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Or I just let them sink or swim as oddities in a strange land. :) My current campaign started exactly this way, in faux-ancient Greece, only I ruled their first characters had to be Human; other species would (and very quickly did, even during their first adventure) become available once they...

Question: if you don't use maps then how do the players know or remember what is where in relation to what? For example, is Karnos (city) north or west of Torcha (another city), what type of terrain lies between them, and how long does it likely take to get from one to the other? Or do the...

IME a long-term campaign tends to end up being some of both: the players' decisions in a sandbox might lead them into a several-adventure storypath, after which they're back out in the sandbox and can go and-or do whatever. My current campaign is in theory a sandbox. in practice, however, the...

Except the way I read it, the question is whether a nat 1 or 20 gives the DM more latitude for narration of what happened. The player still doesn't get to narrate anything unless the DM cedes over that right.

Not quite. A nat 20 in combat could hit a range of ACs considerably beyond just "one-more than a nat 19 would hit".

Though they each didn't want to play a Viking (at least to start with), how interested were those players in playing in a Norse-based setting and culture? Maybe the setting appealed more than the actual playing of a Viking character. Or, is it possible each thought the others would all be...

If I-as-DM say some creature or other is a monster in this setting and you say it should be PC-playable (and maybe the official game even agrees with you), whose word is final at my table?

The Vegas reference wasn't to gambling (this time) but to the famous saying "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas". Where when I get immersed in a character, ideally I leave "myself" behind completely, or as much as possible. I do poems, song lyrics, etc.* as well - over 10,000 of 'em at last...

Pair of compasses doubling as chopsticks, perhaps? :)

@EzekielRaiden (and anyone else interested) You might want to give this page a glance - it's the player-visible introduction to my game and how I run it (along with some specific-to-world info at the bottom)...

That's because you're letting what happens in-game bleed over to out-of-game. Solve that, pretend the game is Vegas, and your friendships stay intact even after you've knocked off each others' characters. And you've got a new story to tell and laugh over. :)

And such worlds make at least a bit of reasonable sense: assuming the setting has a long-term history, major threats to civilized areas would likely already have been dealt with (or else there'd be no civilization left there) and thus would likely be either well penned up or fairly remote or...

To levels, specifically: yes. All caster types recognize the steps of progression up their class, both by what their best spells are and by how effective their spells are, and also by how often they can cast said spells. Comparing these things among your peers will fairly quickly tell you...

Who or what is Jamie Tartts?

Nitpick, perhaps: the PCs can go anywhere they like. It's just that if they do go to some places, they won't come back. Well, yes; one of the things kind of inherent to a playable sandbox is that there be challenges and adventure possibilities out there suitable-ish for all levels. The thing...

Thing is, that's kind of us as well: advancement is very slow in our games and is usually seen as a pleasant occasional side-effect of play rather than the reason for it. It's like a sports team, again. Sure you're all on a team pulling for the same goal (usually, to win), but that doesn't and...

A sandbox DM wouldn't do this, however. Instead the adventure site would be what it is and the players would be expected to either a) alter the course of their PCs toward something more their fighting weight or b) stand in and meet their doom in a hurry. If on the player-side map there's...

Well, if the players are given any sort of map of the setting that shows these roads they've become part of the shared fiction at that point, haven't they? The players may not yet know about the special conditions on these roads (e.g. they have built-in defenses against vandalism), but they...

Being friends outside the game helps a lot. Also, most of the time the game's an amusing diversion that we play for a laugh, and what happens in the game stays in the game.

In my case, I'm more talking about the bolded. There's a difference, I think, between outright cheating (misreporting die rolls, reading the module the DM's running, etc.) which is always bad, and pushing the envelope looking for exploits (which IMO it's then the DM's job to shut down) or cool...