Adventures Sandbox-style: What's your opinion?

[Mallus]

I like my sandbox to be amply stocked with bright, shiny toys, which I suppose in this case means "pre-made NPC's with interesting personalities, motivations, conflicts, and other juicy plot/narrative bits the players can run with".

I prefer an emergent campaign to emerge from more that a hex map and a series of random encounter tables (though I'll admit that the DM'ing challenge presented by such a bare-bones setting intrigues me).

Also, as an aside, I believe that all games scale, one way or another. It's a vital part of maintaining long-running campaigns. The only difference is in how you disguise the scaling, if you even bother doing so.

[Reynard]

Originally Posted by Mallus

Also, as an aside, I believe that all games scale, one way or another. It's a vital part of maintaining long-running campaigns. The only difference is in how you disguise the scaling, if you even bother doing so.

True. But there's a difference between the game scaling because the players seek out adventures that challenge them and scaling because the DM mandates that all encounter are +/- 2 "levels" within the party's level.

[Raven Crowking]

Originally Posted by TerraDave

Reynard, thanks for the answers...as for the last, there seems to an emphasis by the sandboxers on smaller, personal goals (or things just made up on the fly), versus bigger, singular events.

That's a mistake, IMHO.

A sandbox is supposed to allow the PCs to make meaningful choices, but not having the world turn (and bigger events are part of the world turning). As a DM, you don't want to set up any consequences you are unwilling to follow through on, though. I.e., if you set up something where the PCs either act or the world is destroyed, you might end up with a destroyed world. OTOH, there is nothing wrong with Sauron winning and the world being plunged into darkness (ala Midnight). The players deal with the consequences of their characters' actions or inactions.

There was a Dragon magazine (weretiger on the cover, don't know the issue number) that had some really good advice for setting up a campaign world that I would certainly qualify as a sandbox. It included setting an overarching campaign goal that the DM presents facets of as part of various other adventures, enticing the players to choose to follow it. It includes beginning with several small quests that the PCs can undertake, allowing them to choose their shakedown cruise(s). It includes giving PCs mentors....NPCs who can offer limited advice and help in their area of expertise. All in all, one of the best articles on setting up a campaign that I've ever read.

RC

[Raven Crowking]

Originally Posted by Irda Ranger

You mean if the PCs are higher than 8th level or so? The first one's pretty fun (like playing Doom in God Mode), but after that, not so much. That's why God invented "Help Wanted" signs. Place a post on the central message post in town square to the effect of "Local cave-clearing missions for the adventurous and brave. Treasure and glory await. Local Heroes with better things to do will provide their best dungeon-clearing tips, some healing potions, 10 days rations and one donkey with supplies for the brave at heart. Will take only 10% commission on treasure recovered."

Then the PCs can learn the pleasure of delegation, not to mention have a little fun drafting ads that they used to respond to when they were 1st level. :-)

You can also set up a sandbox where each player has a "character tree". When Lord Reynard and his 8th level parties run into a kobold lair in the hills, they just mark the location and send in Cousin Crowking on a different day. Similarly, when Cousin Crowking hears about giants attacking a village, he sends word to Lord Reynard. Each player effectively controls a small "clan" of interlinked adventuring allies, allowing players to tackle a job with the appropriate force.


EDIT: Dang. Shades of Green beat me to it.

[GlassJaw]

Originally Posted by jdrakeh

This. The world is the sandbox. You can (and many do) use pre-written adventures in 'sandbox' play, the trick is getting enough information together on the setting to create the sandbox itself.

+1

I'm a fan of the sandbox style but I'll agree with a lot of the posters here that it is potentially a lot more work.

That said, I would never undertake running such a campaign "from scratch". That's just too much work. If you have a massive supply of published material (like a huge backlog of Dungeon mags like I do), then it's gets a whole lot easier.

The first thing I would do is go through all your modules and catalogue them by level, environment, and location. Pick out some of the best ones at the level you are starting the campaign and generate some rumors based on those. Let the players choose where they want to go. Once they do that, you can flesh out or tweak the module as needed.

