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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tankschmidt" data-source="post: 4780961" data-attributes="member: 35915">It sounds like you're making a noble effort, and hopefully your players will adjust to this new style and come to enjoy it.  The adjustment period is always hard for players, especially if they are used to being spoon fed.  This is just part of the learning curve.  The party picked a difficult quest to undertake without doing the proper research first.  If they had asked around in town prior to setting out, maybe they would have met a couple adventurers -- who were clearly more experienced than they are -- still nursing their wounds after returning from that den of evil.  Hopefully, next time your players learn from their mistake and don't rush in too quickly and end up over their heads in trouble.  Not getting any treasure for two sessions shouldn't be too much of a hardship.  Soon the players will realize that this turn of events is not the result of your stinginess but is a consequence of their actions entirely.  If they want treasure, they will have to plan expeditions to get some.The pacing shouldn't be a big deal if you are using wandering monster tables.  I assume your players are trekking through wilderness to reach some sort of dungeon.  Generate a table for each wilderness (you really only need six or so entries), and set the level of these entries based on how dangerous your believe the terrain should be.  If the route is dangerous, it's likely townsfolk will know, so the PCs should ask.  Then roll a wandering monster check a couple times a day for wilderness exploration and every three or four turns of dungeon exploration.  Feel free to play around with how often you roll checks, depending on how dangerous the location is.  One other point I'd like to make is that four hours of role-playing and no combat is a fine way to play D&D.  There's no need to have combat in every session.  And if the PCs want a fight, they can go looking for one, of course.This is a good point here.  One of the benefits of a sandbox campaign is that the DM doesn't know where the adventure will go on any given night.  You should be as surprised as the PCs at what happens.  What you definitely want to avoid is to have a constant "outline" of an adventure that stays more or less standard week after week.  There's no need to force adventure hooks in a sandbox game.  If the PCs are looking for adventure, they will find it.  Typically their options are to do some hexcrawling through the wilderness, dungeoncrawling through a known dungeon, or ask the townsfolk if they've heard anything going on.  The first two options are entirely exploratory, and that's a good thing!  It means the players are interested in the world you have created for them.  Let them get out there, explore, fight some wandering monsters, investigate some monsters' lairs, and learn when to fight, run, or parley.  The third option is for when the players aren't interested in exploration.  They'll ask around town or talk to their patron about what work needs to be done, or if there's anything interesting going on.  For these sorts of occasions, you need to have a rumor table prepared.  Include about twenty entries along the lines of "I heard the orcs to the north have discovered some sort of magical ore."  When the PCs start talking to people, roll on the table.  If you have several adventures prepared for the players, have several rumors direct the PCs towards each adventure.   Once they have gathered some information, they'll probably set out without any further prodding.Good luck and keep us updated!</blockquote>

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