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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6711030" data-attributes="member: 5834">It depends. There are different types of sandboxes. You might have a megadungeon sandbox like Undermountain, Rappan Athuk, or the original Temple of Elemental Evil big book. Or a location sandbox like Keep on the Borderlands or the first Kingmaker module where you wander around an area finding encounters. Out of the Abyss is like the second type with a longer journey. These type of sandboxes require a lot of preparation or they become way too easy and monotonous. Kingmaker was an example of this. At low level almost any encounter is difficult, so the start was fine. Once the party gets a few levels they started to steamroll encounters that occurred once or twice a day. That's the big problem with sandboxes and the nature of random encounters. You might only get one or two encounters a day of relatively moderate strength. The party rolls over them like a steamroller and you have an adventure that becomes a monotonous string of weak encounters that bores everyone to tears. Players, especially veteran players, can only ooh and ahh so much at random encounters like glowing magical fungus or a rockslide before they go, "Let's get to some real encounters. This is boring." I'm looking at some of these encounters and they'll get destroyed as soon as the party gets some AoE or has a cleric in the group. Won't even be a challenge. It will be less than a speed bump. It further illustrates how incompetent module designers are at encounter design. They love to tell a story or build an encounter with some history. They are bad at designing an encounter intended to challenge a party. Sandboxes are some of the worst designed adventures when it comes to providing a sufficient challenge. Smart players know how to avoid dangerous areas until they are appropriate level. They spend their time cherry picking weak encounters leveling up appropriate before hitting areas that become weak when they're the appropriate level. There is some stuff to work with in the module. So far it's looking like monotonous, weak encounters strung together in a random fashion that my group will steamroll until their eyes glaze over waiting for something challenging.</blockquote>

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