In relation to a sandbox I was thinking more about the +level design of PF2. Is the world just completely compartmentalized into zones. You stay in a zone that isnt suicide until its a cake walk? Im just not sure how a traditional sandbox works in a system like that.
Like
@!DWolf said, I’m running a sandbox *crawl in PF2. I don’t think sandbox necessarily implies a *crawl, but they are structures that commonly go together. Anyway, I do a couple of things to manage encounters.
For dungeon exploration, I follow the old-school style of floor = #HD. I wouldn’t call that
zones, but I wouldn’t fault someone for seeing it that way. I pick a target level then tune the floor for that level. Proficiency Without Level helps by giving me a wider range of creatures to use, but I wouldn’t say it’s necessary in this approach.
For wilderness exploration, I just use whatever makes sense. My setting has a hard cap of 12th level, but I have some areas with 17th level creatures. They just make sense to be there, and the party will need to use its wits if it wants to make it out okay. Of course, since we aren’t assuming they are supposed to fight everything, they have a chance of escaping or parleying.
I think that last line is the assumption that makes things work. The party shouldn’t expect to fight and kill everything they meet. Exploration mode helps a lot to structure play so that they’re not just trudging from encounter to encounter, but it really comes down to communicating expectations. This is not a game where you should expect to fight everything and win.
However, a *crawl is just one type of sandbox. You don’t
have to do that. You can give PCs a bunch of hooks and use
node-based design to let them decide how they want to handle the situation. That’s usually how I handle short adventures: give the PCs a goal, and let them loose.