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Yora
2013-12-16, 09:38 AM
I've chosen the title because "sandbox" is frequently used interchangeably with "hexcrawl", but there's a world of difference between wilderness exploration without a specific goal and a story-driven game with significant amounts of NPC interaction and investigation. Right now, I am thinking more of the later.

There's huge amounts of information on how to do hexcrawling and megadungeon campaigns, but I'm not having that much luck when it comes to preparing open-ended, nonlinear games.
I know I want to run a game in which the players are free to chose what factions to support or to oppose, which enemies they target, and what places to visit to spy and investigate. Building the gameworld with its settlements, strongholds, and ruins is still relatively easy, but when it comes to populating it with people and organizations, I am mostly at a loss how to do that efficiently.

Are there any advice or experiences some people here might be able to share?

Crazyfailure13
2013-12-16, 09:51 AM
I'd suggest taking a look at the elder scrolls games for open-world non-linear games if you need some inspiration, particularly I remember a skyrim design video where they talked about populating their setting and how they did I few other things.

Sorry about the short reply I don't have time to right now but I'll see if I can't find and link the video later.

supermonkeyjoe
2013-12-16, 11:18 AM
You really really really, (can't emphasize this enough) need to make sure this is the kind of game your players want and can handle, otherwise they will just sit and twiddle their thumbs until an NPC comes up and says "Look, here is the plot!"

Make sure that all the PCs have some kind of goal they are working towards, some kind of agency that will push them forward, without an overarching plotline to pull the PCs along they really need an internal motivation to keep them going

I am currently planning a similar campaign set in a city and I know I'm going to give my players a few nudges to get them going, don't assume they will be invested from the get go, introduce them to a few of the main factions and then let them make a decision as to where to go.

With regards to building the Factions, you need to think about how they interact with the other factions, common people and the PCs, think of them as characters in their own right. I've found there are two ways of creating factions and organisations; Either come up with a faction idea or theme and then populate it, of come up with the head(s) of the faction and think what kind of organisation they would run, who would follow them and what they would do.

Grinner
2013-12-16, 12:29 PM
I believe the usual advice is, like supermonkeyjoe said, to determine what the various factions/NPCs are working towards as well as their methodologies, minus PC influence. After establishing the "plot", improvise as the players throw wrenches into the works.

It may be helpful to setup a small GM minigame here. Figure out, in very abstract terms, what the factions' resources are and where their income comes from. When one of them acts, throw a d4 for each faction involved and add the relevant resource value (i.e. spy networks, militias, assassins, etc.). Whoever comes out on top (or whoever you think should) will be victorious, unless the PCs intercede.

I'm not sure how you'd simulate the accrual or resources, but the loser may lose a resource point in the relevant trait.

Advance the simulation to the next "round" whenever you feel it appropriate.

Also, I don't think it's a bad idea to have a hex map, if only to keep things in perspective.

hymer
2013-12-16, 01:15 PM
My thoughts/experiences:
Since the intention is to maximize player involvement, don't go overboard on the planning. Get the factions and NPCs down, and determine what their resources and intentions are for the now. Then you can take it a little bit at a time, focusing on the things the players want to deal with, and adjusting for their involvement.
My main worry is usually the enormous amount of information, which the PCs ought to have from the beginning. You have to ruthlessly reduce the pre-game reading, and if possible spread the knowledge on several players. This is pretty unsatisfactory to me, but my players can't be expected to wade through much more than two pages of text. Some of them much less.
An alternative is to have the players as outsiders, so there's a good reason why they don't know all these things. Then they can get to know stuff in bite-sized chunks as the campaign starts to roll.

valadil
2013-12-16, 03:30 PM
That sounds like my kind of game. See my blog (linked in sig) if you're curious how I do things. Here's a summary.

Run a lot of different things at the same time. If the king has an important mission for 4-6 level 5 adventurers, he isn't going to wait for their previous business with the innkeeper to clear itself up. Throw a ton of plots at the players as see what they go after.

