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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jhaelen" data-source="post: 5585444" data-attributes="member: 46713">That's an interesting point. Interesting to me, because it illustrates what I consider to be a weakness of sandbox games:Sandboxes seem to work best if the heroes' actions are largely inconsequential on a world-wide scope. I think it's also best for a sandbox if the pcs are really not that special, i.e. low-powered rather than (super-)heroic. This allows for others to jump in and take over.Heroic gameplay works best with a strong focus, like the 'save the world' scenario. If you want every action to revolve around the heroes, a sandbox doesn't work well.What works best for myself is a middle-ground between railroading and sandboxing. In my 3e campaign the overarching scenario was "An evil, psionic race is trying to take over the world". I did not decide right away which race that was. This was decided by the players' choices in a pivotal adventure late into the campaign.(Some additional details because I still enjoy talking about the campaign - ignore it if you like <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />)[sblock]What I had decided right from the beginning was that the heroes would have to gain strong allies if they wanted to have a chance to stop the villainous race. The more allies they would manage to win, the easier it would be in the end.After the pivotal adventure I started using a timeline with events that would happen if they didn't do something to foil the villains' plans.Before that point adventures mostly revolved around traveling all over the place, and learning about the land and the people.While I would have been prepared to continue playing if they didn't save the world (either for lack of trying, because they were too slow, or because their allied forces turned out to be too weak), I'm pretty sure that this wouldn't have been an appealing option for my players.But who knows, considering we just started a Dark Sun campaign <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />What happened was that they allied with Aboleth, Duergar, Githzerai and Orcs to defeat a combined force of mind flayers of Thoon and Ilsensine. (The orc allies were not something I ever had had in mind: It was an accidental side-effect of the druid player using reincarnate on a key npc, who was reborn as an orc!)They failed to ally with celestials (because of questionable behaviour), a draconic cult, the drow (for lack of investigating/contacting them), githyanki, and an undead army led by a vampire lord (because they didn't want them as allies or didn't realize they might be won as allies, respectively).In the end, they did defeat the threat (and several players actually felt the finale was too easy - but that was only a logical consequence of their effectiveness at utilizing their allies' resources and a bit of luck).[/sblock]When I introduced my campaign idea to the players, they basically agreed they were interested in battling the psionic villains and accepted that they would have to play characters that were lawful members of a border patrol - at least initially.So, they started on a railroad with a fixed destination, got to change a couple of switch points (and once replace a wagon), stop every once in a while at a tiny sandbox, and choose to skip a few stops.</blockquote>

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