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View Full Version : Can a Sandbox with a Pre-determined Goal be, in fact, a Sandbox?



BrokenChord
2014-11-04, 03:29 PM
What it says on the tin. Let's say you make a big ol' campaign world, do all the ecology and set up the major cities and get yourself to the point where it's functional, it's sensible, and it gives your players more options than they could actually explore in one campaign from even just their initial perspective. Good for a solid game, at least, and if you do it well several, though you probably didn't hash it out well enough to contend with big players like the published settings. You don't set up a plot or anything, though you might have some broad, vague, and easily altered timeline of what'd happen if the PCs didn't exist.

You do, however, tell them to have a particular goal. You don't tell them how they're supposed to do it or even when they should get around to it, but you just tell them, "hey, in this game, I'd like you to build characters whose goal is X." Like, let's say there's a war between the Prime Material and the Abyss happening when the PCs drop in, and you're like "I'm not sticking you under anybody's command, but I'd like you guys to want to keep the world from getting overrun by demons." Don't force the priority on them to do any particular thing, but just leave that out there that they should have some kind of investment in that.

If you do request that overarching goal from your players' characters, do you in the process automatically remove the sandbox nature of the game? If you believe so, why? If you believe not, why not?

Amphetryon
2014-11-04, 03:48 PM
I have known players who truly and firmly believed that any game where the GM placed goals in front of the characters, or had the characters' actions create in-game consequences, was a railroad game. It is my belief that such an extremely broad definition of what constitutes 'railroading' makes many conventional RPGs flat-out impossible as written.

In your specific scenario, provided the GM was not providing rewards or punishments based solely on how closely they were going after the predetermined goal, I would call it a sandbox.

Frozen_Feet
2014-11-04, 04:20 PM
In short, yes.

This becomes really obvious if you play any computer game referred to as a sandbox. Most of them still have set plot or win conditions... there's just no particular pressure to follow said plot or fullfil said conditions. Even fairly linear games, like Tales of Symphonia, LEGO Lord of the Rings or Exile II: Crystal Souls, become wide-open sandboxes at certain points, where a player is suddenly left to explore a big area and complete a number of optional quest or goal in whatever order they desire.

Seto
2014-11-04, 04:48 PM
Your question assumes the following : either something is a Sandbox, or it's not. I'm not sure I agree with that. I think of Sandbox and Railroading not as binary terms for a world, terms that exist in a vacuum, but as the two ends of an axis. Some groups prefer more of one, more of the other, but very few people could have 100% sandbox or 100% railroad and not find it lacking somehow (it gets annoying faster in the second case). That's why every campaign needs to find its own equilibrium, that may not be 50% of each. Say, if Sandbox is 0% on the axis and Railroad is 100%, my world for example is about 20%.

And with that in mind, my answer to your question is : such a world would be around 5%. So not the very essence of the Ultimate Sandbox of Doom, but... yeah. Pretty much sandbox.

JusticeZero
2014-11-04, 05:02 PM
There is a spectrum. Full railroad is bad. Full sandbox is actually just as bad, because by definition, it never clarifies into a focus. Either you have a sandbox and hand them some rails to place where they want, or you start them on rails and let them reroute or make whistle stops.

BrokenChord
2014-11-04, 05:10 PM
There is a spectrum. Full railroad is bad. Full sandbox is actually just as bad, because by definition, it never clarifies into a focus. Either you have a sandbox and hand them some rails to place where they want, or you start them on rails and let them reroute or make whistle stops.

This is actually a nice analogy. I'm pretty sure a 100% sandbox would literally just be a giant continent with nothing but sand. "Plothooks are railroading!"

I'm more wondering if it removes the sandbox element too much to say, "well, here are your rails to set the focus of the game where you'd like, but make sure to loop around here in some way, be that by helping people supply the war effort or by taking part in it yourself or whatever, at some point."

