A couple of thoughts about encounter balance

[MerricB]

In a "sandbox" game, having all significant encounters tailored to the party's level isn't necessary or likely. A good sandbox has a range of difficulty in its encounters, and the party will gravitate to the encounters of the appropriate difficulty - avoiding the ones that are too difficult.

Of course, "significant" in a sandbox is entirely in the eyes of the party and the story that they and the DM are creating between them.

However, once you get to your planned (story) adventure, you get encounters that the party must overcome if they're to continue the adventure. Most published adventures have this type of encounter. The Giants series do; Keep on the Borderlands doesn't.

At this point, you need a much better grasp of relative balance between party and monsters - and you can get wide variance between groups' experiences with adventures as a result!

Cheers!

 

[Wik]

Yet, you can still have a sandbox with goals. Let's say you need to cure the king, and to do so, you need a rare herb. A sage tells you the herb grows on the side of a specific mountain, that is frequented by hill giants.

First off, the PCs don't know where this mountain is - that whole valley is unexplored, and it seems like there are a lot of mountains. So, they prowl over the area, hitting encounter and plots they make up themselves. The king won't die until the next lunar eclipse, which is in six months, so they follow their own goals occasionally (which is why you play a sandbox!)

Eventually, they find the mountain, realize it's their goal because of some descriptions given by the healer, and get to work searching. You could go the way the Giants series does it - a set series of encounters against the party's strength. Or, you could still keep the game as a sandbox.

That flower only grows in rare places. To find it, the PCs need to encounter it from a wandering monster table - just wandering around the mountains long enough will be enough to find it. Or, they could befriend the local tribe that wanders the mountains and get them involved in the search. Or, they could cast speak with plants. Or...

In other words, the campaign has a goal, but it remains a sandbox throughout.

 

[Wik]

Or, to put it another way, "The Campaign is a Sandbox Until Things Start to Matter" has always kind of bugged me. I hated it in Fallout 3, and it bugs me here. If you're going to run a railroad or a guided goal campaign (and I have no problem with that - my campaign can be a bit of a railroad at times, and my players seem fine), so be it. But if you're going to run a sandbox, I think it cheats the players out of things to only run a half-sandbox, and then put a switch on them halfway through.

Being able to make any choice in response to your setting is fun. But, if the goal is to get to the Giant's lair - well, being able to do anything you want, and then getting to the giant's lair and losing a large amount of your plot freedom is kind of a kick in the teeth. I know, as a player, I'd do my best to avoid the end goal and stick to the sandbox, next time.

 

[TerraDave]

Or, to put it another way, "The Campaign is a Sandbox Until Things Start to Matter" has always kind of bugged me.

This "funneling" is a way to give the players a lot of control but still have enough plot to bring things to a rousing conclusion and possibly link to further adventure.

Of course, you probably don't want to go from wide open to an extended narror plot (a long narrow funnel).

 

[TerraDave]

As implied in the example above, part of this is informational. If there is some big hurrdle, you can for shadow and put some burden for prep on the party. It also depends on the edition/game: 4E probably has the most margin for error, single oponent 3E ecounters seem to have the worst.

 

[Dausuul]

Edit: Deleted.

 

[Ariosto]

In a tournament scenario that provides the starting state of characters, and strongly directs the order of events, with arbitrary limits on player action in place -- naturally you have a "better grasp of relative balance between party and monsters" in encounters #1, #2, #3, etc..

In an old-style campaign, you are not in charge of any of that. If the players decide that Characters A, B, and C and their henchmen will undertake a venture down a passage in the Lonely Mountain, then your job is just to adjudicate things fairly. The players are free to assess the situation and adjust their plans accordingly at any time. There is no guarantee that trying to beat a Balrog would be anything but suicidal -- but there is nothing forcing them to do so.

This "sandbox" you propose appears to me to offer the worst of both worlds. You have "your planned (story) adventure", with "encounters that the party must overcome if they're to continue the adventure" -- a taking over of control as in a tournament -- but up to that point, you give players enough rope to hang themselves -- a portion of the freedom of a campaign -- by messing with your ability to predict their state when they get locked into your program of encounters.

If you really want to do that, then I think you had better take responsibility for adjusting encounters on the fly to some standard of per-encounter balance. There may still be some scope for strategy on the players' part, but in essence you seem to have made each encounter a game in itself.