D&D General Sandbox Campaigns should have a Default Action.

[GMforPowergamers]

Note taking when coming up with random crap on the fly is the hardest part for me. Index cards are the best option but even then organizing them is a challenge.

i pitchure myself with 200 index cards ready for anything... and 7 1/2 minutes into game throwing them all up and over my shoulder...

 

[Reynard]

my go to is "if my players did nothing but sit in there and watch me tell the story how would it go" as loose notes, and to have multi stories going and what that answer is... then to customize that answer as the game goes on. Then watch as the players introduce CHAOS into everything they do

Giving NPCs and villains motivations, and understanding the starting state of the sandbox, is a really useful tool for making the PCs feel like they are inhabitants of world, rather than the protagonists of some pre-designed narrative. Keeping track of all that can be a pain, though, and I usually just go with my gut based on the events that have happened when the PCs encounter something that should have moved in the interim. if I was more organized, I would use flowcharts and time trackers and stuff.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

And what happens when these PCs start interacting with these people and place and things that have their own objectives (that you created by the way)? They can interact however they wish? Guess what? In a railroad they can to.

When these interactions happen how is the consequences/rewards determined? By you? You're creating the story of what happens - a story that happens to have a beginning, middle, and end. It is linear not because you are applying it retroactively, but because you (the DM) are applying it as you play.

um... how do you DM a game that you DON'T have NPCs created that interact?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I do not expect nuance. I expect clarity and conciseness. The opposite of nuance.

Welcome to reality. It doesn't work like that.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Sorry Bedrock, I get what you are saying. I have played in many sandbox campaigns and linear campaigns. I have watched people play so called "sandbox" campaigns, and watched people play "linear" campaigns. In the end, I don't care - I am happy they are having fun.

But I do care when the community keeps using jargon that they themselves cannot define - even if they are watching it. And that's the point. If I give you the definition of a dog. Show you a dog. When you see a dog, you will be like - hey, that's a dog! I mean, just ask people if CR is a sandbox and watch the jargon junkies and couch RPG philosophers flood the answers. And none of them will agree. Ask the CR staff and they won't agree.

The reason - because it doesn't exist.

by this logic there is nothing.

I can find people that argue that batman is out of character in every written comic since before they were born, and others that disagree and say some stories are perfect and some are out of character... that second group wont agree on what is or is not those stories. Does this disprove the idea of batman being out of character? or does it prove that it is a matter of taste and opinon?

I can find 2 news article that give the same basic facts, but put different spin on them, show them to two different people (one each) and have those two people not agree on ANY of what happened. (some would say that is everyone in America right now) does that disprove the event happened?

 

[Bedrockgames]

So honest question. After reading many people's version of sandbox, what if someone were to buy a bunch of adventure paths, create a hub, seed all the rumors for the adventure paths, and then, turn their players' characters loose in in said hub. Then, whatever the players chose they could follow. Sometimes it might lead to following a caravan that is a dragon cult, and other times it might led to the cold and desolate Ten Towns, and still others might lead to a school of magic. Is that sandbox?

That isn't how I would think of something being a sandbox. I am sure there are people who run sandboxes as a bunch of seeded adventure paths. Personally I think that is less 'not a sandbox' and more debatable territory among GMs who sandbox. The problem for me there is the adventure path structure itself feels very constrained, so it is like you are running into tracks once you find the seeds. Whereas I think of a sandbox as being much more organic (there are situations players can enter into, there are places they can go, problems they can instigate, but no pre-planned series of encounters or events or A to B to C to D to E). At the very least it would feel like a much more constrained sandbox to me.

I think a lot of this is going to depend on where people developed their ideas about sandboxing. In the spaces where I was talking with other gamers about sandboxes and exchanging ideas, what you are describing was called something like a 'subway system', where there are really just a bunch of linear adventures waiting to be found, but they can be taken or left, approached in any order, etc. The general sense was that shared a bit with a sandbox, but was different. I tend to think of adventure paths as built around set pieces, whereas I see sandboxes as much more freeform (i.e. in an adventure path there may be a destination and there will be a series of planned encounters along the way, a rewarding build up, a final showdown at the destination, etc-----in a sandbox they players may choose to go somewhere, if anything happens along the way, it is probably just a random encounter or it is the product of something like an NPC they have become embroiled with also having an interest in what they are doing and trying to thwart them or something). For me a big difference is you are not worried about structuring things around events, around set pieces, around a build up. You are much more concerned about the actions and goals of NPCs, organizations, etc. And you don't particularly care about stuff like pacing the journey.

Now if you took away the adventure paths but used those books by keeping all the locations, NPCs, etc and let that stuff all come into play organically, to me that would feel more like a proper sandbox

 

[Bedrockgames]

I prefer the term " adventure landscape" to sandbox ( though sandbox is snappier).

Personally I have never liked the term sandbox itself (I like the type of campaign it describes but the term sounds like a very static map of things to explore. I have always preferred living adventures or living world. But if you say sandbox, people have a clearer idea of what you mean.

 

[Reynard]

Personally I have never liked the term sandbox itself (I like the type of campaign it describes but the term sounds like a very static map of things to explore. I have always preferred living adventures or living world. But if you say sandbox, people have a clearer idea of what you mean.

Apparently not...

 

[Bedrockgames]

Apparently not...

I think the term is widely understood. Like any rpg term because there isn’t an institution settling on standard definitions of things and because these ideas emerge in pockets that interact with each other from different parts of the hobby, it’s subject to contention (but so is the term RPG). Only rarely do I encounter people who claim the term is nonsensical or impossible to define (90 percent of the time from people hostile to the concept)

 

[Reynard]

I think the term is widely understood. Like any rpg term because there isn’t an institution settling on standard definitions of things and because these ideas emerge in pockets that interact with each other from different parts of the hobby, it’s subject to contention (but so is the term RPG). Only rarely do I encounter people who claim the term is nonsensical or impossible to define (90 percent of the time from people hostile to the concept)

Yet here we are, arguing whether it exists at all rather than just talking about how to do it better.

To that end: one mental exercise I enjoy going through and has relevance to sandbox design is imagining how the presence of a major monster (like a dragon) impacts the area. Not just the danger of the dragon itself, but how it changes politics, economics and society.