Irda Ranger
First Post
A different kind of tedium, I guess. But once you've made (or "borrowed") a thieve's guild generator you'll never need another one, so it's a once-off kind of tedium.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?
Sounds fine. I would tell the PCs what your "overarching ongoings in the area" are, and have them decide what sounds interesting, before they make PCs though. Nothing sucks quite like bringing a low-Chr Ranger to a campaign where all the other PCs say "Oh hey, let's do that urban & political intrigue hook."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?
Lists of culturally appropriate names and personality quirks are better. There's really no way to know ahead of time if the PCs are going to say "Let's find an alchemist." Or, just keep your notecards with blanks for "profession" and "location" to be filled in as needed during play.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?
Hold up. You're assuming encounters should be "based on their general level", but there are two schools of thought on whether you should do that. I'll call them the "Adventurer Beware" ("AB" for short) and "Oblivion" ("Ob" for short) schools.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?
Under the AB school you make your setting and encounters are whatever is appropriate for the world your PCs live in. If Fire Giants live there, then Fire Giants live there; even if the PCs are first level. It's understood that PCs (even if 1st level) will do recon, use their heads and know to stay out of the deep end of the pool until they can swim there. This should be fine as long as everyone at your table is well informed of this design element and above the age of 12.
In the Ob school of sandbox design, everything is scaled to the level of the PCs. I find this boring and predictable, but YMMV.
What I generally do is have lists of random individual monsters appropriate for the areas (e.g., Ogre foragers). I then fill in the gaps in the monster lineup to make a good encounter. My process might be "Okay, I rolled some (Brute) Ogre foragers. Let's throw in a (Skirmisher) Worg hunting-hound and one (Artillery) Orog Huntsman/Leader to round this out." I find that's the best way to get a good mix of "random" and "sensical", since a purely random encounter might combine Ogre foragers, a Dire Flumph and a mindflayer. Too many encounters like that and things just get silly.