I Won The Sandbox, City Adventures, and 'Meta-D&D'

[calithena]

Sandbox play is actually not the default model of the LBBs, though it can easily grow out of it.

I think it's what a lot of successful D&D games grow into though. Like, you start with a canned adventure or two, then once they're set up and familiar with you a little bit you start letting them pursue whatever they're interested in, and roll with it as GM.

It's at this point that city adventures become really cool. You can sort of go wherever you want in a city. (Makofan's Verbosh game reminded me of this feeling, which I hadn't had for a while: you just let people wander and see what you come up with. Predone cities are good for this, but you can improvise a lot of stuff with a map and a list of NPCs and maybe some 'trouble spots' too.)

Anyway, I think that a lot of old-schoolers actually have similar techniques here, and that some of the groups who have found D&D really fun and inspiring outside as well as inside the dungeon have gravitated to a sort of 'sandbox' style. But it's actually not a style that's well described in very many published D&D products of any era, let alone now. That's why I dubbed it 'Meta-D&D' in the thread header, though we should probably lose that term and just call it 'sandbox play': the game outside D&D that D&D often grows into and that a lot of people love, is what I mean.

So, what goes into a good 'sandbox' campaign, folks? Let this thread serve as our letter unto posterity for how it's done. Links, anecdotes, procedures, and theory are all welcome.

One possible theory is that the sandbox is the default but that the beginning and end of play actually get more focused. That model would go like this:

a) DM gives players a canned adventure or two up front to hook them into the setting and find the group's groove.

b) The group just starts wandering around and exploring what they want and getting into trouble - let the sandbox begin!

c) At some point, everything comes to a head. Maybe a player decides to take over a barony, or a world-threatening evil is loosed. At that point, the sandbox thins out somewhat, and that stuff becomes the new center of gravity for play - except everyone now has a much more visceral sense of the reality of the secondary world for having just knocked around in it for a while. (The gaming equivalent of how Tolkien's history and asides and descriptions make Middle Earth seem so real to so many of his readers.)

[crimhthanthegreat]

calithena said:

One possible theory is that the sandbox is the default but that the beginning and end of play actually get more focused. That model would go like this:

a) DM gives players a canned adventure or two up front to hook them into the setting and find the group's groove.

b) The group just starts wandering around and exploring what they want and getting into trouble - let the sandbox begin!

c) At some point, everything comes to a head. Maybe a player decides to take over a barony, or a world-threatening evil is loosed. At that point, the sandbox thins out somewhat, and that stuff becomes the new center of gravity for play - except everyone now has a much more visceral sense of the reality of the secondary world for having just knocked around in it for a while. (The gaming equivalent of how Tolkien's history and asides and descriptions make Middle Earth seem so real to so many of his readers.)

If by sandbox you mean just playing create as you go and flying by the seat of your pants, then that is mostly the only way that we play with some exceptions. We don't use (a) but we mostly use (b) and sometimes (c) if I am understanding you correctly. At the beginning we just started at (b) and have for the most part just stayed there. For instance right now my players have set a specific goal that they are playing towards; although the stuff I am creating is more (b) than (c). I am roughing some things out in advance, partly because I don't draw very well and it takes me some time to do it, but the details I am creating mainly on the fly, although I am doing a lot of reading right now to fill my mind with fresh source material for ideas to create from.

[coffee]

If by 'canned adventure' you mean a dungeon, then that's exactly what I have in mind. Give 'em a dungeon, and when they want to go elsewhere, make that up so they can.

It is my understanding that that's how the Blackmoor campaign developed. I wouldn't be surprised if Greyhawk did, too.

[crimhthanthegreat]

Hmmmmmm, I hadn't thought of a dungeon as a canned adventure. In the beginning and for many years the dungeons grew everytime they turned a corner, but over the last 20 years I have been building dungeon well ahead of where they are.

[coffee]

It's just that an "adventure" as such doesn't sound like OD&D to me.

You start off in a dungeon, and when that gets dull (for either the players or the DM, or both), you go outdoors -- possibly just to another dungeon!

I understand that there are those who can pull off broad-stroke, high fantasy quests starting at first level, but I'm not one of them.

