D&D 5E How do players know they are in the "wrong" location in a sandbox campaign?

[Lanefan]

Isn't the goal for everybody to have fun at all times? I do believe that there is a level range where a fight is interesting and fun; anything below is boringly easy, everything above is frustrating. The level range can be large, but a sandbox which has both level 1 and level 20 encounters just isn't going to work.

The goal for everybody is to have fun. "At all times" is probably stretching it.

That said, there's more types of fun than just level-appropriate fights. Sometimes the fun comes from sneaking past, or from talking one's way through, or from deciding discretion is the better part of valour and finding something else to do in a different place, or from that grand moment of realization: "Oh hell, we screwed this up! RUN!!!"

A true sandbox not only should have level <1 and level >20 encounters within it (and every level in between), in fact it must have them in order to be functionally playable. Why? Because if there's no very low level encounters then what are the low-level characters supposed to do; and if there's no very high level encounters then the high-level characters are gonna get bored in a hurry...and bored characters are dangerous, trust me on this.

And in a true sandbox it's a fact of life and death that sometimes you're going to blunder into trivially easy situations and other times you'll get in way over your heads...and sometimes those situations might come to you:

One low-level PC to another: "Yes, that's a roc flying overhead. Yes, that's an elephant in its talons. No, don't shoot it!"

Lanefan

 

[S'mon]

In a good D&D game, the players are going to enjoy all of the combats and encounters and feel like they're the heroes of a story. In a Sandbox game, the heroes can go anywhere in the world and continue their Adventures. In a good Sandbox game, the heroes will be able to go anywhere and feel heroic in those locations. In those good sandbox games the heroes need to be able to be successful in their Adventures wherever those Adventures may take them.

Yes, but...
Appropriate PC tactics for the Misty Mountain goblins (blast em! hack em! Take their stuff!) may be diffrent from appropriate tactics for Mordor - and the chances of PC failure & death in Mordor may be much
higher. As long as it is *possibe* for the PCs to sneak into Mordor and (eg) drop a cursed ring of
invisibility into a volcano, it meets your criteria.
If the 1st level PCs could literally go anywhere & kill anything, Sauron included, it wouldn't be very challenging.

Edit: I didn't read all the other Middle Earth-as-sandbox posts first, I swear!

 

[S'mon]

Isn't the goal for everybody to have fun at all times? I do believe that there is a level range where a fight is interesting and fun; anything below is boringly easy, everything above is frustrating. The level range can be large, but a sandbox which has both level 1 and level 20 encounters just isn't going to work.

My Ghinarian Hills sandbox certainly has both. But the level 20s are either well out of the way, or else well known and easy to avoid - the dread black dragon Matriarx sleeps on her Isle of Dread, go there at level 1 (or 10)
and waken her, you can expect to be eaten. Same for the Black Sun Arch-Necromancer Borritt
Crowfinger in Fallen Bisgen - everyone knows he's there, few PCs are raring to go there (though they did just send an NPC pirate to raid there, when they wanted her out of the way!).

 

[ArchfiendBobbie]

How my players are supposed to find out: A simple wisdom check, or maybe ask one of the dozens of people you've passed on the road.

How my players usually find out: "Uh, guys, I think this dracolich/great wyrm/physical god is actually real, and maybe we shouldn't have attacked it..."

 

[Saeviomagy]

Ways to telegraph an area that is too high level:

1. Start the dungeon(s) with something that can be escaped. Hopefully your players get the hint that they should run when one of them is one-shot to unconsciousness. 5e is fairly merciful when it comes to letting those people get back up and run off too: unless your PCs are willfully avoiding healing word for some reason, escaping is fairly easy. Even without it, you can let someone pick up the fallen and leg it. Good monsters for this are:
Monsters that are just plain slow - anything with a movement of 20ft is trivial to run away from, even if it is inclined to give chase. Make SURE that your players KNOW it's slow, or they'll assume that like some 80% of the MM, it can outrun them and they're stuck fighting for their life.
Monsters that don't want to or cannot leave their assigned area - this is pretty standard for dungeons. Monsters that are bigger than the doorway are a good start, monsters that just want to be left alone, undead or constructs with "guard this area" as their instructions, monsters that are somehow tethered.
Monsters that have some agenda other than "kill the characters". The players walk into a fresh dungeon and the first thing that happens is something one-shots one of them, then says "I'll let you live if...". Or "you are not fated to be here". Or "you are too weak for my purposes". Or "knock them out and enslave them". Or even "om nom nom nom nom" - character gone (or for the clever party maybe they sacrifice a horse or something similar), but everyone else gets out while the creature feasts.

