Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
If you're running a sandbox, why do you have a dungeon that you want to get the party to? I always assumed that a sandbox had no specific destinations for the player characters to reach—they would just wander around and have encounters, rather as, in a dungeon, they would open doors and have encounters.
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What constitutes an "encounter"? Is it a room, or a dungeon full of rooms? A single interaction, or the start of a longer engagement? The difference is a matter of taste, I suppose.
My understanding has always been that a sandbox is a setting seeded with interesting adventure possibilities, which the players may choose to pursue (or not) in any order they desire. There's no overarching plot or story line, no Hero's Journey, though there may be recurring NPCs (friends, rivals, or villains) or locations (particularly a home base). The adventures themselves, once embarked on, may be extended or consist of multiple connected activities, rather than one-and-done. Ideally for me each adventure would resolve in a single session (like an episodic TV series or a picaresque short story), but this is again a matter of taste.
The point of the example, however, was to illustrate the relative difficulty of presenting the interesting adventure possibilities to the players in a SF sandbox, over its fantasy counterpart. The same pyramidal structure that a party on foot might spot in the distance when temporarily lost in the mountains now has to catch the attention of a ship in orbit, out of a planet full of other possibilities. The scale is entirely different, making it much more challenging to offer the option to the players in a natural way.
Edit to add: It occurs to me that non-Traveller grognards may not spot the allusion, which is to
Double Adventure 1: Shadows.