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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Zardoz" data-source="post: 4025936" data-attributes="member: 704">A sandbox style game that does not impose any direction on the person playing it is generally only as the things you can do in that sandbox, and the 'toys' you can play with.By toy, I mean things within the game world the players can interact with.  But with D&D, you need to find a way to let the players know that the toy at least exists.  The big risk of a sandbox game is that you create some awesome toys and then bury them deep in some corner of the sandbox where no one can find it.As has been pointed out, the potential for wasted work is pretty high if the players do not know to go looking for things to do in the campaign world.  And if the only things in the world are just static dungeons full of loot, there really is not much difference between trying to run a sandbox and running a string of unconnected dungeon crawls.At this point, I will drop the metaphors.I find a better approach to an undirected campaign is to flesh out some broad details about the world, a basic who is who, what is where.  Then on the first adventure, feed the players 3 unconnected plothooks, and watch which way they jump.  Keep the early stuff simple enough to pull out of your arse on the spot, and figure out what details your players jump on.From that point, all you need to do is stay about 2 or 3 steps ahead of the players.  Work out the NPC's you need.  Introduce plot elements that the players can choose to act on or ignore, and decide what happens if the players ignore a threat long enough.  Create some simple villains, and work out basic escape plans.  Any villain that can live through 2 fights against the players should automatically be worked into whatever plot threads you can work on.Between games, figure out who the players were unable to kill, or ignored, or otherwise worked with, and figure out how they react to the players.  Then just keep notes.Sometime around level 6, you should have a pretty solid list of viable plot hooks on the go that have a direct connection to the actions of your players in addition to any static elements you introduced.  This should be enough to keep your game going for a long time.END COMMUNICATION</blockquote>

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