The many types of Sandboxes and Open-World Campaigns

[Bedrockgames]

That's just the thing that kept my up last night. "Railroading" is a thing that a GM can do. But does that mean that "a Railroad" is a thing that actually exists?
This is getting weirdly onological very quickly.

I would say yes because you can prepare an adventures and even place them in a setting, as railroads. I remember a bunch of 90s modules that were heavily railroaded, with advice like making sure something important to the plot happens or not allowing the players to kill so and so because it will ruin the adventure. Those existed, waiting to be experienced in a sense, and they existed as print books for the game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yes, the sandbox can have a two sides of the screen problem. The players who are not proactive and want to be lead around, and the GM that offers no hooks.

Complicating this is players who are semi-proactive, but are not good at selecting amidst options, so it turns into a constant drawn out debate.

 

[Yora]

Which does not have to be a problem, unless the players start annoying each other.

 

[John R Davis]

I adore this sort of campaign, either to run or play!

I prefer the term "adventure landscape".

I have run Kingmaker AP twice.
Jacquays Enchanted Wood is great and have run a lot.
Have published my own 'sandboxes' ( The Hex Hack and it's add ons).
Am thinking of a sci-fi one (The Sector Hack).
Even a standard module I like a bit of Hexploring ( so Starstone, SKT, or the Ironfang Invasion AP).

It's better if the party have something of an overall goal, lots rumours and mini quests, and their own evolving personal quests.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The answer to that is to not give the players a blank sheet of paper with only one circle that says "you are here". With that setup, you really only can wander off into a random direction and wait for the GM to tell you that you found something.

At the very bare minimum, you need a circle that says "you are here" and an X saying "dungeon". But if you really want to give players agency, there should be three Xs that don't just say "dungeon", but rather have an evocative name that suggest something interesting, and the locals in You Are Here should be able to provide some more information about them when askes. And all three should sound meaningfully different. "Haunted Grave Mounds", "Monster-spawning abanoned mine", and "Bandit camp in the Spider Woods" for example.

However, all of this only works if the players have made characters who are looking for places that are crawling with monsters and promising treasures. Which brings up another important differentiation of sandbox campaigns:
"Are the PCs exploring the land or are they trying to accomplish something?"
A sandbox that provides plenty of opportunities to find ancient treasures has to be designed quite differently from a sandbox that provides opportunities to found a new settlement. You can even have a quest based sandbox with the established goal of "Free the land from the rule of the evil sorcerer lord." If it's up to the players to gather allies and weaken the sorcerer's forces, that'd still be very much a sandbox. But it would require a very different kind of setup in regards to what sites and people populate it.

For me the idea of like a platonic sandbox, is one where you let the players set any goal they want (they might be able to achieve that goal if the dice turn against them, but they can try). Towards that end your sandbox should be varied if you are really looking to run a full open sandbox. But you can also adapt the material and setting to the goals the players develop if you need. If I don't know what direction a campaign in a sandbox is going to go, and even if I do, I try to flesh out not just places to explore but stuff like politics, trade, conflicts, power groups, etc. Still the players can throw you a curve ball, and if they do it is pretty easy to start work on building up aspects of the setting you need as the campaign grows

To be clear I don't think this is the only way a sandbox can be run. I tend to run pretty focused sandboxes but I let the players steer away from that focus if they want to into other things. My point is mainly that in terms of prep, I don't think, if you are running a sandbox, you can bank on the players sticking to dungeons. Part of the appeal of sandboxes to players is they can strike off on whatever goal or direction they want, even if that goes against what it looks like what was assumed for the campaign. Also from the GM side, one of the interesting and fun things is players doing the unexpected and things moving in directions you had never even considered.

This is also why I think improvisation is important in a sandbox. Not everything has to be created before hand. A lot should be. But eventually the players go somewhere or look in some nook you hadn't prepared for. This happens in every single type of campaign but is even more common in a sandbox (even in the most linear of adventures, a player can ask something like "Whose the owner of that house over there" and you have to come up with an explanation on the fly).

