Guiding players to more sandbox-y play?

[TwoSix]

You can lead a horse to a sandbox, but you can't make him drink.

Which is good, because you know, sand.

 

[rogueattorney]

Start with a brief campaign background. And I do mean brief, a half page of material at most. It may help if the group is all familiar with the campaign setting before hand. So if everyone knows the Forgotten Realms or Medieval France or Middle Earth or Westeros or whatever, they have a general idea "where" things are, what the issues of the world are, and what their characters' options are.

Second, I'd give them an explicit choice between about 3 adventures to start off the campaign, and make sure that they know that you, as DM, really don't care which one they choose. "The princess was kidnapped, hobgoblins have been spotted on the northern border, and the caravans are hiring mercenary guards for their trip across the desert. What interests you?"

Third, have interesting places for them to explore that aren't directly tied to the events of the campaign world. Have a haunted castle, a dangerous marsh, a vortex to another world. Let them see these places from the distance. If they decide to go there, great. If not, it's their choice. Have legends of artifacts, lost heroes, lost cities, etc. that the characters can search for if they choose.

Have an information conduit, an npc sage or somesuch, that allows the pcs to get information on the campaign setting whenever they are curious. Don't fall back on knowledge checks and the like. If there's some information that would lead them to adventure that is "generally well known" tell the pcs.

Have campaign events that the pcs can respond to, but aren't campaign killers if they don't. End of the world type scenarios aren't great in sandbox settings. If the characters don't respond to the events, have later events that resolve the situation. Someone else rescues the princess. A village is sacked by the hobgoblins. The caravan is lost in the desert, etc.

Finally, the 8 most important words that should be uttered at the end of every session... "What do you want to do next time?" Keep an open dialogue with your players on what they'd like their characters to do. Talk to them about their character's goals and how they might be achieved. These can be as simple as "I want to find a magic sword" to as involved as "I want to take over the world."

 

[S'mon]

A couple of people have already given my best advice - have three things going on, and let the players decide what to do about them. Three is an ideal number to give choice without burying them in options, which usually induces decision paralysis.

I think it's best to start very small, with a detailed home base locale such as a village that you can reuse, and some nearby adventure sites. The home base should include several detailed NPCs, some of whom have their own things going on. It should have enough resources that the PCs don't need to leave right away. A roadside inn is too small IME, but a trade village with inn, shops, church, a manor house for the local lord et al, might be enough.

 

[rogueattorney]

A couple of people have already given my best advice - have three things going on, and let the players decide what to do about them. Three is an ideal number to give choice without burying them in options, which usually induces decision paralysis.

I think it's best to start very small, with a detailed home base locale such as a village that you can reuse, and some nearby adventure sites. The home base should include several detailed NPCs, some of whom have their own things going on. It should have enough resources that the PCs don't need to leave right away. A roadside inn is too small IME, but a trade village with inn, shops, church, a manor house for the local lord et al, might be enough.

Good stuff.

Related to not overwhelming the players with stuff is not overwhelming yourself as DM.

You simply cannot prepare everything in your world before play. That's why communication with the players is so important. You need to know where their interests lie if you have to stay one step ahead of the players. You have to be willing to improvise. A select few random charts can be a great way to come up with something quick.

And don't be afraid to say, "Sorry guys, I just didn't think you'd make it this far tonight. Can we go somewhere else and come back here next time?" Actually, depending on how game-y you want to make it, you can actually incorporate that aspect of the sandbox into your game. For example, I had a DM in a sandbox mega-dungeon campaign that would give us bonus xp any time we found a section of the dungeon that he hadn't detailed yet, as long as we agreed to postpone exploring that section until it was ready.

 

[Libramarian]

To prove to them that you don't mind if they mess up your plans, mess up your own plans--give them hooks/quests/missions that are obviously in conflict and will lead to mutually exclusive resolutions.

Occasionally develop something involving a throwaway NPC that the players know would never have occurred if they hadn't decided to show an interest in them. Show them that the campaign grows in whatever direction they go in.

Don't tie all the adventure seeds down to specific people and places. Keep some flexible, e.g. a table of random encounters that could occur anywhere in a city, a list of rumors that you can draw from whenever you need something for an NPC to talk about.

I think good sandbox settings should strain verisimilitude. They should be loaded with interesting stuff, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense, like a dungeon. Think "adventureland". The PCs are like Conan or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser--even if they start out just wandering around they'll be sure to bump into something interesting. Basically you have to convince the players that they won't be punished with boredom for exploration, like they would be in most games.

 

[Quickleaf]

Finally, the 8 most important words that should be uttered at the end of every session... "What do you want to do next time?

I agree. With my group, sometimes this works, and often it doesn't. What happens in practice is...

• The players 'decide' on one course of action and end up pursuing another which I haven't prepared for (since I prepared for what they said at the end of the last session).
  
• The players can't decide because they're split or overwhelmed or whatever, and agree to decide via email...and then no emails are sent and no decision made.
  
• I ask the question too late in the evening after a long session and most players are too tired or need to put little ones to bed, so we resolve to figure it out next session.

When it works, the question works like a charm, but that's maybe a third of the time for my group.

 

[Quickleaf]

Ask them questions - leading questions for sure, but ASK, and then USE their input.

For example, they get back to the village after being in the dungeon for two weeks; ask the rogue "What seems different in the town's mood today?". Ask the cleric "What holy celebration or season is coming up next?"; tell the wizard he's smelling an odd, sharp smell every time he goes over to one side of town. Ask him "what does the smell remind you of? Where do you think it is coming from?", etc... You can connect these questions to adventures you're offering to run, or you can make them free-standing questions that you know nothing about. Just be prepared to improvise when they bite!

I have had trouble getting players in this group to bite with leading questions, but that was at the start of the new campaign. I used them during character creation, but never in actual play. And the group's player base has sufficiently morphed that maybe I should try again.

 

[Manbearcat]

Have them signal you via the 4e Quest system rather than you grasping around blindly, trying to hook them (especially if they have amorphous/nebulous PC motivations/aspirations). Its one of the best parts of 4e. I just wrote this post about it and cited this article. With 7 PCs, you would have multiple Major Quests and a multitude of Minor Quests to thematically, coherently guide play. Sandboxes become dysfunctional, incoherent nightmares when players are apathetic, unfocused, and with waning attention spans exacerbated by long droughts of play. Something transparent and available to them will help them be more proactive and better read your hooks (derived from their signals via their Quests).

 

[Dwimmerlied]

Not sure how useful this advice is, but although "railroad" campaigns cop a lot of flak from the cool kids since 2nd edition now, there's a lot to be said for them! Some gamers just like to be part of a cool story and aren't looking for contrived complexity. Some resist it outright. If your gamers find it plenty engaging to game the way they do now, then rolling with it is IMO not such a bad option. I've DMed for gamers that sound a bit like yours, but I ended up going with the flow and we had lots of fun anyhow.

 

[Dwimmerlied]

You can lead a horse to a sandbox, but you can't make him drink.

Which is good, because you know, sand.

and that would be railroading