Quote from: Zalman on February 25, 2024, 03:26:33 PM
Four-foot-one.

A respectable length with time for breakfast, tea, and biscuits.  Perhaps concluding with some pipe weed at the end to reflect on your travels and adventures.

I don't so much experience setting fatigue as I do a combination of ADHD and perfectionism. In the short to intermediate-term, I tend to suffer from a lot of "grass is greener". I'll be running something and hear about another setting that sounds better in some way and then immediately start wanting to switch. In the longer term, I think the problem is I haven't yet found a setting I like well enough to want to be running it for the next forty years. Plus I generally pick settings the same way I pick systems, because I have a very specific type of campaign I want to run with them. I've started the early planning stages on a setting that I hope will be my version of SHARK's Thandor, but it's probably at least a year away from being ready for prime-time, so I'll likely keep bouncing for a while.

Like most things, this is pretty clearly a question of personal temperament. I've got an old friend who's been running Faerun for about twenty-five years. I don't think he's ever seriously considered another setting for D&D. He also just plays whatever the current edition is. Just totally unconcerned with the kinds of questions that prevent me from ever sticking with a setting or system for more than one or two campaigns.

Temperament is also almost certainly behind my preference for episodic campaigns or ones with defined objectives. I also prefer level-based/metroidvania videogames to sandbox ones, short-stories to novels, and "monster of the week" tv shows to season-long arcs. Call it what you want, but I prefer my entertainment to get to the point and then move on.

It doesn't help that my experience with playing in sandbox games (at least the way tenbones defines them) has been largely negative: usually a lot of fanny-ing about interspersed with lackluster encounters, because most GMs aren't actually all that good at improvising. Who knows? maybe someday I'll either play in a good one, or run one that's so overwhelmingly successful that it changes my mind. 

I like a campaign that is about something, or goes somewhere. As such, the campaign will probably plotted for a critical path, the minimum number of episodes to get from inception to overarching completion, with room for player actions to add episodes or skip previously anticipated ones. I like my concept driven material to be as short as possible and as long as necessary.

Quote from: ForgottenF on February 25, 2024, 07:49:30 PM
It doesn't help that my experience with playing in sandbox games (at least the way tenbones defines them) has been largely negative: usually a lot of fanny-ing about interspersed with lackluster encounters, because most GMs aren't actually all that good at improvising. Who knows?

Well, yea. Sandboxing is not "make it up as you go along". You always need a bunch of sandbox resources, and you need to be at least a few steps ahead of the players in making new material. I almost always prep the wandering monsters & suchlike pre-play.

Quote from: tenbones on February 23, 2024, 02:08:20 PM
I wonder if people here (in this thread) actually ever have played an actual sandbox campaign.

The wheedling of meta-engineering campaigns based on "numbers of sessions" and "fights per session" down inevitably to the player-centric "damage per round" ultimately is just ignoring the actual game itself.

But this comes from the notion that "running an adventure" is supposed to act like a scripted story. When the reality is the "story" is what the PC's do. And the GM's job is only to facilitate them doing things as represented by the setting. Saying something like "I don't have time to do a multi-year campaign" is like saying "I don't have any intention of playing TTRPG's for years."

If the campaign is unscripted, you simply play. The campaign is over when everyone agrees its over. This largely depends on the depth of skill of your GM. Inversely it depends on the quality of the GM's player's and their capacity for engagement - and directly that tension that exists between them.

No amount of badly scripted adventures will hold a group long term, and no amount of well scripted one-shots will truly give the feeling of total player agency as long as the script takes dominance over the actual game.

It's bizarre. Pre-determining campaign length is like setting an alarm for having sex. Granted by this analogy, doing one-shots as a "campaign" is like claiming premature ejaculation is good sex. Well at least someone got theirs... Aim higher, go deeper (pun intended).

Yes and no. I might not be the most talented GM out there, but I can run sandboxes and there are a heck of a lot more reasons campaigns going on too long causes problems than just adventure design.

