Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="shoak1" data-source="post: 6888342" data-attributes="member: 54380">Well, I disagree w/the concept of sandbox being preferred by experienced GMs.  IMO sandox makes the DM too much of a player.  IMO most players don't mind having their choices reduced in number in exchange for knowing that the DM is not just making stuff up as they go along.  In my experience, the longer a GM is a GM, the more apt he is to give in to the dark side and give in to the option of making stuff up as he goes rather than doing the hard prep work, all the while citing sandbox and player freedom as his excuse.IMO CoS as written is a hot mess.  But I think its really more just about the way the designers are going in 5E w/the whole sandbox thing.  Not my cup of tea, I liked 3.5 w/its boxed encounter descriptions, set encounters.  I always heavily mod the published adventures to give them more structure.  With CoS, I am doing that now for my upcoming campaign - I basically remake the adventure in 3.5 style, by balancing the encounters (making most of them be within a certain CR range rather than randomly distributed between CR 1/4 and CR 18 lol), giving structure to events and jettisoning the sandbox approach, adding DCs for events not given in the book, printing copies of magic items and monsters to put w/the room key.  I pre-roll random encounters, and pre-design those rolled so I don't have to create something weak on the fly.I also make "sub-games" of town encounters - in short saying "here are the x things you can do in town and y people you can speak to, you have z amount of time because of such-and-such time pressure, so you can do this many things, what do you choose to do?  And I have all DCs of everything ready, we do a little roleplaying to modify DCs, and we're done.  Based on the results, we then go to encounter a, b, or c, with the encounters possibly modified based on their info gathering.</blockquote>

Verification