Making a desert out of a sandbox
by
, May 22nd, 2018 at 04:11 (17023 Views)
Someone once asked me why it was that I preferred running homebrew sandbox campaigns to modules in official settings, which is a pretty popular way of doing things, especially for harried GMs who don't have a lot of time on their hands. I thought about it for a bit, and then came up with an answer that I'm pretty sure wasn't expected. The resulting conversation went something like this:
Me: Well, partly it's because I get to exercise more creativity, but mainly it's because it's a lot less work.
Him: (with a flummoxed expression) Are you kidding? Modules and setting books give you tons of stuff that you can embellish as needed. With your way, you have to make everything up! That's a ton more work!
Me: Ah, see, that's my point. My way, I hardly have to make anything up, and there's not nearly as much work as you think.
Him: (looks at me like I've just suggested that the earth is flat and our politicians are all lizard aliens)
So, okay. I understood his point. Modules give you lots of direct-to-table material. And setting books provide lots of juicy detail. There's only one problem to all that for me, though...I feel obligated to learn all that material in order to use (and abuse) it properly, and for me, that's a lot of work. My way is a lot simpler. Take, for instance, my current campaign. There is one basic concept from which the entire background hangs. It's such a simple concept that, if I were willing to give away the secret to my players, I could describe it to you quite neatly in a brief paragraph (that is, brief by normal people standards, not by my rather lengthier ones). You could call it, if you were in a plagiaristic mood, the One Hook to Rule them All. And while it took some time to come up with the One Hook, once I did a lot of the work was done. Instead, I could get down to the really fun part: exploration.
Exploration, at least for me, isn't work. It's letting my natural curiosity, and my penchant for finding ideas and explanations in strange places, do the heavy lifting for me. And why that can operate as well as it does for me is because the One Hook is kind of like the Ultimate Answer in Hitchhiker's Guide. It's an answer all right, but all it leads to is questions, and it's in finding those questions and figuring out why the One Hook is the answer that an entire campaign can be built. It's a very top-down kind of process, which for me has three big advantages:
- I can say "Here's another question", and then instead of poring over it for hours simply let it float in the back of my mind until inspiration strikes and an answer appears.
- I don't have to make up a bunch of individual items and then figure out how to kludge them all together to make sense, because each new item or situation springs from what's already been created.
- Because I'm creating things based on my own logic, I don't have to memorize someone else's logic and apply that instead, so I can rapidly spool out additional related bits as needed based on my own deep understanding of my creation.
And that, to me, is a lot less like work and more like fun. Granted, I have to do things like create my own maps, come up with my own NPCs and encounters and such...but I can do that as needed (especially with my current game...the joy of an exploration based game is that there's always room to slip little things into "explored" territory, because there's no real way that the explorers can note every single detail of a patch of land unless it's a really small patch). I don't have to build the whole desert from scratch, or even the whole sandbox. I start with a few grains of sand, and just add more as I find them.