I don't know if this belongs here or on the DDG subforum. Apologies if I made the wrong call.
So, in September, assuming that I can spare the time (And I bloody hope I can), I want to start running Stars Without Number. It'll be an eight-week block of game at our club, with potential for us to come back to it in future. But I've never ran a sandbox game before - and truthfully, I don't know how my likely player group will take to it!
Yes, I know, in at the deep end.
I've started on the map and planet generation for sector Q-68. Conveniently, I have 26 inhabited systems; I kinda bodged together Traveller and SWN system generation to get the basics of my systems map, and I intend to do so further for detailing (Starport types etc). I've currently got 31 inhabited planets to detail (For each system, I rolled 2d6, and doubles meant there would be another planet), with a neat variety of stuff. I've also got a star map, which did seem a little crowded, but eh; the star clusters are all nice and nearby, except for one that's off on it's own.
My initial plan is for the players to start as members of an organisation called Stormdivers, who are essentially tomb raiders / wreck explorers. The first session will be their final assessment mission, at the end of boot camp; I want to include a murder sub-plot as another thing, which could also give them a potential out from the organisation, if they like. Organisation membership gives them limited autonomy, which will gradually increase as they become higher-ranking; alternatively, they'd have the training to acquire their own starship... eventually. If they leave the organisation, this is a story thread I'd like to run with.
Another thing I definitely want is a Halo-esque superweapon, and I've got ideas for that. But the faction controlling it would obviously have to have a plan that could be drawn out for a long time; I don't want to have the players wake up one day to be in time for another Scream that they had no idea about. Stopping this is a potential long-term plot thread that would take many blocks of game to go through.
So... with tenish weeks to go, here I am. I need to write up my planets and come up with plot hooks. Does anyone have any hints for a first-time sandbox GM? I don't know the questions to ask. I know the eight-week hard limit is a problem (We're playing a block of Pendragon after that), but we can come back to the SWN game afterwards, and I'm kinda stuck by our club's format.
I think a good rumour table is a great start. Sandboxes only really work IMO if players can actually make meaningful choices about the available content.
A few factions, preferably with conflicting aims, but not actually at war with one another often helps. Scenarios like 'You have recovered a widget, all eight of these factions want it and are willing to pay you, choose' is a fantastic way of empowering player decision making.
Eight weeks is one hell of a short time limit for a sandbox, especially in space. Is going to be tough. You need to work out not just how to let the PCs wander about the Box, but also how they can impact upon the Box.
The easiest way to get your players invested is to have another faction be jackasses to them, and also easy to mess with back.
I'm not sure how good you are with coming up with stuff on the fly, but this is something you might want to try.
Create worlds, rumors, creatures, NPCs, and adventures that are not nailed down to anything on your main map. As your Players begin choosing directions, they will let you know what they want from the game, and at that point you take what you have created earlier and start nailing it down to the map as they move across it through adventuring.
You can think of it as a jigsaw puzzle in which you create the pieces, the Palyers choose which ones they like, and you fit them in to form an overall picture.
I can say that this has worked for me in Traveller, but then again it is ridiculously easy to create the bare bones of worlds, animals, NPCs, and systems by random rolls using that game. The default Free Trader campaign does indeed make a good baseline to work from.
My How to make a Traveller Sandbox works just as well for Stars without Numbers.
http://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-to-make-traveller-sandbox.html
Player buy-in is absolutely indispensable with a sandbox game. If you've got it, you can get away with a great deal, and if you don't have it, you simply can't run a sandbox.
Every PC needs to have a goal. It doesn't have to be a creative goal, or a deeply personal goal, or a different goal than their teammates, but they must have something that will provoke them to action. "I want to get filthy rich" works just as well as "I want bloody synthetic revenge on the Godmind of Cheiron IV". It just has to be a default ambition they can fall back on whenever they need to decide their next move.
To start things off, here's how I'd set things up:
For the first session, get them together and get their PCs rolled up. Two is better than one, in case one of them catches a bad case of laser poisoning. If they can do this before the game, it's best, but it won't take them long in-session if they do it there. The critical thing is to make sure each character has a goal and that you know what those goals are.
Feed them the setup and the initial adventure. Let them use it to get comfortable with the rules and with each others' PCs. While you're running it, think about the goals they've given you. At the end of the session, point out at least two clear hooks that will advance PC goals, and invite them to give you their own ideas about how they might get where they want to go.
Get them to decide on a course of action, and then take that information and use it to prep the next session. You only ever need to be one session ahead of them. In a fresh sandbox, one that's as new to you as it is to them, you won't have the kind of fingertip control and comfort you'd get from a world you've inhabited for years, but that's not necessary so long as you keep things ordered neatly.
