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.

[Idraluna]

I've been playing in Scribble M. Horror's OD&D game which has a roster or almost 40 characters so far. He has a really clever "downtime" system -- rather than being focused on activities that "progress" the character in some way, it reflects obligations that prevent one from adventuring. For example, Fighters may get injured what performing guard duty, Clerics may have to spend a week doing church service, and Magic-users just get really depressed sometimes when their research isn't going well.

The result (plus a rule that adventurers need a week of rest after each expedition) creates a constant turnover where each player is maintaining 2-5 characters at a time.

One other simple thing that has worked well is a big stack of pregens and hirelings, so there's no friction around just grabbing a new character.

[Hexed Pressman]

I played in a long-running sci-fi game in which we not only had a stable of player-characters but entire galactic empires that we managed along with engaging in adventures. The adventures themselves were pretty linear but there was a lot of intrigue and general shenanigans that occurred during the empire phases of session play.

PvP was acceptable and adventures offered opportunities to advance our various empires or, conversely, lead to their downfall. I remember we once convened a special weekend session so we could resolve a player invading my sovereign space with their imperial fleets (it was not successful ?).

It was a mix of sandbox play and linear play. Having roots in the setting and lasting consequences to our actions outside our particular PCs did add an interesting layer to the adventuring. Pissing off some dark force or powerful empire didn't just affect a single character but potentially our entire empires. It definitely had an impact on how we played.

[KurlyJ]

Doomsong makes the PCs members of a guild. (In the adventures released so far, that's the Gravediggers guild.)

What that does is naturally give you bases throughout the setting where the guild has operations. It also allows for there to be a hierarchy, which the PCs likely start off at the base of. It creates hooks, because the guild has a basic function. And it becomes troupe okay because there are always more guild members to take out.

[LudumSi]

When I think of troupe play I go immediately to Ars Magica. Is that where the terminology is coming from? It explicitly defines something it also calls "Troupe Style Roleplaying". This stems from the fact that the "main" characters are mages in a world where that means most adventuring type problems aren't challenges for them. The game expects the players to have at least two characters, one of which isn't a magus, as well as sometimes play as a group of shared hireling/servant characters. It also features a central location and group identity in the form of a covenant - essentially a monastery for wizards, as well as a very well developed suite of downtime activities. In my opinion the most notable feature of its downtime system is that it's also the advancement system. You can only improve your skills and magical arts by studying, and this takes full seasons of game time and is greatly aided by good teachers and books to learn from. I've been trying to adapt something similar to less hardcore games as I really appreciate that it's fully diegetic and removes the external mechanical incentives of e.g. XP. I would highly suggest anyone interested in troupe play to check it out.

That said its definition of troupe play also extends to different players taking on the GM role at different times, which doesn't appear to be discussed here. If we're excluding that from out definition of troupe play here, people may confuse it with this pre-existing terminology.

If we're trying to establish new terms instead, how is troupe play in this context different than an open table? Is it just a matter of different characters rather than different players? I think Misha is onto something in the distinction.

I have personal experience with troupe play - most of my time as a GM has been chasing large scale sandbox games with a lot of players acting independently of one another. Initially I experimented with 1-to-1 time but this has since proved unsustainable. It did do a good job of pushing players towards troupe play though, as if the actions of the previous session included traveling for two weeks, for example, their characters would not be available to play until two real weeks had passed. So at the next week's session they would need to play different characters. I had decided that any new characters would enter the game at the inn the game started at, or anywhere a player at that night's table had a character. I'm still fond of that idea. This did actually happen in practice and we had an A and a B party, though the players were mostly the same core group. I had also been considering a system of unlockable character types based on factions other characters had befriended - character classes or races which couldn't be chosen otherwise.

My second attempt also had one to one time, but the scope of the campaign world was such that it didn't really come up. That game had three separate parties of players which shifted around a bit but ultimately stabilized. There was also not multiple characters, but there was a downtime system which gave each character a downtime action per week. The actions were handled on discord between sessions, and I strongly recommend this over doing downtime at the end of a session or in a session. It really sings the best when its allowing players to do things that wouldn't be a good use of session time, like crafting.

I had a list of actions to pick from but enough players were doing things off-list that it became a huge drain on my time but I also had a free-form advancement system where players were proposing their own perks so it's hard to distinguish the time cost of the two in retrospect. My takeaway was that any sort of downtime actions need to be primarily mechanical and have minimal GM interaction, so that they can be primarily self-serve over discord. Ideally the players would simply make a post to a downtime channel saying what they did and be able to completely resolve it themselves. I can't recommend enough using discord or some other organized non-session communication for larger scale games. In my next attempt I am also planning on having shopping lists available players can just buy or sell by posting to a market channel between sessions.

I will also say that downtime systems tending to focus on individuals will bring conflict between characters as they bump into each other and develop goals which start to conflict. This is a feature for me, but I understand it isn't everyone's thing and I strongly believe the expectation of conflict needs to be communicated to prospective players.

Something I didn't expect with the three-party game was that players ultimately sorted themselves by playstyle preferences such that one group was very combat and dungeon focused, one was doing deeper character roleplaying, and one was just kind of vibing and pursuing other character goals. But the reality is that most people are content with a range of playstyles, so that could be a potential incentive to have multiple characters.

[AmICoolYet?]

I think writing for troupe play, vs actually playing troupe play have very different needs. The groups that I play with tend to be very theater kid coded, so my players really like to get into roleplaying, and be involved with the worldbuilding process a-la Stonetop. Having players take some authorial control over the setting helps me, the GM, run a world that feels like it has a lot of depth and texture, without having to write a ton. And in a troupe game, this allows a massive open world to fill itself out very well.

However, I personally found book 2 of stonetop very unsatisfying. On the face of it, the book 2 portrays locations in a way where they are meant to be more writing prompts than actual hard and fast locations. Like I remember the monks have a big mysterious vault, but if I remember correctly, it does not tell you what is in the vault and just has a bunch of writing prompts for it. Because the mountain people were so vaguely defined, it felt like in the text, they were just like "stock Nepalese culture insert", rather than something new and creative.

I find my own dissatisfaction strange, because the writing prompt style of location design philosophically agrees with how I practically run my games, while clashing with what I want from a pre-written adventure/location.

[misha]

I find my own dissatisfaction strange, because the writing prompt style of location design philosophically agrees with how I practically run my games, while clashing with what I want from a pre-written adventure/location.

I think that gets to the heart of it for me--it's not that this type of prep is bad; it's that it's what I already do when I'm getting ready for a session with limited time to prep. But that means it needs to save me time--and that type of 'have some cool ideas' prep is actually pretty quick, almost as quick as reading. So if it's not saving me that much time, it needs to be better quality than what I'd prep myself--but that means it needs to better match my sense of taste than things that I write myself.