Pretty much what the title says.

My #1 gaming goal for 2012 is to successfully introduce a bunch of people who got their start with gaming in the 1990s, the age of AD&D 2e and the old World of Darkness (great games which featured horrible advice).

There's always the possibility that they won't bite, i.e. they won't engage the sandbox. While there are a few handy tricks for getting them involved (e.g. ninjas attack), most of them feel heavy-handed and trite when executed repeatedly.

What do you do then? Fall back to a more structured model, e.g. mission-based stuff? Try and find new hooks to get them to interact with the setting? Have the much-vaunted Talk on What Everyone Expects From The Gaming Table?

Quote from: The Butcher;520990Pretty much what the title says.

My #1 gaming goal for 2012 is to successfully introduce a bunch of people who got their start with gaming in the 1990s, the age of AD&D 2e and the old World of Darkness (great games which featured horrible advice).

There's always the possibility that they won't bite, i.e. they won't engage the sandbox. While there are a few handy tricks for getting them involved (e.g. ninjas attack), most of them feel heavy-handed and trite when executed repeatedly.

What do you do then? Fall back to a more structured model, e.g. mission-based stuff? Try and find new hooks to get them to interact with the setting? Have the much-vaunted Talk on What Everyone Expects From The Gaming Table?

Yes.  I would do some kind of misson.  Like in a Deadlands game I played years ago.  The scenerio was that we were on a train and was like the Orient Express almost.  I played a Hucksters that was a Pinkerton and there was a player that was a Cleric of the Southern persuasion of Pinkerton's iirc.  Anyway all the characters had hooks to interact with the "world" or sandbox after the misson.  They could team up or be at crosspurposes whichever they felt because it was up them after the misson given they knew each other and understood not everything is what it seemed on the surface after the misson.

Give them campaign traits like FC to get them started (buddy of the sheriff or contact: underworld fence of the town/region whatever works. Kind like background traits pathfinder style a couple of them work out to an extra feat for everybody not unbalanced at all.  And gives them a reason to be there in that world or area of the world.

Hmm.  I wouldn't try new hooks as much as I'd fish for them, even if the players aren't super-aware of what I'm doing.

What I mean, is, when your players create characters (after you've briefed them on your setting details their chars might know), have them write down a couple of goals each -- things they really, really want their characters to accomplish, or maybe even things their characters feel strongly about.  Then, when you're laying out the initial situations in your world, setup things so that when a player comes into contact with a situation, their character, by their very nature, has to respond.

Give them a bit of pressure in the set up. Maybe they all need money for some reason or other. Needing money is a good kick up the backside to go looking for action.

Quote from: noisms;520995Give them a bit of pressure in the set up. Maybe they all need money for some reason or other. Needing money is a good kick up the backside to go looking for action.

I agree, and subtlety in this gets you no-where.

The most successful set up I ever used, was that pre-game, the PCs all got captured by Pirates and shackled to the oars. Then a local rock hard psychotic German wizard sank the pirate ship by hitting it with an iceberg and coincidently they happened to be in the only seats that did not get obliterated. The German dude then tossed them all a single coin for their trouble, and left them to it with a general reminder that he would kill them at the drop of a hat if they caused trouble.

It was kind of based on the Brian runs cattlepunk strips in KotDT, but with more German guys throwing ice burgs. At that point they have nowhere to go but to star interacting with shit, because they need to get food, shelter from psychotic puffins and some way of convincing a very hostile world they should not be killed out of hand. It actually worked really well, three of the four players responded quite well and two of those really went for it (and as a group, three of them are really reactive. Interestingly, the normally proactive one was the one who did not really engage).

Quote from: noisms;520995Give them a bit of pressure in the set up. Maybe they all need money for some reason or other. Needing money is a good kick up the backside to go looking for action.

That's a good one. Money, revenge (like the old "you have a paper slip with five names of people who killed off your friends and family" hook from The Demon Princes, Kill Bill etc.) I had a sandbox campaign that failed, and it failed because the players were in a different mindframe, carefully trained by other games to follow the leads and collect their plot tokens. Giving them a stronger focus may have helped. I realised it, but too late to save the thing and generate momentum.

Of course, sometimes it just doesn't work out. In that case, you can switch back to more mission-based structures and give them relative freedom within that framework. Which is what we did after my failure, with another guy taking the GM seat, and me soon kicking off the longest best sandbox game I have ever run with a different set of people.

