Quote Originally Posted by Segev View Post
The big difference between a sandbox game's plots and a more linear game's plot is that plurality. A sandbox game has things going on that have interested parties, of whom either the player characters already are or who view the player characters as possible agents, tools, or otherwise elements of their own plans for the things they're itnerested in.

In the game I reference most often, Jathaan's seafaring game, we started off as a newly-formed company within a mercenary organization, and we had a few jobs we could take at our option. The one we did take was a task to secretly investigate what had happened to a missing ship that rumors or reports its owner had just gotten placed in a particular area. Our captain (of the company) also got some cargo and some "special cargo" to deliver en route, both as a cover for the trip and for extra profits. The "extra cargo" was carried by a mysterious woman who stayed in her quarters on the ship the whole time she was with us, and turned out to be a fey fleeing the pursuit of another fey who wanted an artifact she had. When she absconded with our help under the watchful eye of said fey, she left our payment...not the gems we had expected, but the artifact itself. Which we later parlayed into both help in restoring the lost ship and learning its secrets, and also into some major trades in faerie bargains.

One task we did not pursue that came up a few times was something to do with a sorcerer taking over some isolated area. I understand that plot has progressed to a point that it may become an issue we have to deal with.

Nothing about how we dealt with the fey interrupt was pre-planned plotting by the DM. Only the fact of the interrupt and the nature of the cargo, placing us in the proximity of further plot hooks, some of which we bit on. These, too, were things that were happening with or without our intervention, and our intervention changed how they resolved, got is loot and acclaim, and generally served to make our actions meaningful.

Again, it's not that the GAME had a plot planned out. There were events going on, and the DM had some idea of how they might go if we didn't involve ourselves. Our involvement changed what happened where we were involved, and had ripple effects, possibly, to other events. And where we weren't involved, things progressed either as the DM knew they would, or determined they would as he advanced the timeline of everything.

I don't know how accurate my understanding of the behind-the-scenes stuff here is, but that's my best guess how he ran it. I know for a fact he didn't plan out a plotted arc for us, though, only set up challenges and obstacles and provided motivations and goals in the form of problems to solve or things other NPCs wanted us to do.
In my opinion, all of those events going on in the game world ARE plot lines. The DM has things happening and can work out how the players interaction will affect those plot lines. The players then build THEIR plot line out of the stories going on in the world and how they choose to interact with them. In addition, how these events turn out often result in the characters deciding to pursue a specific course of action which then creates their own plot line and the DM can play into that development by enhancing the details of the story available in the direction the players choose to go.

In my experience, it is a waste of DM time to flesh out an entire world - there are too many details, too much information, too much going on - it is almost a fractal design - you can take any element and expand on the details to whatever extent you like but if the players aren't going that way, it is a waste of a precious resource.

So what can happen is that the DM creates the broad strokes with small patches filled in where these plot lines may intersect with the characters. If the characters choose to follow up one of these interactions, the DM expands the details in the direction the players are moving while still tracking parallel events at a high level so that those other plot lines may interact with the players at a later point.

It is pretty much as Segev describes but the world is full of plot lines which, depending on the party decisions, may become side quests or the main plot of their adventure. The bottom line in my opinion is that there should always be plot lines even if the players aren't involved.

The alternative is the equivalent of randomly generated side quests in an MMORPG. The characters may gain experience and loot but the side quests are ultimately meaningless, unrelated to any sort of story, and basically a set of disconnected one shots involving the same characters. That works fine for some tables but I have found that most players prefer to have more meaning and more reasons for the actions their characters take. Players get invested in seeing what comes next in THEIR story which motivates them to keep playing.