Quote from: SavageSchemer;1124230Thank you for the plain English explanation. That helps. The way I'm internalizing this is that the sequential nature makes it a "path", whereas if it were a book of loosely related scenarios, it'd just be a "campaign". The aforementioned "Ghosts of Saltmarsh" being an example of the latter.

I disagree; three parts of Ghosts of Saltmarsh are very much sequential and form the core of a path, while the other five or so parts form side quests. Other adventure paths, like Princes of the Apocalypse, contain side quests in them too, making them no different except that they were designed this way from the beginning rather than being retrofitted into a path.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1124233I disagree; three parts of Ghosts of Saltmarsh are very much sequential and form the core of a path, while the other five or so parts form side quests. Other adventure paths, like Princes of the Apocalypse, contain side quests in them too, making them no different except that they were designed this way from the beginning rather than being retrofitted into a path.

I'm perfectly willing to accept that maybe I still don't know what the fuck an Adventure Path is. Or perhaps to more to the point - what makes an AP any different than a collection of related scenarios. I don't own any of the ones linked to on the Pathfinder page, but from the explanation provided a few posts back, I imagine it's the "first play X at level 1, then play Y at level 2 or 3" and so on until whatever max is (and I might not even understand that right, but that's how it reads) that makes it a "path". The closest correlations I can point to in my own gaming have nothing to do with D&D - but are things like "The Kinunir" or "The Pirates of Drinax" for Traveller. Or "Perils of the Surface World" for Hollow Earth Expedition. I wouldn't describe any of those as an "adventure path" insomuch as a series of published scenarios.

Quote from: SavageSchemer;1124230The way I'm internalizing this is that the sequential nature makes it a "path", whereas if it were a book of loosely related scenarios, it'd just be a "campaign". The aforementioned "Ghosts of Saltmarsh" being an example of the latter.

All of the hardcover adventure books from WotC are adventure paths. They have a somewhat looser structure and more optional material than the Paizo APs, but the underlying intent is still there.

If you went to your shelf and grabbed six random adventures, then went through each of them and modified them so that there was a more cohesive feel (replace all monsters of kinds A, B, and C with M; make the main antagonists all part of the same organization; take the final adventure's villain's plan and pepper in references to it throughout; and so forth), you've just made an adventure path.

If you went to your shelf and grabbed six random adventures, and your players just kind of meandered through them with no real connective plots or recurring characters or themes, and you made no effort to make them cohesive in any way, that'd be a "campaign," for whatever value using an incredibly vague word that folks use to describe long-running games is.

Quote from: PencilBoy99;1124149What would be amazingly helpful to me, and for which I would pay an exorbitant amount of money, is a very detailed workbook explaining how to run a campaign like this - not only exactly what to prep, but what you're actually doing in each scene, and how you're building something out of all the improvisation you're doing.

I wanted to respond to this post because I sense your sincerity in wanting to learn how to do a Sandbox right. I feel like I have at least an intuition about where you're going wrong. Follow my logic here.

In the first two types of campaign you have a script that you're following: a prompt in other words. What this does is pace the game for you and inject dramatic, interesting stuff whenever it's appropriate to do so. There's a clear drop in quality between the first one (in which there's a professional writer who has a lot of experience providing you with prompts) and the second one (in which you're the one who is expected to generate these elements yourself). The further step down in quality whenever you are bereft of any prompts whatsoever is therefore unsurprising.

That pacing mechanism (as you've cleverly deduced) is vital to keeping a game alive and interesting. It's the essential heartbeat of a good game. I imagine that you encountered a few scenes in that sandbox style (and I'm using the term sandbox very broadly here to encompass what you were doing) that were without direction, and your players just stopped doing things: and so did you.

In the first scenario, any pause was used as a justification for reading the next beat of the script. In the final one, any pause was met with confusion.

That's the Crux of your problem. We all intuitively understand how to read stories or scripts: they're written with that assumption in mind. They're designed so that we can understand when the next. Beat. Happens. I'm not surprised you found this easy.

Unfortunately, you were not running a game: what you were doing was telling a story. I know this because if your players had gone distantly off-script, the first scenario would have been identical to the last.  Without being able to fall back on the comforting structure of script you would have panicked (just as in the last scenario) and the experience would have been ruined.
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Hosting a game has its own structure though, I'm happy to report. Think about playing a a silly board game like Monopoly: it has a clear structure to when things happen. You're never really left floundering around not knowing what to do next. The problem is that the idea of that sort of process flow has largely been lost when we discuss tabletop roleplaying games.

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Consider the scenario of the dungeon. A little cliche' I understand, but bear with me. If you begin your game in the middle of a dungeon, surrounded on all sides by unknown dangers, a limited supply of food and light, caught between the twin goals of wanting to plunder this place of its unknown treasures and to escape from its unknown denizens, the Next Step writes itself. You don't really have to ask the players "What do you do now?": It's pretty apparent isn't it?

They engage with the dungeon.