[korgoth]

My plan, unrealistic though it may be, is to have most of the principal work done before the campaign starts (which is fine logistically since I am not a DM right now and don't have any plans to start a campaign any time soon). I will have the main city state, the megadungeon thereunder (at least the first six levels, anyway... which amounts to 21 pages of graph paper) and a couple of significant outlying villages (my world is so depopulated that a village is about as big as anything ever gets) drawn up, as well as other resources placed on the hex map (I'm dropping in B4 and Badabaskor, among other things).

I will probably start out with a caravan to the city state (better if the starting PCs didn't grow up there, so that they're expected to know less to run their first characters) that will have a couple of side adventures on the way. Then they get there, and can start doing whatever they want. Want to take a stab at the megadungeon? There are several known entrances in the deserted part of the city (well... not entirely deserted, but the ghuls have proven impossible to exterminate, so you just have to wall them off). Want to just wander through the deserted parts of the city? That's fine, too (though locals will explain why that's not really a good idea). Want to chase some rumors out in the Vadran Wastes? Some are red herrings, some lead to adventure sites (like B4). Though again, they better be prepared to deal with the weird and hungry creatures that haunt those areas.

My goal is to be able to say: "Here is a (part of a) world... explore it as you see fit." Naturally, some choices are better than others at certain levels of play (1st levels wandering in the Wastes might not be a good idea, but there are ways to manage it... such as funding an expedition to a specific area in hopes of a payoff, etc.). I will drop clues as to what areas are considered especially dangerous (warnings from NPCs, "Look at the bones!", etc.) but their destinies will be their own.

Still, I like the idea of starting "in media res". "You're out in the middle of nowhere, with a caravan, heading for the City State of Xulrua. Stuff happens. What do you do?" That saves one from the (imo boring) wrangling about whether my character will work with your character, what if I just want to stay in the village and open a boutique, should I bring my pet schipperke on the adventure, etc.

[calithena]

With players you know in a world you know you don't need the dungeon/canned adventure up front. By canned I just mean that the DM hits the people with situation (dungeon, personalities in conflict, city scene, whatever) up front - whereas in the ongoing sandbox game the players kind of pick what they run into. That's sort of a sidetrack anyway; what I was interested in mostly was tricks for running a good sandbox game that go beyond what you get out of the rulebooks, esp. the LBBs.

For example, I think often in a good sandbox game you just give the players incomplete and/or sketchy maps up front, instead of making them fight for every hex. Or if not a map then a list of rumors - but anyway enough information so that they actually have some meaningful choices about where to go and what to do.

[Deleted]

The idea of this kind of game appeals a great deal to me -- it sort of serves as a return to my 'gaming roots' as it were. Unfortunately, these days it does not seem to have a very broad appeal.
One of our very early campaigns started with a group of players who didn't know anything about this crazy new game... the guy who DMd had played a couple times with another group. He sat us down, showed us how to roll up characters and we strolled off to the dungeon (which was apparently located a short distance from town) where we proceeded to kill off the party again and again.
Eventually that DM left our school and we had to fend for ourselves. Often we took turns DMing adventures for one another. Character mortality was high and as DM I was often only a few steps ahead of the players in terms of dungeon designing (at one point I had a pretty big dungeon). But there were other side journeys, etc.

[crimhthanthegreat]

calithena said:

With players you know in a world you know you don't need the dungeon/canned adventure up front. By canned I just mean that the DM hits the people with situation (dungeon, personalities in conflict, city scene, whatever) up front - whereas in the ongoing sandbox game the players kind of pick what they run into. That's sort of a sidetrack anyway; what I was interested in mostly was tricks for running a good sandbox game that go beyond what you get out of the rulebooks, esp. the LBBs.

For example, I think often in a good sandbox game you just give the players incomplete and/or sketchy maps up front, instead of making them fight for every hex. Or if not a map then a list of rumors - but anyway enough information so that they actually have some meaningful choices about where to go and what to do.