• Character arcs naturally want to move towards progression. Running a character arc too long means you are intentionally making the character's life stagnate and that aspect of the campaign boring. Completing it and moving on to a new arc significantly changes the chemistry of the character to the point that you often may as well roll up a new character.
• System "power bands" don't like being extended too far. Most systems have a level or progression range they are designed to feel best during. This is usually relatively early on in the game, but not at the dead start. For example, almost all versions of D&D play best between Levels 3 and 7, even though the character progression goes on much longer. Savage Worlds plays best when you are most often rolling D4s, D6s, and D8s, and tends to handle modified rolls or D10s and D12s a fair bit less gracefully. It's not like these systems "break" but gameplay becomes notably less good when you leave the power band. This tends to limit the enjoyable vertical progression space, even if it's allowed by the book and technically works.
• Excess horizontal growth dilutes character personality. The more characters have a chance for horizontal advancement, the more overlap characters tend to have, which means less specialist spotlighting.
• Player characters tend to be less time efficient with table time if you leave play time unlimited.

So yeah, there are many reasons to not always aim for forever or very long campaigns. I won't say that they are "evil," but I also think that the choice to aim for indefinite campaign length does tend to weaken the potential experience if you had aimed to not carry the game on forever.

Quote from: Fheredin on February 26, 2024, 09:18:11 AM
Yes and no. I might not be the most talented GM out there, but I can run sandboxes and there are a heck of a lot more reasons campaigns going on too long causes problems than just adventure design.

Sure. There's always a good reason to not run a sandbox campaign. But then the question is "what IS a campaign", the moment we start talking about a "set goal within the constraints of a specified number of sessions" we're doing "storytime" not campaigning. Mind you, I'm not saying *you* are saying this, I'm saying that a "campaign", if you're not a storygamer, or a railroading GM, is something more than running an adventure(s) in some linear format where the GM is guiding players (not their PC's) to a specific goal.

The distinctions are entirely dependent on a GM's skill and understanding on how to conduct a Sandbox. I've proven this point to my players, who also doubted me, where I ran an entire adventure within a much larger campaign, addressing all their weird PC's interests, in what was tantamount to a T-intersection hallway that lasted months. How? By adjusting the literal scale of the "hallway" to massive geographical scale, effectively the players were hexcrawling without even knowing it. Mind you I was doing it to prove a point to some would-be GM's in my group. When they realized all their choices which were completely organic, and created by them, based on whatever inputs and parameters I gave to them via what I felt the setting would cough up based on their location: they were shocked to see that *I*, Mr. Sandbox, had them in a simple T-section hallway of a massive "old school" map.

What's the point of this? That the techniques of a good Sandbox GM transcends and incorporates *all* the other methods of GMing, including railroads, including one-shots, including chain-modules, etc. The conducting of a "campaign" is to play until everyone has come to a natural end. I can scale a one-shot adventure into a sprawling sandbox that could take years to explore, if I wanted to. That doesn't mean implicitly that the players will spend years doing so - a simply bad decision could wipe everyone in the first encounter after all. I'm merely saying that the proscription of length of a campaign, is a weird thing beyond what I find kind of obvious.

Quote from: Fheredin on February 26, 2024, 09:18:11 AM

• Character arcs naturally want to move towards progression. Running a character arc too long means you are intentionally making the character's life stagnate and that aspect of the campaign boring. Completing it and moving on to a new arc significantly changes the chemistry of the character to the point that you often may as well roll up a new character.

