What is the point of GM's notes?

[Lanefan]

Am I mixing them, or are they just different words for the same thing?

You've provided a distinction between the two that I don't really think is all that significant.

When @Emirikol refers to "winging it" I read it as referring to where big things - entire adventures, major geographic features, etc. - are being made up on the fly. The term "improvising" refers to smaller things - the name of the gate guard, the language(s) the captured Orc can speak, etc.

And there is a rather significant distinction, in my eyes anyway: improvisation is (in theory) building on to an already-solid setting framework, while winging it is trying to build that framework at the same time.

Errors in small-scale improv (e.g. "last week that guard's name was Joscan, now you're calling him Harry?" can be brushed off if the underlying framework is sound. Errors in building the framework, not so much; and my guess is it's the latter type of errors that cause games to fail.

 

[pemerton]

I think that the first two examples often involves a "play to win" mentality/approach to the game where character flaws are either excised or minimized* for the sake of the player's ahem... I mean "character's" victory. Character flaws or backstory elements are "conveniently forgotten" in times when they would potentially be an impediment to personal or group victory.

* Which commonly includes, at least in this mode of thinking, lacking any form of personal character attachments (e.g., family, friends, pets, etc.) that can be "weaponized" by the GM against the player characters.

The RM game I described relied on me, as GM, to enforce the disadvantages of intoxication (I can't remember now what the penalty was) and to make the expense of it real. We used to play this game in a club setting, and I remember there was another regular play/GM in the club who would chant "hugar, hugar" when he walked past our table, as it was well-known that the player of the character was leaning into his PC's addiction.

This was the same player who would from time to time point out the need for his PC to suffer a "Depression" critical (a table from RM Companion 3) if something emotionally shattering had just taken place.

My own view is that it's a fairly small step in player attitude - though maybe a bigger step in technical game design - to move from something like what I've just described in RM, to something like Burning Wheel's approach. (Which may be why I like BW so much - it crystallises some of the tendencies that produced the most memorable moments in our old RM campaigns.)

 

[innerdude]

So if at some point I were to attempt a GM-driven, largely prefabricated "living world" sandbox, here's the big dilemma I now face.

I mentioned before, the last time I ran a "living world," about 60% of the way through (somewhere around session 18 or 19 out of 32), the main conceit of a "living world" had largely collapsed. I was still doing weekly prep, still doing extrapolations and "mental imaging" of how background events were playing out, and what was happening outside the view of the players.

But it had increasingly become impossible to give characters the kind of freedom I wanted in pursuing goals. Essentially, to keep any semblance of direction, I had to pre-populate hooks with solutions that felt very much like I was reducing player agency to "mother-may-I" style play.

And at one point sometime around session 27 or 28, one of players sort of called me on it . . . not in an unfriendly or demeaning way, but something along the lines of, "You're kind of just setting up the dominoes for us to knock them down, aren't you?"---an observation/recognition that there was a lot of string pulling going on behind the screen.

And all I could do was just shrug and sheepishly plead "guilty as charged." And it's not even that the players weren't enjoying themselves, it's that it felt unsatisfying to me.

The other element that broke down for me was the realization that at a certain point, it became very difficult to find appropriate extrapolations that didn't devolve into "GM witch hunt" against the characters. And this became a point of "immersion breaking" for me as a GM running my own "living world." Because after a certain point, if the villains in the world are as ruthless and relentless as I imagined them to be, eventually they're going to stop "messing around" and really, really get after the PCs.

As awesome as I wanted the party to be within the game world, at a certain point I had to ask myself, "If the party had really messed up Evil Villain X's plans as much as has transpired, wouldn't Villain X just go full assassin mode and be done with it?"

Like, at a certain point, any plausible extrapolation included something along the lines of, "Enough with sending these stupid level 3 rogue assassins. Isn't it time for Villain X to break out her cadre of a dozen level 19 rogue/assassin/bladesinger/clerics, level-adjusted +3 half-abyssal template assassins and be done with it?" (Savage Worlds doesn't have "levels" per se, but just providing a comparison for context.)