They check doors for traps. They knock on the wall to see if there's a secret panel. They search rooms to see if there's some clue or some a hidden compartment or lurking danger that might kill them all. When they encounter a monster they do something about it: they try to avoid it or bribe it or throw food at it or yeah, they might try to fight it (but does the noise bring more nearby monsters? Is that worth the risk?). They're playing the game, and the structure of the game supports them.

What I want you to do when you're thinking about the sandbox style is realize that it's just an extension of the same principles to outside of the dungeon atmosphere. It's a scenario that demands player proactivity.

Your players are wandering around in town. Why are they there? What are they trying to accomplish? What inhabitants of the town are they interacting with? Why?

Your players are in the wilderness far outside of civilization. Why are they there? What's there with them? Are they in danger? Are they on a quest? The world is as hostile in the wilderness as it is inside of a dungeon: What's hunting them? What goal can they accomplish while they're out here so far from civilized lands? What happens if they fail?

Everything in a sandbox is like this. You have to take the lulls in the action (and you do want these lulls to happen I promise you) as the opportunity to do one of two very critical things for your game:
1) introduce a new element that complicates the situation. The classic method for this is an encounter chart, which I consider to be indispensable for this style of play.
2) Skip time forward to the next player-relevant decision. If they go back to town and run out of things to do, don't be coy: ask them what they do when they're done dicking around in town. Do they go to the Dungeon of Dread? Do they finally answer the king's summons? Do they investigate the rumors of that Necromancer on the far northern mountain peak? Then jump cut to that shit because you don't have time to cock around anymore.

What you'll find you're doing whenever you run a game in this style is that rather than being on the rails of a limiting script, you are responding to the player's earnest wish to interact with the things that exist in this imaginary world. You'll also find it's the best pace of all varieties because it comes with a true in built-in tension, actual understandable stakes, honestly earned rewards, and well deserved-consequences. It paces itself because the players of the ones that are ultimately in charge of how fast things go.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1124223And people say that this website is just full of the Pundit's "Yes Men"!

OK, fair enough.  The number of views and likes tells me that there was obviously an audience for it. Maybe this sort of thing was a bit too obvious for most of the people here, who have ample experience.  For some of the D&D 5e newbies, who have had no prior experience with anything other than the published WoTC material, the video might have been more of a revelation.

But as noted above the 5e modules so far are not adventure paths. Most are fairly bog standard campaign length modules. Even Curse of Strahd is a free roaming adventure with few if any forced events. Yes event A will happen if the players do action A. But that is bog standard too. Of the 5 modules I have for 5e none are adventure paths. The PCs course is not plotted out and they can go about getting from start to finish however they please. Both Tyranny of Dragons, Curse of Strahd, Tomb of Annihilation, Descent into Avernus. None of these follow the adventure path format. And at a glance Saltmarsh is not one either?

Quote from: Azraele;1124236I wanted to respond to this post because I sense your sincerity in wanting to learn how to do a Sandbox right. I feel like I have at least an intuition about where you're going wrong. Follow my logic here.

From the peanut gallery: thanks a bunch, this was a helpful post. I want to run more games and more sandbox games, but worry that I don't have "the right stuff" to run it. This kind of breakdown is helpful.

Quote from: GnomeWorks;1124235All of the hardcover adventure books from WotC are adventure paths. They have a somewhat looser structure and more optional material than the Paizo APs, but the underlying intent is still there.

If you went to your shelf and grabbed six random adventures, then went through each of them and modified them so that there was a more cohesive feel (replace all monsters of kinds A, B, and C with M; make the main antagonists all part of the same organization; take the final adventure's villain's plan and pepper in references to it throughout; and so forth), you've just made an adventure path.

If you went to your shelf and grabbed six random adventures, and your players just kind of meandered through them with no real connective plots or recurring characters or themes, and you made no effort to make them cohesive in any way, that'd be a "campaign," for whatever value using an incredibly vague word that folks use to describe long-running games is.

My brother's Pathfinder campaign is just that. He took our favorite D&D modules from the 80's (White Plume Mountain, Dwellers of the Forbidden City, etc) and tied them all together with the lich Keraptis as the main vilian, and a hunt for important artifacts as the thread that tied them all together.
It's still ongoing after a few years.

Quote from: Omega;1124237But as noted above the 5e modules so far are not adventure paths. Most are fairly bog standard campaign length modules. Even Curse of Strahd is a free roaming adventure with few if any forced events. Yes event A will happen if the players do action A. But that is bog standard too. Of the 5 modules I have for 5e none are adventure paths. The PCs course is not plotted out and they can go about getting from start to finish however they please. Both Tyranny of Dragons, Curse of Strahd, Tomb of Annihilation, Descent into Avernus. None of these follow the adventure path format. And at a glance Saltmarsh is not one either?

