As usual, there’s a lot of talk about sandboxing as the ultimate form of gaming. There’s a bit of one-true-way-ism involved, but also in some cases there is a strange myopic way of looking at games as either sandbox or railroad, with no middle ground. When I posted my discussion about running a fast but epic story arc using B/X D&D, I was immediately told that this was obviously some railroad game, evidently because I wanted to tell a story with it across 10-14 levels of play in only 12 sessions.
I definitely don’t buy into the theory that “if it isn’t sandbox, it is railroad”. Adding quests, storylines and goals to a sandbox game does not mean climbing aboard the train and sticking to the tracks.
The trick to good GMing is to provide story ideas that you leapfrog off of what the players are thinking. We work together to make the game better and to tell big stories. You can still tell epic stories without railroading – it just helps if you all sit down before the game / campaign and talk about what you want from it.
I prefer games that feel sandbox-ish, but where the GM throws plot hooks at us. Just because she has planned a badguy and a storyline to hook us doesn’t make it a railroad, it makes it a challenge and odds are we’ll approach it in a way that she was only half-expecting. But both sides of the table adapt and work with each other to keep the game running.
It seems many people think as soon as a quest is involved, it’s a railroad. Even if the players are the ones looking for such a quest. The sandbox is where we play, but things happen in the sandbox aside from us wandering around, and we end up getting involved in these things – whether they be quests for magic items or to pay off debts to a temple or god, attempts to save innocents from tyranny, or even trying to save the whole world.
It’s only a railroad if the GM won’t allow you to tackle the challenge in your own way.
In our Star Frontiers game we are traveling around the Frontier and working as part-time trouble-shooters for the Streel Corporation when we are within their sphere of influence (and sometimes we contact them when we are outside their sphere of influence but find ourselves entangled in something they would find “interesting”). The game is classically sandbox – we trade goods, deal with corporations and the law, and occasionally find ourselves in really hot water. But we also get “tagged” (as we call it out of character) with adventures that we don’t go looking for. We’ve had a ship we were traveling on crash land on a fairly inhospitable planet and had to make our way to the research arcology hundreds of kilometers away to get help – only to discover that it was abandoned and wrecked, so we started investigating what happened.
When I describe how we were stuck on the planet to some gamers, they see the whole “GM fiat crashlanding and overland adventure” as a pure railroad because she had dumped us there without recourse, and we either had to travel to that arcology or die – and then again when we went looking for the missing scientists so they could fix the hardware needed to send for help (something we lacked the skills and equipment to do). In my opinion, it would have been a railroad is if she had done this and had decided on exactly how we were to get to the arcology and then how we had to go about finding and rescuing the science staff and then blocked any attempt to do it any other way. We were left entirely to our own devices on the “how” portion of the game, she just set up the scene for us and let us tackle it our own way (even if in this case there weren’t that many options on what our own way should be). As it turns out, we would have spent about two weeks less travel-time on the planet if we had done a little exploration at the original landing site to find out what else was there (the reason we ended up landing there instead of at the arcology, it turned out, was that there was an emergency beacon there where a research team had dug up a nasty alien surprise… and had left behind a couple of vehicles we could have used), but we did it our way and she didn’t twist our arms to start exploring the local area before heading out towards the arcology.
Oh, BTW, thanks Heather, we all love the Star Frontiers game.
One of the key things to go with the plot hooks is that if players don’t take them, that the plots should advance. One of my favorite adventures arose out of players ignoring a hook. Then they dealt with the same villains after three years of advancing their nefarious schemes later one.
Interesting. I think you make some insightful points. I admit that I like me some ‘sandbox’, but it requires a rather flexible DM. On the other hand, a ‘railroad’, IMO, is a rigid non-flexible DM. There is, as you say, a middle-ground. Having an over arching story arch is not a railroad to me, it is just a plan. A plan that will get changed and redirected, to the same conclusion, or possibly totally different conclusion if character actions cause the conclusion to be OBE* – or something more appealing rears it’s head.
Your Star Frontiers example in the above, is an example but at an adventure level. The DM had an objective (conclusion), sometimes it is simple – ‘Get off this rock’ which will, most likely, be a single adventure. Sometimes it is more involved – ‘Save the world’, as in a large story arc.
The distinction, for me, is DM flexibility. The fact that your DM set aside the encounters that she had planned (to probably use some other time in the future) and allow you to achieve the objective by just ‘winging it’ is sandbox play. If a party takes a completely different route than anticipated during an adventure and the conclusion is not reached, a fexible DM will plan something different to achieve the overall goal for the next season based on current events, within the scope of a large story arc or campaign game.