But then that feels sucky as well. Because sending those types of enemies after the players feels punitive and mean-spirited and un-fun. But without doing that, the conceit of the "living world" became straight up broken for me---I was now sacrificing "living world" integrity just to allow the players to keep playing.

*Edit---one more thing I thought of. Another problem with extrapolation became the "ever-expanding universe" dilemma, where even if I had set up a specific enemy "front," the question always kept coming up, "Well, is is the real end of the line? Or is there even another, more powerful villain above them?" And this starts to play into my own GM psychology, because on a certain level, you don't want certain NPCs / factions to be the end of the road. Isn't it more interesting to have certain threads keep going? But there was no tool or technique other than just my own judgement to say, "Nope, this really is the end of the line for this thread," or, "Yep, there's another strand to this thread that goes even farther."

And I don't particularly see a solution to these problems by applying any of the "living world" techniques espoused so far.

• Do even more prep.
• Do even more extrapolations until you get it "just right."
• Do NPC psyche/motivation "deep dives."

So I ask the proponents of "living world" play --- how do you solve these problems without turning to player-facing tools and techniques?




Separate, unrelated note:

There's definitely some bleed/overlap between the last 2 pages of this thread and the immersion/"playing as my character" thread. It may be more appropriate to say this there, but just an observation:

For "living world" sandbox play, there seems to be a tacit, unspoken line item in the group social contract that might read something like, "Though your character is free to explore the game world through any means at their disposal, there is no guarantee that any given prefabricated component / session element / quest / NPC / world event / content will directly address any particular character goal / motivation / dramatic need. Please set your expectations accordingly."

 

[pemerton]

I do think that any game needs to have some information established as a foundation. I'm not saying that GMs should start at zero input and then expect to craft a world for the players on the fly.

Thinking through this, in order of prep (as best I can rank it from most to least) for the last 5 ongoing (ie not one-shot) games I've started:

* 4e Dark Sun - we did PC build, I described a bit of the backstory established in the book, and then one of the PCs wrote a "kicker" for his PC that had him killing a foe in the arena just as the cries went up in the crowd that the tyrant (ie the sorcerer-king of Tyr) had been killed. So no prep literally authored by me, but I'd read the book and introduced some key elements to my players. We used a city map of Tyr to frame where the PCs subsequently went and what they did.​

​

* Cortex+ Heroic LotR/MERP - I did the PC build (an elf, a ranger, a dwarf, Gandalf) and brought along my copies of LotR and The Complete Guide to Middle Earth. The players chose their PCs and then we discussed what had brought each of them to Rivendell and why they had to head out into the wild.​

​

* Classic Traveller - the players rolled up their PCs, and I rolled a starting world, and we all made up some backstory around that, and then I rolled a random patron and used a few other worlds that I'd rolled up in advance as a basis to invent her mission and present it to the players (via their PCs interactions with her).​

​

* Burning Wheel - the had mostly rolled up their PCs in advance but we settled on Beliefs and then I started them in Hardby in the World of Greyhawk. I chose Hardby because it is ruled by a magic-using Gynarch and two of the PCs had connections to potentially sinister sorcerers; and also Hardby is in a good location in the middle of the map with a nearby place (Celene) for the elf PC to come from, with the Bright Desert and Cairn Hills nearby for ancient tombs, a port leading to possible maritime adventure, etc.​

​

* Cortex+ Heroic Vikings - I did the PC gen (a berserker, a swordmaster, a troll-ish type PC, a shapeshifter, a shaman/oracle-type) having deliberately made them adaptable either to Viking or Japanese fantasy. I turned up with the PCs and we took a vote and Vikings won (because some of us had already played a multi-year Japanese-themed RM campaign). We then discussed why the PCs had to leave the village on a quest together. And started from there.​

For that last one, the prep was literally nothing more than these PCs are in a fantasy Viking world having to go on a quest. That's not nothing, as Vikings brings quite a bit with it - cold winters, rugged hills as you trudge to the north, trolls and giants, the Ragnarok, etc - but there was no map or world history or anything like that. The first session established a giants' steading in the hills (inspired by my memories of G1) and a dungeon. For later sessions I did do a bit more prep - of NPCs/creatures and coming up with Scene Distinctions for a village being attacked by Ragnarok-inspired reavers and for a high place in the mountains.