The 4e DMG characterised this sort of thing as campaign adventures or mega adventures, the site based campaign adventure like Temple of Elemental Evil being the closest thing WoTC can imagine to a sandbox campaign.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1124250My brother's Pathfinder campaign is just that. He took our favorite D&D modules from the 80's (White Plume Mountain, Dwellers of the Forbidden City, etc) and tied them all together with the lich Keraptis as the main vilian, and a hunt for important artifacts as the thread that tied them all together.
It's still ongoing after a few years.

Yeah that post confused me too. "Stitched together Frankenstein's monster campaign" sounds like a blast.

Quote from: insubordinate polyhedral;1124239From the peanut gallery: thanks a bunch, this was a helpful post. I want to run more games and more sandbox games, but worry that I don't have "the right stuff" to run it. This kind of breakdown is helpful.

No problem; full disclosure, I was using the post for warm-up writing.

If you want some really usable, meaty stuff, I powerfully suggest the Alexandrian's Gamemastery 101 series of articles which can be found at this helpful link. Justin Alexander does an unparalleled job of dissecting how we run games, where we often err, and how we can improve. He's sometimes a touch turgid and detailed for my palette, but he's a smart dude with rock-solid advice.

Quote from: Azraele;1124254Yeah that post confused me too.

It's simple.

QuoteMy brother's Pathfinder campaign is just that. He took our favorite D&D modules from the 80's (White Plume Mountain, Dwellers of the Forbidden City, etc) and tied them all together with the lich Keraptis as the main vilian, and a hunt for important artifacts as the thread that tied them all together.

This? That's an adventure path. It isn't the polished intentionally-written sort of AP that Paizo does, but it's effectively an AP all the same.

It's like the difference between a TV show that has season-long arcs, and more episodic ones like the A-team. If your campaign can be summarized as "we did X, then did Y, then did Z," and there's no narrative connective tissue, it's just a band of folks going around doing stuff? That's not an adventure path. There's no underlying themes, story arc, or villains.

Part of the insistence that WotC hardcover adventures are APs, from my end, is that they have those elements, they're just looser in narrative structure and more sandbox. I personally don't think the railroad-y nature of Paizo APs is a necessary component of what defines a thing as an AP.

Quote from: GnomeWorks;1124258It's simple.

Oh, so you're treating it like fiction, then?

I think the more sandboxy of us treat it more like a wargame with a really big map. We're not really concerned with "narrative cohesion"; a world has cohesion without a narrative.

Quote from: Azraele;1124254Yeah that post confused me too. "Stitched together Frankenstein's monster campaign" sounds like a blast.

It is! Especially since my brother is not married to narrative, and encourages us to step off the rails when we want.
So while there's a "story" running in the background, we're free to say "Fuck this!" and approach it however we want.
It's assumed that we're going to collect all the mcguffins and beat the bad guy, that's our campaign buy-in.
But the day to day decisions are player-character ones.

Really, I think the line between adventure path and sandbox is a porous one. If, in a sandbox, the players decide to become pirates, and in response the GM sets up adventures around pirate stuff, how is that so different from an adventure path about pirates? Most of my GMing has a kind of diamond structure. It's very railroady at the beginning, the world opens up as the characters discover all the adventure seeds I put out, and then it narrows again as the characters decide on a goal to pursue. They either suceed or fail, and then the structure repeats itself as necessary.

Quote from: Omega;1124237But as noted above the 5e modules so far are not adventure paths. Most are fairly bog standard campaign length modules. Even Curse of Strahd is a free roaming adventure with few if any forced events. Yes event A will happen if the players do action A. But that is bog standard too. Of the 5 modules I have for 5e none are adventure paths. The PCs course is not plotted out and they can go about getting from start to finish however they please. Both Tyranny of Dragons, Curse of Strahd, Tomb of Annihilation, Descent into Avernus. None of these follow the adventure path format. And at a glance Saltmarsh is not one either?

You keep saying that the D&D adventure books are not APs, but you never say why not?

What makes one of these an AP but not the other?
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I think one of the things that OSR games provide that might help them be sandboxy and less planned is (1) simple rules (easy to improv an NPC in 30 seconds) and lots of (2) random tables and stuff. Lots of of the Savage Worlds settings and the new Fria Ligan Forbidden lands provide tons of relevant random tables.

I'd also be curious what it would be like to run a provided sandbox game setting, like Nights Black Agent's Dracula Dossier or Arkham City. They're both Gumeshoe games which are on the rules lite end of the spectrum, but have tons of stuff to support an endless series of PC and GM decisions (how to make different NPC's good or bad, no plan of how the players will navigate the sandbox. However, both of these have overall goals that the players buy into (stopping vampires, escaping or stopping Arkham City's big bad). I'm sure I could run something like that, but I can't imagine that that level of work is required to run a sandbox - it would take me years to prepare that level of detail.

There's a neat new OSR game called Esoteric Enterpises, which is a dark urban fantasy where you randomly generate a whole bunch of city relationships and then the players are typically ner-do-wells trying to get by.

I don't know how to express any better, but the NPC's and events and such I plan in advance and think about alot are much more interesting (both to me and my players) than improv done at the table.