D&D 5E Do You Prefer Sandbox or Party Level Areas In Your Game World?

So these are two approaches that campaigns can (and do) use. They have various names, but I'm using these names. I've used both approaches in the past.

Obviously there is more nuance than the definitions below, but these are two possible extreme ends of the poll when voting feel free to choose whichever end you tend towards, or embellish in the comments.

Sandbox -- each area on the world map has a set difficulty, and if you're a low level party and wander into a dangerous area, you're in trouble. The Shire is low level, Moria is high level. Those are 'absolute' values and aren't dependent on who's traveling through.

Party -- adventurers encounter challenges appropriate to their level wherever they are on the map. A low level party in Moria just meets a few goblins. A high level party meets a balrog!

Which do you prefer?

 

[BookTenTiger]

Thinking about it more...

I prefer sandbox that has experienced for different tiers of play. I think the "starting zone" should contain threats that can be tackled by low level characters, and other threats that can only be handled by mid to high level characters. I love it when the characters in my games return to a place later to deal with something they were not powerful enough to deal with before.

 

[Bedrockgames]

So these are two approaches that campaigns can (and do) use. They have various names, but I'm using these names. I've used both approaches in the past.

Sandbox -- each area on the world map has a set difficulty, and if you're a low level party and wander into a dangerous area, you're in trouble. The Shire is low level, Moria is high level. Those are 'absolute' values and aren't dependent on who's traveling through.

Party -- adventurers encounter challenges appropriate to their level wherever they are on the map. A low level party in Moria just meets a few goblins. A high level party meets a balrog!

Which do you prefer?

I vastly prefer the sandbox approach as you describe it. I would even say I prefer my sandboxes not to have areas that are keyed to particular levels of difficulty (I am fine with never knowing what kind of threat to expect). I think that forces you to use more caution, begin with diplomacy, and use your brain more. I should say, I tend to run campaigns that are more human-centric (running a lot of wuxia at the moment), so meeting a powerful foe, and evading conflict is more feasible in that type of campaign than one where you are routinely running into creatures who want to eat you.

 

[Charlaquin]

I played the Skyrim where the Imperial's were in charge.

You mean Oblivion?

At the beginning of the game when traveling in the long civilized areas I would occasionally get attacked by bandits, this made sense. However, later in the game after becoming very powerful, as soon as I stepped outside the city I would be beset by demons and other extremely powerful foes. That didn't make any sense at all. It totally ruined the experience.

The simple aspect of leveling and having the difficulty of foes level with the PCs is the heart of why I dislike levels period. What's the point of having levels if the difficulty of encounters level with the PCs. The challenge of encounters never changes, something that absolutely makes no sense. Much better to have areas where high level PCs will absolutely wipe the floor with the opposition, and areas where low level PCs will get dead immediately.

The latest three Elder Scrolls games (not counting ESO) actually provide great examples of the sandbox approach, the party approach, and the hybrid approach. Morrowind was hard sandbox. Different areas had opponents of different levels and with different gear, all of which were fixed, which mostly meant you couldn’t survive in certain areas until you had spent enough time in others. But, if you were up for a challenge, you could try to punch above your weight class, and in the (admittedly fairly unlikely) event that you succeeded, the rewards felt proportionate to the challenge. You could get high-level gear much earlier than you were “supposed to” if you knew where to look and were sneaky enough and/or fast enough. Oblivion went in completely the opposite direction, absolutely everything scaled to your level. No matter where you went, you found opponents that were an appropriate challenge for you and had appropriate gear for your level. This prevented sequence breaking, but it was pretty unimersive and completely flattened the difficulty curve. Skyrim used a hybrid approach. Different areas had different level ranges, but things scaled with your level within the limits of those level ranges (actually I don’t think there was a cap for the scaling, but different areas had different minimum levels, and there was probably some proportional scaling going on, so that a harder area always felt harder than an easier area, even though both areas scaled so that you wouldn’t totally outpace them). The effect allowed you to explore more freely than in Morrowind, while still allowing for something of a difficulty curve. They addressed the immersion problem by not having enemy gear scale with their level like it did in Oblivion. A high level bandit might have more HP and do more damage, than a low-level bandit, but they used weapons and armor that felt appropriate for a common bandit regardless of their level. No more bandits in full daedric plate.

