D&D 5E DMing, Sandboxes, and Boring Dungeons. HELP

[Gargoyle]

gargoyle and edhel:

At this point, I shouldn't get Hoard of the Dragon Queen right?

I wouldn't unless you think you'll definitely use at least parts of it. I bought it because I plan on running it, but I'm still unsure of whether I'll run the whole thing or just steal from it. Stealing bits and pieces from published adventures is a great tactic, but if don't use it all, it's a waste of money.

 

[Rune]

I've written a series of lessons for DMing in a style I call "streamlined sandbox."

I think you might find them useful, as they are aimed toward lightening the workload in both prep and running the game.

You can check them out here.

 

[Henry]

gargoyle and edhel:

Thanks a lot for your input. This seems really valuable and seemingly learned through experience. Man...I'm getting excited for the possibilities. I'm gonna read it multiple times to internalize it.

I think I will use the same setting as in the starter set, but make it my own as mentioned... beyond the specific areas mentioned in the adventure. My players are relatively new with some 4e experience, but I'm hoping one doesn't yell out "no! Neverwinter is not actually like that!" eh...


urg... why does MM and DMG have to come out so late?!

At this point, I shouldn't get Hoard of the Dragon Queen right?

Welcome, SpiritofFire! I really don't have much to add to the excellent advice above, which was given by some among the best DMs on these forums the only two things to add are:

1) your coloration of the words in your text to grey is reacting kind of badly with the default black theme on the boards, making them difficult to read, compared to all the others in the thread;

2) You are new to DMing; this is the part in riding a bike where you're frequently falling down, learning the balance point, and getting back up again. Don't be afraid to bomb some stuff at first. Every sentence of all those words of wisdom above were forged like a finely-honed sword from the coals and slag of dozens of terribly written dungeon crawls, over-rewarded PCs, total party kills, derivative adventures, and learning to deal with problem players maturely and efficiently. Some of these people have probably been DMing for decades, but they went through their first steps just like everyone else. To steal an old phrase, "they turn their rulebooks one page at a time like everyone else."

Good luck, and go play!

 

[Rune]

You are new to DMing; this is the part in riding a bike where you're frequently falling down, learning the balance point, and getting back up again. Don't be afraid to bomb some stuff at first. Every sentence of all those words of wisdom above were forged like a finely-honed sword from the coals and slag of dozens of terribly written dungeon crawls, over-rewarded PCs, total party kills, derivative adventures, and learning to deal with problem players maturely and efficiently. Some of these people have probably been DMing for decades, but they went through their first steps just like everyone else. To steal an old phrase, "they turn their rulebooks one page at a time like everyone else."

Good luck, and go play!

Yeah. This.

 

[GSHamster]

Be careful of making things too open-ended. A player has a lot less information than the DM does, so it's often harder to make good decisions. As a general rule of thumb, assume that 50% of the info you are trying to convey to the players simply doesn't make it across.

You can try for a middle ground at first. Instead of having the players be completely free, try to frame it so that at any given point, they have 3 obvious choices. That can help players get used to choices at first, while not overwhelming them.

 

[GX.Sigma]

I figured Hoard of the Dragon Queen could help me achieve that, but if it's just a series of small interactions and linked dungeons, I'm going to cancel my preorder. If anyone has HotDQ already, please let me know what it's like!

I don't think anyone has addressed this yet: Hoard of the Dragon Queen is not a sandbox. It's definitely a--what's the polite term?--"story-driven campaign."

Edit: Oh, a few people did. And I accidentally double-posted the rest of this post. Welp.

 

[GX.Sigma]

There's also no info on the surrounding areas. The players wanted to go to Neverwinter to get better supplies and etc, but I know nothing of this city! No info whatsoever, even tho the players supposedly just came from there .

DM pro tip:

• If you and/or the players don't care: "Sure. It's a big city, so you can buy whatever you want."
• If you AND the players care: "...and I don't have a description of it right now, so I'll tell you all about it next time."

The players understand that you have limited resources.

I am learning to hate the idea of dungeons. It always devolves into: search for traps, clear room, search/loot, repeat.

This is only a problem if the combats are too easy. If the party can solve the dungeon just by picking a room at random, killing everything inside, and repeating, then that's what they'll do.

After 4e, I decided to try to "theater of the mind" a dungeon in the 5e starter set, but the players lost their sense of direction and tactical awareness. The wizard complained how he didn't know how to space out his movements and AOE spells. Everyone got lost since they didn't know which room connected to which hallway without their grid.
...