It's your job as a GM to keep things "moving" in the world. It doesn't mean that all progression is vertical. This is a common problem with D&D, especially today. The whole Level-up notion that the game promotes (turbo-charged by videogaming drinking their own urine about what they feel D&D IS, ironically), is a missing a tremendous point about sandboxing. In parallel, there is a *massive* realization right now in the videogaming world that "Survival games" are now a thing. Those are attempts at horizontal progression on a vertical axis. Yes you can build a castle... but in order to do that, you gotta learn how to harvest wood, to build the handle, to create the stone pick, to allow you mine the ore to smelt the metal to create the bronze axe-head that lets you cut the harder timber that lets you make the better handle, that lets you create the pick-head, that lets you mine the better ore and stone that lets you build etc. etc. - where the world is still in operation around you.

A character arc *should* happen. But the world keeps moving. The GM's job, in a sandbox, to keep that world moving. (I call it plate-spinning). The moment a PC can arrive at a place that my world doesn't support (for whatever reason) I better be thinking about WHY? That's what pushes us as GM's to get better at managing not just vertical progression, but horizontal. The Horizontal is **massively** important for sandbox play. PC's do not exist in vacuum. And horizontal play, done right, gives your PC's options they never conceived of (secret: you probably as a GM didn't conceive of them either which is where the Magic Sauce is). Nothing should be IMPLICIT. NOTHING. All things are game-fodder. Leveling up isn't some magical event that happens because some PC killed an Orc and DING! I hit 14th level. That's playing rules, not the game.

In a good sandbox, the change in a PC's arc *shouldn't* be too much of a surprise. When a PC is moving towards the end of a developmental arc (as you might put it) you should be paving the road internally with other options. This doesn't mean that the player will pursue them, but it means you as a GM should be constantly developing options just in case, even if the player goes an entirely different way (which is where you as a GM will have to quickly catch up).

Often a player in this case will run out of drive to do more. Which is fine. In sandbox play, that's a "low-mainteance" plate to keep spinning while you work on other PC's "arcs". You still let the players decide the focus of where things go. OR maybe you've hit the end of the campaign and everyone is happy?

Quote from: Fheredin on February 26, 2024, 09:18:11 AM

• System "power bands" don't like being extended too far. Most systems have a level or progression range they are designed to feel best during. This is usually relatively early on in the game, but not at the dead start. For example, almost all versions of D&D play best between Levels 3 and 7, even though the character progression goes on much longer. Savage Worlds plays best when you are most often rolling D4s, D6s, and D8s, and tends to handle modified rolls or D10s and D12s a fair bit less gracefully. It's not like these systems "break" but gameplay becomes notably less good when you leave the power band. This tends to limit the enjoyable vertical progression space, even if it's allowed by the book and technically works.

True. Specifically, when it comes SW, I'd disagree. I'd have agreed with you when SWADE dropped... but Savage Rifts has taught me differently. To your broader point, you're spot on the money (and I'll address the SW part after) - a good GM running a campaign should understand the actual "power-bands" of their system in use. This is an important point for sandboxing because scaling your game can get thrown WAY out of whack, and limit the potential of your campaign by leaning into the vertical aspect of the game in order to "rush to the sweetspot". I'm guilty of this on occasion. This is where delving into the horizontal aspects of your sandbox can give a LOT of value to your otherwise linear progression, because it will engage your players in activities they otherwise wouldn't even realize they wanted. I could elaborate on Horizontal play more if people are interested...

This will extend your game and therefore your world by giving your players options and letting them go for it. This is the daunting part that will cause most Journeyman GM's to get sweaty, or we run headlong into GM's that are really just reluctant GM's that do it because no one else will. I think this point is where those reluctant GM's have the greatest chance to have that switch turned on where they realize how gratifying GMing with more depth can be, and they start actually enjoying it.

