01-07-2022, 08:01 AM | #1 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: traveller
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Depicting the SF sandbox
The essence of a sandbox campaign is that the GM presents (a portion of) the setting to the players and asks, "What do you want to do?" How does this work, however? My question is two-fold:
My thoughts are below: In planet-based settings, which account for most kinds of fantasy, all historical genres, and even the planetary romance side of science fiction, the typical solution is a map. Maps convey a tremendous amount of information -- terrain, points of interest, distances, relationships -- in a compact form, with easily adjustable levels of detail. For a sandbox campaign, a map makes the players' options readily apparent. The answer to "What do you want to do?" becomes "Let's go here." In a planet-hopping SF setting (including some sorts of paratime travel), the situation is not so simple. First, there is potentially orders of magnitude more information to convey: every one of those destination worlds could (should) offer as much diversity as an entire planet-based campaign, more or less by definition. Second, the information is heavily quantized: the destinations are tightly constrained packets of interest in a vast space of almost literal nothingness. Third, depending on the method of inter-world transportation, the choices of destination may be only loosely (or not at all) constrained by proximity, making option paralysis a real possibility. In reviewing my library of SF roleplaying games, I've identified four approaches to these problems.
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01-07-2022, 08:28 AM | #2 |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: Depicting the SF sandbox
Whether or not the PCs have their own ship should probably be a factor - if they do, you'll need to allow for them getting up to all sorts of nonsense rather than following the plot hooks, whereas if they need a ticket to the next planet, it's much easier to supply one with a hook attached.
Of course, even with a ship, if your FTL tech limits where they can go, it will make life easier - a choice of three jump gates beats a near infinite selection of routes any day. |
01-07-2022, 12:11 PM | #3 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Depicting the SF sandbox
In practice the limit on the size of a sandbox is the amount of stuff the GM is willing to prep, so if you have 20-40 systems those systems will get about as much detail as the 20-40 towns on your fantasy sandbox map.
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01-07-2022, 01:10 PM | #4 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: traveller
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Re: Depicting the SF sandbox
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It seems to me much harder, though, to signal to the SF players that there is a derelict starship to explore in the Eastcote system than it is to put a ruined castle symbol near the town of Batch on the fantasy map. Certainly, the GM can lay a trail of breadcrumbs (rumors, patrons, etc.) leading to either one. But when the time comes to decide which trail to follow, the fantasy players generally have an easier time keeping track of their options, visualizing scope of obstacles they might face along the way, and making the call. Traveller's UPP system is in a class by itself for this, in that (a) it summarize the "terrain" in readily digestible form, and (b) it lends itself to procedural generation on the fly, if the players truly wander away from the GM's prepared material. It doesn't remove the need for special pleading that (for example) a pyramid complex is visible to the players' ship in orbit, but has somehow been missed by every other survey of the planet to that point. Yet that is what's required to get the SF party to the dungeon. Last edited by thrash; 01-07-2022 at 01:15 PM. |
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01-07-2022, 07:03 PM | #5 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Depicting the SF sandbox
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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01-07-2022, 08:35 PM | #6 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: traveller
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Re: Depicting the SF sandbox
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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. Last edited by thrash; 01-07-2022 at 08:50 PM. |
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01-07-2022, 08:39 PM | #7 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Depicting the SF sandbox
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01-08-2022, 09:25 AM | #8 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Depicting the SF sandbox
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And then (c) my experience has been that players whose characters are in a vacant square on a map will either pass on quickly to the next square (because discourse time, the time spent presenting a story, is not proportionate to story time, the time experienced by the characters in the story) or find interesting things to do on their own. In fact, that's just the same as if the characters are in an unoccupied room in a dungeon. Surely you don't put monsters, traps, or treasure in every single room in your dungeons?
__________________
Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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01-08-2022, 12:37 PM | #9 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: traveller
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Re: Depicting the SF sandbox
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"The so-called Wilderness really consists of unexplored land, cities and castles, not to mention the area immediately surrounding the castle (ruined or otherwise) which housed the dungeons... "The terrain beyond the immediate surroundings of the dungeon area should be unknown to all but the referee... "REFEREE’S MAP is a wilderness map unknown to the players. It should be for the territory around the dungeon location." -- Dungeons & Dragons, Book III, pp. 14-16 (emphasis mine). It might also be inferred from the first sample that at least some of the castles encountered are also dungeons, though there don't seem to be any rules for this. Similarly, the map of Sartar (pp. 108-109) in my copy of RQ (probably 2nd ed.) includes a symbol for "ruins" in the legend and at least a dozen instances depicted, which neatly illustrates my point. The Sample Encounter Charts (p. 107) included both ruins and "Chaos nests." |
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01-08-2022, 01:14 PM | #10 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Depicting the SF sandbox
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