 

[el-remmen]

The prep is stating what's there. If I'm going to say that "in that forest is a green dragon"... if and when it gets encountered it's going to be a green dragon that the party can actually encounter. That's why I wouldn't say "in that forest is an ancient green dragon", because I've just now detailed an area that is never going to be used. Which is a waste of my time.

So if the PCs ask a local, hey what's in those woods to the north we saw on a map? He'd reply, "No one knows. The DM hasn't prepped it yet?"

Do you have anything come up extemporaneously in-game that you then have to detail later?

And note... I say this as a DM whose games rarely get to 10th level, let alone go past it. So anything in the adventuring area will be level appropriate (either weaker, stronger, or on level) so that the party can choose to go there and actually encounter stuff without it being an automatic TPK. Because as a story-first DM... I find TPKs to be pointless. If the party fails (and they certainly can)... it'll be failure within the narrative, not within the board game.

I am the same way about levels.

The story of failure is still a story and can be a good or even FUN one (as long as it doesn't happen too often - but then again I feel the same way about the story of victory )

 

[overgeeked]

Sandbox. By a mile. The world exists independent of the PCs. If they wander into the wrong area, they die. If they want to bully lower-level stuff, then they face diminishing returns. If they want a challenge, they have to go find one.

 

[Blue]

My most recent was more sandbox then level appropriate, but I had players who were used to level-appropriate (even after it getting discussed in Session 0) and the paladin immediately zoomed in on the biggest threat and wanted to deal with that - which would have killed them easily.

On the other hand, the worst of the immediate threats weren't too much beyond them, and plenty lesser than that. So they picked what they wanted to do, some side-quests intruded and leveled them up a bit, and then they were at a survivable level for what they were doing next (as long as they weren't stupid).

 

[Oofta]

The idea that you have to put a ton of work into sandbox campaigns kind of baffle me. You have to put some thought into directions that your players could take but most of the time it can be a sentence or two.

The way I handle it is that at the end of a session I ask where the group wants to head next time and I prep for that. If they ever manage to stumble into an area I haven't even considered I'll make something up that's consistent with the rest of the campaign world.

I guess I've always been into improv, so much so that people accuse me of magically railroading when I'm making things up on the fly. It's a skill and like all skills is something most people can develop and get better at by doing it.

 

[turnip_farmer]

Sandbox. By a mile. The world exists independent of the PCs.

By coincidence, I was just reading an old but relevant article by the ever insightful Angry GM

Whenever I say something like that, someone always sputters about how the characters won’t be the right levels for the dungeons or whatever if they go out of order. And my response is always “why are you writing the dungeons that far in advance then?” And their response is something about how the world shouldn’t level with the PCs. And my response is usually to slap the s$&% out of them for thinking that D&D is a WORLD and not a GAME.

 

[tetrasodium]

I lean heavily towards sandbox letting players do what they want & potentially reap the consequences, but it's not like I have regional level ranges or something. If the players wind up getting involved in something that for whatever reason sends them to argonessen (dragon continent), the demon wastes, the mournland, or whatever I'll likely find level appropriateish stuff, find an excuse to send them somewhere more fitting, or give reasons to hijack their travel plans along the way. The players would go into those areas knowing how dangerous they are though.

With that said, I've no qualms with powerful npcs punishing chaotic stupid with instant karma if forced into a corner. Those NPCs are both bound by & protected by the same laws that apply to the PCs possibly even with extra rights from being special (i.e. nobles/wealthy/secretly a frickin dragon/etc). so the bitchslap might come in the form of underlings or political pressure that makes life difficult for the PCs without somehow gaining a powerful political backer of their own.

Being able to spin the various plates on the fly as players go around acting in unexpected ways is definitely a more advanced GM skill that can seem daunting to newer gms though & 5e doesn't make it easy to learn for a gm that didn't pick it up elsewhere.

 

[aco175]

The prep is stating what's there. If I'm going to say that "in that forest is a green dragon"... if and when it gets encountered it's going to be a green dragon that the party can actually encounter. That's why I wouldn't say "in that forest is an ancient green dragon", because I've just now detailed an area that is never going to be used. Which is a waste of my time.

There may also be other things in the forest, other than a dragon. PCs that wander into Dragon Forest or Troll Swamp have a higher chance of finding danger they cannot handle, but there is also goblins in the forest and bandits hiding out, since nobody would look for them in Dragon Forest.

This would be a good point for having encounter charts for areas of the campaign. Something I like, but never seem to have time for. I tend to feel that I would then need to make actual encounters for the random encounters.