The players received incomplete/sketchy maps starting about 1973 and we started using rumors a few months before the maps. As the players complete and update those maps, that find, buy or otherwise come into possession of others maps that are of varied completeness, accuracy and trustworthiness. There are literally dozens of places to hear rumours.

One of the other things that I do, and when our children started playing and now as our grandchildren start playing it always bears new unique fruit, is I have each player keep a notepad and have them jot down anything that they hear or see that interests them or anything they think they might like to do ingame. They give those to me whenever they get a full page. That is one place that rumors come from.

We have pretty much always had a player driven game. The current game adventure that we are starting right now is entirely player driven. They told me we want to do thus and such, and I said you just want to see me work harder, you can't fool me after all these years. ;D But they came up with the idea and now it is up to me to create (including ocean) about a 1.5 - 2 million or so square miles of territory for them to play in over the next 7-10 months. As they progress through that, assuming that they live, they will from time to time will hear rumours from a many different sources and those rumors are going to have conflicts between them and discrepancies, they will have to sort out what they think might be accurate and proceed on that basis, they will also receive maps from ones drawn on the ground with a stick to more elaborate ones and who knows how much of the info is correct or perhaps even deliberately misleading.

They will also run into new friends, new enemies and people who want to go with them.

The only time I really hit them with something predesigned is when they ask for it, otherwise most of it is created on the fly except for some barebones that I sketch out and in this case I have limited time to sketch it out ahead since we are playing four days a week when possible, but we won't hit that every week until after the New Year's.

[serendipity]

I've been in very free-form adventures where the party was given lots of choice regarding what line of inquiry to pursue and where to go. The best of those required a great deal of work on the part of the DM to create and people areas of the world and situations we might never even encounter. Puzzles, too, could not be created on the fly, not if they were interwoven into the fabric of the adventure. For more cerebral quests and adventures, there must be an underlying order. This means that although the freedom to direct an adventure is prized among players, in my opinion it will limit the type of adventure which results. This doesn't mean sandbox adventures are overly simplistic or not fun to play. They are, in fact, the style I prefer over most modules and canned dungeons. But some adventures do require frontloading in order to be played out properly.

[Melan]

calithena said:

So, what goes into a good 'sandbox' campaign, folks?

Time. It cannot be set up immediately, only grow as the players become familiar with the setting and start to create its interior structure through their interactions with it. The campaign becomes increasingly more complex and accumulates shared history, which is carried by the group playing the campaign. It is more people and action than paper and planning.

[crimhthanthegreat]

I think getting a lot of input from your players and learning what you (the ref) and your players mutually find a lot of fun gives you the in for the players to have lots of choice and the ref still be able to do the "frontloading" mentioned above. My players have given me a broad goal and some details about how they want to go about accomplishing that goal, my part then is to rough some things out and weave some things into it ("frontloading") and then to create the other needed details on the fly as we go. This, I think, is very successful in giving both the players and the ref what they want.

[howandwhy99]

Accretion of the jazzy bits with the cool bits you've stolen from all over. I think 4e worldbuilding got this right in that most campaigns are homebrew worlds and the easiest worlds to create are simply cobbling together bits others already have. You can have Cormyr next to Darokin next to the Beastmaster lands next to Krull next to Hyperboria next to... ad infinitum.

The way we play is the characters make up their backstories and those become part of the world. I'm from a horse farm, Dram is from a town named Hamfast, others are from bits and parts all over, near or far. We even detail the bits as players we want in our backstories. We've had 2 princesses and 1 prince so far (elf, dwarf, & half-fey elf). All that stuff gets spitwadded on to the world. Gods are the same way. I believe in whatever God I want...and I'm the Cleric. There are others around, but mine is just as valid. Ditto with magic systems, ancient fighting styles, thieving guilds, whatever. The big point here is that each one is only what our PCs believe is true when they start the game. Heck, that half-fey elf turned out to be half-drow as drow are the fey of this world. That's always fun to learn.

[Zulgyan]

I think 4e worldbuilding got this right

How didn't OD&D got this right too?

(Welcome to the boards!)

[howandwhy99]

Cuz' some of us have been pounding the drum over on ENWorld for a couple years now and the designers heard it? One right turn does not preclude another.

(thanks)