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?

 

[Emerikol]

I don't know what work is being done here by the phrase the right. All you're saying is that someone who wants to GM a game (they don't become "the GM" until they actually start GMing) can offer up x, and that others may or may not want to play x. But it's not as if we're talking about blind declarations, or a formal auction, or something of that sort. Just like I can talk to my friends about where to go for dinner, so I can talk to my friends about what RPG we want to play together.

What I mean is that I give the DM a lot of leeway in running the game he wants to run. His investment is far higher especially with my style of play. If though what is offered is totally unappealing to someone then they don't have to join that particular campaign. I guess I am not in the situation where I have exactly five friends that I would always game with no matter what. In that situation, you may approach it differently.

I have more people who might play and most of the time they all want to play and often I turn people away. Sometimes I've ran two campaigns but as I've aged and gotten more work responsibility I just don't have the time or energy to run two games. I've ran single games with 9 players before and it was not ideal. So I shy away from too large a group. 4 or 5 is fine.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Vitally important advice if you're going to run a sandbox campaign where most of what happens in the game is driven by player ambition.

For context, if you read the 1e DMG, Gygax stresses over and over again that letting players easily acquire whatever they may purport to want leads inevitably to bored players and dull campaigns. Something he knew well in 1979 that some DMs still don't grok.

The very same DMing advice restated in friendly, non-threatening, story-centric, modern-day terms would be: find out what your players want, then make their characters go through hell to get whatever it is.

Dismissing this idea as "adversarial" completely misses the point, which is to maintain healthy long-term interest in the campaign.

You’re giving him/it too much credit. What the advice actually says is obviously and unavoidably a statement that the DM has to be the Boss, and that the DMs world and story are more important than the PCs.

 

[Lanefan]

You’re giving him/it too much credit. What the advice actually says is obviously and unavoidably a statement that the DM has to be the Boss, and that the DMs world and story are more important than the PCs.

I wouldn't put it that the DM's world and story are more important than the PCs, but I certainly stand behind the idea that the campaign itself is and must be* bigger than any one PC within it. Characters come and go. Hell, players come and go. But the campaign continues, notwithstanding; and that's what I think Gygax was trying to get at.

* - with one outlier exception, that being a single-player campaign that aims specifically and only to tell the story of one PC.

 

[S'mon]

You’re giving him/it too much credit. What the advice actually says is obviously and unavoidably a statement that the DM has to be the Boss, and that the DMs world and story are more important than the PCs.

Gygaxian D&D doesn't have a concept of 'story' - you can see this in his adventure and campaign advice. He does prioritise the 'milieu'.

 

[Jack Daniel]

You’re giving him/it too much credit. What the advice actually says is obviously and unavoidably a statement that the DM has to be the Boss, and that the DMs world and story are more important than the PCs.

And you appear to be missing the context, the particulars of which Lanefan and S'mon have already pointed out. (I can only assume so, since you initially expressed surprise at what was written in the 1e DMG.)

Would a lot of Gary Gygax's advice be downright terrible for an epic fantasy game involving five friends around a kitchen table, where one of them is the DM leading his friends through his story, and the other four are each playing one special character who will form part of a boon fellowship that will inevitably go from zeros to heroes as they work to thwart a supervillain and save the world? Yeah, probably. But OAD&D isn't that kind of game, so you shouldn't expect advice in support of that.

But what about a 1970s Midwestern Gygaxian wargamey persistent sandbox camapign, where there are more players involved in the campaign than could ever all sit down together around one table, some of them regulars and some not, and each player has at least five or six characters to draw from when deciding which character they'll take on a given evening's adventure? Damn good advice. Of course the DM has to be the boss with a setup like that, and of course the DM's milieu is more important than any one PC or any group of PCs. It very nearly has to be that way for the game to function at all.

But there you sit, rendering judgement, absent the proper context.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Gygaxian D&D doesn't have a concept of 'story' - you can see this in his adventure and campaign advice. He does prioritise the 'milieu'.

Nitpicking. DnD is better off having moved away from the early Gygaxian model of play.

But there you sit, rendering judgement, absent the proper context.

Oh get off your high horse. No one is impressed.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Gary Gygax employed a degree of 'Schrodinger's GMing' in his games.

Monster encounters looked like this: 12 ORCS, 4 with crossbows, 7-12 gp each, POTION OF HEROISM in hole under water barrel. Will fight until death.

Depending on the party entering their area, the HPs would be set high, or rolled, or set low. Likewise, the orcs might have a spy hole, detect the approaching party, fire through loopholes in the door and wall, or else be sitting around and possibly surprised.

Source

By "depending on the party" I think Gygax means that more powerful parties would have more difficult encounters.

 

[S'mon]

Nitpicking.

Nope

 

[pemerton]

Even allowing for the context of Gygax's advice, I don't see any reason to prioritise the game above the campaign.

 

[the_redbeard]

As for the OP, I'm definitely in the Sandbox style as a DM, albeit there should be foreshadowing, or the opportunity for foreknowledge, so that the players get a general idea of what they are up against. There's a line of advice that I like in the somewhat hyperbolic "Quick Primer for Old School D&D" that goes something like:

'If you haven't quizzed the one-armed former adventurer in the tavern, consider it a failure on your part as a player'

The point: if where you're going is completely unknown, then you have no warning of what is out there. It behooves you to do some pep to find out what is out there. I'd be a bad DM if there weren't means to do that, meaningful improvisiation to creative player investigation, or at least piles of burnt bones in front of the dragon's lair.

I'm fairly comfortable knowing that the playstyle I run limits how many players are interested. I do try to be up front about what I'm throwing to see if they want to catch it, with a 1 page bullet point description of my intended DMing style.

What surprises me is that sandbox is winning the poll. That is NOT what I expect from the majority of players who appear to me to be all about 'character story and destiny', single villain worlds and the like; the standard assumptions of the adventure path. There's a reason those things sell: lots of people play that way. I'm glad they have fun, but that's not the kind of fun we have at my tables.