Your downtime between sessions is where your serious prepwork happens. Maybe run a faction turn, see what else is going on in the cosmos, and maybe tie it in to someone's goals. Even if it's irrelevant, it's a news crawl you can pass along, and maybe one of the players will realize a hook you didn't see. Three-quarters of the fun of running a sandbox campaign is the pleasure of being surprised even when you're the GM. You really don't know what's going to happen at the next session beyond the outlines of the situation at hand.
Whatever you do, don't overprepare. Overprep is one of the two big campaign-killers for sandboxes, along with PC aimlessness and frustration. It's all too easy for a GM to exhaust herself mapping out far more than she needs for the next session. Whenever you work on a sandbox campaign, you need to ask yourself two questions- "Will I need this for the next session?" and "Am I having fun making this?" If you can't answer yes to at least one of those questions, you need to put it down and go do something more fun before you burn yourself out.
Quote from: fectin;552475The easiest way to get your players invested is to have another faction be jackasses to them, and also easy to mess with back.
This is a great idea it's how I do it because my most DM experience is from running White Wolf style and stuff. Factions and Agendas waiting for players to fuck up beyond my initial setup. From there I wing it.
Quote from: SineNomine;552560Get them to decide on a course of action, and then take that information and use it to prep the next session. You only ever need to be one session ahead of them.
crucial info, that! since you never know what direction they'll go in, this is your main concern. plus keeping a "push" handy if they don't seem to have a direction of their own.
with that short time-frame too, i'd keep any pushes/pulls to be small-scale, nothing epic, unless you hope to return to the sandbox campaign after pendragon or whatever.
Quote from: SineNomine;552560Player buy-in is absolutely indispensable with a sandbox game. If you've got it, you can get away with a great deal, and if you don't have it, you simply can't run a sandbox.
Every PC needs to have a goal. It doesn't have to be a creative goal, or a deeply personal goal, or a different goal than their teammates, but they must have something that will provoke them to action. "I want to get filthy rich" works just as well as "I want bloody synthetic revenge on the Godmind of Cheiron IV". It just has to be a default ambition they can fall back on whenever they need to decide their next move.
The general rule is that the players need context in which to base their initial decisions otherwise it is likely the sandbox campaign will fail. Without it player might as well be throwing darts at a board for all the meaning their decisions have. This leads to unhappy players.
Having a goal is one of the many technique a referee and his group can use to generate that initial context. The one that in my experience works most times is the referee interacting one on one with each player prior to the start of the campaign to find out what they want to play and do. Then the referee works with the player to set that within the setting teaching the player whatever he needs to know.
Quote from: estar;552804The one that in my experience works most times is the referee interacting one on one with each player prior to the start of the campaign to find out what they want to play and do. Then the referee works with the player to set that within the setting teaching the player whatever he needs to know.
This is a perfectly good way of doing things in most systems, where characters are fairly durable creations. However, for by-the-book SWN with new players, I've found it tends to be counterproductive. It usually takes a few explosive decompressions and sucking chest wounds before the players really absorb the fact of their characters' fragility, and anything that smacks of heavy background development has an excellent chance of being wasted in the first two hours of play. Moreover, it runs the risk of implying that a particular character's goal arc is inevitable, when every step of its accomplishment is contingent upon their choices. Certainly the sandbox should have specific opportunities for a PC to pursue their goals, but if too much effort is devoted toward facilitating a particular goal it turns into a plush railroad toward a destination decided before the train ever left the station.
It also implies a fixity of purpose that tends to age poorly in a sandbox campaign. The burning goal of session one may become irrelevant by session three, when the group fixes on some other goal that's arisen in the course of play. I get the best mileage out of something light and notional, something that can be summed up in a single sentence.
Of course, the players need to have some grasp of the setting if they're going to make intelligent choices about what goals they want to pursue, but this sort of thing can be accomplished by a paragraph's worth of exposition. One of the reasons that the world tag system is so easy to use is because they formalize cliches that everyone knows. When you say "It's a high-tech ocean world with hydroplane pirates who are really secret police for the tyrannical government", most players are going to be able to fill in the blanks without much help.
Trying to pin things down in too much detail can be actively counterproductive, because every fact you give them is a fact they can't just assume out of their own mental templates. When you say "A low-tech desert city with masked alien priests", they're going to ask you questions about it, but they're also going to go on some assumptions. If one of the players says "They've got watersellers here, right?" you nod and say yes. When they make assumptions about your world, if there's not a compelling reason to deny it, you just nod and confirm them. Not only does this give you a chance to be surprised about your own creation, it also gives the players the natural confidence to operate smoothly within your constructed fiction. Keeping your up-front work light and cursory gives more room for this kind of surprise.
One trick I used for rumors was to create a couple page newspaper with headlines and articles and fill it with my rumors. This way the players could have a handout and decide which way to go without feeling railroaded.