Remember, you don't need to create "everything" beforehand. Quite the opposite. You'll drive yourself insane if you do that.

Another thing to keep in mind to bring the "sandbox" to life is that things will be happening in other parts of the world independent of the players. Create some factions, organizations, churches, adventuring groups, etc that have their own motivations and timelines. Throw in some of these in-between adventures. They might even draw the interest of the players and you'll have more plot hooks.

Rival adventuring groups are great in a sandbox setting, especially if the PC's are interested in the same things. A race to a newly uncovered dungeon would be great fun.

[evildm]

When I was younger I used to run pretty much every campaign this way. Just see what happens and roll with it. As such, I was very good (IMHO) at handling things on the fly and keeping it interesting.

As I've gotten older, it's been a bid difficult to do, but after running an adventure path and a heap of pre-written adventures, I've got a hankering for a sandbox style campaign. As such, it's what I'm prepping for right now as my next campaign.

I took most of my inspiration and ideas from the Grand Experiments: West Marches articles over on Ars Ludi (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and running your own) and have been fleshing out a wilderness area of Eberron for my players to romp around in. I've been doing my best to create one interesting item a day: NPCs, locations, quests, macguffins, etc. Nothing is extremely fleshed out, but I hope that when the campaign starts I'll have enough elements floating around that players can latch onto and interesting play will emerge from that. Over my years of DMing, emergent play seems to be the most rewarding.

Thanks for the interesting non-edition-flamewar-topic! Also, I highly recommend checking out the articles I've linked above, if you've never read them before.

[Sandwich]

Thanks to everyone who responded to my questions earlier. But there are a couple more things the idea of a sandbox campaign has me wonder about.

Hypothetically speaking, if the party goes someplace and has the crap kicked out of them, forcing them to run, does that create the risk of meta game thinking along the lines of 'oh, well, we better level up some before we head back there again?'

Also, thinking in terms of 4th edition, should I draw up maps for every possible dungeon, but still keep the actually encounters contained therein random? Or should I just have a few very basic maps that I can reuse (say by turning it upside down for one dungeon as opposed to another or something like that) and just improvise or randomly generate details? And is the 'encounter deck' a good idea?

Sorry if these are really newbie type questions.

[El Mahdi]

Originally Posted by Sandwich

Thanks to everyone who responded to my questions earlier. But there are a couple more things the idea of a sandbox campaign has me wonder about.

Hypothetically speaking, if the party goes someplace and has the crap kicked out of them, forcing them to run, does that create the risk of meta game thinking along the lines of 'oh, well, we better level up some before we head back there again?'

Also, thinking in terms of 4th edition, should I draw up maps for every possible dungeon, but still keep the actually encounters contained therein random? Or should I just have a few very basic maps that I can reuse (say by turning it upside down for one dungeon as opposed to another or something like that) and just improvise or randomly generate details? And is the 'encounter deck' a good idea?

Sorry if these are really newbie type questions.

To the first question: They may "metathink" (it's always a possibility no matter what), or they might think along the lines of: "We got wipped. We need to rethink our strategy". By going back to the drawing board, they may determine they have things they need to learn before they re-attempt. This is the basis of "experience". Their "experience" has forced them to learn and adapt to new strategies.

To the second question: I would only write up dungeons for whatever seeds you have planted with your group. They will decide where they want to go. But (hopefully) they won't go anywhere you haven't already given them clues or leads to. In other words, instead of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that you expect them to follow, you leave multiple trails of breadcrumbs, any one of which they can choose to follow. If they go off the grid (and they may do just that), you can still use any of your prepared dungeons (they don't need to know it was intended for somewhere else), or you just make it up on the fly.

And I love encounter decks. There awesome for varied and believable, yet random, encounters. (I still use my AD&D Deck of Encounters I & II boxes)

[Fenes]

Originally Posted by Sandwich

Thanks to everyone who responded to my questions earlier. But there are a couple more things the idea of a sandbox campaign has me wonder about.

