Ongoing Sandbox Campaigns in Old School Advanced Fantasy Adventure Roleplaying Games

Is your game like this? It should be.

This blog is about running Ongoing Sandbox Campaigns in Old School Advanced Fantasy Adventure Roleplaying Games. This is a gamist blog where I talk about running the game. Other topics, like the history of games and game designing, old school products, RPG politics, the state of the OSR etc. might get a (very) minor mention. We will also look at some of the fiction that inspired the original old school games and see how that can inform running games today.

My game of choice is OSRIC, an open-source game inspired by Gay Gygax’s seminal roleplaying game Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition. A link to the OSRIC guys can be found here and all the rules are available in PDF. Though I urge you to pick up physical copies. I will explain why I like Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition (AD&D1e) and its faithful clone OSRIC as we go along.

So, lets dive into a definition of terms. Roleplaying games are a broad church, I describe the games I like as: Ongoing Sandbox Campaigns in Old School Advanced Fantasy Adventure Roleplaying Games. But what do I mean by this?

Ongoing: I want a game that lasts from session to session, week to week, month to month, year to year. A persistent game where the characters, settings, locations and players change over time in response to numerous iterations of play.

Of course, such an ongoing game necessarily has an element of ‘Triggers Broom’ (A UK reference, Trigger was a sitcom character from the 1980s. A street sweeper, in one episode Trigger wins an efficiency prize from the council for using the same broom for twenty years. When asked how he managed it, Trigger tells us that “its had 17 new heads and 14 new handles”). This paradox is also known as ‘the ship of Theseus’.

I think this is ultimately what I mean by ongoing, a game that starts in one place and goes somewhere else, we are still playing the same game even as the playing pieces change. It’s not like chess, a game that runs out of pieces and ends. This type of play necessarily requires some sort of procedural generation in order generate new pieces and keep it going.

Sandbox: If ‘Ongoing’ refers to the temporal then ‘Sandbox’ refers to the spatial. The ongoing game requires a sufficiently large space to explore. A map. The term sandbox has its roots in wargaming and the sand tables they would reshape to make an infinite variety of battlefield topographies. In RPGs Sandbox is an often bandied term but for me it has a specific meaning:

For me Sandbox means that the setting design is sufficiently rugged that the referee/judge/DM/GM can adjudicate any course of action that the players can think of. Of course, the GM needs the players to engage to some extent with the material he has created, but it is on the GM to build a sufficiently large map that the players can say ‘we go South! (or east, or west, or north)’ and have a reasonable expectation of bumping into something unique to interact with. Unique is important here, the choice of direction must be important (their should never be a quantum ogre), going in a particular direction has a unique set of consequences. When explaining this idea to new players in my campaign I explain it in these terms ‘There is no story, you can go wherever you want, do what you want, look at things and I will tell you about them, talk to people and I will tell you what they say. If you want to plant an apple tree and watch it grow you are welcome to do so. But this is a dangerous world, if you choose to do nothing the world will still happen to you.’

I believe this sandbox play requires a map to explore and, like the ongoing game, procedural tools to fill it. Again, it is different from chess, it should be possible to extend the game beyond the finite 8x8 grid. I will write much more about this concept in subsequent posts.

Campaign: Another word that is often bandied, and another word from tabletop wargaming. But what does it mean?

Dictionary says:

Noun

1.       an organized course of action to achieve a goal.

2.       a series of military operations intended to achieve a particular objective, confined to a particular area, or involving a specified type of fighting.

Verb

Work in an organized and active way towards a particular goal, typically a political or social one.

So, these definitions all point to the idea of goals. Goals in an ongoing sandbox campaign should therefore be evolving, and ideally player generated.

The caveat here is that, to use the military expression, ‘the enemy gets a say’, while some goals should be generated by the player others will be necessitated by the actions of NPCs or random monsters and events. Sometimes a dragon attacks the town, and the players will need to take action or watch their holdings be burnt to the ground. Just like trying to organise a game session, life has a habit of getting in the way.

