| I think I really like this idea for a style of running my game. The last campaign I tried to do involved me fleshing out every inch of every area and every character in a town. It really sucked when the area I'd spent weeks fleshing out in my notebook ended up getting ignored by my players. They decided they didn't like the villagers, and opted instead to go live with some druids I'd thought of only in passing.
I think the sandbox works better for me because, really, I found fleshing out tons of detail beforehand to be rather tedious. Especially in terms of designing dungeons and encounters. Is the "sandbox" style good for getting around that? Or will I always have to put up with the tedium?
I'm thinking I'm just going to draw up some general maps and think up several overarching ongoings in the area (i.e. war is brewing between two kingdoms, a plague has hit a group of villages, a king has gone missing) with general backgrounds and explanations for these events, and then just let my players respond to and get involved with whatever sounds good. Is that doing it right? Or should I just have a minor event or two and just see where it goes?
I've been making little NPC cards on notecards. I figured this way I could access them easily and have everything right in front of me? Is that a good idea? Are there other helpful little things I could do?
One last thing, how do you make your own random encounter tables? Should I just list monsters they're likely to run into based on their general level and what's in the area? Like, should I make random encounter groups or should I just have tables of random monsters?
I'll admit, I've been DMing for a while, but to an extent some of it is still a little new to me. Well, not new, but I feel like I still need a lot of good advice. Sandbox is always something I've wanted to do, but it seemed like more work. Now, though, I think it may actually be less. | 
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