D&D 5E Do You Prefer Sandbox or Party Level Areas In Your Game World?

So these are two approaches that campaigns can (and do) use. They have various names, but I'm using these names. I've used both approaches in the past.

Obviously there is more nuance than the definitions below, but these are two possible extreme ends of the poll when voting feel free to choose whichever end you tend towards, or embellish in the comments.

Sandbox -- each area on the world map has a set difficulty, and if you're a low level party and wander into a dangerous area, you're in trouble. The Shire is low level, Moria is high level. Those are 'absolute' values and aren't dependent on who's traveling through.

Party -- adventurers encounter challenges appropriate to their level wherever they are on the map. A low level party in Moria just meets a few goblins. A high level party meets a balrog!

Which do you prefer?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I have to say as a DM and a player, I prefer sandbox.
This actually mostly comes from the player side. I’m tired of wandering into what should be a really scary place and having a hard fight then winning and going into an easy place and having a normal fight and winning and wandering into an easy place and winning and winning and winning and winning. It’s been close to 20 years since we had a death in my game group not initiated by a player’s desire to change characters and probably 10 since we had to retreat from a fight.

I love the story, but the appropriate leveled area has lost all sense of risk. I read stories for the plot twists. Our games have lost that since 3rd Ed.

Note: just to be clear, we have avoided fights, when it’s clear there are overwhelming forces, but that’s normally telegraphed from a mile away, but once the dice come out and tactical combat starts, it’s always level appropriate for some reason.

Again, this is not actually using this style of play effectively. And it's really NOT hard to do it effectively! It is, in fact, rather more similar to the "curated randomness" of randomly-generated hexcrawls, or the dynamically-evolving "naturalism" of a sandbox where things aren't perfectly static until the player characters show up.

The key difference is that, with what's being called "sandbox" play here, there's much more emphasis put on the players personally figuring out what's doable and how powerful things are, and opportunities arising more due to random chance and the slow accretion of incidental choices. Whereas with the actually effective and appreciated alternative--what I would call "tale-building" since "narrative" is a bit loaded these days--the emphasis is more on the DM presuming the characters know what they're doing, and thus presenting options that make sense within the fiction pre-filtered for what the party would see as worth doing. (And, again, these filters can come from the environment, from the PCs' own knowledge/backgrounds/interests, or from the knowledge and behavior of other people/organizations in the world.)

Both things end up caring about what makes sense within the world. Both things care about groundedness. One puts more onus on the players personally, reducing the character to little more than a vehicle or avatar, while the other puts more onus on the DM personally, treating characters more as persons that the players get to control. Neither is okay with "Skyrim" play.

 

[S'mon]

Not sure where all this hate for Skyrim is coming from - seems like a great game to me!

 

[Sacrosanct]

I won't read almost 500 posts to double check, but I'm sure my vote will be similar to what several others have stated:

Sandbox. I prefer a living world, that goes on regardless of where the PCs are or what level they are. Low level PCs could very well enter a giant lair if said giants happened to be living in that area where the PCs decide to go. That being said, most often there are clues and hints that flow within the living world to give players an idea of what's what. I.e., if a giant lair was up in those hills, there are good chances people would know about it and at the very least rumors would have spread. And any adventurer worth their salt would (should) do at least some research before heading off into a new region. Ultimately the players decide what they do. I'm the referee and I need to be fair. That doesn't mean I need to change encounters to make sure every one can be beatable (balanced) by the PCs. (fine if you like that style, but it's not my preference).

 

[Tsuga C]

Sandbox is preferred, but with readily or semi-readily available lore and/or warnings to let the party know that Island X is a death sentence at their current level.

 

[Xeviat]

I find online VTT play is brilliant for sandboxing as I can have umpteen maps, including generic ones, set up and ready to use wherever the PCs go. Covid-Times is the first time I've run a multi party sandbox in the same campaign area, got 3 groups in my Faerun/Damara campaign and it's Roll20 that makes it possible.

I suppose I make too many custom monsters and dislike stock monsters for that to really work for me.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Not sure where all this hate for Skyrim is coming from - seems like a great game to me!

It's not hate for Skyrim. It's hate for Skyrim's specific level mechanic being transported, as precisely and unchanged as possible, into D&D.

