Quote from: RPGPundit;521513I have certainly seen, even in my full-blown Cast of Thousands, World-in-motion style campaigns, situations where the players, completely unused to the idea that they have to be the active participants in finding adventure, end up doing basically nothing and then complain the campaign is "boring".

I've run into this as well, but I've always considered it more of a "choice paralysis" because the Players initially are not used to a campaign setting where they drive the action and the setting interacts and responds to them. Take your average Player and say, "What do you want to do?" and they usually get this deer in the headlights look because the options available to them are just too many and the Players are overwhelmed.

You've got to give them a nudge, or a reason to go out and do the things that they are there to do. Even if it is just initially to get their PCs out of the starting gate.

Quote from: RPGPundit;521513I have certainly seen, even in my full-blown Cast of Thousands, World-in-motion style campaigns, situations where the players, completely unused to the idea that they have to be the active participants in finding adventure, end up doing basically nothing and then complain the campaign is "boring".

So I can't say I'm a hardliner about the sandbox's "impartiality" needing to be absolutely pure.  I'm more than willing to make things happen, to fudge encounter checks at least, to leave hooks right in front of players' fucking faces, if it means that it will get them to actually start to interact with the setting.

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Yep, gotta give the ball a little push to start it rolling sometimes.

I've found that the key to successful sandbox play is to start out linear and then shift to more of a free form.  In other words, I know what is going on in the campaign world at the beginning of a campaign and I'm opening the game with something will pull the players into the middle of what is taking place. How they react to it and where it will go after that is anyone's guess, but there be a firm foundation from the start.

I never have a scripted ending in mind. I might have a vague idea about the possibilities but it is so subject to change based on what the PCs do and do not do that it is pointless to create the endgame with any degree of detail ahead of time.

Quote from: PaladinCA;521562I've found that the key to successful sandbox play is to start out linear and then shift to more of a free form.  In other words, I know what is going on in the campaign world at the beginning of a campaign and I'm opening the game with something will pull the players into the middle of what is taking place. How they react to it and where it will go after that is anyone's guess, but there be a firm foundation from the start.

I never have a scripted ending in mind. I might have a vague idea about the possibilities but it is so subject to change based on what the PCs do and do not do that it is pointless to create the endgame with any degree of detail ahead of time.

Makes sense to me.  In the same vein as the "tentpole dungeon" (discussed here and elsewhere), you have a "tentpole mission" (/conflict/etc.).  Something to fall back on, in any case.

My current game is hung on the Saltmarsh series - but, considering there's a decent chance that the group one week won't have any of the same faces that were in the group last week, there's a smörgåsbord of missions, characters, lairs, ruins, dungeons, and such to occupy PCs who aren't actually involved in those events.  (I'm finding that doing all this development work for non-module stuff is giving events IN the module a lot more significance, not to mention the fact that I don't have to adjudicate questions not covered in the text in a complete vacuum.)

Quote from: PaladinCA;521562I've found that the key to successful sandbox play is to start out linear and then shift to more of a free form.  In other words, I know what is going on in the campaign world at the beginning of a campaign and I'm opening the game with something will pull the players into the middle of what is taking place. How they react to it and where it will go after that is anyone's guess, but there be a firm foundation from the start.

I never have a scripted ending in mind. I might have a vague idea about the possibilities but it is so subject to change based on what the PCs do and do not do that it is pointless to create the endgame with any degree of detail ahead of time.

This is what I do.  Mostly because I'm lazy and can't be arsed to create preplanned bullshit so I make shit up on the fly, mostly going off the few hard guidelines I might have, kind of like an outline/framework for a paper which always changes as ideas pop into my head or some whim facilitated by what one of my players do when it presents itself.

Huh, tentpole dungeon. A support beam that holds up the circus. Something to fall back on when PCs hanker for something less involved (or just delightfully mindless). I like the term.

Quote from: RPGPundit;521513I have certainly seen, even in my full-blown Cast of Thousands, World-in-motion style campaigns, situations where the players, completely unused to the idea that they have to be the active participants in finding adventure, end up doing basically nothing and then complain the campaign is "boring".

So I can't say I'm a hardliner about the sandbox's "impartiality" needing to be absolutely pure.  I'm more than willing to make things happen, to fudge encounter checks at least, to leave hooks right in front of players' fucking faces, if it means that it will get them to actually start to interact with the setting.

RPGPundit

Well, that was the reason for the last part of my post, enmeshing the characters in the World in Motion.

It's almost operant conditioning.  When the PCs see events moving along, and them missing the boat, or their inaction having a personal effect, which is sort of formalizing your little push.
Just shine a light on the consequences of their lack of action, and most will say, "crap, I won't do that again.'

I think part of it depends a lot on how you set up your timing. You need to have a timeline of events, that is, of how things will play out subject to modification by PC actions, and its necessary that there be some big things happening in your sandbox world relatively early in the game, in order to get the players swept up in it.  Some of the times where my sandbox games have failed is where I planned for a long slow buildup of events, meaning the players had no early events to hook onto.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;521904I think part of it depends a lot on how you set up your timing. You need to have a timeline of events, that is, of how things will play out subject to modification by PC actions, and its necessary that there be some big things happening in your sandbox world relatively early in the game, in order to get the players swept up in it.  Some of the times where my sandbox games have failed is where I planned for a long slow buildup of events, meaning the players had no early events to hook onto.

