We’ve looked at the common mistakes that are made when using plotted/railroaded approaches. Now let’s look at the flip-side of the coin and look at the low-value prep pitfalls people can fall into when attempting to be open and flexible in their design.
Here’s a common one: You’ve prepped a bunch of elements for your sandbox campaign and now you believe that you need to keep all of those elements active and moving around.
For example, when I ran my OD&D sandbox I prepped a hexcrawl with 256 keyed hexes. Imagine running that hexcrawl and, between every session, trying to touch every single one of those hexes and saying, “Okay, here’s what’s happening in this hex right now. Here’s how the situation in this hex has evolved since the last session.”
Not only does this sound exhausting, but basically all of that prep is wasted. The players haven’t seen the previous situation in the vast majority of those hexes, and they likely won’t see the new situation you’re creating, either. So the players aren’t actually seeing any of this activity. You’re creating a ton of content of which your players have no awareness; no experience.
I’ve spoken to a large number of GMs who are intimidated at the idea of running a sandbox campaign specifically because this kind of prep work – this monumental task of keeping an entire fictional world “in motion” – is incredibly daunting to them. The reality, of course, is that this isn’t necessary. This low-value prep can be avoided through status quo design.
The truth is that status quo is generally the way the real world works: Imagine going to a diner. If you go there today, what do you see? You see some waitresses. They take your order. They deliver the food. If you went tomorrow instead of today, what would be different? Probably not a lot. Probably nothing. If you went next month would it be different? Probably not. Maybe the waitresses would be different; or the owner might have tweaked the menu a bit. But if you’d never been to that diner before, these changes would not really affect your experience.
Now, let’s say that you went to the diner today and fired a rocket launcher through the window. Then you go back tomorrow. Would the diner be different?
Yes.
And that’s basically the secret of status quo prep: You prep a chunk of the game world in a given state and then you don’t bother touching it again until the players’ actions interact with that state. But as soon as the players do agitate or change that status quo, that chunk of the game world becomes active.
It’s kind of an inverted quantum state: Until you observe a subatomic particle it’s impossible to know its current state. With status quo prep, on the other hand, you know precisely what the state of something is until you look at it.
THE ACTIVE QUO: It should be noted that status quo doesn’t mean “static.” It also doesn’t mean “boring.” The status quo of a pirate cove, for example, isn’t, “The pirates are all sitting around doing nothing.” The status quo of a pirate cove is a bunch of pirate ships constantly sailing out to pillage the high seas.
In fact, I’d argue that the best status quo design is usually more like a coiled spring: The lightest interaction from the PCs will cause an explosion of activity.
NON-LOCAL EFFECTS: And the actions that force a location (or organization or NPC) into “motion” doesn’t necessarily have to be direct. For example, what if the PCs unleash a horrible plague that kills goblins? They don’t actually need to visit the dungeon full of goblins on the other side of the map in order for those goblins to be affected by the plague and the status quo of that dungeon to be changed.
These non-local effects don’t require cataclysmic scenarios, either. A single NPC being knocked loose from another location can act as a free radical, banging around the campaign world and putting any number of other elements into motion. For example, when the Necromancer escapes from the PCs’ raid of Bleached Bone Gulley, maybe they end up slaying the goblin chief and enslaving the tribe.
RETURN TO THE STATUS QUO: With that being said, in the absence of continued PC interaction, elements of the campaign world will generally trend back towards a status quo again. (Note that I said a status quo; it’s usually not likely that things will go back to the same status quo. PCs tend to be more disruptive than that.)
For example, the PCs raid a terrorist compound, wreak a lot of havoc, and kill a couple of the cult’s leaders before being forced to retreat. Over the next week the cult calls in reinforcements from some of their other cells to guard against further incursions until they can finish packing up and moving their operations to a new location.
If the PCs don’t re-engage with the terrorists within a couple weeks of the original raid, then the new status quo features cyborg guards (the other cells were up to some wacky stuff), an abandoned terrorist compound, and a new operational center set up in the sub-basement of a parking garage.
DANGERS OF THE STATUS QUO: One danger of status quo design is that you can end up inadvertently stumbling into a sandbox setting where you’re not actively tracking the activity of anything in the game world and, as a result, there’s no activity for the PCs to observe, which translates into a lack of scenario hooks.
This is a problem I discuss at length in Juggling Scenario Hooks in the Sandbox, but basically the solution is just, “Make sure you have scenario hooks. And lots of them.” (Once the PCs are in motion, of course, this will usually take care of itself.)
Robust, default structures for delivering scenario hooks – like random encounters, rumor tables, or the default action of the hexcrawl structure itself – are one way of doing this. Another is to look around your setting and remember that status quo doesn’t mean nothing is happening: The pirate cove is raiding local shipping. The terrorists are blowing things up. The goblins are fighting werewolves in the forest. Some jackass is shooting rockets into local diners.
Those are all obvious sources for endless scenario hooks. And in status quo design, you can really think of a scenario hook as being a hook: A thing which jerks the PCs into motion towards an object. And once the PCs collide with that object, the ripples they create will spread fast and far.
At that point, the challenge won’t be putting the campaign into motion. It will be keeping on top of it.
”Some jackass is shooting rockets into local diners.”
HAHAHAHAHA
really enjoy your sense of humour.