Specifically, Skyrim dynamically levels everything based on your character's level. Alduin will be level 15 if you fight him at level 15. He will be level 80 if you fight him at level 80. Etc. No matter what you do, no matter where you go, no matter how experienced you become, the world is always exactly calibrated to your level. A lot of people don't care about this, or even see it as a perk...in Skyrim. But it is at best a gross misunderstanding and at worst a deep and fundamental caricature of the style of play Morrus so badly articulated in the OP.

What does the Epic level party meet in the Shire?

Nothing, because they don't have any reason to; they move on, probably after some fun RP and six meals a day. Or maybe an easily-resolved speedbump thing. Or Gandalf/an army of uprising peasant hobbits (if evil PCs). Or fallen Saruman and his goons--he's still an angelic being, even if fallen. Or an attack by the now-leaderless ringwraiths (they did go there before, after all). Or the PCs can try to save the people--but it'll be tough, rezzing/healing/rescuing everyone will be a tall order.

Some places, options won't be prolific. I opened with "nothing" for a reason: sometimes, there can't or shouldn't be something in a place. But if the party always goes where the answer is "nothing," there's a WAY bigger problem: the DM is running a game her players aren't interested in, and/or the players are thumbing their noses at the game the DM's offering. That's way bigger than sandbox vs "tale-building" (my term). And if the party doesn't, if they go places where it is reasonable for them to encounter interesting threats...I don't see how there's an issue.

I won't read almost 500 posts to double check, but I'm sure my vote will be similar to what several others have stated:

I'd actually really appreciate it if you would go back and read at least my first post, here. As I've said quite a bit just recently, I feel the presentation being given here is "do you like <generally acceptable flavor A>, or do you like <the most garbage form of flavor B>?" I think there's a much more interesting conversation to be had if we actually think about the best (and most grounded!) forms of BOTH styles, rather than giving one in its most congenial form and the other in basically the worst caricature available.

 

[Stacie GmrGrl]

Both

How dare you cross the streams like that... You should know that crossing the streams is dangerous and could end all life as we know it.

 

[Oofta]

How dare you cross the streams like that... You should know that crossing the streams is dangerous and could end all life as we know it.

But how else do we stop Gozer?

 

[Stacie GmrGrl]

Ideally I much prefer Sandbox because sandbox worlds feel much more organic and natural. Characters have their personal relatively perceived power level and much of the setting's denizens and environments (NPCs, monsters, hazards, threats) also have their own perceived power level based on the nature of what they are.

To have a setting where every encounter is warped to match the perceived power level of the player characters just makes the world less organic, more constructed, and not as believable.

And Maybe the problem is the perception of characters having a perceived power level. Because most sandbox, and hexcrawls by association, are played with games that have classes and levels then there is this extraneous consideration that has to be part of the world building of power level, and how some monsters are specifically designed to be encountered at specific character class levels... Which probably is why party level play is a more common way to go.

But if you take the sandbox approach and use a game without these obvious power level benchmarks... Games like Forbidden Lands, Hero System, Gurps, Mythras, Runequest, and Shadowrun... You don't have these obvious power levels. So conceptually it'd be easier to have a more organic sandbox, with the issue being even more up front work for the GM in setting preparation.

The other thing about these more universal games is they don't have escalating hit points, which is another factor in how organic a world feels.

I think k it cones down to if you want a organic world or a arbitrary world... One that has its natural denizens being authentically them that reacts around the PCs or one that's tailor made specifically for the PCs perceived power level and gets altered around the Meta-level of the character's game mechanics and not the person in the game world.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

I voted sandbox, but then realized the poll is confusing two options that are not related to one another. Sandbox can just mean you have a layout of encounters and locations that can be encountered in any order, but it doesn't prevent the GM from scaling those encounters to work for the party (and arguably, the current most popular iterations of the game discourage the GM/DM from not trying to keep encounters at least nominally balanced around the PC power level).

I think when most people think sandbox they really mean, "freedom to roam, without hidden strings, even if there are consequences," which few can disagree with. But in my forty odd years of gaming I have never actually seen a campaign that actually functioned like this in that exact way....even those who create wide open worlds in which to let the players roam about end up providing some form of direction (even if in response to the players), some form of consistency in the mechanical elements (such as avoiding untimely lethal encounters) in the name of a good time.