D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[AbdulAlhazred]

That statement wasn't mine but a quote from a separate essay, and it's not being offered as a hard classifier. In the context of the essay its deliberately provocative and offered with a little wink, more to encourage people to think about the subject than to say someone is running it wrong.

I certainly would not say "it's not really a sandbox" about a campaign that is less prepared.


Agree with this.


I do think you have a point especially with 5e D&D, and especially with higher level 5e. A lot of sandbox fans end up drifting towards simpler OSR games, and part of that is they're easier to improvise.

Well, I think when you get to high levels, D&D has traditionally pretty much broken down. 5e maybe is a bit less extreme than 2e or 1e (or I guess 3e, never played high levels there, it seemed to break at like 5). At that point most games IME devolve down to some form of either neo-trad (IE performative play that simply exemplifies whatever the player is aiming for in their PC) or gets super force-heavy and silly. My old main GM was a genius at this. His high-level games kind of managed to skirt a middle ground where he was puppet mastering things, but somehow the game was still about you exploring your character. Never seen anyone else pull that off.

 

[Azzy]

Well, I think when you get to high levels, D&D has traditionally pretty much broken down. 5e maybe is a bit less extreme than 2e or 1e (or I guess 3e, never played high levels there, it seemed to break at like 5).

Hoo boy! I played a high to epic level character in a 3e campaign. It was a pain from a player perspective (not to mention that I had to use a spreadsheet to keep track of skills, feats, ability score improvements and plan things out from low level to ensure I had the prerequisites to take the prestige class that I wanted, etc.).

 

[Manbearcat]

Again, though, that's great to say but, when the rubber meets the road, system matters. Say your group has chosen to enter the "Simple Dungeon of 6 encounters". Bog standard dungeon crawl. It's nicely non-linear - multiple paths are possible and there is no "end goal" other than whatever the players want to achieve. Nicely sandbox right?

But, here's the thing. Most people can't do that on the fly. You have six D&D encounters. That's probably around 10 different stat blocks, each of which is very detailed. You can't do that on the fly. It needs to be prepared. And that takes time. Often, quite a lot of time depending on the level of the PC's.

Now multiply that by a hundred in order to be able to allow enough player choices to count as a sandbox. At the high level of simply describing things, that's easy. But, in actual play? That's a MOUNTAIN of work.

As you know (at least I think you do!), I, of course, agree that system matters enormously.

What I was trying to point at was a generalized approach to general content creation rather than a specific approach to specific content creation (such as a 6 room dungeon for challenge-based priorities).

If we're talking about building out a dungeon crawl for challenge-based priorities, we really need to index the particular system we're talking about because the process and the demands of pre-play prep vs improvisation are each going to look different depending upon the system. Some examples of this are:

* Moldvay has a particular procedure for prepping dungeons. Map w/ rooms having multiple ingress/egress points, theme, stock w/ denizens/puzzles/secrets/loot, build out Wandering Monsters table. Torchbearer (unsurprisingly) is similar.

* But D&D 4e and Dungeon World both work very differently than Moldvay or Torchbearer. Both the concept of dungeon and the execution of the play will be very different.

For 4e, you should probably be organizing the "delve" as a Skill Challenge with each decision-point sending you deeper into the depths on a success or generating some kind of complicating twist/escalation (including nested Skill Challenges) on a failure. 4e can trivially handle this on the fly.

Whereas Dungeon World is going to be a different beast entirely. You might have a Front for a dungeon with particular moves, Grim Portents, Impending Doom. Or you might just have an idea that spawns suddenly out of immediately preceding play and you just put relevant dangers/opportunities in front of the PCs and let the the snowballing move resolution engine generate a cascade of situations that coalesce into a dungeon crawl as you go. As with 4e, this will be on the fly, but it will be a very different affair then 4e in terms of the feel and execution of the play.

Regardless, neither of these two paradigms of 4e or DW delving looks nor plays like Moldvay or Torchbearer nor is such delve-play prep-centered + tradition crawl procedures. So yes, I certainly agree, you very much have to index what game you're GMing (and playing) as you consider the variance in task before you.

 

[Faolyn]

As you know (at least I think you do!), I, of course, agree that system matters enormously.

What I was trying to point at was a generalized approach to general content creation rather than a specific approach to specific content creation (such as a 6 room dungeon for challenge-based priorities).

If we're talking about building out a dungeon crawl for challenge-based priorities, we really need to index the particular system we're talking about because the process and the demands of pre-play prep vs improvisation are each going to look different depending upon the system. Some examples of this are:

* Moldvay has a particular procedure for prepping dungeons. Map w/ rooms having multiple ingress/egress points, theme, stock w/ denizens/puzzles/secrets/loot, build out Wandering Monsters table. Torchbearer (unsurprisingly) is similar.

* But D&D 4e and Dungeon World both work very differently than Moldvay or Torchbearer. Both the concept of dungeon and the execution of the play will be very different.

