the group up for failure.
You can make an adjustable game, though--a sandbox game with clearly-defined rails that the players are free to leave at any time, possibly rejoining farther on down the line. Like most things in gamemastering (and life), it's a lot of work, but ultimately very rewarding.
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...or I only write encounters, no plots. I figure that if the players spent hours making their characters, they know what those characters want to do. I get heavy handed at character generation making everyone figure out how they know each other and why they are together, no exceptions. It is not my responsibility to keep the game from turning into 5 solo adventures...This is pretty appealing to me (or at least using it to some extent). What's your character creation process like? Any tips on running this kind of reactive game? Or good articles, blogs, or whatever about the same?
Character creation is a whole session. The characters need to be somehow connected. Family members, romantic interests, best friends, members of a guild, members of a military unit, having already saved each others lives, etc... Sandboxes will grind to a halt if the group doesn't trust each other. I suppose the mechanics side of it varies by campaign, but much like anyone else's. It doesn't have to be all the same bonds either. One campaign I played in the witch was dating the rogue who was the cleric's grand nephew, who had a devoted follower (the fighter) she had saved. Everything worked fine until a 5th player with an unrelated character was introduced and the party started infighting. There is really no easy way to get a group like this, you just have to find the players who get and like the style of game and try to keep them together. The stories are a lot crazier than what I would come up with on my own, but I do have to put in a decent amount of work after game putting stats on anyone or anything that is going to be seen again. It helps very much if you know the rules well enough to create NPC's on the fly, and are comfortable roleplaying a wide variety of them. I actually don't know of too much written advice I would recommend about this, one of my friends from childhood always remarks that most people play the game differently from how we grew up doing it.
They beat off these ninjas...*chuckles*
Did we just wander into a scene form La Blue Girl?