As for SW - I'm gonna disagree here because implied with the die-code of SW, you now have options to really up the powerscale of your game by leveraging the concepts in SW Rifts. YES it means you're playing a much higher-octane game. But what is high-level play supposed to be other than high-octane? Prior to SW Rifts, I felt the same thing as you. Mainly that the Core rules don't break down, but our assumptions (especially if you come from a prior edition like SW Deluxe) is that a "standard" build is based on a +2 total, and that the core task resolution and subsystems (read: magic systems) only extend so far mechanically RAW. SW Rifts blew that all up. The *standard* SW Rifts character at the start is nearly Heroic rank in "normal" SWADE terms (~13+ level for you D&D folks). And the core task resolution doesn't change at all. Rather the values you're needing to do larger things change. Therefore it mechanically reinforces much much much more horizontal play - Yeah your Mindmelter could slag this entire town with a couple of attacks. But why would you and it might cause a psychic ripple that brings the Xitiicix hordes down on your team. What do you DO about it? ALL of these sub-systems in SW Rifts, and what they implicate are *absolutely* informing us what could be possible in Non-Rifts settings.

If you want your game to be playable at 20th-lvl+ in D&D, it's a MASSIVE headache. If you're running SW Core + Fantasy, and you leverage the Mega Magic rules from SW Rifts? You build horizontal platforms for your non-casters to become legendary "iconic frameworks" unique to your setting, which then kicks off more vertical progression (more arcs!) for those PC's. Then you literally have no upper limit gated by ones perception of the die-codes. Is there a limit? Sure. But it's radically higher than most people imagine.

Quote from: Fheredin on February 26, 2024, 09:18:11 AM

• Excess horizontal growth dilutes character personality. The more characters have a chance for horizontal advancement, the more overlap characters tend to have, which means less specialist spotlighting.

This is a GM issue. It means you as a GM have to think broader OR more integral. Examples - your Horizontal growth of your warrior might be something like he gets knighted and is given a title and starts a keep, but your Thief character becomes his "advisor" (i.e. spymaster). In terms of horizontal growth the two are joined in a formal capacity, and that means the Thief character will have to bend his gameplay towards things like spying on potential rivals, setting up defenses against espionage, intelligence gathering networks - ALL the things the Warrior might not be suited to do. But for him, he's dealing with actual incursions into his territory, rivals prodding him at social events, hosting tourneys to keep himself sharp. Hunting expeditions led by his Huntmaster (another PC - ranger?) which might lead to a sandbox setpiece (a dungeon!).

ALL of those things are massive gaming opportunities that depend on you as the GM to give them proper relevance. Take it a step further, what is to stop the Thief character from maintaining his connections (in whatever manner appropriate to your game and setting) with the Underworld? The Thief PC might have been a member of the Thieves Guild... now he has temporal power as a trusted advisor to the local ruler, now he's SQUARELY a specialist while intrinsically intertwined with another PC's "schtick" that keep them mutually exclusive. And that tension is PURE gameplay glory. BUT it depends on the skill of the GM to keep it spinning.

Quote from: Fheredin on February 26, 2024, 09:18:11 AM

• Player characters tend to be less time efficient with table time if you leave play time unlimited.

Definitely true. The balancing act here is to make sure your NPC's have their own agendas and timetables. You can let players and their PC's chill all they want. But you need to balance it out in your sandbox with the idea that your NPC's (the important ones anyhow) also have agendas that have *nothing* to do with the PC's until those agendas and the PC's intersect on some level. THAT intersection is where the PC's have to decide to move and do something. Or not. GM's can easily say "Okay guys you're all chilling out doing <X> for downtime. I wanna let some time go by... "

You'll be surprised how lazy thinking Players will say some banal-shit like "Okay I'm gonna hang out and party in my favorite tavern" rather than say something constructive like "Remember those cultists we killed a few sessions ago? And a couple of them got away? I'm going to follow up with contacts/investigate/read up on that cult during the downtime."

Meanwhile if they do something banal, you're moving your timeline on your cult's real secret activities up based on what the PC's do on their downtime. IN EITHER CASE - once those two agendas intersect: you have adventure. Adventure means game. Game means the campaign is rolling forward.

Quote from: Fheredin on February 26, 2024, 09:18:11 AMSo yeah, there are many reasons to not always aim for forever or very long campaigns. I won't say that they are "evil," but I also think that the choice to aim for indefinite campaign length does tend to weaken the potential experience if you had aimed to not carry the game on forever.