If you do this, however, be sure to actually think about all of the options. I made one and threw in a partial story just to fill space, then that happened to be the one that grabbed their attention and I hadn't really thought about it as an adventure. I really had to "wing it" that day. :eek:
Quote from: SineNomine;552824This is a perfectly good way of doing things in most systems, where characters are fairly durable creations. However, for by-the-book SWN with new players, I've found it tends to be counterproductive. It usually takes a few explosive decompressions and sucking chest wounds before the players really absorb the fact of their characters' fragility, and anything that smacks of heavy background development has an excellent chance of being wasted in the first two hours of play.
My technique is not about generating background details. It about
teaching the player enough about the campaign so that they have a foundation on which to base their initial decisions. If may result in a lot of background detail if that what the players is interested in, then it may not. Either case the player will have the knowledge needed to get going in a sandbox game.
If a referee is not willing to do this or finds it burdensome then running a sandbox campaign will be a waste of their time and the players time. I suggest going with a campaign that more structured perhaps one that starts out mission oriented or throw the player in a situation where the initial choices are obvious.
Quote from: SineNomine;552824It usually takes a few explosive decompressions and sucking chest wounds before the players really absorb the fact of their characters' fragility,
If the players doesn't know this before the start of the campaign then the referee has failed to do his job teaching the players about his campaign. The burden on me, the referee, to teach my players the assumptions and not reduce them to what is esstentially a game of playing twenty questions. Typically most of the problem are combat or special ability (magic, super powers, etc) related. So what I do for a group of player that is unfamiliar with the game or setting is run a sample combat covering the areas that in my experience are problems.
In the case of SwN, I would put the sample combat on a moon or starship, loaded with dangerous hazards and typical foes.
Quote from: SineNomine;552824Moreover, it runs the risk of implying that a particular character's goal arc is inevitable, when every step of its accomplishment is contingent upon their choices. Certainly the sandbox should have specific opportunities for a PC to pursue their goals, but if too much effort is devoted toward facilitating a particular goal it turns into a plush railroad toward a destination decided before the train ever left the station.
The referee is simulating the setting while running a sandbox. Literally a whole world full of possibilities. One player may have questions about elven ruins, another about the mage's guild, another about the sewers. Many referee are daunted by this feeling that they have to do an insane amount of prep.
That is not true if you take the time out of game to talk to the players about what the goals are for their characters both before and during the campaign. This will give you what you need to focus on during the limited time you have to prepare for a game.
While it nice to think that we can make up all of this on the fly the problem is that takes experience. Even with that experience there are just some details that needs preparation in order keep it consistent over the course of the campaign. My techniques solves both issues.
Finally in practice it is a lot less formal than how I am writing it. A lot of time the players don't know that I am really interviewing them as I am just talking them normally during the usual gaming banter.
Quote from: SineNomine;552824It also implies a fixity of purpose that tends to age poorly in a sandbox campaign. The burning goal of session one may become irrelevant by session three, when the group fixes on some other goal that's arisen in the course of play. I get the best mileage out of something light and notional, something that can be summed up in a single sentence.
Sandboxes are unpredictable by their very nature and require good communication to keep them fresh and interesting. My techniques are about that communication both initially and during the course of the campaign.
Quote from: SineNomine;552824Of course, the players need to have some grasp of the setting if they're going to make intelligent choices about what goals they want to pursue, but this sort of thing can be accomplished by a paragraph's worth of exposition.
Yet that doesn't cover individual goals which are just as important. Otherwise the game will be dominated by the active members of the group to dissatisfaction of the more passive players.
Quote from: SineNomine;552824One of the reasons that the world tag system is so easy to use is because they formalize cliches that everyone knows. When you say "It's a high-tech ocean world with hydroplane pirates who are really secret police for the tyrannical government", most players are going to be able to fill in the blanks without much help.
I use cliches all the time and have no argument with this. It way all my published settings are vanilla fantasies with a handful of twists. Everything I don't cover can be reliably assumed by what the average players known about fantasy.
Quote from: SineNomine;552824Trying to pin things down in too much detail can be actively counterproductive,
Again, and I stress this, it not about detail, it about communication and teaching the details they
need. Many peoples I work this their goals and background can be summed up as "I am Bork, Bork comes from a poor planet/village. Bork wants to find treasure and be rich." What get added in my conversation with them is stuff useful to their specific class and/or race. About a paragraph worth in general.
QuoteBork know about the mercernaries guild and the Far Star Traders. The Guild hire fighters like Bork granted them lucrative contracts for various jobs. Your contact there is John Able. The Far Star Traders are a loose groups of criminals like the Mob or the gangs, job security is lot less, danger is more but the payoff can be way greater. You know various brokers that deals with the Far Stars hang out at the Startown Tavern.
