Mark
CreativeMountainGames.com
Here's another question: If you want to make exploration of the game world a priority in sandbox play, how much information is too much and how much is too little?
As far as I can tell, you want to make the players aware of the risks so that they can make their choices, but you don't want to reveal so much that they aren't surprised or aren't forced to make logical deductions about the game world.
Let's say that, in a large mist-shrouded lake, there's a local legend: no one who goes into the mist ever comes back. Their boats return, washed up on shore, with no sign of their crew.
The DM knows that it's because harpies on an island in the middle of the lake fly out and take the people back to their aerie to eat them.
You want to make the players aware of the level of risk but you don't want to give away any secrets that would be interesting to discover through play.
At the moment our legend doesn't work: the level of risk is unknown. We'd want to put something in there about the level of risk in a natural way. (The easiest way would be to say, "This area is level x", but eh.)
Another question, related to mechanics: Would it be a good idea to tie some information to skill checks?
You'd want to make the result of the skill check secret, I guess.
Would something like this work:
DC 20. Success: The PCs learn of a fisherman who did return but he went mad, babbling about "the bewitching song". PCs who talk to him may be able to extract more concrete information. Failure: The PCs hear about an alchemist who ventured to the edge of the mist and has been studying it; his theory is that the mist is a poison that drains the body of liquid, causing the fishermen to dive into the lake to slake their thirst, and eventually they drown.
I have a feeling I want to make each roll carry some kind of risk.
It is absolutely essentially, particularly if you and/or your players have been playing in non-sandbox formats, to spell it out, out-of-game, to the players in advance how your sandbox (note that I do not say "a" sandbox) will function. Everyone will assume different levels of shorthand and have varying concepts going in, so take a lesson from these threads of yours and know that everyone will bring their own meta-nomenclature and personalized vernacular to the table. You have to be sure that they understand and accept your understanding of it all or, at least, understand how to mentally convert your own to their own.
That said, I prefer to keep many die rolls secret and feel that this is particularly important to my sense of sandboxing. If a die roll is meant to resolve a binary circumstance and the players are meant to know the result immediately, then they roll openly. If a die roll is meant to dictate the degrees of a result and the characters are meant to weigh the outcome against facts in evidence without knowing the definite truth, the die roll remains secret and I, as DM, describe the result. So, as to skill checks, they happen all of the time and the players rarely know just how often. I am not one to simply allow players to outright call for a skill check but no matter what they are doing, I am often rolling skill checks or their equivalent with or without the knowledge of the players. It's good to keep a list of all pertinent PC knowledge and ability check mods handy on the DM side of the screen for quick reference.