The Theme of the Adventure (part 2)

    The last time we touched on this subject, we were talking about how individual missions can be different with different feels.  Is this an exploration?  Is this a horror cross-over?  Is this a massive war?

    But this time, let’s get into a different type of affair.  As in, how are you as the GM going to run the mission.  There are two main paths that you can go down:  railroad or sand box.  As we get deeper and deeper (no pun intended) into the Endless Dungeon, we’re displaying one of the clearest examples of a railroad style adventure.

    Let’s consider the analogy for a brief moment.  Why is it called railroad?  Because the people on the train, the engineer included, cannot change the direction of travel.  The train cannot get off the tracks.  Well, it could get off the tracks, but that would be a disaster.  Analogy confirmed.

    The Endless Dungeon, and nearly all dungeons, are railroads.  There is an entry place and maybe an exit.  Even if there are multiple pathway choices within, they are all going to lead to the same big bad guy at the end guarding the exit.  Players are offered the right path or the left path, but it just doesn’t matter.

    Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the spectrum is the sandbox.  Here, making your own path is not only easy, but required.  The players can go in any direction they want, and the GM is expected to react to it.  Not only should the GM react, but the choices being made by the players should affect the plot as it progresses.

    The truth is, railroads are vastly easier to set-up as a GM.  Since there is only one course of events, only one set of encounters needs to be designed.  In a sandbox environment, the GM needs to be ready for anything.  Now, some GMs are convinced that they can just shoot everything off the cuff, but that really doesn’t work.

    OK, now some of you just went, “I can do it.”  Guess what - you can, IF you are prepared for it.  For some people shooting from the hip is really showing up with no prep.  They are so convinced with their own abilities, that they really think the players won’t notice that they are delivering a substandard product.

    But there are others - quite a few - who have enough knowledge about what’s going on in their world that they may not have anything prepared for the gaming session, but when the players say they want to turn left or turn right, this GM knows what’s over there.  That’s not shooting from the cuff, that’s preparing for anything.

    And here in lies the problem.  Being prepared for anything takes a lot of work.  Even for folks who have been floating around their game worlds for decades, knowing what’s going on “everywhere” is incredibly difficult.  But perhaps what is most difficult about sand box games is getting them going.

    For those players who are unfamiliar with open ended games, deciding what their characters are going to do can be extremely trying.  When offered one of three choices, the party can choose which they want to pursue.  When the party is offered literally unlimited choices, they not only cannot agree on what to do, but they probably cannot get more than one vote in any direction.

    Picking from an infinite number of possibilities is tough to do.  A GM leaving the players that many options is bad game mastering.  Therefore, while every gaming group is different, the best answer probably lies somewhere between these two extremes.

    These are obviously going to be opinion, but in our opinions, in a role-playing game, the player characters need to have the ability to make some decisions based on their own character history and personality.  What do we mean?  Well, it is quite common for a gaming group to get together for the evening and then the GM lays out the mission introduction.  But halfway through the mission introduction one or more of the player characters start thinking, “this isn’t for me, or at least not for my character”.  These things can be as simple as “my barbarian wouldn’t want to help these mages” or “in my understanding of my character’s religion, this would be evil”.

    The ability to pass on a mission is one of the key aspects of a true sandbox game.  If the GM is only prepared for one mission at a gaming session, then the railroad tracks have been laid.  This isn’t the worst thing in the world, and few GMs have the time to be prepared for a true sandbox event, but if you’re only ready for one adventure, then it isn’t sandbox.

    How do we fight this?  You saw some of it in All About Wilderness Adventures.  A job posting board at an adventurers’ guild hall allows the party to choose which mission they want to take.  The player characters get to choose one of three, and you are on your way to a sandbox.

    In an effort to move towards the middle - offering a railroading mission but one where the party has to work to find the mission in the first place helps.  While this might still be railroading the players into this mission, by making the player characters do some work to get in touch with their contacts in order to find out what and where the available missions are makes them feel like they are choosing their missions instead of having the mission force upon them.

    In many cases, it may not be whether this is railroading or not, but the perception of the players.  If they feel in control, it may not always matter if they are.

 

    This post was written as part of the recently released Valor in the Prison of Despair aka All About Wandering Monsters, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one details everything having to do with wandering monsters, random encounters (both combat and non-combat), and other game mastering tricks, but within a fully defined mission showing both the stats for point-based characters (like in Legend Quest) and class-based characters like in most of the die-20 games.

    We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 75 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.