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<blockquote data-quote="AaronOfBarbaria" data-source="post: 6743041" data-attributes="member: 6701872">How I sandbox:1) Give the players a premise for the campaign, along the lines of &quot;How about the characters being students at a wizard academy and investigating strange secrets within the academy?&quot;, and moving on only once the players are cool with the premise.2) Have the players all make characters as a group, sharing ideas and talking about what they think might be cool to have happen (taking notes of anything they seem really excited about for later use, as well as anything that comes up that sounds like it would bore them).3) Start playing - make up on the details that the players need when they actually need them, let them lead the action (decide what to do) so I only have to think of part of what would need to be thought up if I had prepared in advance (the obstacles in the way, the results of actions, and the NPCs interacted with - but never what could/should be done at any particular point, and never any detail that didn't actually come up)4) take notes of the relevant things made up in the course of play so that players can revisit locations or NPCs and find them to be coherent instead of ever-changing because no one remembers how they were last time.It is even easier when you have a campaign setting already laid out for you to draw from, rather than having to make up the entire world whole-cloth for every campaign (which I recently quit doing after more than a decade of inventing a world unique to each and every campaign, and have found myself very happy with the results - and also with something fun to do in my free time, reading up on my chosen setting to have more details commited to memory).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AaronOfBarbaria, post: 6743041, member: 6701872"] How I sandbox: 1) Give the players a premise for the campaign, along the lines of "How about the characters being students at a wizard academy and investigating strange secrets within the academy?", and moving on only once the players are cool with the premise. 2) Have the players all make characters as a group, sharing ideas and talking about what they think might be cool to have happen (taking notes of anything they seem really excited about for later use, as well as anything that comes up that sounds like it would bore them). 3) Start playing - make up on the details that the players need when they actually need them, let them lead the action (decide what to do) so I only have to think of part of what would need to be thought up if I had prepared in advance (the obstacles in the way, the results of actions, and the NPCs interacted with - but never what could/should be done at any particular point, and never any detail that didn't actually come up) 4) take notes of the relevant things made up in the course of play so that players can revisit locations or NPCs and find them to be coherent instead of ever-changing because no one remembers how they were last time. It is even easier when you have a campaign setting already laid out for you to draw from, rather than having to make up the entire world whole-cloth for every campaign (which I recently quit doing after more than a decade of inventing a world unique to each and every campaign, and have found myself very happy with the results - and also with something fun to do in my free time, reading up on my chosen setting to have more details commited to memory). [/QUOTE]

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