Posted by Jer at 12:05 PM on
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Well, that's a big gap between posts, isn't it?
Ahem. Well, in my defense, some stuff has come up in my personal life to slow down posting. My free time has been absorbed by a new addition to our family, and that sort of thing tends to make you re-prioritize your life.
Anyway, I wanted to point out something that was posted by Jeff Rients over at his gameblog. Jeff has posted a number of articles along the theme of running a "sandbox" campaign for roleplaying games, and I find this idea to be a lot of fun - not just for the nostalgia value, but because I think it may be a better model for my current gaming group than the model we're using right now.
The idea behind a "sandbox" game - or at least my interpretation of the sandbox game - is this: as the GM you start with some locations, some NPCs, and some adventure hooks, and then you plop your players into it and let them drive the story. Rather than laying out a campaign up front, the campaign grows organically from the actions of the players and their interaction with the elements in the "sandbox".
Now, this is not a new idea at all - in fact, this structure is how many (perhaps even most) folks played D&D when I was growing up and learning the game. My first campaigns basically used this model exclusively - because it was the model that "The Keep on the Borderlands", "The Lost City", and "The Isle of Dread" used in their presentation and those were the adventures that taught me what roleplaying was. My first two campaigns were basically multi-month exursions in the Caves of Chaos and then delving in the ziggurat atop Cynicidea.
But then I started buying more modules, and I found out I was "doing it wrong".
Read More
Tom Moldvay was (and still is) one of my favorite module writers from back in the day. He was responsible for three of my favorite D&D modules of all time - "The Lost City", "The Isle of Dread" and "Castle Amber". He was also responsible for the re-write of "Palace of the Silver Princess", which I've never had as much love for (though the original version not written by Moldvay and downloadable from Wizards' website is pretty cool - even with the odd errors it contains). With the exception of "Isle of Dread", these modules were more "mission-based" than "sandbox" - they gave a goal for PCs to successfully "complete" the adventure. "Castle Amber" and "Silver Princess" are both pretty egregious about it too - the adventurers are basically trapped in the scenario until they accomplish the end game. ("The Lost City" only barely has a mission at its core - the PCs need to find water at the beginning of the adventure. The "mission" is easily ignorable, and so I ignored it in my first campaign centered around the adventure. To this day I still barely consider it to have a mission focus at all.)
Most of the modules that I bought back in the day followed a similar formula - there was a mission that the PCs were supposed to accomplish to "complete" the adventure. And that started to color what I thought a "good" D&D adventure was supposed to have. A "good" adventure was supposed to have a goal for the PCs to accomplish, a set of villains for the PCs to fight, and a "mastermind" or "big bad evil" villain at the end of the adventure to bring a capstone to the adventure. My early subscription to Dungeon magazine reinforced these expectations, as did the RPGs outside of D&D that I started to buy. Eventually, these expectations led me away from D&D to more "narrative" systems that were built to emphasize narrative devices like plot, deeper character development, and adventure construction along the "goal-oriented" line. In High School and colleged D&D was ditched entirely in favor of games like TORG, Ars Magica, Mage, and others. Even when I ran D&D, I fought with the system to run Planescape and Ravenloft campaigns that fit that style of play.
When I came back to D&D in 1999 (with the 3e release) my prejudices about campaign and adventure design came with me. Our current campaign has had an overarching story arc with lots of little subplots percolating around, and each individual adventure has had its own smaller story arc that contributes directly or indirectly to the overall arc. But this has been somewhat unsatisfying for me (I'm not sure about my players - perhaps someone will respond in the comments). Mainly because of the big gaps in time between our games. When you go months between sessions, subtle story elements get forgotten, and the overall arc gets lost.
Would a sandbox style game lessen some of these problems? I'm not sure. I think in some ways it might be better - mainly because MY expectations for the game would be more realistic. The game could focus more on "what's right for this session" instead of "how does this fit into the campaign story arc" - and that might make things more enjoyable for me as the DM. On the other hand, individual story arcs from the players may not grow the way they did back in the old days if we aren't playing every week. That could result in less character development on the player's side and less fun for the players. I might be able to correct for this with some careful note taking, but I won't really know until I get a chance to try it.