A campaign then is about players taking a long series of actions to achieve a particular set of goals in the game world. This is different from a picaresque tale like REH’s Conan or Vance’s Cugel the Clever. Yes, they both want things and hatch various plans to get them, but both characters basically roll from adventure to adventure. No one more so than Conan, where a story can open with Conan sitting on the throne of Aquilonia, we don’t need to know to much about how he got there, he’s Conan.

However, in an Ongoing Sandbox Campaign we want to explore Conan’s rise to power in all its mechanical details. We want to experience every moment, make the decisions, ask the question at each moment ‘What would Conan do?’. It’s a testament to the skill of REH that he is able to create this feeling of depth and adventure in just a few short sentences in his stories.

My conception of the campaign is more like the Count of Monte Cristo. Edmund Dantes starts of as a level 1 Fighter (Sailor), in a dungeon. He must achieve a large number of minor objectives (escape, becoming the pirate leader, recovering the treasure, fighting bandits, becoming their leader, entering Paris society, spying etc.) over the course of many years, to achieve his major objective (the nature of which is itself subject to change). War and Peace is another example, here a large ensemble of characters try to survive a real-world military campaign, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Dracula might be another example; the characters spend the first half of the novel being terrorised by the count before deciding to get proactive and destroy the beast.

 Here is another difference with chess, while the objective of chess remains the same (destroy white) the long-term objectives in an ongoing sandbox campaign are subject to change.

So, that completes the first part of our definition Ongoing Sandbox Campaign. Such a game could obviously be played in a variety of different systems including, computer games, war games, theatre of the mind, kriespiel, Braunstein etc. They also get played in real life, in corporate and military strategy meetings. As I write this, I am reminded of the War Room in Doctor Strangelove, and before you seek to argue with my definitions so far, please remember: There is no fighting in the war room.

Is this your D&D table? It should be.

Let’s go on to look at the systems we could use to play such a game.

Old School: I include ‘Old School’ in my definition of the kind of game I’m interested in order to pay homage to the masters. I say ‘Old School’ in reference to Gary Gygax and his contemporaries and the games that they played. In his 1st edition Dungeon Masters Guide Gygax sets out in the greatest detail what fully developed fantasy campaign gaming might look like. I believe very few people (possibly nobody) have run campaigns that really go beyond the scope of what is described there.

               I choose to play Old School games, particularly AD&D 1st edition, because it is there. I don’t believe that we need a ‘new’ game while we still have yet to master the game that is in front of us. I see so much talk on the internet about modifying the game, or creating new mechanical content (spells, classes, monsters) for it as if people have somehow used it all up. I am willing to bet that the vast majority of d&d players have never used more than 10% of the options listed in the core books.

               I say I like ‘Old School’ not because I think that it is impossible to make a new game that would be better than AD&D (it obviously is within the wit of man to achieve such a thing) only that I have not yet seen such a game.

I certainly do not believe that I am about to invent one.  

               I would say that both Marc Miller’ s Traveller is another example of an old school game that has the depth of Gygax’s conception. But that is a conversation for another time.

               The fact is that inventing a new kind of game is hard. Particularly a game of the complexity of D&D. Gary Gygax was a genius. We are not geniuses, but we know them by their fruits. Many people think that they can make a game like D&D, it seems easy, just look at how many people try. You may have tried yourself.

No one tries to make a new version of chess (or very few, and most of them are very well-established rabid chess enthusiasts). The strange thing about people who make new versions of D&D (whether official or OSR) is how little regard they seem to have for the original and advanced versions of the game. They say that it’s ‘broken’ or ‘unplayable’ or ‘unrealistic’. And it’s fine to criticise a game, I just wonder how much of this criticism is really based on play.

You will notice that NO ONE makes any criticism of chess.