You have a starship with a mortgage on it, gotta go make money by engaging in speculative trade from world-to-world while having an adventure now and then to pay those bills.

Been working for Traveller since 1977.

Provide them with a clear objective to start with, which could be decided prior to play or handed out to them as play begins (i.e. a mission or some event they engage in right at the start of the game such as their friends' assassination in New York in Masks of Nyarlathotep), and then enlarge the field of possibilities as the adventure progresses.

They could find traces of parallel criminal dealings that tie into another adventure, find out that the bad guys had two or more sponsors who are themselves engaged in other nefarious activities, and from there the PCs decide what to do with that, which lead they want follow etc. Alternately, an NPC, a patron, the police, could make the choice for them if they can't or won't do it on their own. You just need to take it slow and let them take the lead when they feel confident with it by keeping at it, providing them the world to interact with on a coherent, continuous basis so that it will in effect exist when the time comes for them to make it on their own.

TL;DR start with a clear mission/objective, enlarge the field of play from there, as the campaign proceeds, until the players won't need the training wheels anymore.

Quote from: noisms;520995Give them a bit of pressure in the set up.

Definitely.  One of the best (though short-lived, alas) sandboxes I ran was a Gamma World game a couple years back.  It started with a description of the PCs witnessing the annihilations of their home village by a heavily-armed force of pure strain humans backed up by a nuclear-armed robotic tank.  Then I simply asked them, "What do you do now?"

The PCs had no place to stay, no one to speak with, nowhere to get comfortable through inertia.  They were in a situation where they had to do something.  They eventually found out that the marauders were agents of the Knights of Genetic Purity (I used heavily-modified versions of the GW factions for this game).

Game ended before they finished their plan for assailing the enemy home base...didn't get to the parts I was really hoping to get to, which involved them discovering they were on a generation ship ala Metamorphosis Alpha with a heavy leavening of Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun (even used terms like "shiprock" and had the god windows and everything...despite what I thought were overly obvious clues to the true nature of their characters' environment, my players never suspected).

A couple of thoughts

1) I'm running a sandbox game right now and I started with the PC's in an organization (paramilitary) that gave them missions before they graduated to a more pure sandbox. By that time they had enough at stake in the world that they're pretty self-motivated.

2) A classic approach is to give them a McGuffin artifact / object that draws attention -- a magic sword or a ring-of-power or whatever. Give them some reason to hold on to it, but it can be an adventure-generator for at least awhile (Bad guys come after it. Good-guys come to examine / consult it, groupies come to worship it, etc.)

Cheers,
-E.

I no longer suscribe to the Forge Game Theory as a whole, but a couple gems stood out to me.

One is the idea of "bangs".  Like POW ZOOM BANG.  BANG.  Toss something in there and see what the players do with it. Generally, these can feel really kitschy and contrite to me at times. Especially when paired with a light barely there system. If the idea is truly random (i.e. those Ninjas attacking for no good reason), it doesn't work well IME.

Here is how I do Bangs; look over the characters, find the stuff they focused on. Backgrounds, advantages, disadvantages, class, skill choices, items chosen, anything really. What is important to this player for this character? Did they mention any particular hijinks when they were making it?

Then I fashion a Bang out of that stuff. The more characters I can tie into it, the better.

They aren't just attacked by Ninjas, but by a group of highly trained assassins sent by the Baron DeMarkus (enemy of our disenfranchised noble Mage) to retrieve the Goldblume family heirloom. The famed blue ruby of the Forgotten Highlands. One of our characters, the alluring Rogue Dancer Shanna was given this by her mother when she was young and made inference that it held magic. Gothwit and Dallus, our down-on-their luck mercenaries were quite taken with Shanna, and agreed to travel with her a bit, until something more lucrative presented itself. In the last 2 years, only the adventures Shanna and crew embroiled themselves in we're too tasty to walk away from. Both men have grown quite fond of her.

There. My Mage stated he had an enemy on his character. My Rogue had this heirloom, so I tie them in together. I ask the mercenaries how they came to travel with these other two, and they both chose loyalty to Shanna for their characters. I just tie them in, light the Baron's greed fuse, and toss the Bang in and see where they take it.

If you pay attention to what your players are choosing for their characters, you're going to get a strong idea of what they want to see in the game. Toss it in there, and then let them lead you to the next "thing". Perhaps they need to establish a base and build power and wealth to confront the Baron? Or maybe they feel he's too powerful and calavant across the land, trying to put as much distance between them as they can.