 

[Mannahnin]

I have set XP rewards. Gaining a level requires spending new level × 5 XP. I’ve used variants of this in different systems. Sometimes I’ve scaled it to the system’s native XP progress, but I don’t feel it’s worth the effort unless one really wants it. Those below the median level of the party receive double XP for the session.

Individual Goals: Reward 3 XP at the end of the session when you complete either (or both) of your goals. You also gain 1 XP for each goal you help someone else in the group complete. The group can give you feedback on your decision, but you decide what counts as completed for your goals and helped for other goals.

Group Missions: Reward 3 XP at the end of the session when the group completes its mission. The group (excluding the referee) determines by consensus whether a mission was completed.

This sounds similar to how Ten Dead Rats does xp. Though I guess the last version I saw did gold for XP primarily, but personal and party goal-based is the main system I remember Paul talking about during development.

Page 4:

https://www.paulsgameblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/TenDeadRats.pdf

 

[Yora]

This is an aspect where system really starts to matter a lot. In theory, you can tell players that they can do whatever they want. But in practice the mechanics of the rules system influence what kinds of behaviors are beneficial or detrimental to the players. Character advancement being the obvious number one. Players will gravitate towards behaviors that increase the rate ot character advancement, like doing things that get them XP. Establishing clear rules for what will get them XP and how much is a very great tool to guide the campaign without ever giving the players any directions in where to go and what to do.

Another good one is supply consumption. In a campaign where food supplies are tracked for all PCs, hired NPC, and animals of the party, and running out of food has meaningful mechanical impact, many situations can play out very differently from a campaign in which food is not a mechanical factor. Lack of water or freezing or being burned to death outdoors are even more severe versions of that.

 

[aco175]

I think the perception is that DMs want to think they provide a sandbox, a full 10 on the 1-10 scale, but end up around 5 and have plenty of railroading. I know I do it. I ask the players where they want to go, but they may have only a few choices unless one is totally anarchist and just wants to go North or such. The next week I have a dungeon or something planned to run and if the players now choose to turn around and not go into the dungeon, I can wing some stuff, or just say that choice is not set up and we can do that next week. The choice comes down to running what is written out or not playing.

The Essentials box set with the mission board postings is a bit of both ideas. The PCs can choose where to go, but only have a few choices. The box could do a better job of providing some missions that get harder if the PCs do not go there first and competing NPC groups, but it is designed for new groups.

 

[payn]

This is an aspect where system really starts to matter a lot. In theory, you can tell players that they can do whatever they want. But in practice the mechanics of the rules system influence what kinds of behaviors are beneficial or detrimental to the players. Character advancement being the obvious number one. Players will gravitate towards behaviors that increase the rate ot character advancement, like doing things that get them XP. Establishing clear rules for what will get them XP and how much is a very great tool to guide the campaign without ever giving the players any directions in where to go and what to do.

Another good one is supply consumption. In a campaign where food supplies are tracked for all PCs, hired NPC, and animals of the party, and running out of food has meaningful mechanical impact, many situations can play out very differently from a campaign in which food is not a mechanical factor. Lack of water or freezing or being burned to death outdoors are even more severe versions of that.

An excellent point. It sums up why I have been moving away from sandbox in D&D games and towards it in Traveller.

 

[kenada]

This sounds similar to how Ten Dead Rats does xp. Though I guess the last version I saw did gold for XP primarily, but personal and party goal-based is the main system I remember Paul talking about during development.

Page 4:

https://www.paulsgameblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/TenDeadRats.pdf

Looks similar, though it seems more GM-directed. The GM has no say in the system I’m using, and that’s intentional. It evolved out of Dungeon World’s end of session questions and GTD, though the idea for group missions came from one of XP methods proposed by Worlds Without Number.