I think that AD&D is robust simply because it was played more and play-tested more and more rigorously than any game since. AD&D is at the summit of that development process. Subsequent versions and games make design choices that are clearly fail states for reasons that we could discuss all day long.

Advanced: I am interested in advanced gaming. I write this blog for people who know what a ttrpg is and understand the differences between them. I want to play a challenging, difficult game, a game that has specific, detailed rules for determining the outcome of a very wide variety of game situations. I want a large number of specific options which are mechanically different from each other in a meaningful way.

I am not interested in playing a game that is very simplified or streamlined. A game where the GM gets to make it all up as he goes along, or worse still a GM that lets me make it up all.

I don’t personally think AD&D is that complicated. It says ‘ten and up’ on the cover. Yet today we seem to have a whole industry devoted to making games that are extremely simple. Where the idea of counting twenty arrows is seen as too complicated for an adult player to manage. OSR aficionados will notice how quickly we went from original rules to no rules and how quickly the game crashed because of it.

Some of this desire for simplification comes, I think, from a desire to attract new people to the hobby. However, I don’t understand why these new people would not be able to understand the existing rules or why it is somehow felt that new players would be attracted to a greatly simplified version. Most people are introduced to the game by a friend who has already played a more demanding version, why not assume your friend is equally able to understand it? It’s like saying:

‘I’ve read this great novel! Why don’t you read the cliff notes?’.

Another part of the desire for simplification comes from the number of people who want to make their own version of the game. The vast majority of new versions are dramatic simplifications with many of the original rules being simply stripped out. Designers likely do this because producing a work on the scale of the AD&D is very hard. It’s a lot of effort to sit down and write an encumbrance rule that is better than Gary’s. After all, many players don’t use it, or don’t understand it. So, it’s easy for the designer to dump it and save themselves some words. Indeed, the number one dumped rule seems to be encumbrance, the number two being specific time rules.

Obviously, an adventure game needs to account for what the players can carry and how long things should take. If you are hand waiving that, then you are hand waiving the entire economic basis of your fantasy world. Everyone has whatever they need whenever they want. The ongoing sandbox collapses. It becomes like a George RR Martin novel.

For me an advanced game suggests a detailed demanding world where an impartial referee adjudicates the players actions using a robust system for good or ill. It speaks of a world where the number of monsters appearing and the quantities and types of treasure they have are determined by a set rule, not a wave of the GM’s hand. As such the monsters and treasure are concrete facts of the game world and they must be dealt with. They are not movie extras or set dressing being moved about by the GM. Gary has determined the probability of goblins appearing in the local wood during the day and they have appeared. There are two hundred and ninety of them, deal with it.

Wandering monster tables and probabilities are another often scrapped set of rules in retro clones. I wonder why?

No player in chess laments the asymmetry of knight and queen or suggests we do away with castling. These are facts of the game and the emergent complexity should be celebrated.

Fantasy: I love history, more than I love fantasy. I read a lot more history than I do fantasy (I love them both, a LOT). Now, a game like the one described above could be run in a historical setting, and it might be very fun. So why include fantasy?

               Firstly, the worlds of fantasy are simple and rich in easily identified archetypes in a way that history is not (the archetypes are there in history, but a high wisdom score is needed to spot them). Fantasy worlds like Howard’s Hyboria or Tolkien’s Middle Earth are just easier places to run these types of games than, say, the Middle Ages. Fantasy worlds are less contentious, and they are fundamentally bounded by the fact they do not exist outside the writers imagination. I will write much more about this subject in future posts.

               But for me, the major reason to include magic and monsters in the game is to increase its tactical scope. Many people are attracted to RPGs because of the possibility of ‘tactical infinity’ the idea that the players could do anything. The addition of spells like invisibility, teleport, gate, rock to mud, passwall, polymorph, wish etc. greatly increases the tactical possibilities that may occur in any game by an order of magnitude. We can now change the map, change the dispositions of enemies, the way we move etc. Monsters also have these abilities. In an advanced game they are not just hand wavy or vague, such abilities are clearly defined, and this greatly increases the tactical depth. We enter what might be described as ‘Meta Tactical Infinity’ where all game elements are open to manipulation in a way that all participants can understand.