When things start to slow down, I see nothing wrong with tossing in another Bang to shake things up and generate some interest. It's like the weekly TV series. Exploration takes up a few episodes, and once in a while an episode ties in the "overall plot". I don't predetermine the plots, I just have events going on, and things fall out of those events, and I see where the players take it.  I consider it part of the GM's toolkit; pacing.

Quote from: trechriron;521022I no longer suscribe to the Forge Game Theory as a whole, but a couple gems stood out to me.

One is the idea of "bangs".  Like POW ZOOM BANG.  BANG.  Toss something in there and see what the players do with it. Generally, these can feel really kitschy and contrite to me at times. Especially when paired with a light barely there system. If the idea is truly random (i.e. those Ninjas attacking for no good reason), it doesn't work well IME.

Here is how I do Bangs; look over the characters, find the stuff they focused on. Backgrounds, advantages, disadvantages, class, skill choices, items chosen, anything really. What is important to this player for this character? Did they mention any particular hijinks when they were making it?

Then I fashion a Bang out of that stuff. The more characters I can tie into it, the better.

They aren't just attacked by Ninjas, but by a group of highly trained assassins sent by the Baron DeMarkus (enemy of our disenfranchised noble Mage) to retrieve the Goldblume family heirloom. The famed blue ruby of the Forgotten Highlands. One of our characters, the alluring Rogue Dancer Shanna was given this by her mother when she was young and made inference that it held magic. Gothwit and Dallus, our down-on-their luck mercenaries were quite taken with Shanna, and agreed to travel with her a bit, until something more lucrative presented itself. In the last 2 years, only the adventures Shanna and crew embroiled themselves in we're too tasty to walk away from. Both men have grown quite fond of her.

There. My Mage stated he had an enemy on his character. My Rogue had this heirloom, so I tie them in together. I ask the mercenaries how they came to travel with these other two, and they both chose loyalty to Shanna for their characters. I just tie them in, light the Baron's greed fuse, and toss the Bang in and see where they take it.

If you pay attention to what your players are choosing for their characters, you're going to get a strong idea of what they want to see in the game. Toss it in there, and then let them lead you to the next "thing". Perhaps they need to establish a base and build power and wealth to confront the Baron? Or maybe they feel he's too powerful and calavant across the land, trying to put as much distance between them as they can.

When things start to slow down, I see nothing wrong with tossing in another Bang to shake things up and generate some interest. It's like the weekly TV series. Exploration takes up a few episodes, and once in a while an episode ties in the "overall plot". I don't predetermine the plots, I just have events going on, and things fall out of those events, and I see where the players take it.  I consider it part of the GM's toolkit; pacing.

You just articulated exactly what I trying to say upthread.  I take it even further in my games.  I typically give Pathfinder or Fantasy Craft background/campaign traits, usually 2 to each player, basically works out to an extra feat, specifically tied to the campaign and intertwined to each character in the group.  They can't help but use them if you've pegged their in game goals correctly.

I find making side quest hooks on the fly at the end of each session tends to work. But I also make players work for it too, and I don't create the side quest beforehand. Basically I create a form of "attendance + coolness" currency that allows people to buy side quests that they sorta create in-game. Sorta like training wheels; helps people get thinking about self-motivation.

So for example, each player attending gets a coin for attendance. As they do really cool and entertaining things in-game they might get an additional coin by GM opinion. At the end of the session, the GM improvs side quests based on what happened and gives them a coin value. Players may then spend their own coins to open a quest for themselves (the quest requires that PC to be present to go on, others may assist), pool coins to open an expensive quest together, or save coins for another time.

Sorta dissociative, but for some reason players who normally are reactive and completionists tend to thrive on the idea of "opening secret easter eggs." Might be a sign of the times from video game influences. However it does give me time to prep side quests as players take the direction and tell me what they want to do next session.

Interesting idea but to clarify, is this used to set up later sessions or done at the end of the night?  And what about your more introverted players? Are they left in the cold?  Not everyone is quick on the trigger.

Shipwreck.

They're stuck on an unknown land. They have no way to back the fuck out, as the ship's gone.  They've got their starter gear, and have to explore the damn place if they want to survive.  Back against the wall, nowhere to run = they'll fight like hell (i.e. engage and adventure) because there's no other choice.