Sandbox Gaming -or- "You mean I have to come up with my own fun?"

Due to my extensive history of running World of Darkness LARPs, I've developed a style of GMing that I call Sandbox Gaming. Sandbox Gaming, in essence, is much like the open-world RPG video games we've gotten and enjoyed since Grand Theft Auto 3 really blew our minds. What happens is you set up a sandbox for everyone to play in. Generally, I set my sandboxes as towns and cities that all the characters' actions and consequences will be taking place in. Then you let the characters loose in the sandbox and see what they come up with. It's a bit more complicated than that, obviously, but that's enough info to get one started and to act as a lead-in paragraph for this article.

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Modding Mods -or- "So... um... who's playing healer?"

In which I write a ton about how to modify gaming modules to fit your non-standard character party. It's long, but I guarantee it's worth it.

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Actions, Intent, and Fate -or- "I'm lawful evil, of course I butchered the pickpocket."

The majority of RPG systems I've encountered have some sort of morality system in the character design process, apparently because players can't be trusted to do anything except murder entire populations of towns and steal everything they find unless there's some sort of consequence. And since law enforcement in many games is rather lax and all of its officers have stats and finite numbers -- which means they can all be killed, then those consequences have to happen to the numbers that the players really care about through game mechanics that will alter and destroy characters without the necessity of having corporeal agents to do the duty. Frankly, I don't agree with morality systems built directly into a game because behavior, good or bad, carries its own consequences.

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Populating Your City With Petty Crime -or- "Seriously, there can't be that many burglars around here, let's just go knock on doors!"

A followup on the previous topic of petty crime, except here I'm demonstrating how I figure criminal populations for cities.

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Petty Crime and You -or- "So you're new in town and the first thing you do is attempt to score meth? I don't think you can roll high enough for that right now."

In most RPGs, a lot of the world-wide plot centers on the idea that the forces of evil are actively working to destroy the world, conquer the world, or just destroy the forces of good, and it's the job of the forces of good to stop, eradicate, or destroy the forces of evil, no matter how utterly ridiculous those prospects may seem. The thing is, giant conspiracies of good vs. evil are found in virtually every fantasy setting, since they often go hand in hand with the theme of The Brave Few Against The World, so I'm not actually going to cover the giant global conspiracies in this blog, because this is about details and tweaks, not "how to write your ongoing plots". So, in the spirit of that sort of thing, let's start small and work our way to bigger, starting with crime and it's organizations.

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