Well again, it's dependent on what we wanna call a campaign vs. "we're playing a boardgame where there is a set start and ending, and we're gonna do stuff along the way and roll dice." We're doing the same thing... but one methodology involves gaming deeper than the other.

I'm not hung up on terminology like "campaign" and what it means per se. As a reflection of a collection of adventure sessions where players do stuff along a theme, sure. The quality of those experiences are what matter. In the meta - this ideally means having a GM that truly gives a shit, and players that only have to be ready to play. The "campaign" is that thing we all share that ends when it needs to end.

Quote from: S'mon on February 26, 2024, 07:56:11 AM

Quote from: ForgottenF on February 25, 2024, 07:49:30 PM
It doesn't help that my experience with playing in sandbox games (at least the way tenbones defines them) has been largely negative: usually a lot of fanny-ing about interspersed with lackluster encounters, because most GMs aren't actually all that good at improvising. Who knows?

Well, yea. Sandboxing is not "make it up as you go along". You always need a bunch of sandbox resources, and you need to be at least a few steps ahead of the players in making new material. I almost always prep the wandering monsters & suchlike pre-play.

Yep. And sandbox GM's have different tolerance levels for running their sandboxes based on their skills. Some Sandbox GM's are *really* good at improv. Other's are *really* good at organizational skills. Most of us are in-between. Prep is still prep, and there are a host of things to consider based on your personal strengths and weaknesses.

What is *not* part of my prep as a GM, is using a pre-made adventure that I haven't pored over and deconstructed to the atomic level to make sure it fits my setting. If using them at all.

Quote from: tenbones on February 26, 2024, 11:37:01 AM
What is *not* part of my prep as a GM, is using a pre-made adventure that I haven't pored over and deconstructed to the atomic level to make sure it fits my setting. If using them at all.

I'm about to run one for Cyberpunk where I've made the main friendly NPC the antagonist, switching friends and foes. I felt that suited the genre. 

@tenbones,

What are "Horizontal", and "Vertical" progression?  Is that like wealth/titles/stuff and levelling respectively? 

Quote from: Svenhelgrim on February 26, 2024, 06:09:05 PM
@tenbones,

What are "Horizontal", and "Vertical" progression?  Is that like wealth/titles/stuff and levelling respectively?

Yeah - basically horizontal progression is anything in the game where the PC's get "power" or "ability" due to the things they do IN the game. So the Fighter that RP's starting his own mercenary company, that later becomes indispensable for a kingdom(s), the Wizard PC that starts a magic academy, or the PC that gets a title and domain, the Thief that becomes a major leader in the Thieves Guild.

Vertical progression is anything that is internal to the PC itself - class/skill progression, gear etc. which makes him more effective in direct play. Levelling and its *direct* corollary impactors in D&D terms.

Quote from: S'mon on February 26, 2024, 03:49:58 PM

Quote from: tenbones on February 26, 2024, 11:37:01 AM
What is *not* part of my prep as a GM, is using a pre-made adventure that I haven't pored over and deconstructed to the atomic level to make sure it fits my setting. If using them at all.

I'm about to run one for Cyberpunk where I've made the main friendly NPC the antagonist, switching friends and foes. I felt that suited the genre. 

You're doing God's work.

I'm still waiting for tenbones guide for sandboxing anything. I feel that if I bring this up enough you'll eventually write it.

Quote from: PencilBoy99 on February 27, 2024, 11:05:35 AM
I'm still waiting for tenbones guide for sandboxing anything. I feel that if I bring this up enough you'll eventually write it.

It's coming. I'm working on something and will be including at least one face from these parts who has already done a bunch of sandboxing how-to's too. Soon!

I'm building a little mini-studio in my office, but getting hamstrung by big non-gaming things in my day-job (good things, but intense stuff). But it IS coming...