This has the benefit that you don't need to plan each thing out so far. If you're doing 5 hour sessions, a single plot thread would need 5 hours of prep. But if you're running 5 plots at once, they each only need 1 hour. Planning less far in advance leaves you freer to go in weird directions when the PCs change course.

For actually tracking the game, here's how I do it. Make ambitious NPCs. Give them things they want to accomplish. Each of these NPCs gets a page in your notebook or a file on your computer. After each session, go through all the NPCs. Write a one sentence update on how the PC was affected by the game session. If this changes their course of action, figure out how. If the PCs failed to connect with the NPC, figure out what he does instead. Ambitious NPCs aren't going to wait around for the PCs to walk on screen - they'll find the PCs, hire a different adventuring party, etc.

Now, go through the scenes of your game. What did the players touch? Did they tip a barmaid extra? Did they hassle an unnamed guard? Did they sell a cursed artifact to a vendor? Find all the things they interacted with. If any of them can be spun into a plot, add that to your list of NPCs.

Just go through your NPCs one at a time and figure out their reaction to the events or non-events of the session. Next session, make those reactions happen.

CarpeGuitarrem
2013-12-16, 03:46 PM
Check out Dungeon World; its "Fronts" system is a way to set up an open-world campaign, where the world keeps moving and advancing as the players take actions. You can easily lift that system out and use it for whatever system you're playing with.

veti
2013-12-16, 04:21 PM
The thing about the Skyrim style of "open world" is that it actively bombards you with plot hooks for a dozen different adventures at a time. It's a lot of work up-front to prep all those.

The most successful "open worlds" in my experience are those where - yes, the players can go anywhere (and very often they will), but there is also a compelling central adventure that, if they don't deal with it, will keep coming back and harrassing them at inconvenient moments. Thinking of Skyrim again: if you install 'Dawnguard', all settlements (and, more importantly from your point of view, merchants) become vulnerable to random vampire attacks, which get worse as you level up, until you drop whatever other timewasting you're doing and go deal with the vampire threat.

For factions: you'll need to think about economics. Who owns everything? The answer to that question will probably give you most of the major factions. If it's a pure feudal world where all land belongs to the nobles, and peasant serfs owe alliegiance to the owner of their land, then most factions will revolve around (groups of) nobles. If cities have started to become independent and important in their own right, then there will be merchants and trade guilds. If the nobles have lost their grip and been forced to sell parts of their land, then the people who've bought the land (embryonic capitalists) will be important, and you might even have the beginnings of Marxist organised labour on the other side. If there's a significant immigrant group, then they'll probably be (initially, at least) dispossessed and pretty poor, and factions will form around "integrating the X" versus "holding on to our own" versus "channelling them into something more useful, like claiming more land".

Yora
2013-12-16, 06:03 PM
Open world games are still only open in a geographic sense. You can go wherever your want at whatever time you want, but it still ends up as linear dungeons that you have to visit in a predetermined order. It's more like switching back and forth between 200 linear adventures, but you still can't go off the rails.
It's about as good as a video game can get and there's huge amounts of individual details to take and adapt from that game (particularly for the campaign I am working on, having a similar setting), but the very basic structure is a rather different one.

TheThan
2013-12-16, 07:30 PM
One of the most important things to remember about any sandbox game, is that whatever the PCs do, there are consequences for it. Those consequences may be good or bad. So when they wipe out that group of bandits on the road, another group may take offense and try to jump the pcs later and either kill them in revenge or just rob them blind.

This naturally leads to adventures as the pcs can get wrapped up in any given scenario, if they kill the local baron that cheated them out of their pay, then maybe now they’re wanted for murder and treason. Maybe now they have a price on their head and they can’t risk going into a settled area without disguises. Maybe, the baron’s son was plotting an assassination of his father so he’s willing to let them go without much of a pursuit. After all, they did him a favor. Maybe the new baron is playing both sides, secretly hiring the PCs for jobs, while publicly calling for the pcs heads. Now the pcs are caught up in this big political mess that could go as far and wide as the DM wants it to.

that's just an example of how the pcs actions can lead to adventure.

kyoryu
2013-12-16, 07:50 PM
It may be helpful to setup a small GM minigame here. Figure out, in very abstract terms, what the factions' resources are and where their income comes from. When one of them acts, throw a d4 for each faction involved and add the relevant resource value (i.e. spy networks, militias, assassins, etc.). Whoever comes out on top (or whoever you think should) will be victorious, unless the PCs intercede.

