Post by DoghouseReilly on Mar 16, 2024 17:42:24 GMT -5
Here's an vid with player advice for approaching sandbox games for players who aren't used to this approach (with the advent of adventure campaigns as the norm this is not unusual with newish players in modern gaming). But the advice he gives is applicable to all players in any style of D&D campaign play-engage with the setting and NPCs, ask questions, make decisions, don't run away from the story/content and keep the DM inthe loop about what your characters want to do.
Lots of solid advice, even if the presenter isn't the most charismatic presenter...
-M
As a solo player, sandbox play is all I do. Even when I play with my daughter, neither one of us is a GM - we improv the story. I assume that nothing but sandbox play for somebody who is GMing for other humans is a non-starter for all but the most improv-talented of GMs, but when your only responsibility is to entertain yourself, sandbox plus improv is a good fit (some solo players even skip the sandbox part and improv the game world as well, but that ain't for me. World-building, to the extent that my character would know about the world, ahead of time is a lot of the fun). Still, any GM thinking about allowing more of a sandbox style could probably use some ideas from the solo scene.
At the risk of repeating something I might have said earlier in this thread as DrakeTungsten, here's a couple tools that might be of interest for sandbox or improv in group play:
1) Open-ended oracles. An "oracle" can be any source of content or inspiration, which can be used to move the world/sandbox forward (that is, what's happening in this living world outside of the player's actions), or to provide backstory to an NPC, or describe an NPC's mood or situation or immediate desires, or any general "what happens next?" kind of question, or anything else you need fleshed out or to pop up.
I hear you saying "I could create tables for all this and not be pompous about it and call it an oracle", and you are right. It irked me when I was getting into solo play and stuff like regular old random encounter tables were called oracles. They often call rolling skill checks as "consulting the oracle". I'll stop ranting here and just state my point: be careful if you're going to look deeper at solo play. A lot of those guys are too eager to say "consult an oracle" when the things they are talking about are already covered by your system's rules, or simple custom tables which I assume regular GMs would create from time to time anyway. Tables have their place as oracles, but I would only label a table an oracle if the table wouldn't be necessary if you had a flesh-and-blood GM.
So I make the distinction of saying "open-ended oracles." These are things like story cubes and the versatile Gamemaster's Apprentice Deck. They require interpretation, and that's the appeal for me. There's more of an opportunity to get a surprising result. With the story cubes, I roll a handful, and I don't feel obligated to use them all. If any of the rolled results can be interpreted to be connected, I'm more likely to use them, but mostly, whatever can be interpreted to sensibly (if perhaps surprisingly) flow from what has come before is what I use.
When explaining what an oracle is, most solo players say "ask the oracle questions you would ask of the GM", but I don't like this explanation because it only covers one use case for the oracle. It doesn't account for the GM letting you know something you wouldn't think to ask, which sort of leads into second type of tool...
2) Tools to help shape a story out of the randomness. The most popular is probably Mythic. It does a lot more than help you shape a story, but I ignore the rest of it. Just to overview, though - It has a yes/no oracle (virtually self-explanatory - if you have a yes/no type question which you would rather be randomly determined as opposed to you just decide for yourself, assign a probability and roll for the result), and various other oracles (tables) for specific uses.
Anyway, the two things Mythic has to help you construct stories are the idea of threads - tracking subplots and using a subplot management table to see if the next scene is an advancement of any of the subplots, and the second thing is the Chaos Factor - this tracks how out of control a subplot is (from the PC's point of view), and the Chaos Factor becomes a modifier when you roll a yes/no question (ask for my rant about yes/no oracles, go ahead, I dare ya...), and, IIRC, it's also a modifier on the table which manages the advancement of subplots.
The Adventure Crafter can also help you manage your improvised subplots, but works differently from Mythic.
Various other solo systems and solo tool compendiums include plot twist tables you can roll on once in a while. I use a mish-mash of all of these things.