Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5724656" data-attributes="member: 26473">A "litterbox" is a sandbox gone wrong. Maybe the players go tharn, unable or unwilling to act. Maybe the referee's setting is so bland that it's best described by the flavor of something before the vanilla is added.What are your crappy sandbox experiences?Mine was a Traveller referee who made no effort to tie his random encounters to anything else in the setting. We encountered a group of chasers on a world that tried to eat our crew. After we dispatched the alien beasts, we decided to backtrack them to their lair - maybe we could capture the young and sell them, we reasoned. Nope, no young, no lair, and indeed, no tracks leading anywhere. This was where they lived, they never went anywhere else, and they didn't have a lair - they just sat their waiting for things to come by, then attack them.Later we encountered were engaged by space pirates in a Type S scout/courier. We outgunned them two turrets to one, and they had a single pulse laser to our batteries of triple sandcasters, twin missle lanchers, and a beam laser. We knocked out their ship in short order with a couple of missles while their laser pulses were stopped by our sandcasters. Whe we boarded the now derelict ship, the whole crew was dead, the cargo bay was empty, and there were no records at all of where the ship came from or where it was going. It didn't even have a name.When pressed, the referee admitted it was a random encounter rolled from the tables, and he never gave any thought to random encounters being anything other than stuff that just appeared with a die roll.ADDENDUM: While I appreciate the experience point, let me be clear that "litterbox" is NOT my coining. It appeared independently twice on rpg.net, from two different users in completely different threads.</blockquote>

Verification