Manning the Canons or Riffing in the Sandbox

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There are a lot of settings out there that are just plain cool. And I enjoy playing or designing within the limits of the canon universe. I also love settings that lend themselves to new creations and a player-driven expansion of the universe or concepts within it.

As I work on adapting literature to games, I am experimenting with different ways to restrict or encourage creation.

So far, I find it easier to encourage sandbox play either indirectly, such as minimal lore or implied setting in tables and descriptions. Direct encouragement through tangible, valuable rewards for creating new things (for example, taking time to document a species of flora/fauna in UVG = XP), in my limited experience, is very effective.

To build out some more ideas, I thought of an opposite question: How would one enforce sticking to canon, either through the setting or mechanically?

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I think this would be something enforced by table culture rather than mechanically. I say this because the only instance I can think of where rigorously enforcing canon would be desirable would be a group absolutely desperate to play within a particular setting. I’d expect this to involve a lot of session 0 buy-in, and agreement over what constitutes canon, especially with (but not limited to) expansive and well-established (but complex) canon such as Marvel, Star Wars, WH40K etc.

In envisaging this theoretical group, I’m also imagining a group of fairly close friends, or at least a group of people brought closer by a shared love of a particular setting, with a strong commitment to achieving a shared goal of cleaving as close to source material as possible, and as such I think that deviations would probably be “punished” at a table level rather than in-game, too (supplying snacks, beer run… something like that. I honestly have no idea: this kind of game feels deeply unnatural to me).

On the flip side, this could also be addressed not just via in-game mechanics but actually “in-world” i.e. diegetically: the example immediately springing to mind being a WH40K, where an apocryphal player declaration is ruled to be made in-character i.e.:

“I believe that to be an Yrmgarl genestealer”

“Dude, we said in sesh 0 nothing from 1987 Rogue Trader was canon… rules are rules, your character’s mouthing off about some weird chaos moon aliens now…”

…and then that character is immediately declared a heretic, with whatever in-game consequences are appropriate. This is cute because it plays on notions of canon and apocrypha, very relevant in the quasi-ecclesiastical canon of Warhammer.

EDIT: spelling and syntax

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What do you mean by “sandbox play”. Sandbox is so many different things in peoples’ minds.

Do you mean for the players, the game master or the group? Because that’s three different perspectives. Also, I wonder what you mean by “enforce”. Introducing canon or just always have to have the setting present?

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Are we talking about collaborative games and anchoring them to some premade cannon? Or about classic gm-centring ones and options to invite players to do some limited world-building?

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In this context I mean

A sandbox game doesn’t have a well-defined “win” condition; defeat the baddie, rescue the princess etc. Within the game universe and players can set for themselves what they want to do and what goals they have.

As far as perspective, I am thinking from a design and making standpoint, and as @alonein_thelabyrinth mentioned - the game is designed with this hypothetical group in mind. Ei, fans of Jules Verne who want to play “in” the Verne universe. You are right, enforce makes less sense here - perhaps reinforce or strongly encourage the groups’ resolve to stick to canon.

Perhaps this would clear up @Selhan 's question as well, it matters less how the group is structured (collab, GM-led, GM-less) and more about anchoring them to canon and discouraging limited world-building.

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OK, so part of the problem is the underlying question of how you prepare for something when you don’t know what will happen?

How I tend to force feed setting material to the players, even if I normally have a game mastering style that is more considered collaborative storytelling.

  1. Choose one from a list during character generation. The important part isn’t that they are choosing something, but reading through the list. (Again, this is my designer’s goal should be part of the players’ interaction design philosophy.) I really like games that drop setting material in power, feat, or skill explanations. Let the title be “mysterious”, so the player needs to read the description (read: the setting material).

  2. Present a setting list to use during the session. Just hand out a bunch of one sentence setting material and tell the players that they can use that during the session.

  3. Show more the more they do. Every time that the players do something, reward them by showing things from the setting. This means that you need to prepare by reading a lot, but also planting stuff in the characters that they can use, like goals, places and people that they know, reusing previous happenings, and dangling hooks in front of their faces. Like, if you describe a room, you don’t describe everything in the room apart from the very essential (function, light, size, creatures) in very broad strokes. It’s not until they start moving in the room that you fill it out with more details. Do the same thing for the entire session: broad strokes, then use a finer and finer brush to give more and more details.

