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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 9066536" data-attributes="member: 70468">Your campaign is conflicted about its nature. You call it a sandbox, but the play you describe is more like a traditional, curated, story-based campaign. The PCs can make some choices, but they’re still doing tasks for NPCs, and you have intentions for how certain situations should be approached. There’s also the issue that not only are they bound to their location, but the binding effectively prevents them from hiding from the authorities when they get into trouble.It’s okay if you want to do a story-based campaign. Those are very popular, and people have a lot of fun doing them. However, I think it’s important to step back and understand what’s actually being done in the campaign and reconcile it with what it’s supposed to be about. That seems to be the source of conflict. There’s a lot of talk about story and what the NPCs are doing but nothing about the PCs’ goals and what they’re trying to accomplish (beyond the job that was given to them). Sandbox play should be driven by the PCs and the goals they’ve decided. If the intent is a sandbox (versus story-driven), then find out what the PCs want to accomplish and orient play around that.Play it. If the campaign is really a sandbox, it’s not about some particular story. Until the PCs are taken out of play, they can still try to pursue their goals. Even in prison, they can attempt to break out, take advantage of the situation, subvert their situation, etc. However, to get to that point, the game has to get there. They have to be arrested and processed. The authorities need to know what happened and act on it. There’s a lot that can happen between “the PCs made a mess of things” and “the PCs are imprisoned and out of play”. If I would retcon anything, it’s the tracker spells.I run an exploration-driven sandbox campaign (and that’s what my homebrew system is designed to facilitate). I try to avoid prescribing a particular outcome or putting them in situations where there is an intended path. There have been times where they could have (and did) walk away from a situation. They recently killed one of their ally’s people. There will be consequences for those things, but they’ll be operationalized according to my system’s procedures. (In a game like PF2, I’d look at the VP subsystem to track something like that.) It takes time for consequences to be found out and then come to fruition.Based on my experience, my advice if you do want to run a sandbox (versus a curated game) is to dial back on the quest-oriented play. Let the players establish goals. Sometimes that will involve going to people who can help them and doing a favor, but sometimes they’re just going to go out and do stuff. Worlds Without Number has some good, system-neutral advice for running a sandbox in an adventure-oriented framework (versus exploration-driven, which is what I like to do). One of the keys is to ask the players at the end of the session what their intent is for the next, so you can prepare something appropriate for them for the next session. You should only do as much prep as necessary (and that you enjoy doing, though overprepping comes with the risk of wasted prep).</blockquote>

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