Litterboxes: Tell us about your crappy Sandbox experiences

[D'karr]

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

You should have killed his character in the tavern, just to prove him right.

 

[TarionzCousin]

He just never had the character do anything, because he was convinced that I would kill him.

DM "You're walking along outside in the sun when you notice it suddenly getting darker."
Player "What? I look around to see if I can tell what's causing this."
DM "You see a dark, oval shape falling from the sky. It's getting big extremely fast, directly above you."
Player "I leap out of the way."
DM "You quickly jump ten feet but it's not far enough. A humungous turtle, at least 50 feet in diameter, lands on you. You are crushed instantly and die."


--too subtle?

 

[Ringlerun]

My worst sandbox experiences was way back in the mid 80's with Space Master.

If no one has played Space Master before it takes about 2 hours to generate your character. Longer if you only have 1 players book between a few people.

Anyway to get back on topic we all spend time creating characters for a campaign a friend of hours was going to run. In the first 5 min we broke some planetary law and ended up in jail. And the penalty of breaking any law is to fight in the arena. To cut a long story short we all died as we had no melee skills. And my character had his throat ripped out by a foot long space cockroach. I didn't even make it to the arena i died in the waiting cell.



A few weeks later we tried again with same GM and same game system. This time we were stuck on some massive spaceship the size of a planet. The gist of the game was that this huge ship was being pursued by an armada and when it exited hyperspace to strip a planet for fuel the armada would catch up and we would have to fend off the fighters until the ship jumped back into hyperspace.

(i think the idea was stolen from some book at the time). Any way none of us had any fighter piloting skills and all the weapons were automated. So we all sat as the GM waffled on about how great the battle was and how the ship is all damaged and how we barely escaped to hyperspace.

So as a good group we decide to go exploring the ship and find that the ship is zoned into sections of different races, animals, plants and such. A huge galactic ark flying through space.

Getting more and more bored and not knowing what the hell we were supposed to do a few players started to get a bit antsy. And when we stumbled upon the gay and lesbian zones they had had enough and decided to kick the tires and light the fires literally.

We all grabbed flame throwers and starting from floor 1 door 1 we went on a killing and torching spree until the automated defenses killed us.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I played a very bad vampire larp in the 90's where the whole game was on rails... to try to stop on the next larp me and 2 other sandboxers jumped in to help. I have never seen it happen, but with 30 pcs, 7 story tellers 3(me one of them) of us being 'incharge' and 4 answering to us, and 3 NPCs who just played npcs for us.

we went to start game one, and my idea was to introduce the 10 main npcs we would have, and 1 or two other NPCs and let the players see witch way they want to go.

1 hour into game I learned no player would talk to or do anything until we did somthing...so We started a fight between sabbot spys... and after a while we realize d only NPCs were involved.

 

[Summer-Knight925]

I didn't play it, but the DM said "you're in a tavern, go"
it was 4e

I heard that after 6 hours of the DM detailing every person in the tavern and creating an 'atmosphere' not a single player was left.

The DM later said he planned nothing but rather made it up as he went along, he did this again with a group who had never played a table-top anything before, they stayed for awhile.

When they played at my table (I run a Basic Fantasy/AD&D mix) they told me "what I was doing wasn't D&D because" and they actually said this next part "everything was linked and it was thus unrealistic"

Because the horde of orcs totally can't be sent closer to a town by a dragon who recently nested in some caves the orcs had once called their home, they just 'have to be random'

 

[Treebore]

Many of you make me very glad for the groups I have. In one all 6 pretty much equally drive what happens, and in the other 5 out of 8 do, and even the other 3 are focused on at least what their character does. In the 2 I play in the group seems to rotate who is "lead", and sooner or later everyone has been the lead.

 

[BenBrown]

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.

I dunno. I think this one's at least partially on you. Sounds like serious miscommunication to me. Now, it could just be that they were dim, but not telling them what's in their backpacks unless they specifically ask doesn't scream "good GMing" to me.

 

[Wycen]

The fifth session I took my ECL 2 party and threw a CR 10 death knight blackguard at them.

This reminds me of the first 3E game I played in. I don't think it was sandbox, I'm not even sure we had a notion of what a sandbox was at the time, but we attempted to follow the clues the DM gave us.

This led our party of 1st and 2nd level characters into the dungeon below the castle where we found a "lich" rise out of a vat of slime, lob a 10d6 lightning bolt at us, and promptly lots of running and WTF?! comments became apropos.

 

[Mark CMG]

I was in what was supposed to be a snadbox game once where the DM was really only interested in letting us follow prepared hooks. He started us off in a tavern (all right, we'll let that part go, we thought) but every time we left to go explore he would narrate us back to the tavern and then try to get us to talk to one of the people in there. Each person seemed to have a hook ready for us. We'd discuss it and found most uncompelling, at least when trying to gauge the majority of the group, then we'd come up with something on our own that we'd all want to do (or most of us anyway). We'd then take off out of the tavern and find it was a dead end, according to the DM who would once again narrate us back to the tavern. Once we got onboard and decided to run through all of his hooks we found out that half of them were also designed to be dead ends or false leads. I don't even recall if the others were all that interesting. Very frustrating "sandbox/litterbox" though not a true one really.

 

[SnowleopardVK]

Hmm, I played one where I recall being instantly captured and carted off to be executed (I don't think I ever learned why). I pulled a series of tricks to get out of the prison transport wagon, but found myself against my captors, some sort of knight guys who were far stronger than anything a low level PC could handle, and who didn't get even a scratch in our fight.

I was then effortlessly saved my a trio of NPCs who had me join them and go back to their boss. I followed along for a bit, but during the meeting with the boss, all my attempts to join the roleplay were shot down by those NPCs telling me to shut up and let them do the talking.

So the GM had a long conversation with himself between the GMPCs and their boss. It ended with a mission to some dungeon in a desert. These NPCs would be coming along.

I tried to bring up with the GM that due to obvious power differences between these NPCs and the PCs, either the upcoming dungeon would be too easy, and the NPCs would blow through it, or too hard, thus giving the NPCs a challenge and likely killing the actual PCs. He insisted that they were going.

So I said okay, they're clearly strong enough to do this on their own, I'll thank them again for saving me and then go find something more appropriate for my character to be doing. He warned me that if I tried to 'desert' they would kill me.

And so I quit that game, and that was that. I don't think any more sessions of it were run, and that sandbox's world was abandoned.