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I am a big fan of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) genre of games. I grew up playing RuneScape, and I still play Old School RuneScape today. Because I am still an MMORPG fan, it comes with no surprise that I am a fan of Josh Strife Hayes, who creates videos surrounding MMORPGs.

What comes up often is the discussion of the theme park MMO vs the sandbox MMO. The way that Josh Strife Hayes puts it (I will link the video, should I find it) is that in a sandbox MMO, you can pick up a laser tag gun you found in the laser tag area and use it in other places outside of the laser tag area. In a theme park MMO, you can have multiple “rides” or systems, but they typically do not interact with one another. In a sandbox MMO, these mechanics and features may be interfaced with in multiple areas in the world.

No game is purely theme park or sandbox, but they have tendencies in their design towards one or another. The goal of a theme park MMO, in my opinion, is to have lots of different ideas and features to interact with. You don’t like the spinning cups? That’s fine, there’s a place where you can meet characters or some roller coasters you can ride. You won’t necessarily have a spinning cup during your character meeting, and for many cases, that’s the best. While I am sure I would have a great time trying to out-spin Gaston, I think an actor may get sick if they had to do that for more than an hour at a time. The systems in a theme park MMO don’t necessarily interact with one another, and it is so it doesn’t take away from the experience of any of the systems.

In a sandbox, if you introduce a feature you can typically use this feature anywhere else in a game. In RuneScape, you are introduced to the woodcutting skill, which allows you to cut down trees. Most trees in the game in all sorts of areas from then on are trees that can be cut down. Mechanics like these can further pull a player into the immersion of the world (why wouldn’t you be able to cut down a tree that’s in a different area?). And in Minecraft, these mechanics are powerful. Being able to build, destroy, and place blocks anywhere allow players to approach the world without engaging with the combat system at all, or make their combat systems more complex like in BedWars.

Theme Park MMOs and TTRPG Design

The origins of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is commonly told in the Tabletop Role Playing Game (TTRPG) community. Gary Gygax was a war gamer who decided to tell stories and play games about single units, single people in their war games. They zoomed in to the war game and made stories about these people, which became the first forms of D&D, and which passed down and iterated to the current edition and all the other games that were inspired from then on.

D&D, but moreso third party creations, have a lot of similarities to a theme park MMO. There are systems for random encounters, which determines the next event that occurs when the party travels to a new place. This mechanic doesn’t necessarily translate to all places, but is reserved for unexplored, wild, or chaotic areas. It is an aid to the game master (GM) to ensure that something is happening in the game and the players have something to react to.

There are systems that are created by third party creators to address and create mechanics for all sorts of activities. There are mechanics for fishing, hunting, cooking, crafting, creating spells, and more. The reason for fans creating these systems is because the other systems, as they exist in D&D, cross into the spirit of D&D as carried by the Old School Renaissance now: rulings, not rules. You make rules and judgement calls that make the most sense for your table.

And in the spirit of that, a GM will create a system or a mini game that will evoke different feelings for an activity that fits at their table. Does rolling survival feel enough like fishing for your players? Maybe not, so a new game will be created for that.

And thus, another ride on the theme park.

Sandbox MMOs and TTRPG Design

One of the purest forms of a resolution mechanic in a TTRPG that can be seen in many games is dice resolution. Rolling a die, and seeing what level of success you have at a task. This is a mechanic that is applied to many different things: whether you hit with your great sword or if you convince the deacon that your party is definitely not enemies of the church. It’s the basis of roll for shoes. In the world and the outside metagame of many TTRPGs, you roll to see if something happens, which applies to both sides of the screen.

When I think of mechanics within sandbox type of games, these are base mechanics that are simple in concept, but which can be applied to complex situations. Look at Super Mario. It’s a game about jumping, and that can be iterated and twisted into so many different environments that it feels complex. Jumping on floating blocks feels a lot different than jumping on towers of the same height and distance away. It’s like doing a tight rope 2 feet off of the ground at 100 feet off the ground. In a game, it may be rolling to hit a bottle off a wall, or rolling to cut the noose of someone about to be hanged. The stakes change the feeling of the same action, which is a discussion worth its own blog post.

There’s a lot more on this discussion, as it mirrors quite a bit of Nintendo’s game design process. Game Maker’s Toolkit’s Mark Brown has an excellent video on it here, who discusses the design philosophy of Nintendo, and which translates well to designing for a sandbox style game with a core mechanic.

So what?

When we’re designing our games, it’s important to think about the type of game that we want to create. If it’s more like a theme park, with lots of different small systems, what’s the overall theme of the park? How can you stay within the theme of the park while giving different offerings? It might just be the set dressing.

If it’s more like a sandbox, what is the action that you want to explore and make interesting for your players? Do you want to do the action a lot, or with care? You can add tension in unexpected ways, like with the tower resolution mechanics in both Dread and Star Crossed.

Maybe the framing of design from a theme park and a sandbox perspective can help make your game! That’s the hope in the post, at least.

But for now, bye!