Litterboxes: Tell us about your crappy Sandbox experiences

[S'mon]

I briefly DM'd a 4E D&D sandbox game in the post-Spellplague 4E Forgotten Realms.

It turned out the players were not particularly experienced with rpg games, and didn't really know how to play in a sandbox.

They ended up mostly getting into barfights and beating up random people on the streets of Waterdeep. They completely missed all hints and ads (on bulletin boards) alluding to possible missions and other work-for-hire.

I'm happy to include strong 'hooks' in a sandbox, where eg an NPC directly seeks the PCs' aid. The difference from a linear campaign is that in a sandbox the PCs are always free to decline the request and go do something else.

 

[kitsune9]

I had a litterbox DM. He made up encounters as he went along, but the one that took the cake was that we got restless of being stuck in the town after a session of doing nothing so there was a dungeon not too far from our random wanderings. He took the time to create a map, use up a lot of my printer ink, but the dungeon has NO encounters. No traps, no monsters, and not even any furniture. 20 rooms of nothing. We got about halfway through his dungeon before I pulled the plug on his campaign and took back over.

 

[ggroy]

I'm happy to include strong 'hooks' in a sandbox, where eg an NPC directly seeks the PCs' aid. The difference from a linear campaign is that in a sandbox the PCs are always free to decline the request and go do something else.

In my particular 4E FR sandbox game in question, it didn't occur to the players to look up the bulletin boards in the bars/saloons, nor to chat with the bartender. When they were not in barfights, they went around beating up and killing random people on the streets, without ever asking them anything.

In the end, the players ended up killing the bartenders without ever speaking to them, and setting the establishments on fire. All the ads on the bulletin boards in a particular bar/saloon went up in flames, when the players were committing arson.

Every time the players came across an "important looking" NPC, they would just gang up and kill the NPC, instead of talking to them.

When the game was just about to completely collapse, the last encounter involved the "cops" attempting to arrest the players for being too rowdy and the wanton destruction they left behind. Even though the encounter was at a slightly higher level, the players ended up killing all the "cops".


Essentially for this particular group of players, there was no way of conveying any possible plot or direction to them. They were just having too much fun destroying everything in sight.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I had a litterbox DM. He made up encounters as he went along, but the one that took the cake was that we got restless of being stuck in the town after a session of doing nothing so there was a dungeon not too far from our random wanderings. He took the time to create a map, use up a lot of my printer ink, but the dungeon has NO encounters. No traps, no monsters, and not even any furniture. 20 rooms of nothing. We got about halfway through his dungeon before I pulled the plug on his campaign and took back over.

Even a total crap DM can populate a dungeon map with nonsensical monsters & treasure. It sounds like your DM didn't really want to play at all.

 

[fba827]

Hrm, some from previos DMs and some of what i'm about to say were my own failed attempts in prior years ...

1) Offering no choices - i.e. the PCs are plopped down and the DM just stares at the players blankly, waiting for them to do something despite no information really being given

2) Too many choices - i.e. the DM overwhelms the players with 10 choices, each of which are equally justifiable, and the players end up spending most of the session "discussing" which is the more pressing matter only to have people change their mind by the next session after having thought about it and realizing their their character would probably push harder for another option

3) Decent number of options but all clearly way out of the PCs' league. i.e. the sleeping volcano has begun to activate meaning that the chained god is awaking and will destroy the world. the PCs must get there quickly to stop him before he escapes. (all at first level...where the challenges are either so extreme and impending that they must be dealt with right away OR they can be built up to over time, but there is no reasonable way to build up to it such as no way to research/prepare, you simply have to pick a time to go do it so may as well simply forget that it was even an option until 10 levels later)

4) a setting that simply doesn't make sense - trying to be so unique in setting elements that some things simply don't make sense together

5) providing so much history and backstory about parts of the sandbox that the characters have no reasonable way of interacting with or even knowing about since it's on the other side of the continent and no way to get there. it's just information overload and the relavent parts end up getting lost

6) a DM who sees his sandbox as being so great, he gets offended at even the notion that something needs to be adjusted

you'll note that many of these apply to non-sandbox campaigns as well, just different context.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

My experience is the opposite: I've yet to see a (supposed) sandbox that doesn't 'go bad' (or rather die an early death).