2. Add some NPCs to the mix: redshirts or even named NPCs can be useful as polish mine detectors. You can do it live: "OMG, that creature just one-shotted Durvan the incredibly tough and dangerous!" or ex post facto "OMG, this is the blade of Durvan the incredibly tough and dangerous, lying here next to this burnt skeleton! He didn't even have time to draw it!"

3. Traps. Traps don't chase you, and typically PCs can recover from them. A long hallway filled with obvious traps should be able to deter players even if the first trap can't instant-kill a PC (ie - does enough damage to take them below 0, but not enough to take them to -hitpoints). At higher levels, death is a bit of a revolving door unless the entire party carks it: you can 'discourage' a party with access to revivify by flat-out slaughtering a party member.

4. Like certain video games, hard puzzles that require specific resources to pass. Collapsed passageways that require something major to clear them (like high level spells or large quantities of black powder etc). Areas filled with molten lava that needs to be cooled before you can walk across/near it. Doors with no keys, or keys from somewhere else. Riddles to open the way.

5. Throw them in the grinder: persistent players may make it past all of these tricks. Let them. They're choosing to tackle those higher level threats, and failure needs to be an option.

 

[jasper]

....One low-level PC to another: "Yes, that's a roc flying overhead. Yes, that's an elephant in its talons. No, don't shoot it!"
Lanefan ....
Yet time and again I have dming and seen the following. Jasper, " I shoot my long bow at the roc! Nat 20!" If I was dming playing TRUE SANDBOX, then Lanefan would kneecap Jasper and run for the hills and let Jasper get ate!.

 

[Geoarrge]

One thing I sort of got from Skyrim is the idea of using a small number of monsters as widely known benchmarks (in the sense that while a lot of it was scaled, frost trolls were pretty hard before about level 10, as were giants before level 20.) That translated to an idea about having folk tales about two or three famous monsters that most NPCs would be able to recite at least partially, as a justification for estimating the PCs' power level within the game.

I might have one story that involves something like "After throwing down with many a bugbear warband, Sir Gary and the Five Companions faced a hydra and slew it, though Steve the Bard was slain saving Jill the Sorceress so she could sear the beast's last neck stump." That kind of story could have several layers of usefulness.

First, it establishes what a post-5th level party should be able to do, so it's a way of saying "You need to be 5th-8th level" without actually referencing the numbers.

Secondly, it establishes that a hydra is somewhat more deadly than a bugbear warband. So, just because you've entered into the realm of multiple attacks per round and decent area attack spells doesn't mean you should immediately hunt a hydra, maybe you should confront some bugbears first.

Thirdly, of course, it offers clues on how to defeat a hydra properly, if in fact an actual hydra battle ever occurs.

 

[Psikerlord#]

Best solution: implement a formal Party Retreat rule like Low Fantasy Gaming rpg has ( https://lowfantasygaming.com/freepdf/ ).

Then there are no wrong locations. Wherever the PCs are, that;s where the story is.

 

[Redthistle]

Best solution: implement a formal Party Retreat rule like Low Fantasy Gaming rpg has ( https://lowfantasygaming.com/freepdf/ ).

Then there are no wrong locations. Wherever the PCs are, that;s where the story is.

Thanks for the link!

 

[neq.the.glockenspiel]

Provide side quests! And get NPCs into the party ASAP to help put storytelling into all aspects of the game. Another possibility is just layer Storm Kings Thunder on top. That has piles of totally unconnected storylines and encounters, readymade NPCs etc you can you just throw in without too much prep.


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