D&D 5E Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Linear Adventures and Sandbox Wishes

[Cybit]

That is what is often referred to as the "Theme Park" model -- look over here at all the stuff to do, then move down the one way path to the next area. A sandbox is more open.

I think it is very, very difficult to do a sandbox as a published module. Too many possibilities to consider.

Side note; my players are giving me grief because all of them appear in the playtesters list except me. On a related note, there was a TPK last week.

 

[fjw70]

While I'm very happy with adventures that don't have the stat blocks. Including the stat blocks in Dragon Queen would probably add 4 pages to the page count. Or rather, they would have had to remove 4 pages of other content to include the stats.

I would be fine with that.

Hopefully they will produce monster cards (like the forthcoming spell cards). If that happens I will remove my objection.

 

[Haffrung]

I think it is very, very difficult to do a sandbox as a published module. Too many possibilities to consider.

Check out the Vault of Larin Karr, or Ancient Kingdoms: Mesopotamia.

The thing is, there's a lot of content in conventional linear adventures that you don't need in sandboxes. Lengthy NPC backgrounds, cut-scene descriptions and dialog ("Excellent, you've recovered the staff of Mallazizi! Now we can cast the enchantment to open the Gates of Azathoth and rescue the duke" etc. etc.). You can ditch that stuff altogether in a sandbox. And you need to be very compact in the NPC backgrounds. Instead of half a page, you need to cover that stuff in a short paragraph. Basically, write the setting with physical description only. Put the faction and events section in a very compact format in another part of the book. Let the DM and the players develop the rest organically.

And of course, you need a DM who is comfortable with some improvisation. You can't cover every edge case, and you will have some 'wasted' material. But in my experience, I get a lot more game sessions out of a sandbox book than a similarly-sized linear adventure. At 112 pages, the Vault of Larin Karr has enough content for 5 levels, or around 15-20 sessions of play. And that's even taking into account that the party will likely skip/miss a quarter of the content in the book.

Another factor to consider is that it's easier to reuse sandbox content than story-driven content. A town can continue to be a base of operations, a basilisk lair that wasn't visited can be reused elsewhere, as can the band of gnolls that weren't encountered. When this stuff isn't embedded into a story, it tends to easier to lift out intact.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I think it is very, very difficult to do a sandbox as a published module. Too many possibilities to consider.

Not at all. Open sandbox may seem too wide and broad to be packaged into an adventure, but once you learn to limit the scope of the sandbox to suit your adventure's needs it can be quite manageable.

Another common misconception is that an adventure designed as a sandbox cannot handle any kind of plot or feature villains with motives. A sandbox adventure can certainly have these things without leading players around by the nose or providing only a single trail of breadcrumbs to follow.

A sandbox adventure needs to start with a defined scope. Of course the adventurers can go anywhere they wish but an adventure doesn't have to an entire world or even an entire large region just because of that. The scope could be a small village and surroundings (T1 The Village of Hommlet), or any other specific place. What you decide on for your setting, the scope of the adventure is focused only that part of the setting.

So while there is nothing actually stopping the PCs from heading to Verbobonc while adventuring in Hommlet it is beyond the scope of the adventure to include details for that place in T1. That doesn't mean T1 isn't a sandbox. There are also agents of evil at work in the area that have plans of their own. Within the scope of of the published module, the players can explore and investigate where they wish.

Going a bit further and adding more plot elements to your sandbox, we can look at L2 The Assassins Knot for inspiration. This adventure is an actual murder mystery the PCs need to solve yet it is still a sandbox adventure. The sandbox in this case is a small town and surrounding area. The players begin the adventure with several clues and then enter the sandbox to investigate. Meanwhile the villains behind the foul murder continue with their plans and keep murdering other people! The players may go where they please and when, but the bad guys are operating on a fixed timeline, so the PC's can't just futz about wasting time during the investigation.

So a good published sandbox adventure is not only possible, it's been done before. With a few key points to remember, any decent DM can construct one.

Remember to define the scope of your sandbox for purposes of the adventure.
Determine the resources, strengths & weaknesses of the bad guys.
Outline the ultimate motives, and detail the most immediate plans of these bad guys.
Sketch out a rough timeline of what the outcome of these plans are, should they actually succeed.
Add players and mix well.

 

[Mercurius]

It makes complete sense for the first official adventure for 5E (aside from the starter set) to be a linear story. Not only are they easier to fun but they're also probably considerably more popular.

I'd love to see some box set sandboxes. I think the box set format is ideal for a sand box campaign, something like so:

• Gazetteer: A big (96-page) book for lore and locations
• DM's Guide: A medium (64-page) book for general guidelines, adventure seeds, short scenarios, and random encounters
• Appendix: A small (32-page) book for critters, treasures and index.
• A bunch of maps.

For $50-60 MSRP, you've got months of adventuring.

Make it so, [MENTION=697]mearls[/MENTION].

 

[Reynard]

It makes complete sense for the first official adventure for 5E (aside from the starter set) to be a linear story. Not only are they easier to fun but they're also probably considerably more popular.

I'd love to see some box set sandboxes. I think the box set format is ideal for a sand box campaign, something like so:

• Gazetteer: A big (96-page) book for lore and locations
• DM's Guide: A medium (64-page) book for general guidelines, adventure seeds, short scenarios, and random encounters
• Appendix: A small (32-page) book for critters, treasures and index.
• A bunch of maps.

For $50-60 MSRP, you've got months of adventuring.

Make it so, [MENTION=697]mearls[/MENTION].

Sold. Double sold it it is set in the Known World!

 

[Tormyr]

I think Murder in Baldur's Gate and Legacy of the Crystal Shard both did a decent job of being published sandboxes. The sandbox was partially an illusion in that there were 3 different plot paths that you could bounce between and were interwoven to some degree. However, they still came together in a finale regardless of the path you took. They were not true sandboxes, but they allowed the players to lead the plot progression.

Age of Worms, on the other hand, is very linear. There is a lot of content, and you could still go off on your merry way somewhere else, but the world will go to the nine hells in a hand basket pretty quickly without your involvement. If you wanted to be more sandbox here. You would have to toss in your own content while keeping at least some aspects of the story going forward without the characters so that when the characters are pulled back in when they find out about things getting worse.

 

[Paul_Klein]

I don't mean to de-rail this conversation, but can anyone tell me if there is a connection between the Starter Set adventure and Hoard of the Dragon Queen? Are the two adventures linked in anyway?

 

[fjw70]

I don't mean to de-rail this conversation, but can anyone tell me if there is a connection between the Starter Set adventure and Hoard of the Dragon Queen? Are the two adventures linked in anyway?

Not directly linked. There are some dragon cultists in the SS adventure that foreshadows the ToD but that about t.

 

[SigmaOne]

While I'm very happy with adventures that don't have the stat blocks. Including the stat blocks in Dragon Queen would probably add 4 pages to the page count. Or rather, they would have had to remove 4 pages of other content to include the stats.

I agree. I think it's a waste of space to repeat the information, which should be easily findable using bookmarks for back-of-book or print-outs, or CTRL+F (or CMD+F) on a laptop, or other search functionality. I find it goes pretty smoothly.

As for linear vs. sandbox, whether it's good or bad is a matter of personal preference and style. But given these are public-play adventure paths that spand a variety of sessions, with players potentially moving characters from one group to another between session, I have a hard time seeing how they can give too much leeway... there *have* to be fixed milestones for starting and stopping to make it work, it seems. But then I don't have a lot of personal experience with public-play adventure paths, so maybe I'm wrong about that.