Now, I say all that to support my next opinion. The fact that your DM told you what she had planned has two effects; one, it takes those encounters out of her repertoire to use in the future (not a big thing if they don’t plan on using them any other way), and two, it lets you know that you weren’t railroaded. So, to close and summarize, I imagine that many players that think that they where railroaded may have not been, but rather what was planned was not released for their scrutiny. The distinction is signs like when the DM says such as in your Star Frontier game, “erm… yeah.. but you might want to think about securing your ship first before you adventure out… yeah” or “You walk for hours, as you round the edge of a hill crest and see… your ship! You have wondered in a large circle!”. That is an inflexible DM that can’t set aside their planned encounters and just wing it. That is the true distinction of being railroaded, IMHO.
Best and thanks for sharing your thoughts,
The Bane
I use an informal poll after each session that contains six options (some are plot hooks, some merely locations) that the PCs have heard about. I ask my players to vote on where they’d like to go next session, or what they’d like to do. Some people might call that a railroad… But, as you say, I feel like it’s in between railroad and sandbox.
I’ve consciously designed the Star Wars campaign as a “sandbox”, but I’ve noticed that, whether they do it out of what they think is politeness towards me or a “let’s get on what it” mood, they usually swallow the first adventure hook I dangle, even if it promises far more risk than reward for their characters. And when I dangled two adventure hooks simultaneously–making them choose–one of the players got really upset because she thought she would miss out on all the “cool stuff” going on with whatever one they passed by. In other words, I guess what I’m saying is that the type of campaign *I* would love to be a player in (very open-ended, with lots of room for self-directed action) isn’t necessarily the one that all players like–some of them really like being assigned a straight-forward “mission” each session with clear goals.
I agree with your definitions and I strive for a middle ground in the games I run, too. I think it’s good for characters to encounter things from time to time that they can’t avoid, like the crash landing you described. They’re still able to react to these events however they wish.
Good post Dyson!
I agree and I will even go so far as to say that a good DM can take an adventure path such as Dragonlance or one of Paizo’s and run it in a sandbox style.
The key is what Eusebius mentioned in that player decisions must have consequences.
Yeah, I think the term sandbox is way overused and imprecisely defined. I’m starting a new campaign and proposed running it more “sandboxey,” and the players balked a little. “You mean no plot, just wandering around and doing random encounters all day?” They didn’t want any of that extreme definition of sandbox that some people propose.
There’s a lot of different elements to it. Are there “plot hooks” at all or just exploration? Are all the plots from the DM or do they let player actions initiate plots? Does the DM just break sim and disallow actions they don’t like? Are there “right” and “wrong” ways to accomplish character goals?
At its worst, sandbox play means “nothing more subtle than a guy in an inn saying ‘go get that dungeon’ exists.” Some people see railroading in everyday events – if a horde of zombies is approaching from the west, then they are “railroaded” into going east, though this is a faulty understanding.
I think in the end, we prefer for there to be story elements, but no feeling of constraint on player choice. But things in the game world happening to you that you don’t like or that constrain your realistic choices aren’t railroading. That’s something that just happens in real life.
This discussion, especially of the “going East” thought, had me flash back to The West Marches. (Hope url tags work in this, if not google Grand Experiment West Marches)
Anyway, that bog had me attempt what I consider an actual “Sandbox” game via PbP that revolved around players starting rumors in the base town. Everyone would type up a rumor that they where interest in exploring and I would add a couple too. The the party would decide which rumor they would investigate and I would run the adventure. They be rumors, it was my call if they where actually True, Partially True, or False. Great concept, but as others here have mentioned, it didn’t work out so well.
Don’t know why I felt compelled to share…
Best,
The Bane
A pure railroad style game, is, by definition, bad, since it explicitly means that you are giving the players no choice in where they end up. I gather you meant story-based or goal-based, but wanted to capture your readers’ attention. Mission accomplished.
A story-based game is fine, so long as the players don’t have to finish the story.
The promotion of sandbox style games is not one-true-wayism. It is a method of focussing attention on the preferences of the players, by letting them strike whatever path they want. The fun to be had by the DM will be to give the players something interesting to do, in whichever direction they go.
And if I am wrong, and it is one-true-wayism, then appropriately so.
Really enjoying your blog.
I like to let the players create a NPC contact that their character knows in the setting. They don’ create any stats for it just a background that explains who the NPC is, how he knows the PC and what sort of expertise the NPC might have.
The purpose is that the NPC is there for the PC to turn to for advice or help even (within the limits I judge that the NPC, as described would, would be able to help. The upside is that the player created NPCs are such fertile material for plot hooks.
Basically the NPC is player created but referee run.