What's your opinion of campaigns where you have no overarching plot or anything, you're just sort of plopped into there to explore and decide on your own course as a player? GMs, if you have or are running a no-rails game, how do you do it?
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They rarely work in my experience. Without external pressure driving the party in a specific direction, often times what happens is one player decides what the party as a group is going to do, and then the other players start resenting that player for squelching what they want to wander off and explore or otherwise do.
They can work, but you should probably get player buy-in about what they want the long term goals to be before you start playing in character for party stability. That however, rarely works out; most players just want to play it by ear and then worry about later when they hit it.
That's the only type of campaign I do run. Running a cyberpunk campaign where the players are encouraged to seek out their own interests and goals. I generally have one job set up ahead of time, and then ask the players what their characters plan to do. If they have an answer I'll prep something for that, if they don't we freestyle it. Freestyling is not perfect but it gets the job done, the preprepared stuff is generally more solid but both work. I have had issues with the players being passive and not knowing what to do, but that usually resolves itself in moment-to-moment gameplay. As a GM you're rewarded for coming up with something to do quickly, and then letting it expand as they go through it. Their motivation in a vacuum might be lacking but when in a situation they liven up. Could be a table specific thing though.
Definitely the hardest part is having players who want to chase their own goals. I had a player unironically state that it was my responsibility as the GM to make sure they make interesting choices which was an eye opener for why they were so passive. You want to cultivate a culture of 'do cool stuff, get rewarded', because if they think that cool stuff will happen to them you'll end up with a shitty sandbox. It doesn't hurt if cool stuff does actually happen to them, though.
>one player decides what the party as a group is going to do, and then the other players start resenting that player
Solved by spotlight management skills. When Player 1 keeps suggesting things to, then give the other players an option to counter-suggest and give the one that hasn't had their turn the deciding vote. If the others have no input then they have nothing to complain about.
I once helped GM a 4-year sandbox campaign mechanically based on Dogs in the Vineyard. The setting itself was all homebrew. It took a lot of influence from Lovecraft and other similar horror and dark fiction authors but it was more a deconstruction of a lot of cosmic horror tropes. Much of the campaign was focused on a setup similar to The Shadow Over Innsmouth but it place in the early 20th century Deep South, largely along the Gulf coast. There were large numbers of molluscoid aliens settling on islands in the Gulf and being seen in southern Louisiana and Mississippi, soon clashing violently with humans in skirmishes that eventually ended in a federally-instituted, uneasy peace. Initially it seemed like the aliens (casually called, "Wagglers" or some variant of, "squid-people") were grotesque heartless invaders like people were saying, the players took on jobs that were basically enforcing apartheid. After a couple sessions it became abundantly clear that the situation was a lot more complex than they thought. There were five players in total and they actually changed factions as the campaign went on to the point that about a third of the way through the GM split the players into two different rooms because it was turning into PVP, the players disagreeing strongly on who were the, "good guys." Long story short a lot of the conflict between humanity and the aliens boiled down to the fact that they were very psychologically different from each other. The Wagglers were a species where autism was the norm and being allistic was considered a disorder in the same way that for humans it's the other way around. Plus their language was visual and spatial with sensitive auditory systems, but not well suited to understanding verbal communication with even less ability to communicate orally, essentially they used sign language combined with their ability to change texture and color like cuttlefish.
cool!
Only works you have players that like to explore, to engage with the world around them and to create their own stories instead of just having the DM telling one to them
From my experience the best way to introduce a group to the style is to have a few obvious hooks on the starting location and to leave the related "quests" open ended, allowing them to come up with ideas of how to follow up from there
It's my preferred way to run a game. Can't have your game derailed if there never were rails in the first place. Just roleplaying as the factions and npcs responding to what the players do. Your players do need to lean into the campaign being a sandbox for them to work.
what if there woke?
I combine sandbox play with adventures and a campaign. I just don't railroad and handhold my players when it comes to those.
If the sandbox is an active world with factions and events that happen, react to player activity and create interesting emergent gameplay experiences then yes, they're great.
If they're just a clusterfrick of whatever with not active participants that just sit around waiting for the players to wander into their agro range or something, less good.
A sandbox can have several different things happening in it at once and are better for it. The 'over arching plot' is how and what players do with it rather than a preplanned script like in a Gankerrpg though. It could even be
>the players ignore and avoid much of the world's events and things happen around them as they explore
and that would be fun too.
I mean that’s kinda what most of rogue trader is
>no overarching plot
>there to explore
That is the essence of my games, or will be when any of them are tested and done.
One in particular has you exploring the shantylands that surround the city and clearing out the savage Yrch forts, moving onto the monster-filled wilderness and delving the dungeons that dot the landscape, then eventually getting to the furthest reaches of the outer lands where the incursive forces of undead in their Nekropolis and to hellish lavalands where Drakko-kyn take residence.
I think it's better for a West Marches style game than a standard party meeting weekly.
I've GM'd campaigns like that for 7 years. I think it's mainly due to nobody in our group having any prior pnprpg experience. People liked it. I already had an autistic world build in my mind so I just transported my players to that place. No piss fetishes, I promise. I think it's best to treat the world as something continuous where the players are just small actors. Mabye the goal is to amass enough coin to buy a manor or just to become a recognized name. I throw out some hooks. If the players take them, good. If they don't, I use some parts of those ideas for later where it makes sense. Sometimes it's easier to let your players find their own hooks that you didn't see and just go with it. Improvisation is fun!