JusticeZero
2014-11-04, 05:34 PM
Midpoints and destinations make for the most obnoxious railroads. Either start them on a rail and accommodate the deviations, or make them start building rail and fit your material onto it. If you want them helping the war, tell them when they are making characters that they are helping the war effort.

NotScaryBats
2014-11-04, 06:07 PM
I think different people have different definitions of Sandbox, but in my opinion, any sort of player agency is a degree of sandbox. So, yeah, you can definitely sandbox with a defined goal and I think that makes the best kind of sandboxes.

Elder Scrolls is a good example of this, because you start off and are given a particular story that you can pursue. If you want to, you can completely ignore that story and go join the Thieves' Guild or whatever, because the world is developed.

nedz
2014-11-04, 07:14 PM
Your question assumes the following : either something is a Sandbox, or it's not. I'm not sure I agree with that. I think of Sandbox and Railroading not as binary terms for a world, terms that exist in a vacuum, but as the two ends of an axis. Some groups prefer more of one, more of the other, but very few people could have 100% sandbox or 100% railroad and not find it lacking somehow (it gets annoying faster in the second case). That's why every campaign needs to find its own equilibrium, that may not be 50% of each. Say, if Sandbox is 0% on the axis and Railroad is 100%, my world for example is about 20%.

And with that in mind, my answer to your question is : such a world would be around 5%. So not the very essence of the Ultimate Sandbox of Doom, but... yeah. Pretty much sandbox.

This, and JusticeZero's post which follows, are pretty good. I've run full blown sandboxes in the past but they tend to drift and die. Campaigns need direction and whilst, in a sandbox, players should provide this - they do need something to drive them.

Regarding the specific question in the OP: it might be better to specify a party theme which should naturally cause them to become engaged in the war rather than specify the destination explicitly up front. So, in your example, you could specify a Good aligned party, say, (who would naturally fight the demons) rather than characters focussed on the war already. It's less direct and allows you to foreshadow IC rather than OOC.

Thrudd
2014-11-04, 11:37 PM
There are always pre-determined goals, otherwise there is nothing motivating the players and it isn't a game. At the very least, the game's rules imply certain goals (in D&D: find treasure, fight monsters, and get more powerful). A sandbox doesn't mean there are no goals, it means the goals are generally player defined (within the context of the game rules). People who say "adventure hooks are railroading" are wrong. It's only railroading if you are forced to follow a plot. The DM asking for characters with certain goals or motivations is not railroading, and doesn't prevent the game from being a sandbox. You're asking them to make characters that are appropriate for your setting, not much more. This is necessary for any coherent roleplaying game.

DigoDragon
2014-11-06, 08:40 AM
I'm reminded of the game Fallout 2. You start off with a goal "Find a GECK device", but there isn't a time limit and you can just do pretty much whatever you want, whether it be towards that goal or off on the tangiest of tangents. So I'd say yes, you could have a fairly sandboxy style game with an end-goal (as long as there's no specific rail to make that goal).

NichG
2014-11-07, 03:20 AM
Railroading, or at least the particular kind that can be problematic due to quashing player agency, isn't about constraining the goals - its about constraining the methods of achieving them. Otherwise the term becomes so diluted as to be pretty useless. E.g. most games are going to have an underlying goal of 'survive' because it's a prerequisite for being able to do other, more involved things; that doesn't mean that having a combat encounter is railroading the characters into 'not-dying'.

Where it becomes railroading is when methods which should be feasible means to approach goals are shut down either arbitrarily (no, you aren't allowed to try to join the evil empire to fight it from within - I have a specific way in mind that you can use to defeat it, and that requires you join the good king's army instead) or due to excessively contrived situations (there's a path through the forest which has been warded since time immemorial to protect travelers from the God of Crushing Wayward Adventurers with Falling Rocks; if you leave the path, you will automatically face a CR 35 encounter with said deity).

So yeah, you can have a pre-determined goal in an open-ended game. Some goals will work better or worse for this of course.