whafrog, the Masked person discribed in the bounty board is the pirate queen. That is the same hook/bounty posting that they recomend in MPQ. In MPQ, they just have to send info for to receive the beginning of the MPQ quests.

i cant get it to quote in my previous post so I will have to make another.

Actually, the Womp Rat hunters sounds like a perfect way to start. At the beginning there has to be an understanding between GM and players that the players will accept the first hook. A "you guys are so broke, you're desperate enough to be womp rat hunters" type of mission is an amusing idea. I would just start in media res, or something close to it. They don't have to find the contact, a contact is already talking to them, giving them the mission in some way. He could beg them for help or use a chargen relationship (e.g.: "your brother used to work for me and I saved his butt, can you help me out?"), or simply be a good samaritan ("you guys look hungry. Tell you what, if you help me out I'll make it worth your while"). During the mission you can have them meet all kinds of characters that might show up again, from the grizzled old hunter who doesn't like "punks" cutting in on his womp rat bounties, to people they can use later as a refuge, to glimpses and interactions with NPCs they might meet later on. Whatever people you decide to use as "flavour" can easily become important facets in later sessions.

That is kinda how I was going to do it. I used to try to do everything by pen and paper but it is much easier to do it on a PC so I can just copy paste things that never got any use into a new adventure (so that way I can recycle unused ideas.)

After the mission is done (probably no more than 2 sessions), the characters will now have a reliable contact. Maybe that's when he's impressed enough with their work that he passes on the information, and they get to meet the masked person. Maybe they already met the masked NPC, but she wasn't wearing a mask at the time, so the PCs don't know it's her, but their efforts were enough to get her interested.

Basically, start simple and straightforward. Toss in a bit of foreshadowing by introducing other NPCs tangentially, but don't divert from the main mission or reveal that those NPCs are important...they should stand out, but not stick out. Make the first mission amusing if you can, and somewhat rewarding wrt XP and money. Give the players some decent XP to spend and some money to buy small upgrades to their equipment so they can look towards a future where womp rat hunting is behind them, and...the hook is set.

It will only be two sessions for the first adventurette thing I am making. After the Clandestine theft operation, the PCs will need to do one more, smaller job for the Contact (who ends up being a man for the Zann Consortium, who will hand them over to work for Venlana in MPQ) and then he will tell them where to go on Salecami and all that jazz.

EDIT: just to reinforce the media res thing...if you start with hunt for the contact, the players could easily get diverted, lost, frustrated at failed social checks to find him, or wondering what they're doing fighting a bunch of guys their supposed "contact" is screaming at. Because at this point they owe him nothing. You could say the PCs know him from "way back" or something in their chargen past, but that's only from the PC's point of view. From the player's point of view, he's still just a meaningless statistic. So the media res gets around that by avoiding all the potential frustration of the search and just launching into the story. After that, the players will have a reason to appreciate him, if only for the cash and opportunities.

I also Liked the small task board I set up. I felt like it was a good hook, but I will take your advice not to have the PCs running around forever. the people that this contact is screaming at were going to be a rival group that didn't do their task correctly, but I might change that. It was just a filler space in the outline at that point. I like your advice.

I also Liked the small task board I set up. I felt like it was a good hook, but I will take your advice not to have the PCs running aroun

Justin Alexander makes a good presentation, and his treatise on event node design inspires a lot of thought, though I think the premise can be taken too literally and too far to be useful for most GMs.

There's cooperative non-linear/sandbox and then there's group play-make-believe with dice.

In the former, the GM takes pains to ensure that players find his challenges, encounters and implied goals interesting enough to engage on their own -- then also give them enough agency to look forward and back and believe (or be told afterwards) that their tactical or strategic choice was only one of several.

In the latter, priority of choice over cohesion requires so much contingency planning for caprice that it may as well be fully improvised. And while that's a legitimate way to play, the expectation from most players -- and the social contract with the GM -- is that there will be a wide and often branching path that's worth exploring. It's like a remark I make: "Bethesda would have so many more dev resources if they didn't spend time modeling for a psychotic player character."

So I'd say follow within reason. Account for multiple solutions or encounter order. Embrace productive sidechains.

If you've done prep work, then your game isn't improvised. Or not any more than your standard RPG play style. If you've accounted for the 8 points I mentioned in the OP, you don't have to account for multiple solutions and encounter order becomes irrelevant... unless, for some reason, the order by which encounters take place affects how the PCs interact with the antagonist. But that should be accounted for as part of the setting/antagonist weakness/resources/etc.

Sandbox games are, by-definition, open-world. Open-world games, which are basically exploratory crawls for our purposes, may be non-linear but the world still has to be pre-populated by the GM - which runs the risk of locations/encounters/etc. being ignored - or the GM is improvising everything . Using a hook for the players gives the players motivation and focus but prepping the situation instead of the plot gives them ultimate agency within the boundaries of the hook. Exploratory crawls are antithetical to narrative games but that's a different discussion.

The Kingmaker Adventure Path for Pathfinder and Grand Theft Auto are great sandbox games but those games have all the locations and encounters pre-scripted and the writers/programmers were getting paid to account for every player action. If I wrote GTAV as a table-top RPG and my players didn't find all 50 hidden UFO parts, I would be angry. First at them, then at myself.

If you've done prep work, then your game isn't improvised.