Hypothetically speaking, if the party goes someplace and has the crap kicked out of them, forcing them to run, does that create the risk of meta game thinking along the lines of 'oh, well, we better level up some before we head back there again?'

That's not metagaming. It's a quite common reaction of many people to failing at a task, be it in sports, school or a fight - train more, learn more, get better tools, try another tactic. Entire movies and novels are centered on the hero(es) having to get better, to learn new combat skills etc., to beat the villains.

[S'mon]

Originally Posted by Fenes

That's not metagaming. It's a quite common reaction of many people to failing at a task, be it in sports, school or a fight - train more, learn more, get better tools, try another tactic. Entire movies and novels are centered on the hero(es) having to get better, to learn new combat skills etc., to beat the villains.

Exactly right. "This isn't over. I shall grow strong in magic and battle skills - then you shall hear of me again!"

[Melan]

Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw2

1) I've been told adventure writing is an art, but if you are simply following the direction of PCs does it require even more skill to pull off?

No, just a willingness to improvise, to run with the ideas the players give you and spin them into adventures. You need fairly active people to pull it off, though, so if the players are more into following a plotline, sandbox games are not the best solution. Much of sandox gaming is based on the recipe of provocative open situation --> action --> reaction, with a random component thrown in to spice up and complicate things.

2) Does it dramatically increase the preparation time needed? (You may take this question however you feel.)

Hard to say, but it did not increase mine. It could increase it if you compulsively detail everything. On the other hand, if you work from a few sketchily written adventure hooks, random encounters and small adventure sites, you should be okay. Basically, you want to avoid overextending yourself and eventually not using the majority of what you have written. So small, modular parts might work better. I have done a lot of these for my Wilderlands campaign: see Isle of the Water Sprites or The House of Rogat Demazien for examples which were originally vignettes at about three or four pages each plus some maps. No great work to write, and it was not a big waste if some of them did not end up in play immediately (I only ran Water Sprites last weekend, in fact).

3) Would you recommend it to new DMs? And why or why not?

I would, since I ran what is now called a "sandbox campaign" when I started DMing at the ripe old age of 13, and did it for about two years without writing more than about 20-30 pages of adventure text in the meantime (sadly, this also means much of that campaign is lost to forgetfulness... - all I have is the maps and a few sheets of in-game notes). It doesn't take an "experienced" or "qualified" DM to run a sandbox game, just one willing and able to make up stuff and run with the ideas the players give him. Also, practice makes perfect, and improvisation is a skill that's pretty easy to build up.

[Shades of Green]

Originally Posted by Sandwich

Also, thinking in terms of 4th edition, should I draw up maps for every possible dungeon, but still keep the actually encounters contained therein random? Or should I just have a few very basic maps that I can reuse (say by turning it upside down for one dungeon as opposed to another or something like that) and just improvise or randomly generate details?

You should probably design three main kinds of dungeons:

1) Plot dungeons, well-detailed and with solid adventure hooks planted in the settings for the players to find and follow if you wish to. In a sandbox campaign always present the players with more than one choice; if they choose to ignore that particular dungeon, nothing bad happens; you could probably recycle 90% of it (map, monster placement, probably most of the plot) if you change the hook and twist the plot a bit.

2) "Mobile" dungeons, reasonably large but not tied to any given geographical location. Relatively generic dungeons - i.e. "goblin layer", "castle", "haunted catacomb system" and so on would do great in this category; just keep them varied and alter them enough when you recycle them to avoid repetition. Create (or find in published modules/the net/your notes from older campaigns) several of these when you have spare time, but don't place them on the map. These would be used (and placed on the map) when the players are looking for adventure where you haven't planned for. Once placed on the map, of course, they should remain there.

3) Small dungeons, typically lairs, small caves/tombs, and similar affairs, usually with a few rooms and containing a small number of encounters (probably one or two). These would serve to flesh out random wilderness encounters, especially for characters with exploration abilities/skills; instead of just "an ogre emerges from the shrubbery and attacks", you could let the players find an ogre's lair from time to time.