I agree. I've had two such experiences.

One involved a GM-written system, although the system wasn't really the problem. It was high-lethality, so when a friend of mine and I joined, I decided to be a doctor/gunslinger (based on a completely inaccurate portrayal of Doc Halliday, who was a dentist for a few years in real life) and my friend decided to be a seller of cybernetic limbs. We were not in the least bit surprised that these talents were both desperately needed in our first session.

Which wasn't bad, in fact, it turned out to be my favorite session. We were living on a "prison world", which was divided into numerous factions, some utterly insane. The worst of them was the "Walrod" because we couldn't ever remember his name.

The Walrod's armies attacked "our side". Naturally, a gunslinger shouldn't be duking it out with an entire army. I took control of a heavy weapon system designed by a badly wounded PC and kicked much arse, blowing up squads of weak troops. However, I was also a bit upset as my character couldn't show off his gunslingin'. (I didn't know it then, but I would only get to shoot with a pistol once before I left.) I healed a PC sniper, fixing his two internal injuries but botching his less severe arm injury, costing him his arm. Cybernetic limbs...

Unfortunately, despite our PC group having reasons to stick together, our characters just wouldn't communicate. I don't know why. The sniper PC, for instance, was played by a good roleplayer. He received a secret message from someone in the Walrod's camp to go free him, in return for secret info. Naturally, he told noone about this. He went, got into a fight with three corporate agents who ambushed him, and though he won he couldn't even walk afterward due to his injuries. Only then did he call for help. *Sigh* Since the other PCs were all busy doing nonsense, and our walkie-talkies never worked (literally) due to a stupid NPC constantly holding the talk button or something, I was barely able to pick up the call for help, and went and helped him out. I don't know about you, but wouldn't a gunslinger have been handy in that situation? I talked to the player about that, and came to the conclusion that good RPing can apparently result in in-game idiocy. (His character was a paranoid, it seems. My character should have dosed his water supply with psychiatric drugs... but didn't.)

I had to do that kind of thing a second time. The seller of exotic limbs tried to do a business deal with a group who just wanted to kill things, literally. He actually took someone with him, probably just to drive the van, but they were (or became) a redshirt, rather than, say, talking to another PC. Naturally he called for help when the large group of psychos threatened him. Naturally the comm system was fuzzy or whatever. I went over there, taking a really powerful robot NPC with us, on the grounds that taking on the whole group of psychopaths by myself was really dumb. (I would have taken other PCs with me, but IIRC they were all busy competing for DM time!) We were able to talk/intimidate our way out of the situation. No healing was necessary, as the red shirt had died.

By this point I had gotten the hint. The group just couldn't coordinate. I'm not even sure if this was player-driven or not, but apparently you had to write your own plots, and couldn't take other PCs with you. (Not that I could get the DM to confirm this.) Here we all were competing for DM time, while he wanted us to test out the new heavy mecha rules (hint, gunslingers don't do mecha). After a few more disastrous sessions of trying to change things (which involved shooting a crazy PC with a knock-out drug after they had killed hundreds of innocent soldiers allied with our side), I left.

The other was an Exalted campaign. I believed the hype, and the rules were decent but not great. But the issue here isn't rules. This time I was gaming with a group I'm much more familiar with (the group I'm DMing for now, although there's been some turnover).

We made up our characters independently (in an RP sense, there's no classes so coordinating character builds wasn't an issue) and then couldn't. Tie. Them. Together.

My own character was an assassin who really hated dragonkin or whatever the heck those things are. (He recalled his past life where he worked with them against the other Exalted, causing the fall of their previous empire.) One character, Xerxes, was a warlord who wanted to, what else, take over the world? Being an Exalt, he could do it too. Another character was into collecting magic trinkets, one was a goof-off who liked to shoot stuff (he wasn't there the first session), another wanted to breed yaks, and another wanted to build stuff. The last two were non-factors in the campaign, I'm honestly not sure why they were there.

We all lived in the same place, and we were all Exalts, but that's all we had in common. Each session generally involved us all competing for DM time until we were down to the last hour, at which point we'd all coordinate to beat up a city.