EDIT: Left out * Prince Valiant - prep there consisted in me having read the rulebook and saying "Let's try this out". The players built their knights. I flipped through the Episode Book (which I hadn't read yet) and seeing one by Kenneth Hite that looked interesting, and finding a more "procedural" one too (a tournament) and a similarly "procedural" challenge from a knight in the rulebook.

 

[pemerton]

I am generally not a minimalist when it comes to prep, either as a player or a GM. I probably spend 5-10 hours a week on prep as a GM if I'm really into the game I am running and about an hour or two as a player.

<snip>

In most of the games I run and play in these days there is a substantial slice of life component. We place a lot of emphasis on character's families, friends, mentors, lovers, et. al. My vampire character has an estranged wife, coworkers (still works as a security consultant), clan ties, a driver, a couple apartments, a handler from Mossad, etc. He lives a full life. Getting to that level of depth and sense of history requires a lot of work / authorship. I find it best if players have a hand in helping create the things and people their characters would value because it feels a lot more natural than "Let me tell you about your brother." to me.

True confession: I do not do this much prep, as GM or player.

This is one reason I like a system like Cortex+ Heroic that supports low prep but vivid salient details (via Scene Distinctions).

And lean heavily into tropey-genre ideas too, like Prince Valiant or Vikings or Dark Sun's sword-and-sandals/sword-and-planet.

 

[pemerton]

I do no like Compels in FATE though. I'm not a fan of suffering now to be awesome later or basically playing out tropes. I want mechanics to align player and character perspectives as much as possible rather than to encourage what I would call portrayal or characterization. I usually strive for embodying the character. Vices in Blades, Willpower triggers in World of Darkness, Strife in L5R 5e, Intimacies in Exalted, and basically the entire way Dogs in the Vineyard works is much better than Inspiration for playing flaws or Fate Points for accepting Compels to me.

Hi @Campbell, this is another of your posts where I'd be keen to hear a bit more elaboration. Upthread @hawkeyefan told us how Vices in BitD can earn XP when leaned into by the player. How do you see this differing from a Compel in Fate?

EDIT: I read on and got some answers.

Mostly I think it's a reward for characterization rather than character. You are rewarded for fitting an existing conception of a character. It feels performative to me in a way that Blade's more open ended "You expressed your beliefs, drives, heritage, or background." and "You struggled with issues from your vice or traumas during the session." do not.

Your heritage and background are somewhat defined, but your beliefs and drives are never like these defined things in Blades. Basically what the questions do is give you a chance to reflect on play and see if we learned something new about the character. The important distinction for me personally is that question asks did you express it in some way. It does not have to be living up to your heritage or what we already know about your character.

Trauma and Vice are more defined. Your Vice is how you recover stress, Your traumas come from losing all your stress in a score and they are like one word things like Cold. I find that without thinking about because they have such prominence in play it's much easier for me to think about.

So I think Beliefs and Traits in BW would be closer to what you like, than to Compels?

But Milestones in MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic might be a bit closer to Compels and hence a bit further from what you like?

 

[pemerton]

You've mixed winging it with having to improv on occasion. I think we can agree that at the edges improv has to occur to some degree. Winging it though is making up the adventure or inventing whole groups of important NPCs on the fly. And I very much have observed games fall apart under such conditions.

When @Emirikol refers to "winging it" I read it as referring to where big things - entire adventures, major geographic features, etc. - are being made up on the fly. The term "improvising" refers to smaller things - the name of the gate guard, the language(s) the captured Orc can speak, etc.

And there is a rather significant distinction, in my eyes anyway: improvisation is (in theory) building on to an already-solid setting framework, while winging it is trying to build that framework at the same time.

Errors in small-scale improv (e.g. "last week that guard's name was Joscan, now you're calling him Harry?" can be brushed off if the underlying framework is sound. Errors in building the framework, not so much; and my guess is it's the latter type of errors that cause games to fail.

I'm not sure what counts as the adventure here - especially in the context of a sandbox game where (as I understand it) the players can choose any goal or action for their PCs.