Don't just plan your own dungeons - in addition to crafting your own, also borrow, steal and rip from anywhere you could find them: notes from previous games you've run, published adventures, computer games (especially ones with strategy guides available online), internet sites, even non-fiction books (I once even found a very cool map of a bronze-age copper mine in a high-school chemistry textbook). Some - such as ones from computer games or non-fiction books - would need monster placement, others - from older edition material - would need stat conversion, but each of these sources would make your life easier.

[Mallus]

Originally Posted by Reynard

But there's a difference between the game scaling because the players seek out adventures that challenge them and scaling because the DM mandates that all encounter are +/- 2 "levels" within the party's level.

Oh definitely. But I've the only DM I've ever met that scaled difficultly so rigidly was the code behind Oblivion...

[Set]

I do a kind of 'half-sandbox' thing. I come up with a starter area, and a few encounter types that I'm comfortable with, and then leave clues around. The party can choose one of these hooks, and end up going on the undead-bashing missions or the wolf/werewolf-fighting arc or whatever. If they want to totally leave the area, I can still use the *encounters* (although I might tweak them to suit the flavor of wherever they do end up), even if the location and 'storyline' might be different.

On the other hand, if my players up and said something like, 'Hollowfaust sucks, let's move to Mithril!' I'd have to pretty much toss my prepared characters and make some more suitable for that region (Orcs, Proud tribes, blood sea mutants, etc.).

I think of it less as 'sandbox' style and more as 'buffet style.' There are multiple dishes available, but still only from the assortment I put on the table.

[Obryn]

Originally Posted by Mallus

Oh definitely. But I've the only DM I've ever met that scaled difficultly so rigidly was the code behind Oblivion...

Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul is a wonderful thing.

In fairness to Bethesda, though, when you're creating a game to appeal to a wide variety of players (both casual and serious), your best bet is to scale it. I am glad there were plugins for other options, though.

-O

[gizmo33]

Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw2

1) I've been told adventure writing is an art, but if you are simply following the direction of PCs does it require even more skill to pull off?

(Everything IMO): No, not more skill, just different skills. A good scripted adventure that is complicated is not trivial to "pull off" either. The answer to this question is also a matter of player expectations. The first adventures I ran as a 10-year-old were essentially sandbox games (as pretty much all old-school adventuring was, as I understand the definitions).

Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw2

2) Does it dramatically increase the preparation time needed? (You may take this question however you feel.)

I've played in games where I've been bored but the other players have had a good time. While I personally thought that the DM should have prepared more, the other players would have probably disagreed. So I think this is related to question 1: it really depends on your players expectations. If they expect complicated tactical situations (combat, social, whatever) or deep, rich settings, etc., then that stuff takes work. But how much of that stuff your players require depends on them.

Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw2

3) Would you recommend it to new DMs? And why or why not?

A new DM with new players, or with experienced players? I don't want to cop out like i did on the first two questions, but my first answer is basically the same. If I tried though, I'd say this: I'd recommend sandbox to a new DM because that's basically what we played when I started at age 10 and it was a blast.

[Raven Crowking]

If you are seriously considering a sandbox, I would encourage you. Then I would tell you to read Reynard's blog entries...all of them.

RC

[Delta]

Originally Posted by Angrydad

...He crashed through the window, knocked over a priest who was christening a baby, caught the baby before it could hit the ground, announced that the child would be named Tyrus (the PC's name), and then sprinted out the back door...

LOL. Now that's good D&D.

[TarionzCousin]

Originally Posted by Angrydad View Post
...He crashed through the window, knocked over a priest who was christening a baby, caught the baby before it could hit the ground, announced that the child would be named Tyrus (the PC's name), and then sprinted out the back door...

Originally Posted by Delta

LOL. Now that's good D&D.

...and a future PC being born.

[Dannyalcatraz]

Sandbox style, run well, can be the most awesome RPG experience you'll ever have.

Sandbox style, run poorly, is boring as sand.