Depicting the SF sandbox

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by thrash

Given the open-ended nature of a sandbox campaign, it is fairly likely the characters are Adventurers, not merchants, scouts, etc. Moving cargo is how they pay the bills; survey is how they get to the rumored Location of Fabulous Excitement.

One of the most repeatable forms of sandbox campaign is "your characters get off the stagecoach at this newly founded town." As they try to make a living or pursue character goals, the GM introduces local actors, conflicts, and opportunities. It could be adopted to sci fi fairly easily with a setting on a space station or new settlement.

[thrash]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

One of the most repeatable forms of sandbox campaign is "your characters get off the stagecoach at this newly founded town." As they try to make a living or pursue character goals, the GM introduces local actors, conflicts, and opportunities. It could be adopted to sci fi fairly easily with a setting on a space station or new settlement.

While a valid type of campaign, it doesn't conform to my understanding of what is meant by "sandbox" if the player-characters are (more or less) constrained to the vicinity of their initial location. By implication, they would be waiting for Adventures to come to them, rather than "messing about in the sandbox" to find Adventures for themselves.

It's the difference between Deep Space Nine and the other, ship-based Star Trek shows. Stargate SG-1 straddles both categories, since the characters venture out quite extensively but ultimately return to base. Both DSN and SG1 arranged to give the characters more mobility as the story progressed, however, presumably to keep from getting stale.

[thrash]

Originally Posted by whswhs

High pop, low TL seems to imply low economic output, and thus less reason for outworlders to build multiple ports, and less resources for locals to do so.

That doesn't follow. Type E ports by definition don't require any resources to build. Low-tech locals would lack the means (both communications and transportation) to concentrate their global economic output in a single location for trade. If there is enough interest for regular contact, it might instead make more sense for visiting merchants to rotate among population centers, collecting what has been accumulated since the last visit and distributing off-world goods in turn. This would help avoid exhausting either supply or demand sides of the commerce, however limited they might be in total.

Traders visiting Earth in AD 250 would be better served visiting Luoyang, Ctesiphon, and maybe Teotihuacan as well, rather than establishing just one port near Rome and counting on the Romans to have all the trade goods they might want.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by whswhs

High pop, low TL seems to imply low economic output, and thus less reason for outworlders to build multiple ports,

On the other hand, it also suggests that local surface transport might be expensive, so that the cost advantage of landing spaceships near the consumers and suppliers is greater.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by thrash

While a valid type of campaign, it doesn't conform to my understanding of what is meant by "sandbox" if the player-characters are (more or less) constrained to the vicinity of their initial location. By implication, they would be waiting for Adventures to come to them, rather than "messing about in the sandbox" to find Adventures for themselves.

'Box' is in fact part of 'Sandbox'. The box needs to be big enough to provide a wide range of choices, but does not have to be unlimited in size.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by thrash

• Provide a gazetteer, listing potentially interesting destinations.

Are there other options (or variations) that I've missed? What works? What doesn't?

One variation on a gazetteer would be a searchable database with positional data and systematic specification of social, governmental, and economic/technological characteristics. The representation system would need to be designed with intelligent care, but once that were done the content could perhaps be generated procedurally. As you say that's best when the means of interstellar travel doesn't impose a notion of adjacency or make proximity notably important, and it perhaps does well in putting the players into the same information-overloaded shoes as their character.

I am not proficient enough with programming and computer graphics to do this, but it seems within the capabilities of a keen amateur to augment such a database with an anaglyphic or rotatable display in which the user gets to specify on the fly which objects from the database are included and which data about nodes and links are displayed and how they are represented (with size, shape, colour, captions etc.).

[Isikyus]

Have you encountered the video game Outer Wilds?

It has exactly this problem: it's a sandbox game (at least to start with), with adventure locations spread across a solar system. It does a few things to help players find them

• A map of the known system (which also means you know it's important if you find an un-mapped place)
• You can land anywhere on a planet, but uninteresting locations are empty. Every visible feature on a planet's surface either has an encounter, or leads to one (via roads, clues, etc.)
• Dialogue and other clues leading to new places (e.g. on planet A you find notes saying "I'm going to planet B next").
• Radio beacons/signals that can be tracked to encounters
• Patterns that imply missing things (e.g. three escape pods, one viewing stone per planet), inspiring you to look for them

Many of these require a very interconnected world to work, but I could imagine, say, a pattern of precursor artifacts cropping up on different worlds — you find them in spaceport markets, but the sellers can lead you to minor ruins, which have maps of major precursor sites.

[Astromancer]

Looking at both recent world history and highly likely scenarios for the later 21st century, I suggest that many worlds wouldn't have planet wide Tech Levels. Maybe one group who settled a given world embraced high tech. But other cultures on a world might be anarcho primitists, or simply embrace cultural norms that restrict technological development. In the historical past Hinduism restricted learning to read to the highest castes. There are still Brahmins that reject mass literacy as actively evil.

Only one culture on a world might be able to host a spaceport or be worth the effort to trade with.

Conversely, the societies on a planet, again for cultural reasons, might not tolerate sharing a space port.

One more category. What is tolerable at a space port would vary by culture. One culture might be far more tolerant of criminal activity that didn't happen in or near their port facilities than another. While the competing port might have more advanced facilities, more comfortable accommodations, better medical services, and less volatile people, the efficient legal authorities could be a drawback. Or a plus.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by thrash

It's the difference between Deep Space Nine and the other, ship-based Star Trek shows. Stargate SG-1 straddles both categories, since the characters venture out quite extensively but ultimately return to base. Both DSN and SG1 arranged to give the characters more mobility as the story progressed, however, presumably to keep from getting stale.

To me, both Star Trek and SG-1 are fundamentally un-sandboxy, because the main characters get assigned a mission every week. They do not get to choose where to go or what to do. To me what makes a sandbox a sandbox is that you present characters with a situation with actors and let them choose what to engage with (while some of those actors try to recruit or exploit them). The situation might be as broad as "Dracula has awakened and is allied with forces within British Intelligence" or as narrow as "you are all in Istanbul in 1942 with a shortage of money, a connection to at least one criminal or intelligence organization, and a habit of hanging around the Hotel du Paris."

[Fred Brackin]

To address one of the early questions, if you give the players a map it needs to be a selective map. As fun as the Universe map is to look at it has a lot of "Condition Anthony" stars on it (poke at them and they're uninteresting).

So the last "sector" map I provided to players in a space game showed almost no M class red dwarves. Because of the jumpline formation rules you almost always ouldn't get ot them even if you wanted to. Putting them on a map just added clutter without adding useful information.

Then I omitted binary stars as a usual thing. Their astrographics tangled the jumplines and the fact that close biaries wouldn't have planets anyway was a bonus.

On the other hand, the map did show big type A stars even if they wouldn't have any planets because they formed long jumplines and made "hubs". The jumplines were long enough that most "A"s linked to at leasty one other "A". This even created campaign slang. Taking long journeys by following the linked "A"S was "Taking the A Train".

So perfectly simulationist maps are not useful. You need a selective map that filters out the least interesting items but also shows ways to get to areas of interest.