But putting that to one side, there seem to be unstated assumptions here about what the role of the setting framework is. It would be helpful to discussion to have those brought to the surface.

Eg are we talking about maps and keys used to resolve action declarations? is a group of important NPCs defined by their motives and relationships, or their mechanical stats, or both? what work are these things doing in play that makes prep so important?

These are not rhetorical questions. I think it would be good for the discussion to hear some answers to them.

 

[pemerton]

** innerdude checks his game room for NSA-level surveillance equipment, because clearly @Campbell has been watching his group **

** accusing stare **

In all seriousness, though, this is 100% the same with my group

<snip>

all character development was along an axis of "preconception." This is who my character is, I'm going to play to that.

Zero evolution along the character growth axis---This is what my character wants---how is that going to play out and change how I view my character?

I think character growth in RPGing, especially from the "inhabitation" perspective that @Campbell prefers as opposed to a pre-conceived arc perspective, is very demanding on the players. And on GMs, who have to be prepared to be brutal!

In my most recent BW session, I experienced a moment of character growth when Aramina, the "henchman"/sidekick of my main character Thurgon, was present when Thurgon was able to invoke a miracle to lift the burdens from his mother:

The characters continued on, and soon arrived at Auxol,. The GM narrated the estate still being worked, but looking somewhat run-down compared to Thrugon's memories of it. An old, bowed woman greeted us - Xanthippe, looking much more than her 61 years. She welcomed Thurgon back, but chided him for having been away. And asked him not to leave again. The GM was getting ready to force a Duel of Wits on the point - ie that Thurgon should not leave again - when I tried a different approach. I'd already made a point of Thurgon having his arms on clear display as he rode through the countryside and the estate; now he raised his mace and shield to the heavens, and called on the Lord of Battle to bring strength back to his mother so that Auxol might be restored to its former greatness. This was a prayer for a Minor Miracle, obstacle 5. Thurgon has Faith 5 and I burned his last point of Persona to take it to 6 dice (the significance of this being that, without 1 Persona, you can't stop the effect of a mortal wound should one be suffered). With 6s being open-ended (ie auto-rolls), the expected success rate is 3/5, so that's 3.6 successes there. And I had a Fate point to reroll one failure, for an overall expected 4-ish successes. Against an obstacle of 5.

As it turned out, I finished up with 7 successes. So a beam of light shot down from the sky, and Xanthippe straightened up and greeted Thurgon again, but this time with vigour and readiness to restore Auxol. The GM accepted my proposition that this played out Thurgon's Belief that Harm and infamy will befall Auxol no more! (earning a Persona point). His new Belief is Xanthippe and I will liberate Auxol. He picked up a second Persona point for Embodiment ("Your roleplay (a performance or a decision) captures the mood of the table and drives the story onward").

Turning back to Aramina, I decided that this made an impact on her too: up until now she had been cynical and slightly bitter, but now she was genuinely inspired and determined: instead of never meeting the gaze of a stranger, her Instinct is to look strangers in the eyes and Assess. And rather than I don't need Thurgon's pity, her Belief is Thurgon and I will liberate Auxol. This earned a Persona point for Mouldbreaker ("If a situation brings your Beliefs, Instincts and Traits into conflict with a decision your PC must make, you play out your inner turmoil as you dramatically play against a Belief in a believable and engaging manner").

Because I made the Faith check for Thurgon, he didn't have to grow much at all - a Belief changed, but it continues rather than alters his arc. Which was easier for me to cope with!

 

[hawkeyefan]

Really? So inventing massive amounts of information that all has to remain consistent is the same as just answering an unexpected question based upon a fully developed character.

As I said, it depends. Does the game in question require massive amounts of information that needs to be consistent? If so, then how much of this is already established and known?

My point is that all of this depends on the game.

I've found playing old school D&D is not a hindrance to roleplaying. Mechanics are not necessary to roleplay. Mechanics may help some roleplay and in some cases hinder others for that matter.

Sure. They are not necessary, I think I said that. Any group can roleplay to the extent they like. As I said, there are games that promote this through mechanics and or/processes, and there are those that don’t.