  4. Let the adventure form around them. I’ve been experimenting with pseudo roles (and pseudo clues) for the last year, where I have a bunch of information waiting to be released whenever the players do something. They may make up a bunch of stuff on the spot, but I can always build on that and then plant setting material. Sometimes the players’ ideas will contradict the preparation, like if you have a map, but why having a map in the first place? Just have a bunch of places and then place them out as the players move through then environment. Because if it’s not established to the players, it doesn’t exist. See the bits of the setting as tools that you can respond with whenever the players do anything. I used “places” as an example, but you can do this with groups, people (don’t make a person - make an idea of a person), customs, architecture, etc.

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There are a lot of settings out there that are just plain cool. And I enjoy playing or designing within the limits of the canon universe. I also love settings that lend themselves to new creations and a player-driven expansion of the universe or concepts within it.

This, all the way. A great example of this kind of setting is Star Wars. There is a strong canon, but it has left a grand abundance of opportunities for new or branching lore.

I also think that a mutually-loved fictional world is one of the strongest foundations you can have for developing a group dynamic around a shared vision for a game. People are going to have different ideas about how to approach most game worlds because creating a shared imaginary with any degree of similarity from one mind to another is a tremendous challenge. But, if everyone in the group loves Indiana Jones or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The Stormlight Archive, you’ve got a stew going on!

As I work on adapting literature to games, I am experimenting with different ways to restrict or encourage creation.

Interesting. I’m picturing the As I Lay Dying RPG or the Don Quixote RPG.

So far, I find it easier to encourage sandbox play either indirectly, such as minimal lore or implied setting in tables and descriptions. Direct encouragement through tangible, valuable rewards for creating new things (for example, taking time to document a species of flora/fauna in UVG = XP), in my limited experience, is very effective.

I suspect the [do thing = get XP] loop would likely lose its appeal after a certain amount of repetition.

To build out some more ideas, I thought of an opposite question: How would one enforce sticking to canon, either through the setting or mechanically?

I mean, this is what PbtA is all about. The whole idea of PbtA is that there are thousands of great worlds to explore and for each a thousand ways to explore them, but each way of exploring them is a bit lacking in elbow room. You enforce the canon by making the options available to the players reinforce the predetermined themes and activities.

Probably the best example of this is Bluebeard’s Bride. The game doesn’t deviate from the bride’s fate in the story, but rather builds the tragedy into the rails of the mechanics. It might be a bit extreme as examples go, but it’s fitting.

I am not suggesting that PbtA is that best way to go for your game, but you might look at the work done in that space for ideas of how to achieve your goals here.

Magpie Games is especially good at designing game mechanics around supporting a core game world. They made the aforementioned Bluebeard’s Bride, as well as the licensed RPG for Avatar and Korra. That game is specifically designed around exploring and expanding a richly canonical world without breaking the canon.

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Yeah, I keep coming back to PbtA games, but I haven’t had a chance to play any to get a real sense of them.

Mechanics would be the main lever on canonness(?) and can reward or punish based on what style of game the table is aiming for.

So for the Don Quixote RPG, we could have base mechanics for chargen and risk / unknowns, but then “add on” mechanics that lean into identity and delusion and chivalry and damsels in distress etc. A game master can then use or ignore depending on what type of game canonwise they are looking for.

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“Manning the Canons” is such a great phrase for playing around with someone else’s setting. I’ve always held that a lot of the fun of playing RPGs in predefined settings is the transgressive thrill of messing up the toys in someone else’s sandbox, but this really only works if the rules are clearly established so that players can learn them and figure out the boundaries for positive creativity within that setting.

I can’t really speak for the mechanical incentives, but I think I think if you’re trying to foster that kind of participation in a ttrpg adaptation of a literary work setting-wise you have to play it completely straight. Don’t wink or nod, never pretend you’re above the setting or the source material, lay out the facts (and lies) of the setting as clearly and concisely as possible. Players who want a very straight-laced ‘canon-esque’ experience will appreciate it, and players who want to break those rules will be able to sift through it and decide what the mutable boundaries are, what the immutable boundaries are, and how it benefits their stories to break them.

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