This is unique to D&D. Imagine a game of chess where all the rules, the board and the properties of the pieces are open to manipulation by both players in a way that is transparent to both players.

Adventure: I want to play a game that is about exciting adventure. Exploration, Combat, War, Theft, Espionage etc. These are the exciting and emotive subjects that games should be based around. I prefer games that are more grounded in these kind of physical challenges with real world analogues. I see some OSR material that seems focused on encounters with very weird situations and entities. The weirder the better it seems. I feel that this focus on weirdness somewhat detracts from the ongoing sandbox campaign element. Its hard for the players to work out what’s going on and what they can do about the situation.

               For me this is like the difference between Howard and Lovecraft. I love both these writers, but Howard is much more suitable for gaming because the situations Conan finds himself in are understandable. There are Picts chasing him. There is a giant lizard. A tower is full of treasure, and an elephant guy, and a wizard. In each of these situations Conan has a lot of choices, we can predict the actions and motives of the enemy, there are clear rewards (treasure, girls), and, in the end, he wins.

               Lovecraft’s characters don’t win. They have few choices. They continue to research strange things and poke about for dubious rewards (there is no treasure, no girls). Until something weird, and bad, happens. Lovecraft’s protagonists are not adventurers, they are all, eventually, losers.

Of course, this can be fun and entertaining, but it is not very gameable because all play is survival gaming, being the last one to die. Like a game of hide and seek. How long can you hold out?

Roleplaying: Of all the terms I have defined here this is actually the one I care about least. I don’t require players to speak in funny voices, I don’t mind if they do. First or third person. I don’t mind. I sometimes do voices, but I am a good talker, very experienced in public speaking in unfriendly rooms, so I can do voices as required if I think it will aid the players understanding of the situations or if I have had a glass of wine. I don’t think the voices are necessary and actually often inhibit play. Acting is hard. Often I have found that the players have much better discussions as themselves when they are ‘acting’ their characters. Very often the requirement to act makes it very hard for less confident players to chime in.

One of my sons loves to act his characters (he is always a lizard man of some type, he does a gravely voice) but I note that when he has a particularly creative idea he expresses it in his normal voice. My other son never does the voice, he always describes action in strict third person. He thinks the voices are silly.

When it comes to ‘playing the character’ and ‘meta gaming’, I think it’s all a load of nonsense. Players can engage with the game world in any number of ways. I could write a long bit about how later editions of the game were ruined by their focus on ‘roleplaying’ and ‘narrative arcs’ and ‘character backstories’ and ‘lore’ and ‘story paths’.

But, I simply don’t care about that style of play. My game doesn’t support it.

I think that a deeper and richer emergent roleplaying occurs when we focus on other areas of play. I prefer to think of roles in terms of what the different classes can actually do in a game session.

Sometimes I feel that RPGs have, in some quarters, become like a version of chess where one player’s bishop does not take the knight because ‘that is not what his bishop would do’.

 Game: It’s a game. Players win and lose. You have to get points, to go up levels. You get 1XP for each GP found and returned to the base. It’s a game about collecting coins, in a maze, full of ghosts. It’s PAC MAN. Advanced PAC MAN. That’s why we’ve been pumping in the quarters for more than 50 years (33 in my case).

The rules in short:

Get as many GP as you can, any way that you can.

Make sure you don’t lose too many HP.

Convert some GP into XP to go up levels, to get more HP.

Run out of HP. You die.

If you are a player, you control the PC.

If you are the GM, you draw the map and control the monsters.

A simple play loop for a simple game.

This for me is why Old School D&D is still the premier TTRPG. It’s just that simple.