How do you keep the players from getting lost in these complicated dungeons without a battlemap drawn in? I am DREADING the last dungeon in the starter set. LOOK AT THE MAP! OMG!

The DM should describe the layout of the dungeon as they explore it. If they can't keep track of that properly (hint: there's paper and pencils on the table for a reason), that's their fault. You will sometimes need to help them out a little (drawing a rough diagram on scratch paper is fine). They (and you) will get better at it over time.

How do you deal with stuff like zoning, flanking, etc and AOE spells using the "theater" method? Does anyone use a diceroll to determine how many enemies get hit within blast range or if allies get caught up in it too?

A few ways to deal with this:

1. Imagine the grid in your head. It may sound insane, but it works for me sometimes.
2. Think of it in terms of zones: inside the room, at the door, outside the room. Assume everyone is in a clump in the middle of the room unless they specifically say otherwise.
3. Think of it in terms of the story, or the choices the character has to make: "You can hit two goblins, or three goblins and the dwarf."
4. If you're not sure, roll a die (make sure the players know you're rolling it).

 

[Joe Liker]

I've only ever run one sandbox campaign. It went better than I ever could have dreamed, but it took a little while to get off the ground. I hadn't read the seven guidelines mentioned upthread, but I did manage to come up with most of them on my own, entirely by accident.

By FAR, the hardest part was training the players to take the initiative and set their own goals. Video games and linear adventures have people so used to being led by the nose, it's like pulling teeth to get them engaged in creating their own story. I set so many hooks and points of interest, but they still seemed to expect me to tell them what to do.

For a couple of sessions, I thought I was being too subtle, so the hooks became so blatant that it was basically no different from the average railroad campaign. Then I realized this was NOT the way to get them in the spirit of the thing.

Eventually, I just sat there in silence. As they stared blankly back, I said, "So I guess you guys are just going to hang out around the campfire today, huh?" It was so weird seeing the light bulb come on over their heads -- OH! This really is a sandbox campaign! (Even though I'd described it as such in no uncertain terms.)

They went on to explore with relish, develop those hooks into meaty plotlines, and come up with all kinds of amazing plans for reaching some very interesting goals. Hmm ... I really should run another sandbox sometime.

 

[Libramarian]

Hmm, while I see the validity of your advice. It seems like prolonged combat doesn't interest my players. Even if they give it some flair, it is mostly walking up and swinging. Even with traps, treasure, and cool weapons, it doesn't seem to get my players to care. A cool silvery sword which pulses with an unknown magical energy? eh pocket it and go into next room. I was shocked.... I mean these dungeons were designed by professional game designers, so I don't know if I could make them any better. It seems as if they're in a dungeon for a reason, that end goal is all they care about resolving. Most of the time, they don't even bother looting the bodies or searching actively for loot. Which is why the logical step for me seems to be to minimize dungeons to small but memorable skirmishes and focus on exploration, character interaction, and etc.

TBH the first combat in the starter set seemed to be the only FUN fight they had since they were trying to figure out what was going on, inspecting the site, and trying to gather info from the enemies. Every "dungeon" with a drawn out grid map for the DM in the adventure ended up a slogfest.

I think pure dungeon-crawling is done better by the early editions of the game. There are many reasons for this but a big one is gp=xp, the old rule where recovering treasure gave you xp immediately. Suddenly a lot of treasure that used to be boring isn't because it ties right into xp. Traps also were generally deadlier in early dungeons, which made exploring more tense. Also combat was much faster to resolve. In my 1e campaign we typically get through about 30 rooms in 4 hours. 5e is supposed to work much better for the classic dungeon-crawl than 4e. I haven't played it since the very first playtest packet so I'm not sure how successful it is at that.

The fact that you're thinking of moving away from dungeons does make sense to me. I'm not a huge fan of the dungeon as an adventure setting considered separately from the rules in early D&D that led synergistically to the dungeon-crawl. When you prune those things away I can see how it's kind of a boring setting in itself. You might say that I'm a fan of dungeon-crawls but not so much of dungeons. I think of modern D&D adventures that use dungeons but don't really have the exploration and resource management of early dungeon-crawling as a skeumorph.

 

[Yora]

Traps were also deadlier because characters were easily replaceable. When your character gets killed, the idea was that you all have a laugh and five minutes later the replacement character is ready to go.

 

[Phoenix8008]

Welcome to the boards and to the wonderful world of DMing!

I have run some sandbox-ish campaigns before, but they are never as good as I want them to be. I'm taking notes from this thread as well and copy/pasting links to some of these offered resources as well, so I'm not a Sandbox Master by any means. But I do have some advice that seems relevant, so I'll offer it as well.