I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to start a new campaign - I've promised the group that this one goes to the end - which right now means either level 20 or Total Party Kill. They're only 9th level now, and TPK seems unlikely with this group, so we're probably a long ways away from starting a new campaign. But the next campaign I start I will push for running a sandbox game instead of a story-based one. Who knows, maybe I'll even break out the "Keep on the Borderlands" to kick the campaign off.
I'll probably post more on this theme as ideas percolate - especially since I'm finding that I have more time to THINK about gaming than time to PLAY. Sad but true - life no longer gives convenient schedules for gaming.
Ahem. Well, in my defense, some stuff has come up in my personal life to slow down posting. My free time has been absorbed by a new addition to our family, and that sort of thing tends to make you re-prioritize your life.
Anyway, I wanted to point out something that was posted by Jeff Rients over at his gameblog. Jeff has posted a number of articles along the theme of running a "sandbox" campaign for roleplaying games, and I find this idea to be a lot of fun - not just for the nostalgia value, but because I think it may be a better model for my current gaming group than the model we're using right now.
The idea behind a "sandbox" game - or at least my interpretation of the sandbox game - is this: as the GM you start with some locations, some NPCs, and some adventure hooks, and then you plop your players into it and let them drive the story. Rather than laying out a campaign up front, the campaign grows organically from the actions of the players and their interaction with the elements in the "sandbox".
Now, this is not a new idea at all - in fact, this structure is how many (perhaps even most) folks played D&D when I was growing up and learning the game. My first campaigns basically used this model exclusively - because it was the model that "The Keep on the Borderlands", "The Lost City", and "The Isle of Dread" used in their presentation and those were the adventures that taught me what roleplaying was. My first two campaigns were basically multi-month exursions in the Caves of Chaos and then delving in the ziggurat atop Cynicidea.
But then I started buying more modules, and I found out I was "doing it wrong".
Read More
Tom Moldvay was (and still is) one of my favorite module writers from back in the day. He was responsible for three of my favorite D&D modules of all time - "The Lost City", "The Isle of Dread" and "Castle Amber". He was also responsible for the re-write of "Palace of the Silver Princess", which I've never had as much love for (though the original version not written by Moldvay and downloadable from Wizards' website is pretty cool - even with the odd errors it contains). With the exception of "Isle of Dread", these modules were more "mission-based" than "sandbox" - they gave a goal for PCs to successfully "complete" the adventure. "Castle Amber" and "Silver Princess" are both pretty egregious about it too - the adventurers are basically trapped in the scenario until they accomplish the end game. ("The Lost City" only barely has a mission at its core - the PCs need to find water at the beginning of the adventure. The "mission" is easily ignorable, and so I ignored it in my first campaign centered around the adventure. To this day I still barely consider it to have a mission focus at all.)
Most of the modules that I bought back in the day followed a similar formula - there was a mission that the PCs were supposed to accomplish to "complete" the adventure. And that started to color what I thought a "good" D&D adventure was supposed to have. A "good" adventure was supposed to have a goal for the PCs to accomplish, a set of villains for the PCs to fight, and a "mastermind" or "big bad evil" villain at the end of the adventure to bring a capstone to the adventure. My early subscription to Dungeon magazine reinforced these expectations, as did the RPGs outside of D&D that I started to buy. Eventually, these expectations led me away from D&D to more "narrative" systems that were built to emphasize narrative devices like plot, deeper character development, and adventure construction along the "goal-oriented" line. In High School and colleged D&D was ditched entirely in favor of games like TORG, Ars Magica, Mage, and others. Even when I ran D&D, I fought with the system to run Planescape and Ravenloft campaigns that fit that style of play.