Okay, this has all been good stuff!
Quote from: SineNomine;552560To start things off, here's how I'd set things up:
This was really good advice, thank you!
Sector generation gave me three regional powers, and three handy star clusters for them, so there's some conflict; there are also no psychic academies, so I can start the psychics with a motivation to get out and earn money.
My plan for the first session will be the PC's final assessment for an explorer organisation; it seems like a good time for the players to learn that their characters aren't immortal, as well as for the characters to learn it. I can also use it to set up an investigation mission for them.
I'm figuring that planetary travel would require a period of acclimatisation, when you land; and if you're sent there to do something, after it's done, there might still be a few days before you can drill out. So that's plenty of time for players to investigate stuff, or have other things happen to them, or plan their next move.
Quote from: jadraxEight weeks is one hell of a short time limit for a sandbox, especially in space. Is going to be tough.
It's a really short time, I agree, and it's a problem with our structure; eight weeks isn't much time to get into a character. We do well at events, frex, because we've had to learn how to pick a character up quickly.
We've got an SLA Industries campaign, for example, which is probably in about session 30; but the pace is so slow and the blocks so split out (About six weeks a year) that it feels like I've not been playing the same character in each block, but a slight variation on the same concept. Don't get me wrong, I'm having fun, it just feels odd.
There's also an issue that, if the system doesn't handle low-level characters well, you have to gives lots of XP quickly, and then everything feels... rushed. You don't have time to learn the character. So I'd like to run longer games, but it's not possible next year. We've experimented with "campaign blocks" this year (6 weeks of game A, 8 of game B, 6 of A, 8 of B...), and that's worked well, so it's maybe something we will repeat next year.
Quote from: jeff37923;552481Create worlds, rumors, creatures, NPCs, and adventures that are not nailed down to anything on your main map. As your Players begin choosing directions, they will let you know what they want from the game, and at that point you take what you have created earlier and start nailing it down to the map as they move across it through adventuring.
I was going to get
760 Patrons for a hand with this, to assist my imagination, but this sounds like a great idea.
Quote from: finarvyn;553680One trick I used for rumors was to create a couple page newspaper with headlines and articles and fill it with my rumors. This way the players could have a handout and decide which way to go without feeling railroaded.
If you do this, however, be sure to actually think about all of the options. I made one and threw in a partial story just to fill space, then that happened to be the one that grabbed their attention and I hadn't really thought about it as an adventure. I really had to "wing it" that day. :eek:
One thing I wanted to be able to do was have a "job board", and hand out "mission card" props for them to choose from (If they stick with the explorer organisation, of course!). This works great in, say, SLA Industries.
This could all fail, badly, of course. But I'm looking forward to it.
Quote from: Ladybird;553755I was going to get 760 Patrons for a hand with this, to assist my imagination, but this sounds like a great idea.
Get it.
About 3/4 of all of the game stuff I ever bought has been to help my imagination and to steal ideas from, I hardly ever use things as is.
760 Patrons is great for ideas for sci-fi games in general.
Quote from: finarvyn;553680One trick I used for rumors was to create a couple page newspaper with headlines and articles and fill it with my rumors. This way the players could have a handout and decide which way to go without feeling railroaded.
In addition, it really helps if the PCs hear about stuff that's happening that won't have anything to do with what they're actually doing. News from far away, and stuff like that.
And, to top that, make sure there's continuity. If they hear news about Space Pope Anastasius LVIII being caught diddling an android, make sure that later on they hear about his encyclical announcing that androids do in fact have souls (or, if you prefer, his brutal beating death at the hand of the College of Space Cardinals). Stuff like that.
If you want to be very ambitious, like I have been in quite a few long-term campaigns (games that span over a decade of game time in the setting), have player characters hear about situations that at first have nothing at all to do with them, and then gradually over time end up involving them, or even make an offhanded but memorable mention about something, and then some 10 game years later or so have that something show up again in a way that can be relevant to an area of interest to the PCs.
Putting it into sandbox terms, remember what information you send off into the setting, too, keep track of it, so that if the PCs later of their own initiative end up getting unexpectedly intertwined with the situation (like say, if one of them ends up working for a Space Cardinal), you can relate it back to those earlier and originally throw-away events.
RPGPundit
Just so nobody thinks I've forgotten about this! Progress has been slow due to my daughter, but this is still a thing that excites me.
I'm still sketching out histories for my planets, and putting them together into some sort of vaguely cohesive thing. My sector threw up a Preceptor archive, so I'm currently leaning towards that being the party's initial affiliation (The Preceptors being an organisation that, before the Silence, basically stored human knowledge) They'd have plenty of half-facts that nobody has investigated in six hundred years that a team of rookies could be sent to for their first few missions, until they proved themselves.
Well, back to writing, I guess.