It is way too much fun being like some sort of biker gang or a bunch of Far West outlaws – roam the countryside, cause mayhem,
fight in local taverns, set fire to magic
shops, beat an Elf senseless, and then skip town
when it’s getting too intense, and start all over again in the next big city.
Why give up that?
Welcome to the sandbox paradox: it’s a
revolving / unevolving kind of play. PCs get
to be more powerful, but storylines are ever the same. Players never take it
upon themselves to “build” anything big or durable.
In our long-running campaign of modified Ars
Magica, we’re currently trying it. We’ve built a convent
on an island, but we have quite a long list of miscellaneous
tasks to tackle, like meeting the fisherfolk and beekeepers
and their “guild” masters, or getting a handle on the King’s concubine who is
much too interested with us and our new convent
right now.
We’re giving up the fun of being roaming
outlaws (almost). But after twenty years of butchering monsters and humans
alike, maybe we could give that trade-agreement-with-local-beekeepers a shot. What do we have to lose? If it
goes south, we can still go back to butchering everyone and skip town – murder hoboes, as another blogger
said, and it is so damn true.
Most of the time, players behave badly in
sandboxes, not railroads, for obvious reasons. But there are, of course,
exceptions. For Dungeon Masters, the average sandbox is more time-consuming than the average railroad, and it
takes a well-behaved DM to run a sandbox, but railroads can be run by
DMs behaving badly. Here are two extreme examples.
There’s the “film director” DM, the one who
has a wonderfully convoluted and rich story to
tell but is way too lazy to sit down and write an entire novel, or even give NaNoWriMo a try. PCs are nothing but “extras” on his set, and are frowned
upon each and every time they dare to improv
a little or rock the boat. It’s like their DM
is telling them: “Know your place, actors.
You’re neither screenwriters nor the director,
are you?” And that’s not all. Sometimes these Ultimate Railroad DMs will
sit down at the beginning of a game session and declare: “I have been dissatisfied with how it turned out at the end of
last month’s session, so today we will start over right after your escape from
the sewers, and hopefully we’ll do it right this time...” The last 90 minutes
of a previous session – redacted, wiped out, cancelled.
Laughing, are you? Don’t. I’ve seen this.
Recently.
And then there’s the “dominatrix” DM, the
one who wants his players to be humiliated and completely ridiculed and at his mercy, while being railroaded along
nonetheless. Example: Prince summons PCs to his palace, but PCs have to leave
weapons at main gate. Prince then orders PCs to take part in an expedition he’s
sponsoring. PCs say no problem, let us retrieve
our weapons and go back to the Gray Troll Inn
to grab the rest of our gear / money / components, and then we’re all good to
go. Prince says no, ship’s already setting
sail right now, right here at palace docks,
you’ll miss it if you even run back to main gate. So PCs board ship without any
weapons / spell components / blankets / food, and with what money they had on their persons during audience with Prince. Ship
travels at sea for twelve days, during which
time PCs have to beg for rations and borrow spare weapons from sailors who
regard them as amateurs, intruders, and liabilities...
Laughing, are you? Don’t. I’ve seen this.
Recently.
So, the question remains: sandbox, or
railroad? The chance of players behaving badly, or the risk of DMs behaving
badly?
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