My players barely manage to start moving even when they know what they must do because their lord gave them instructions, I sadly don't really see them taking the initiative in a sandbox.
I deeply regret the fad for making everything sandbox. It was never a "better" way to play, it was just a way to play. Fortunately, during that I discovered it's my way to play. I do it that way, and I love doing it that way.
However, there's a big thing to keep an eye out for. Sandboxes based on "here's a ton of stuff that's happening, pick one to involved yourself in and I'll go with you" tend to be wild successes. Sandboxes based on "You can't tell me what to do" or "I give up, do whatever you want" tend to be massive failures.
>Sandboxes becoming a fad is bad
>But also how I discovered I love running sandboxes
Pardon? Shouldn't you be happy that this fad helped you learn a new way to enjoy yourself?
I'm glad to have found it, but firstly it wasn't worth the damage that the constant drum beat of "sandbox good, non-sandbox evil" did to gaming culture as a whole, nor did I benefit from being exposed to massive amounts of inferior sandbox materials and experiences generated by early movers.
Given my choice, I'd have rather not had either of those happen and instead come across sandbox play 3 years later with much better materials to work from and thus have to learn much less through trial and error.
Sort of like "discovering I like baseball" is probably not worth the trauma of "being forced by a crazy person to play baseball at gunpoint." It's better than being forced to play baseball at gunpoint and *not* discovering a fondness for baseball, but it's not better than just growing up playing Little League.
It does really require players who are driven and can make their own goals. Some people simply aren't cut out to play in a sandbox, because when given the choice of rumors and events and directions and landmarks that they could wander off and explore, they end up crippled with indecision or just do what they view as the 'safe' thing.
Some players simply need a more structured campaign, and that's just reality.
>GMs, if you have or are running a no-rails game, how do you do it?
What I do is often just focus on landmarks. There will be landmarks the PCs might already be aware of, like cities or mountains, and landmarks that they aren't, such as lost castles or ruins in the wilderness.
I'll often even set up tables to instigate those sorts of random dungeons, rather than typical random encounters. More engaging to find a random goblin fort than a random goblin ambush, after all.
Then treasure will often include random relics for some evil force like a dragon cult or a lich or whatnot, and the campaign practically writes itself.
a lot of sandboxes suck because too often a GM will just forget to put anything in the box for the players to do, especially at the start when you most need a thing for the players to do.
that said, if you do remember to give the players a thing to do, it can be good fun
I can't really comment towards one system or another, but I will say that if you run a campaign like this, most of your party's time will be spent coordinating logistics and it will take some effort if you want to make sure that each session has exciting content.
How many current adventure hooks is too many?
I've got about six or so going on in my campaign (four if you don't include character backstory hooks, more if you include ones not explicitly set up to the party yet but put into motion due to their actions)
At a certain point too many plot hooks will make them start questioning if they're the only ones in the world who actually do anything if there's so much work that needs doing.
Typically I like to clean out old plot hooks by having a couple other bands of mercenaries or the like in the same region who are cleaning things up for that reason, though obviously if you have too many other adventurers it starts to make the PCs feel less important.
Just to throw out numbers for the sake of an example, say there's 20 plot hooks about cults, monsters, and ancient tombs near the current town of the PCs. They deal with 1, so there's 19. If 2 more get done by mercenaries, then the remaining 17 plothooks will make it seem questionable how the town has survived. If 15 get done by mercenaries instead, then the PCs will look at the remaining 4 and question what they're even doing if everything is getting cleaned up so easily.
Six is probably a good number. The PCs handle one, maybe another two get handled by mercs or the opportunity passes, but the remaining three isn't such an overwhelming total that the PCs are questioning aspects of the world, nor are a third of the jobs being handled by mercenaries an overwhelming share of the work.
Basically, you just want to avoid the extremes of 'this town doesn't need us' and 'this town won't survive even with us', because those are likely to make the party skip town entirely for a place that seems more promising.
Solid advice, really appreciate it- would is still apply if the campaign is a hexcrawl? Also, what if I am at six hooks and they ask for rumors?
I'd say that most of my advice applies to a hexcrawl, aside from the fact that wilderness encounters can sometimes become plothooks themselves.
I would say that plothooks could often come in the form of rumors, and that rumors can be better since they're more easily cleaned up by confirming that they were indeed just rumors.
Between any established plothooks, random encounters, extra rumors, and hidden plothooks, it does sound like you'll end up with a lot more than six.
That said, it does seem like your concern would be the players feeling like they're either overwhelmed by the number of threats, or overshadowed by the townsfolk dealing with the threats.
One way to think of it might be in terms of action economy, oddly enough. The party can only deal with one hook at a time, but if it takes a week, then that's one week of villainous plans for the other hooks. If new hooks regularly get added, then the party might feel blindsided if something they ignored at level 1 comes back to bite them in the ass, since they literally didn't have time to deal with it alongside everything else.
That's why I bring up mercenaries, since they're basically extra 'actions' to help the party out, and you can use it to explain why the plot hooks that the party ignored and weren't interested in didn't end up being a problem. Obviously that's better for rumors, minor threats, and things the players themselves seem to have forgotten, rather than backstory hooks or anything that they've stated an interest in investigating.
It's also something that you can course-correct as the game goes. New mercs could arrive, existing mercs could fail and die.
The players could also be given influence over those extra 'actions'. Like an allied NPC hunter who can scout locations in the wilderness, or a friendly guardsman who can investigate around town. That won't solve the hook, but would let you know where the party is interested, and let them know about growing problems.