When I came back to D&D in 1999 (with the 3e release) my prejudices about campaign and adventure design came with me. Our current campaign has had an overarching story arc with lots of little subplots percolating around, and each individual adventure has had its own smaller story arc that contributes directly or indirectly to the overall arc. But this has been somewhat unsatisfying for me (I'm not sure about my players - perhaps someone will respond in the comments). Mainly because of the big gaps in time between our games. When you go months between sessions, subtle story elements get forgotten, and the overall arc gets lost.
Would a sandbox style game lessen some of these problems? I'm not sure. I think in some ways it might be better - mainly because MY expectations for the game would be more realistic. The game could focus more on "what's right for this session" instead of "how does this fit into the campaign story arc" - and that might make things more enjoyable for me as the DM. On the other hand, individual story arcs from the players may not grow the way they did back in the old days if we aren't playing every week. That could result in less character development on the player's side and less fun for the players. I might be able to correct for this with some careful note taking, but I won't really know until I get a chance to try it.
I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to start a new campaign - I've promised the group that this one goes to the end - which right now means either level 20 or Total Party Kill. They're only 9th level now, and TPK seems unlikely with this group, so we're probably a long ways away from starting a new campaign. But the next campaign I start I will push for running a sandbox game instead of a story-based one. Who knows, maybe I'll even break out the "Keep on the Borderlands" to kick the campaign off.
I'll probably post more on this theme as ideas percolate - especially since I'm finding that I have more time to THINK about gaming than time to PLAY. Sad but true - life no longer gives convenient schedules for gaming.
Labels: dungeons and dragons, games, rpg, sandbox
3 Comments:
Yonoshe wrote me this in a private e-mail:
Cool Idea.
So it's Grand Theft Auto: Greyhawk!!
Do we get Xp for bashing wenches?
I'm putting the response here because I want to keep the discussion in one place:
You get no XP because I told you to post comments at the blog and not via e-mail :)
Actually, to make this a real answer:
The analogy to GTA is not so far fetched. If you start breaking the law in your home base, you'd probably either find yourself unwelcome in your home base or you'd end up torching the place and losing your home base altogether. If you were powerful enough before you started throwing your weight around, you might be able to conquer the area and set yourself up as warlords. Or you might incur the wrath of whatever noble is in charge of the area and start a war.
And that's all good - if that's the direction that the players want to take it, I'd roll with it. Personally, I'd rather see a group of heroes than a group of thugs, but it really would end up being at the direction of the whole group.
Thugs? We'd probably look more like a bunch of giant, powerful, clumsy oafs walking around, accidentally destroying Gandalf's Ice Creame Shoppe every other week, and we'd still find ourselves unwelcome in our home base. And lacking in sweet deserts.
I have to wonder if this style of play would lead to a bunch of recordkeeping just like our current campaign- you just wouldn't have as much to keep track of initially.
I'd try to keep better notes about what we run into in our current campaign, but I have a hard enough time trying to keep track of what my character's powers are at any given moment (and I swear to Zod that next time I'm playing a seriously vanilla fighter).
And we'd probably still find a way to run off the map within seconds of game time anyway, and you'd still be left improvising.
One of the benefits of a framework like this is that it actually encourages improvising. Now when I improvise I have to worry that you guys are going to latch onto my improvisations and I'm going to pull the adventure way off from the overall story arc. If there's no story arc to worry about the improvisation becomes the game rather than becoming a potential distraction. That benefits all of us - me because I get to do the fun improv stuff without worrying about getting "off track" and you guys because you get more control over the storylines the group is involved in.
As for record keeping - yeah, it would be just as bad eventually. But I wouldn't have to worry about plotting out where you guys are going to be with the ongoing story arc on a session-by-session basis. That's a problem even with pure episodic games that I've run with a story focus - as a DM I tend to worry too much about where you're going to be and where you've been and I don't get to focus as much on "where you are now." This style moves the focus for the DM to worry about the moment, and deal with repercussions of what you do at a particular session between those sessions.
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