For those games that do have such rules, it tends to be because character portrayal is more central to the play experience.

I get that the game you mention is focused on providing mechanics to achieve an experience you want. For me though while it might assist in roleplaying it would ruin other aspects of what I like about a game so it wouldn't be a win. And I don't need those mechanics to have a fun roleplaying game with lots of interaction between PCs and lots of immersion.

Cool. Yes....nothin g I’ve said is anything I’m claiming to be objective.

I think your jaded, game shop AP style D&D play is affecting your judgment. My games are not at all like that. A dungeon is a job but my players are more than their jobs. So I expect, my games would differ depending on which characters got played. Now do players go completely against type? No. Not sure they would want to do that.

Everything I’ve been saying is about the games and their rules. I’ve made no assumptions about your game specifically.

So your assumptions here about mine are not only uncalled for, but are inaccurate and come across as very petty.

To the style of play the game seems designed for then no arguments. For a deeply character driven and immersive game, I'd say it's not required at all. It perhaps goes back to the age old debate from years ago about whether you need mechanics for something to be part of the game. I don't think you do.

I think we both want what we like but I won't be caricatured in my own style of play as if there is little or shallow roleplaying going on in my games. I don't see that. I see players invested in their characters and being immersed as those characters. They interact with the world and have a rich roleplaying experience.

Yes....different people enjoy different things and so there are different games.

Crazy.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Given what I've written above here, do you think you could either:

* Ask questions that would give you sufficient resolution for you to work with the depicted situation then use my answers to show us the exact procedure that you would use to evolve the situation?

or

* Break down a play excerpt where you did something similar (like I mentioned above - pestilence + hysteria/panic vs a prefecture's infrastructural and personnel driven response they could martial)? I'm particularly interested in if you use competing dice pools for something like this similar to how you deploy your Mass Combat System.

My heads been ringing since yesterday so I wanted to wait to respond to this, since it seemed to require a bit more thought. I think part of the problem with the example you gave for me is it is very involved and centered in a setting and system I am not very familiar with (like I said I have blades in the dark, and have been reading through it, but am not particularly familiar with the content). So I found myself getting very confused when I went back and tried to read through the situations you described and then draw a line from that to what it was you were asking for my input on about them.

My head is still ringing by will try my best to do the second thing from above.

I can't think of a situation off the top of my head. But I would very likely use a dice pool resolution method for something like this. For example if there were an outbreak of plague of some kind, then I might try to resolve how effectively the imperial bureaucracy handles that by a number of methods. First off, I might simply say: this is how it pans out: because the outcome seems very clear. I also might think through the situation logically and decide. But given that we are in the middle of a pandemic and we have all had more time to think about how difficult this problem really is, I would probably resort to more mechanics and rulings. I may say okay what resources do they have (in terms of money to spend on the issue, physicians, magic in the setting, martial experts who can help find or obtain cures guarded by immortals, etc). What I might then do is think about how the emperor and his council might decide to allocate those resources (and if there is some important political split on these matters, I may roll to see which faction wins the debate). Then I would probably turn those allocations into dice pools, and roll those against This to generate my outcomes. For simplicity let's just say they allocate all their resources to different prefectures but to varying degrees. And the results would probably be something like failure denotes significant number of deaths due to failure to stem the plague in region X. Success means they were able to keep deaths down. Total Success might mean actual progress fighting the plague (I would probably have this require a number of total success, over the course of months or years (just given how much a sudden miracle cure might not seem plausible to players given the present situation).

Again, this is just me trying to provide a response. There may be something more concrete that came up in my campaigns that I can think of later.

So if at some point I were to attempt a GM-driven, largely prefabricated "living world" sandbox, here's the big dilemma I now face.

I mentioned before, the last time I ran a "living world," about 60% of the way through (somewhere around session 18 or 19 out of 32), the main conceit of a "living world" had largely collapsed. I was still doing weekly prep, still doing extrapolations and "mental imaging" of how background events were playing out, and what was happening outside the view of the players.

