Troupe Play and Sandbox Campaigns

[sam_the_bold]

Something I've been rotating in my mind is the role of troupe play in big sandbox campaigns. I say "troupe play" in a very broad sense: really, I just mean "you don't always have the same characters in the party each session." And I've realized that, with relatively few exceptions, pretty much all of the big long sandbox campaigns I've run have ended up involving troupe play or something much like it:

• I've run West Marches and open tables, for both overland crawls and dungeons, usually with a roster of ten to twenty players or so. 
  
• In my Seas of Sand, Mothership, and Wolves Upon the Coast campaigns, there have been crews aboard the ship(s), which provide an easy list of extra NPCs who can go on adventures or serve as replacement PCs. 
  
• In my long-running Heresy campaign, we ended up with four "main PCs," the primary heroes of the campaign and the leaders of their rebel heresy, and then ten-ish "minions," who got substituted in and out on various adventures. I think by the end of the game, the average adventuring party had like one-and-a-half main PCs. 
  

What I've noticed is that in each of these cases, troupe play facilitates the sandbox: it means that characters can die without ending the main quest, making it easier to have huge terrifying monsters and threats, and it means there is a lot more flexibility in team composition for problem-solving, which expands the range of flavors of problems you can set up for players to face. 

Likewise, while this isn't explicitly tied to troupe play, I find two common knock-on effects of troupe play are 1) you need a home base or other place to leave your dudes that aren't out on an adventure, and 2) that you need downtime activities for those homebound dudes to do "off-screen." And both of those together encourage a much larger, richer field of play. (As a tangent, watching the Quinns Quest video about Stonetop, I was struck by how much of his praise focused on the longevity of the game and the effect of giving players a home base situated in the world—both things that Stonetop does by default, true, but also don't seem terribly unique.)

These elements combined—a wide range of dangers and threats, a home base, and prominent downtime—all feel like they really enable a proper sandbox game. One that's focused not just on "where your party is traveling at this exact moment," but one that exists and persists within a wider, broader world. And so now I'm wondering, for whatever future big sandbox campaign games I run and big sandbox campaign projects I make, how I can best support and enable and encourage troupe play. 

Any good ideas?

[JimMonsoon]

I’ve tried to push my players towards having a stable of characters to pull from but they have not seemed into it yet. Somewhat related I hear that Ben Milton’s next project, maze knights, is focused on having players run more than one character at the same time - I think this means literally at the same time, but I wonder what the downtime will look like for that.
(Very excited to hear what y’all think of Stonetop btw)

[misha]

A lot of the campaigns I've played in and run have been set up as open tables, where there's a fair amount of variance in who shows up week to week, and stable play has always felt like a natural outcome of that playstyle. Any campaign where you can get laid out for multiple weeks from severe injuries, resurrection sickness, training time, or whatever also really benefits from it. I really like the dynamic it brings, where you're bringing different characters to different delves based on the overall party composition/expected challenges/etc.

I'm actually a little torn on how much to emphasize downtime activities. The open table I currently run is in a slot that's always pretty tight on time, often with first time roleplayers, and with very little discussion off-table between weeks. That's a game I really want to keep at the table as much as possible, and to keep what's at the table generally focused on communal action (so, usually dungeon crawling).

I initially thought the formalized downtime system of His Majesty the Worm was really cool, but in practice the fact that it was so systematized and every player was Making Meaningful Choices during it meant that it took an enormous amount of time to resolve. Which isn't necessarily bad--it's still play--but the fact that it was so single player meant that it dragged a bit for me.

I do wish my players engaged with the surface world a little more, though, so what I've been toying with is the idea of tying downtime actions explicitly to money. It's not that you get one downtime action per gap between dungeon delves, it's that you can spend your money to make major moves in the local setting and become a known regional actor--or maybe a better way of saying it would be that becoming entangled in the surface world power network costs money.

I think in general there's a big split within troupe play--are you doing troupe play because you have a set of regular players each controlling multiple actors within the world, or are you doing troupe play because there's a bunch of drop in/drop out characters at your open table? Things like home bases and emphasis on downtime actions work great for the first, but for the second I've found that you really want to elide a lot of the crunchy "did you follow the rest of the party when they left to go hexcrawling?" questions and just let absent players exist in a nebulous void. For the second style, troupe play is less active mechanic and more facilitator--I'm not really sure what to do to help it along other than not look at it too closely.

For the first type, with a tight regular cast of players, I've found that the best support is just including things in the game that require time to carry out. Injuries that take you out of action for a month and a half. A big enough map that when one character goes off to explore B1 they're out of action for 3 weeks as they travel, so you need to spend a week playing as someone else (in the big ongoing campaign I've played in a character once drank two potions at once and got magically fucked up in a way that required a 6 month travel to a healer, leading to every player having an "A Team" and "Success Team" character). Item crafting or spell research or training times that take you out of action for a month.

[Ophiolith]

One thing I wanted to try for my old open table, but never got around to doing before things fizzled, was take a leaf out of Sword World's book and have a roster of hireable secondary characters that people could take out on adventures with them, and would track inventory and experience like regular PCs. It seemed like such a fun concept, especially to aid in having a bit of guaranteed contiguity even if the roster of players changes dramatically.