By Kevin Manus-Pennings
The sandbox approach I pioneered (or so I believe) back in 1988 was working well. My players had the freedom to accept or abandon adventures as they chose and could follow their own interests in doing so. This style felt natural and removed the artificial sense that episodic or modular play had created. Unfortunately, it also meant that time needed to be a continuous element of the game. If one runs screaming from the castle but plans to return, then where does one go in the meantime and when?
Voila, continuous time must be introduced to keep track of what is happening. In the game that would eventually be called Karandrin, players play each hour of their lives, or at least those of interest to that player. Admittedly, this approach means that players must go through some of their character’s downtime, but the more uneventful or uninteresting parts can be simply rolled through with little fanfare.
Take, for example, my wife’s character Mara. If she has left a set of ruins (completed or uncompleted) and set out for town, we roll travel encounters every four hours until she reaches her destination. Mara enters a pub, and I roll for anything interesting. If nothing presents itself, I ask my wife if she has anything Mara needs to accomplish before she goes to bed, such as ask questions, hire services, put word out on the street, etc. If Mara has no objectives to accomplish, we roll for events for her waking hours (brawls, strange news from the road, etc.) and then put her to bed. If she has errands to run, we roll through those to whatever level of detail my player needs. Characters may spend days in town and we use a very similar process for each day: less interest means less time spent on the accomplishment; more interest means more time. I cater to the players.
Another advantage of this approach is that the characters can build contacts and enemies. Now, a GM might produce an ingenious system of procedurally generating these elements, but those xxx will lack nuance and the actual history and feel of the relationship. More importantly, the player will feel as though their character has a history. Now, where your players are not interested in these aspects at all, roll away and hand out contacts and enemies. Sorry for wasting your time.
An astute reader will feel some overlap between continuous play and elements of sandbox I mentioned earlier [Link Needed]. The two approaches definitely evolved hand in hand. Characters seeking out their own adventures would benefit from the ability to make regular returns to town, double check facts, research in a local temple, or what have you. If you can return to any point in a world, the GM has to know how much time has passed to know what may have changed at each of those locales.
An astute viewer will note that much of these activities is missing from the stream. Well, while players generally enjoy their own errands and in-town objectives, we find that observers don’t. We’ll take care of most of that off-screen and leave you the juicy bits. (Stay tuned also for a later article on what I’ve had to change for the streaming of Karandrin.)
A final point on continuous style that I know some role-players will find off-putting: continuous style does require a bit of note taking for players. While I as the GM take lots of notes, a player needs to be able to at least keep their days straight, particularly if they’ve made arrangements with NPCs in the future, etc. To date, however, no one has quit playing over the amount of notes, so I hope I can say this requirement has not been a fatal error.
Indeed, what few players I’ve had in Karandrin seem to enjoy it. The world, wild and wondrous as it is, was their oyster and it felt less arbitrary, less forced than many other approaches. Another aspect was developing, however, and that is what brings us to third key element of my world and how I run it: deeply organic.
© 2022 by Kevin Manus-Pennings
Karandrin 