I love 5E even more because it helps with what I feel is a key component of Sandbox DMing: character connection to the world. The backrounds that are available are so great for this. You can quickly and easily pick a character goal, some group the character is associated with, some bond they have (maybe with an NPC or family member), and even a flaw that can be used for some great roleplaying opportunities! That's what I'd focus on to start. Yes, having the bare bones of a meta plot and bad guy factions and their goals is needed as well, but the characters (and their players) are the focus.

Since you've been playing the Starter Set, check out this thread on Reddit from another DM whose Noble Fighter decided to make Phandalin his own, and the ideas going into domain management type play that sprang up from that discussion: Reddit.com/r/dndnext - Owning Phandalin Using this, you could really start the campaign there and build a sandbox out of it that way if the players wanted to.

Keep handy little things that are easy to forget to mention, but that build realism in the world, like a random table for weather. Make sure to mention what the weather is every day or two of campaign time. It's easy to forget and I've seen campaigns go on for 'years' of time in an eternal spring/summer with no rainy days ever showing up.

Also: time, Time, TIME! Give the party stretches of nothing to do between adventures. (Edit: not NOTHING to do. But long term crafting, town building, training, or just lack of quests to pass some time, etc.) Maybe weeks or months of time. I'm playing in a 3.5 D&D game that the characters started at 8th level and are now up to 16th level... in 6 months of 'in game' time! Whatever your big meta plot is, don't make the end of the world happening a month from the start of the campaign.

That's what I've got for now. Hope it helps and I wish you good luck!

 

[Uller]

I haven't read the whole thread...but the most important advice was given early. Start small and don't script everything out. Sandbox campaign's are the PC's stories...the DM is just helping them construct it. If you have some over arching campaign story in mind, the players will still feel like they are following your script. Besides, maybe today the barbarian horde commanded by the evil cleric and his demon allies sounds like an interesting campaign idea, but 3 months from now you (or your players) will have thought of something more interesting.

The way I do it is I start small: a village, a small outpost or a neighborhood in a bigger town or city and a couple of paragraphs of how it fits into the surrounding areas and another about what the PCs might be doing there. I usually "railroad" the PCs in the first session the same way LMoP does (I like to start a campaign with a fight or some other crisis). But then at the end of each session I try to give the party 2-3 concrete options of what to do next (and encourage them to come up with their own as well). I encourage the party to choose their next course at the end of a session so I have a week or so to detail things. That way you don't have to have _everything_ planned for...just the most likely stuff.

As time passes, some options expire and new ones arise (if one option was "stop the bandits from robbing the caravan" once that event happens it will go away but might be replaced with a couple of new options like "capture the bandits that murdered the caravan guards" or "find the kidnapped merchants from the caravan")

When you feel like a particular theme or set of circumstances has played out, shake things up with a big event that moves the campaign along and reminds the PCs that there are other, more powerful, actors in the world.

 

[Uller]

Also: time, Time, TIME! Give the party stretches of nothing to do between adventures. (Edit: not NOTHING to do. But long term crafting, town building, training, or just lack of quests to pass some time, etc.) Maybe weeks or months of time. I'm playing in a 3.5 D&D game that the characters started at 8th level and are now up to 16th level... in 6 months of 'in game' time! Whatever your big meta plot is, don't make the end of the world happening a month from the start of the campaign.

Yes. This is important. The PCs need time to establish their relationship with the setting and what their stake in it is. In my 4e campaign, we started with Reavers of Harkenwold. Moved on to Thunderspire Labyrinth, then the party became important figures within Harkenwold and important allies of the Baron (he even gave them titles...the ranger became the sheriff, the fighter became commander of the Baron's men-at-arms. The wizard established himself in the abandoned tower, etc...After a time, we started over with 1st level characters and the PCs became important NPCs. Then as those characters came into their own, the original party started reprising their roles and joining the party on occasion. The players seemed to really enjoy how their PCs became a part of the setting. But that takes time.

 

[SpiritOfFire]

Keep handy little things that are easy to forget to mention, but that build realism in the world, like a random table for weather. Make sure to mention what the weather is every day or two of campaign time. It's easy to forget and I've seen campaigns go on for 'years' of time in an eternal spring/summer with no rainy days ever showing up.

Oh man...I just realized I never changed the weather >.<

Granted, most of my 4e experience was indoors, but I should definitely add weather from now on.

Are there any free resources for simple, but commonly used random tables? The d30 Sandbox Companion seems a bit over engineered for me.