I'm not sure how you'd simulate the accrual or resources, but the loser may lose a resource point in the relevant trait.

Advance the simulation to the next "round" whenever you feel it appropriate.

Basically this. How strongly you define the 'minigame' is a matter of taste, but I like to think in terms of the PCs doing something, and then the various NPC factions getting to do various things to try to achieve their goals.

WbtE
2013-12-16, 09:35 PM
Start small. Prepare more or less what you'll need to run three sessions - as an estimate, a starting location that is fairly detailed, substantial notes for a week's travel in every direction from that, and a vague sketch of another month's travel beyond those borders. Don't fret about a grand narrative or multitudes of factions at the moment, as you can always invent further complexities later.

If nothing else, you don't know how enthusiastic your players will be about this game and game-style. Spending a lot of time preparing for a campaign that never eventuates will be frustrating, even if you enjoyed that preparation time. Furthermore, you may benefit from letting your ideas marinate.

hymer
2013-12-17, 05:52 AM
The thing about the Skyrim style of "open world" is that it actively bombards you with plot hooks for a dozen different adventures at a time. It's a lot of work up-front to prep all those.

Bombard them with hooks, but with the understanding that they tell you in advance which one(s) they will be pursuing the coming session. Then you need to develop what they're working on, and some smaller items that they may choose to deal with when the crop up. Keeps the workload (and the work waste in particular) down nicely.

Comet
2013-12-17, 01:05 PM
Check out Dungeon World; its "Fronts" system is a way to set up an open-world campaign, where the world keeps moving and advancing as the players take actions. You can easily lift that system out and use it for whatever system you're playing with.

Speaking as someone running a school of old -type of fantasy adventure (OSR stuff) and a reasonably experienced GM on the whole, is there enough stuff in the book to justify the price point if I don't intend to use the core system itself? This Fronts stuff sounds reasonably intriguing, but can I get enough of a feel about it just by googling gaming blogs or does the book contain enough elaboration on the matter to justify getting the book just for that?

Grinner
2013-12-17, 01:09 PM
Speaking as someone running a school of old -type of fantasy adventure (OSR stuff) and a reasonably experienced GM on the whole, is there enough stuff in the book to justify the price point if I don't intend to use the core system itself? This Fronts stuff sounds reasonably intriguing, but can I get enough of a feel about it just by googling gaming blogs or does the book contain enough elaboration on the matter to justify getting the book just for that?

If you don't want to actually play Dungeon World, you may want to just skip the book altogether and look the mechanic up in the SRD (http://book.dwgazetteer.com/).

Honest Tiefling
2013-12-17, 01:12 PM
Ask the players. Get them to write up bios with their goals, so you can have tasty things to dangle in front of their face knowing that they'll jump at it. Even if you don't really have a goal in mind, it'll probably help in getting them interested and thinking of their own schemes.

kyoryu
2013-12-17, 01:27 PM
Ask the players. Get them to write up bios with their goals, so you can have tasty things to dangle in front of their face knowing that they'll jump at it. Even if you don't really have a goal in mind, it'll probably help in getting them interested and thinking of their own schemes.

A good way of doing this is to modify Fate's character creation process to work with your system (which isn't generally hard).

Doing so almost inevitably results in a party with high levels of cohesion, and lots of tasty hooks for the GM to use.

http://www.evilhat.com/home/fate-core-downloads/

Yora
2013-12-17, 01:48 PM
Have you ever asked players to come up with ideas what they would like to do?
I have. Lots of times. Over and over for 13 years.

Still havn't gotten a single reply. Not once.

Honest Tiefling
2013-12-17, 03:42 PM
Yeah, some people are like that. Through, are they the type to go as far as to look under rocks to try to find the plot the DM wants them to be on, or are they the type to only figure out what they want to do once they have sat down?