For 4e, you should probably be organizing the "delve" as a Skill Challenge with each decision-point sending you deeper into the depths on a success or generating some kind of complicating twist/escalation (including nested Skill Challenges) on a failure. 4e can trivially handle this on the fly.

Whereas Dungeon World is going to be a different beast entirely. You might have a Front for a dungeon with particular moves, Grim Portents, Impending Doom. Or you might just have an idea that spawns suddenly out of immediately preceding play and you just put relevant dangers/opportunities in front of the PCs and let the the snowballing move resolution engine generate a cascade of situations that coalesce into a dungeon crawl as you go. As with 4e, this will be on the fly, but it will be a very different affair then 4e in terms of the feel and execution of the play.

Regardless, neither of these two paradigms of 4e or DW delving looks nor plays like Moldvay or Torchbearer nor is such delve-play prep-centered + tradition crawl procedures. So yes, I certainly agree, you very much have to index what game you're GMing (and playing) as you consider the variance in task before you.

Hussar was claiming that having to prep the stats for this six-room dungeon in a game like D&D is prohibitively time-consuming, and therefore D&D is bad for sandboxes.

 

[Azzy]

Hussar was claiming that having to prep the stats for this six-room dungeon in a game like D&D is prohibitively time-consuming, and therefore D&D is bad for sandboxes.

While I'm sure that there are other games that handle it better, D&D invented the sandbox.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Hussar was claiming that having to prep the stats for this six-room dungeon in a game like D&D is prohibitively time-consuming, and therefore D&D is bad for sandboxes.

Depends on what you consider time-consuming, and how much you enjoy the process. Thus, like so many other things, it is purely subjective.

 

[Lazybones]

I like to make my games as sandboxy as possible (in terms of giving players freedom to make decisions beyond the default storyline I've created), but for me at least, it does involve considerable prep. My current campaign is set in a city state in an island archipelago. It has a series of quests that players can choose from, but I also started a "Player Options" folder based on things that the players have said over the course of the campaign (which is 151 sessions old at this point). That folder is almost as thick as the one holding the original quests, and includes a lot of things that they mentioned as ideas but never followed up on, like robbing a bank and setting up a magic shop, which I still spent considerable time preparing for. This particular game is on a VTT, so that might have some impact since it's harder to just throw something together on the fly.

 

[Faolyn]

Depends on what you consider time-consuming, and how much you enjoy the process. Thus, like so many other things, it is purely subjective.

Oh, definitely.

I just don't consider "requires a lot of prep" inherently meaning "bad for sandboxes." Bad for improv, sure, unless you have a large collection of material readily available to you. (I was running a GURPS game once ages ago where, for reasons I've since forgotten, the players insisted there was a chubacabra around and I was like "wait, I have stats for them!") But improv isn't a requirement for a sandbox--after all, if the players want to go to a place you haven't prepped for, you can always say "sounds good, let's call it here for the night so I can flesh it out."

 

[Lanefan]

Again, you are just proving my point. If I need three full modules, just to provide a modicum of choice for the players, that's not a system that's easy to run sandboxes in. If I need a raft of random generators, pages of notes, and adventures, just to get through the next four hours of play, then that's not an easy system to run sandboxes in.

I suppose I should mention that I'm assuming the presence of a bunch of published modules(* and **) regardless of the type of campaign one plans to (potentially) use them for. I mean, if you ain't got 'em on your shelf for real, there's an awful lot available online for (not-pirated) download.

Also, when I talk about a campaign I'm thinking of something that goes on long enough that maybe all those modules, plus others, might get run. Doesn't have to be decades, but certainly years rather than months.

If going in all you're looking to run is a quick three-adventure four-month banger then nearly all of this discussion becomes irrelevant.

* - or homebrew adventures, but if you're looking to reduce the workload these are probably not an option.
** - if you don't have adventures on standby then what are you intending the PCs to do once they reach an adventure site?

How much evidence is needed here?

More than what you've given so far.

And the "raft of random generators, pages of notes, and adventures" isn't to just get you through the next four hours of play. Ideally, it's to get you through the next four months or even next four years of play.

 

[Lanefan]

Well, I think when you get to high levels, D&D has traditionally pretty much broken down. 5e maybe is a bit less extreme than 2e or 1e (or I guess 3e, never played high levels there, it seemed to break at like 5).

1e starts wobbling at about name level (9th-ish for most classes) and the wheels tend to come right off by the early teens. With work it can be massaged so as to delay those phases by a few levels (the 1e-adjacent game I play in is wobbling at average-12th level though the wheels are still hangin' on) but that's about it.

We played 3.x into the low-double-digit levels and same thing, it started wobbling at around 9th-10th and by the low teens the wheels were going in different directions than the car.

With 1e, though, it's worth noting that the name-level wobble is somewhat intended by design; the assumption was that name-level characters would retire and become [landowners-nobles-politicians-whatever] while a new generation of characters took over the adventuring duties.