Remembering the previous experience, I attempted to link my character to the plot-drivers. Xerxes wanted to take over the world, and what army can't use an assassin? (My character figured that taking over the world meant killing a lot of dragon-things.) So I attached my non-charismatic character to his. He played realistically, for instance, having people spy on me (my character wasn't particularly trustworthy), but in-game we could work together anyway. At least until Xerxes' player had to move away. *Sigh*

So then I linked up with the collector. He would dispatch me to kill interesting opponents and bring him their items. As a player who hates items, I didn't have a problem with killing things and delivering their stuff to someone else. Alas, that player HAD TO MOVE AWAY too!

At some point we did manage to have fun. A neighboring super-powered nation tried to tax us. They were led by dragon-whatevers. So while we pretended to befriend them until we got strong enough to deal with them, I got Xerxes to hold the meeting in our zoo. Filled with exotic powerful creatures. And me with lock-picking skills... not only did the meeting end up with a lot of dragon-whatevers dead, it also meant the enemy had to react, if only by attacking us. I missed actual plot.

But now we were left with PCs who couldn't work together at all. After a short while, the campaign just collapsed.

Due to these experiences, I hate player-driven, both as a player and as a DM. There needs to be a plot.

I have been in some partly-player-driven campaigns that worked well. In these cases, sometimes the PCs wrote part of the plot, but it was never more than one or two, and the rest went along with it. Other times the DM wrote part of the plot.

in my experience, you want a couple of players to start driving the game, and that's one of the few ways in which a sandbox can avoid turning into a litterbox. If everyone is trying to drive the game, the notion of them all wanting to go the same direction is unlikely. If most of the group is (relatively) more passive and let's a few more vocal folks take the lead in charting the game's course, you might actually have a recipe for a sandbox that works.

That's what I meant by "partially played driven".

 

[KiloGex]

I had a campaign set up where the players would break free from a slave camp and then, using the maps that they were given by their accomplices, make their way to safety. The one problem I ran into is that nobody took Survival or Nature or any such skills that would allow them to navigate in the wilds, while the biggest issue I met was NOBODY LOOKED- IN THEIR BACKPACKS! We went for almost 4 sessions with the players just wandering around, traveling south instead of east where they had been told they needed to travel.

Eventually, I gave in and asked them "does anyone have rope in their backpack" to which they all responded no, because none of them had asked to have any. They simply assumed that what was in their packs was the equipment that they had asked to have at the beginning. The fifth session I took my ECL 2 party and threw a CR 10 death knight blackguard at them.

They deserved to die.

 

[TarionzCousin]

Then did not understand why the surviving PCs wrapped him up in a carpet, tied the carpet with ropes, and threw it in the river. And he blamed me for what had happened!

And that was the end of the campaign, the three surviving party members (out of seven) riding off in the dead of night after murdering one of their own.

Murder is such a strong word. I would call this a mercy killing.

 

[kitsune9]

Even a total crap DM can populate a dungeon map with nonsensical monsters & treasure. It sounds like your DM didn't really want to play at all.

He was a very lazy person in RL. He couldn't hold a job because he didn't want to work. He didn't want to go to the Unemployment office because that meant driving and filling out forms.

He spent time creating a dungeon map and used up a lot of my printer ink to print it out, but if there was a point to the exercise, I stopped it before we got to it because all of us were frustrated with the Campaign That Went Nowhere.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I think the best approach here is: "OK, so this character retires. Do you want to create a new PC who can go adventuring with the others?" - or even "This NPC is accompanying the PCs - as your PC isn't adventuring, would you like to play the NPC?"

If nothing works on the turtle, or if he continues all whiny, then yes you need to boot him.

I actually tried the NPC trick. He was playing a rogue, so because he wasn't with them the group hired a replacement.

When I gave him Ricky (yes, Ricky the Rogue, I'm, I'm sorry... ) he had the new rogue hide in shadows during combat, and not join in the fun.

Maybe if I was using Fate Points or something similar (spend one of these and you get knocked out instead of killed) then maybe that would have worked. He just never had the character do anything, because he was convinced that I would kill him.

The Auld Grump