Keeping the World Dangerous – A Monster Scaling Table for a Sandbox TTRPG?

[the Jester]

Howdy all

I'm currently working on a story-driven sandbox TTRPG campaign where players can form and follow their own paths. They can explore where they want, tackle what they want, and write their own story (through various types of core systems). But this raises an important design question:

How do you keep the world consistently dangerous and exciting in a sandbox game without breaking the feeling of progression?

The whole point of a sandbox (to me) is that the players can, to a greater or lesser degree, choose their level of challenge (and that should impact the rewards they receive).

In other words, a low level group avoids the lair of the dragon who lives on Mt. Deathtime, while when they achieve higher levels, the group seeks out that same dragon.

There's no need to adjust the challenges like you suggest; you just seed the world with high level challenges (as well as low level ones) from the start and let the party choose what to engage with.

 

[DarkCrisis]

Stick your monsters where you want. Make sure they know they are about to face something crazy before engaging and let the dice fall where they may.

I always liked that in 1E players could throw food or gold (depends on monster INT) to distract them while they flee.

Can’t handle these 8 Orcs! Toss some gold and run!

 

[HeritageTTRPG]

The whole point of a sandbox (to me) is that the players can, to a greater or lesser degree, choose their level of challenge (and that should impact the rewards they receive).

In other words, a low level group avoids the lair of the dragon who lives on Mt. Deathtime, while when they achieve higher levels, the group seeks out that same dragon.

There's no need to adjust the challenges like you suggest; you just seed the world with high level challenges (as well as low level ones) from the start and let the party choose what to engage with.

THAT is something that makes alot of sense to me ... and probably is good enough reason to ditch the entire idea. Still, I kind of want to avoid players out-leveling certain areas and thus removing too much tension and deadliness of otherwise deadly encounters. However, very good point you are making there. I will take your points into consideration, while pondering.

 

[Distracted DM]

So, World of Warcraft does this nowadays, where monsters scale up to a players level on a player-level basis (so two players of different levels in the same group will both see a monster as their same level).

It opens up much more of the now-enormous game world for anyone to play in, which is good. There's no more either rapidly out-leveling old content or having everyone squeezed into the same few zones while the rest of the world is entirely vacant. (Although the new hotness is always much more populated than older content.)

However, it also means that leveling up means a lot less until you start reaching the by-expansion caps on how far up monsters will scale. Leveling up gives PCs more tools to play with, but even people who really enjoy modern WoW, like me, generally acknowledge that if everything more or less keeps pace with you, players lose much of the feeling of getting more powerful and more accomplished.

So, the answer is, this system does work, and I think it would definitely work for ttrpg play, but it's essentially a variant of the quantum ogre situation: Wherever the PCs go, there's almost certainly something that's more or less a fair fight for them. You will run into players who feel like this makes the game world feel less real to them. (You'll especially run into these people online, even if not at your actual table.)

If I might, I'd suggest not doing this, but letting stuff be at its baseline level but also having a robust wandering monster encounter table that includes the full range of monsters on it. So your level 1 PCs could conceivably turn a corner and find themselves eyeball to eyeball with a wyvern devouring a herd of cows and have to scramble to survive. And a higher level party could periodically run into a goblin hunting party that they can slaughter with impunity, if they're inclined to. Players can mostly avoid trouble -- stay out of the dragons graveyard until you're high level, to lower the chances of running into an angry and hostile dragon -- but they're not ever guaranteed to do so.

Everything being same-ey as far as threats/difficulty is what sort of killed Elder Scrolls Online for me.
The better method IMO was City of Heroes' mentor system where you were leveled up/down to play with a friend.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The better method IMO was City of Heroes' mentor system where you were leveled up/down to play with a friend.

City of Heroes was 50% genius, 50% deeply mediocre. I have so many questions about their work environment.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I always liked that in 1E players could throw food or gold (depends on monster INT) to distract them while they flee.

Pro-tip: You can do this in real life, too.

"Don't mug me! Here's a bag of Tostino's Pizza Rolls!"

 

[Bill Zebub]

I get what you are aiming for, but I just don't like the way a level scaling world feels.

Yeah, same. Hard to put my finger on it, but as a player I would find it very dissatisfying to know that my progress is being counterbalanced by changes in the world. Feels wrong.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Pro-tip: You can do this in real life, too.

"Don't mug me! Here's a bag of Tostino's Pizza Rolls!"

I would totally roleplay my barbarian as turning back to get the pizza rolls that were meant to distract the monster.