RPGPundit

I always liked that GM advice in the original Star Wars D6 rulebook about starting the players "In Media Res." When you place the players right into the middle of things at the start, they can't help but do something about it, even if just to try and get away from the mess.

Quote from: PaladinCA;522469I always liked that GM advice in the original Star Wars D6 rulebook about starting the players "In Media Res." When you place the players right into the middle of things at the start, they can't help but do something about it, even if just to try and get away from the mess.

Except that some people would say that's not much of a sandbox then, and they might be right, depending on how you framed your "in media res".

RPGpundit

In my experience and from reading other people accounts the main reason that sandbox fail to take off initially is the lack of context for a player to make a reasonable decision. Without context they might as well use a dice as they have nothing to base their choices on. This situation generally leads to the sandbox campaign failing unless you have some highly motivated players.

A couple of folks posted starting off a Sandbox campaign with missions. Missions solve the problem by providing context namely NPC X telling them to do Y. So while the range of choices is minimal now they have something to base their decisions on. Nothing wrong with this as long as you realize that it is not the only way to successfully start a sandbox.

The general technique that works with most players is to do a pre-game where you sit down with the player and talk about their character. You bounce ideas off of each other about goals and background details. During this, the referee will take the players vague ideas and offering alternatives grounded in the details of the setting. The player then picks what he likes the best and you move on. The referee also tries to slant the choices to give natural reasons for the party to be together. How specific you make all this is a judgment call based on the player's interest and attitude.

The concrete result should be a page of notes and the player understanding the initial situation of his character. Because the player understands his character initial situation from the first session he has something to make his choices.

Pundit brought an issue where his timeline of events ramp up slowly. What I do to overcome that is that the players usually starts the campaign focused on personal goals that are somewhat limited. During the pursuit of these goals the larger events start intruding. And their understanding of the larger events also increases as they interact with the setting. Sometimes they care and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they have to deal with the larger events if they threatened one of things they care about accomplishing.

While I try to slant everything to be interesting, I don't try to force things to come together unless that would naturally happen. If the players manage to dodge all the major events of the campaign's time period so be it.

And you've never had a game that fell apart out of boredom as a result?

If you have, then I admire your principles in believing so much in The Sandbox that you're willing to let a campaign die rather than betray that; misguided as that seems to me.
If you didn't, I would bet that in your heart of hearts if you check you might realize that there have been times you too have "nudged" things along.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;522851And you've never had a game that fell apart out of boredom as a result?

If you have, then I admire your principles in believing so much in The Sandbox that you're willing to let a campaign die rather than betray that; misguided as that seems to me.
If you didn't, I would bet that in your heart of hearts if you check you might realize that there have been times you too have "nudged" things along.

RPGPundit

This sounds like the same old misunderstanding - that a sandbox is purely reactive.

Compare it to a pinball machine.  Any properly-designed sandbox is going to be chock full of "bumpers" for the party to stray up against - requires not a whit of "authorial control" to keep that ball bouncing, simply run it as it lies.  Occasionally it might require judicious use of the "flippers" - which is still not "cheating", or whatever.  Just drop a new event/character/group/etc. into the mix.  The sandbox isn't in keeping hands-off, it's in having the stones not to railroad things along a predetermined path.  New thing happens, party reacts to it (or doesn't).  Simple as can be.

Quote from: RPGPundit;522851And you've never had a game that fell apart out of boredom as a result?

I had campaigns fail but not from boredom.

Quote from: RPGPundit;522851If you didn't, I would bet that in your heart of hearts if you check you might realize that there have been times you too have "nudged" things along.

A couple of things that I need to explain here

In the pre-game I help the player to try to come up with an interesting background. In addition I try work to with the player to setup multiple hooks as a lot of time what the players thought would be interesting or important is not.

During the campaign one of the job of a referee of a sandbox campaign is to generate the consequences of what happens as a result of the player's choices. I don't go for the most probable but rather look for the most interesting of the POSSIBLE results that are plausible.

So in essence, I do indeed nudge things along.  What "interesting" in both situation depends on the player. So during the course of the campaign I try what the players like and doesn't like. Both as individual and as a group.

I been doing this for a long time and developed a good eye for interesting consequences that keeps the player engaged in the campaign. I am not perfect by any means and learning new techniques and tricks all the time. And there are times when I misread and everything I do fails to engage the player.

And the sandbox style is not THE way to run tabletop roleplaying. It is a package of techniques to run a campaign a certain way. It has specific consequences and disadvantages. There are other techniques to use if you want to base a campaign around a interesting location or a interesting plot.

The point of my earlier reply was about the complaint you had on ramping up events. I ran into that issue as well and figured out a way to solve it that works most of the time.

Fair enough.

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