But it had increasingly become impossible to give characters the kind of freedom I wanted in pursuing goals. Essentially, to keep any semblance of direction, I had to pre-populate hooks with solutions that felt very much like I was reducing player agency to "mother-may-I" style play.

And at one point sometime around session 27 or 28, one of players sort of called me on it . . . not in an unfriendly or demeaning way, but something along the lines of, "You're kind of just setting up the dominoes for us to knock them down, aren't you?"---an observation/recognition that there was a lot of string pulling going on behind the screen.

And all I could do was just shrug and sheepishly plead "guilty as charged." And it's not even that the players weren't enjoying themselves, it's that it felt unsatisfying to me.

The other element that broke down for me was the realization that at a certain point, it became very difficult to find appropriate extrapolations that didn't devolve into "GM witch hunt" against the characters. And this became a point of "immersion breaking" for me as a GM running my own "living world." Because after a certain point, if the villains in the world are as ruthless and relentless as I imagined them to be, eventually they're going to stop "messing around" and really, really get after the PCs.

As awesome as I wanted the party to be within the game world, at a certain point I had to ask myself, "If the party had really messed up Evil Villain X's plans as much as has transpired, wouldn't Villain X just go full assassin mode and be done with it?"

Like, at a certain point, any plausible extrapolation included something along the lines of, "Enough with sending these stupid level 3 rogue assassins. Isn't it time for Villain X to break out her cadre of a dozen level 19 rogue/assassin/bladesinger/clerics, level-adjusted +3 half-abyssal template assassins and be done with it?" (Savage Worlds doesn't have "levels" per se, but just providing a comparison for context.)

But then that feels sucky as well. Because sending those types of enemies after the players feels punitive and mean-spirited and un-fun. But without doing that, the conceit of the "living world" became straight up broken for me---I was now sacrificing "living world" integrity just to allow the players to keep playing.

*Edit---one more thing I thought of. Another problem with extrapolation became the "ever-expanding universe" dilemma, where even if I had set up a specific enemy "front," the question always kept coming up, "Well, is is the real end of the line? Or is there even another, more powerful villain above them?" And this starts to play into my own GM psychology, because on a certain level, you don't want certain NPCs / factions to be the end of the road. Isn't it more interesting to have certain threads keep going? But there was no tool or technique other than just my own judgement to say, "Nope, this really is the end of the line for this thread," or, "Yep, there's another strand to this thread that goes even farther."

And I don't particularly see a solution to these problems by applying any of the "living world" techniques espoused so far.

• Do even more prep.
• Do even more extrapolations until you get it "just right."
• Do NPC psyche/motivation "deep dives."

So I ask the proponents of "living world" play --- how do you solve these problems without turning to player-facing tools and techniques?




Separate, unrelated note:

There's definitely some bleed/overlap between the last 2 pages of this thread and the immersion/"playing as my character" thread. It may be more appropriate to say this there, but just an observation:

For "living world" sandbox play, there seems to be a tacit, unspoken line item in the group social contract that might read something like, "Though your character is free to explore the game world through any means at their disposal, there is no guarantee that any given prefabricated component / session element / quest / NPC / world event / content will directly address any particular character goal / motivation / dramatic need. Please set your expectations accordingly."

Like I said, I am not the best mouthpiece here. Giving people GM coaching tips has never really been my forte. But going to try to answer this as best I can. It is a little hard to say without knowing the setting and the specifics of the campaign. It may be living world sandbox isn't a good fit for your group's style. The players should be the ones really taking the initiative in a sandbox. I have had campaigns go over 100 sessions without a problem (in fact it should get easier not harder). But I really think truly figuring this out for you would require a conversation, not a post to post discussion (I just think it is the kind of topic where you say something, I respond, and if I am going in the wrong direction, you immediately correct me and I change course). On a forum, it is like driving an 18 wheeler on a BMX track sometimes.