Most GMs want their experience to come alive for players, and that's idealized as an epistemology, where literally no one knows what will happen next, or should. I think we as GMs need to be careful not to get caught up in such a pure concept.

This account from Brian May of Queen, quintessential improv performer, always stuck with me on the subject: "The guitarist said that his better material stems from this way of working[,] in which he thought of the tune before playing it: 'the fingers tend to be predictable unless being led by the brain.'"

If you've done prep work, then your game isn't improvised.

Hm, I don't find that to be true. I prep by creating generic things I can apply at the table to help my improvisation. I create generic NPCs, generic settings, lists of names, collections of pictures, etc.

Not in the absolute, this-is-entirely-made-up sense, but who's talking about that?

You did.

In the latter, priority of choice over cohesion requires so much contingency planning for caprice that it may as well be fully improvised.

I'm not advocating for complete off-the-cuff improvisation to maintain agency and I haven't seen evidence that Alexander's push for prepping situations or node based design advocates for that either. Any concept played out the table can be taken too far and arguing that situational design can lead to a messy end is a slippery slope logic fallacy.

What I can't emphasize enough is that the GM hook needs to be tempting enough for players that they want their characters to be pulled into the situation. A properly prepared situation will have enough data points for the GM that he can mix, match, and re-mix them on the fly and a good hook will keep the players from wandering off the reservation.

The GM should also be able to sense when a situation has reached a satisfactory end state.

Hm, I don't find that to be true. I prep by creating generic things I can apply at the table to help my improvisation. I create generic NPCs, generic settings, lists of names, collections of pictures, etc.

That falls under the standard level of GM improv that I mentioned. Whether you roll on a chart or mix-and-match prepared characters and situations, that's a tried-and-true way to run a game.

Hm, I don't find that to be true. I prep by creating generic things I can apply at the table to help my improvisation. I create generic NPCs, generic settings, lists of names, collections of pictures, etc.

That falls under the standard level of GM improv that I mentioned. Whether you roll on a chart or mix-and-match prepared characters and situations, that's a tried-and-true way to run a game.

You and I have the good fortune of seeing eye to eye on this, but it has also been my experience that this style of GMing is rare, both in practice and in discussion. I do consider random tables a completely different beast than generic NPCs and set pieces, though. The former is a tool to inject something new, whereas the latter are for dealing with new situations. At my table, my PCs are the random event table, so I basically follow where they lead. Of course I have some idea of the elements of the story I want to bring in and I consider them frequently, but they are loose guidelines and not hard & fast, as I've previously described.

Heist adventures are incredibly easy to run as player directed adventures

<a href="

http://red-talon-wanted-dead-or-alive.obsidianportal.com/adventure-log/gm-trick-player-generated-planned-heist-adventures"> http://red-talon-wanted-dead-or-alive.obsidianportal.com/adventure-log/gm-trick-player-generated-planned-heist-adventures</a>

Meh, this kind of thing varies from group to group and GM to GM. Some are able to GM by the seat of their pants, making up elaborate stories with zero preparation and characters you'll never forget, others need minimal preparation, have at least a gist of the story prepared beforehand with important NPCs thought up to have as a guideline. Some like to develop huge plots and villains pulling the strings, they may allow the players to do what they want but they will have their NPCs doing things still and have several outcomes planned out due to player actions, while others just like the simplistic Dungeon Crawl, killing creatures whose only reason to exist is to be killed by the players and loot that is there for the stealing. At the end of the day, it's what you and your group find to be fun, and screw what others may think.

What I'm saying is, the most fundamental piece of advice I would give anyone is, "Find what works best for you". You may make tons of mistakes along the way to finding what works and what doesn't, you may utterly ruin the first couple of campaigns you run in fact, but hell it'll also probably some of the most interesting sessions you'll have.

I've been lurking on this thread for a while without posting, but I just wanted to comment because I ran a session last night using this system. Hands down the most satisfying session I've run in the last year.

For context: I had two new players and one slightly less new player, and we ran the AoR Beginner Game as a one-shot. Except that the story makes no sense to me, so I changed that and instead gave the PCs a mission to infiltrate Whisper Base and disable a large ion cannon that was protecting an Imperial refinery on the planet. Basically, in fact, I ignored almost the entire adventure except for the NPC descriptions and the base description. I set up some contingencies (like how the NPCs changed their behaviour if the PCs set off an alarm) and added a couple of extra things (like a brig, in case the PCs all got gunned down early on and needed to wake up somewhere), but had no plot beyond the "hook" of the PCs' goal.

It worked an absolute treat. Despite the fact that none of my players were very familiar with the rules (two of them had literally no concept of the rules until 20 minutes before the game, and one of those, although a moderately keen boardgamer, had never played an RPG before), everyone had a real blast and they came up with some creative (and, in some cases, ill-thought) ideas that I don't think would have happened if I'd simply run the adventure as written.

Interestingly, it also led to some really creative use of Advantage and Threat - these actually changed the narrative at times, and again I don't think they could have done that if I'd simply followed a plot (or, at least, I would have been very grumpy about it because of all the work I'd wasted). We didn't really get into using Destiny Points much, but I feel that those could probably have a lot more impact in this style of adventure too (instead of just being used to upgrade checks, which is pretty much all they're used for in my sessions at the moment).

Bottom line - I'm going to be using this model of adventure design as my template for my next few sessions, at the very least. Thanks for posting.