One thing I will say, just something I am kind of sensing form the post: living world sandbox assumes somewhat objective elements. Factions are pretty fleshed out. You can always make new factions as they occur to you or as you need (sometimes you just realize, oh, there should be more factions in this area, or you haven't got to a certain area yet). But when I did my wuxia setting the first thing I did was make a bunch of different sects. I established their hierarchy, their beliefs, their general involvement in things, I statted the leaders, I statted the disciples and sub chiefs, and I included their numbers. As I went forward I honed this process more. Subchiefs got more personality and fleshing out rather than just being stat blocks, I started assigning names to as many sect members as I could, etc. The point of this is yes you can always decide there is a bigger evil behind the scenes, but in a sandbox you don't usually begin by saying 'this is going to be the enemy' and this is the big bad. You let that stuff emerge naturally as the players have dealings in the world, so their choices matter (i.e. it is up to them how they handle their first interaction with the Chief of the Nature Loving Monk sect, and that may determine whether he becomes a staunch ally, an enemy or a disinterested neutral party: or maybe they just develop a working relationship with him). Like I said it is chemistry so it is a little hard to anticipate in advance all these things. But I would generally just have that sect leader using what resources he can against the party if they become enemies. Now that doesn't mean he is just going to kill them. He may just be trying to bend them to his will. It depends on the conflict.

On character and player goals, I generally don't worry about making things players have written as goals come up. But if they are pursuing things in character, those things probably will come up. Like if a player is determined to join a criminal organization, if they look around enough they should eventually find a way into that (just like in real life if you were dead set on something like that, you'd probably find a way in). I think the thing to do here is prep as much as you can in terms of big picture stuff, but understand there will always be hidden underworlds in any setting. And the question in a sandbox is "is there a good reason for something like this not to be here? and if not, what would this kind of thing look like in this place?". If you need to make things up on the fly, you need to make things up on the fly. Also you can always use between session time to prep things. Say the players decide after they read about some weed that grows in the northern mountains that is guarded by blood drinking giants, and it just came up in passing in some library or something, that they want to go obtain it but you have nothing prepped: it is entirely fair to say: look I don't have that area mapped yet, let's stop the session and I will have it by next week. Ideally you would have stuff like that but a living sandbox world is always capable of growing bigger than what you have written down, and you can't anticipate everything. But those kinds of riffs (where you invented the blood drinking giants guarding the weed) are something I find pretty easy to come up with in a way that jives when you have long enough familiarity with the setting (especially if there is setting cosmology that makes consistent sense: for example my setting the gods often make mountain gods to guard special things on mountain tops so it is an easy thing to extrapolate)

But not every type of setting is suited to a sandbox. I run ravenloft living adventure style, but not as a sandbox, because I don't think I could (I just wouldn't know how to do that). For me wuxia campaigns just make total sense as a sandbox. But it is a little hard to explain why beyond how the fuel of those campaigns is the various martial sects. I think also the fact that I have seen hundreds of wuxia and kung fu movies, gives me a data bank of scenarios and I may be overlooking how significant that is.

But my advice really is don't torture yourself. If living world sandbox isn't working for you, even after reading the linked materials. There is no law that says you have to run a living world sandbox. And maybe you might need to hack the concept more so it fits with what you like and what you find easy to run.

Another piece of advice I always give with sandbox is relax. The thing that made me reluctant to do sandbox at first (and to be honest kind of scared me a little) was fear of the game crashing. But at a certain point I just said "screw it, let's just see what happens". The more relaxed I got, the more I found myself comfortably running sandbox games. I think sometimes, putting pressure on yourself to make it perfect can have the opposite effect.

If you really want to give it a go, I would definitely check out Rob Conley's guide to running a fantasy sandbox if you haven't because that is the most step by step one I have seen: and he has a link to more posts on each topic at the bottom). His treatment is pretty deep and detailed. You might not need every step, but given that he covers each step in such depth, if there is something you are missing, there is a good chance it is there.

In terms of solving this without player facing techniques, I am not sure. I don't use player facing techniques and it works fine for me. Maybe it won't work fine for you, or maybe you are trying to get something different out of sandbox than I am and we are talking past each other.

Have you ever tried running a sandbox with evil PCs? I ask because I sometimes find that easier (evil PCs are sometimes better than good PCs at finding ways to stay entertained and have long term goals (i want to take over the city, is a pretty easy adventure to run for example, if they drop that kind of thing on you).