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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Pros and cons of a sandbox game, and what to do about them?
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<blockquote data-quote="hastur_nz" data-source="post: 7211459" data-attributes="member: 40592"><p>I've played in a 'pure sandbox' that was pure DM homebrew, and it was a disaster - he put in heaps of time prepping heaps of stuff, and annoyed us so much with all his house-rules, restrictions, extra rules and so on, that after one session we all quit. We were all experienced players and/or DM's, not newbies. But the moral of the story was that our DM got into his head more and more ideas of what HE wanted the game to be and how it was going to be fun, while WE didn't agree, but he forged on regardless until it blew up in his face - so be mindful of your players and what they are interested in and will have fun with, unless you want to play the game by yourself.</p><p></p><p>One other piece of advice I've not seen - be mindful of the number of players. I forgot this one myself a couple of weeks ago, when my game went up to 6 players and I just happened to have a pretty open-ended kind of urban adventure that provided lots of the classic 'sandbox' elements... and the players wanted to try and do everything on offer every day, including spending an age discussion why, what, how, splitting up, etc etc. The more players you have, the more I think a decent set of "rails" is a real bonus. The most focused games I've played in, are where there's only three of us at the table, then we can easily decide what options to take and get on with it, and everyone still gets a decent amount of time in the spotlight. With lots of players, it's too easy for one or more people to need to run in their own direction, find their personal spotlight, etc, and if you present a heap of options chances are you'll get a group which wants to try and do them all, or takes forever deciding which one if any they might do. So with lots of players, limit their visible options and help them focus on doing one thing from a limited set of options, or even better give the illusion of choice where the choice is pretty obvious but they feel like it's their choice not yours via some NPC (e.g. show them, don't tell them).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="hastur_nz, post: 7211459, member: 40592"] I've played in a 'pure sandbox' that was pure DM homebrew, and it was a disaster - he put in heaps of time prepping heaps of stuff, and annoyed us so much with all his house-rules, restrictions, extra rules and so on, that after one session we all quit. We were all experienced players and/or DM's, not newbies. But the moral of the story was that our DM got into his head more and more ideas of what HE wanted the game to be and how it was going to be fun, while WE didn't agree, but he forged on regardless until it blew up in his face - so be mindful of your players and what they are interested in and will have fun with, unless you want to play the game by yourself. One other piece of advice I've not seen - be mindful of the number of players. I forgot this one myself a couple of weeks ago, when my game went up to 6 players and I just happened to have a pretty open-ended kind of urban adventure that provided lots of the classic 'sandbox' elements... and the players wanted to try and do everything on offer every day, including spending an age discussion why, what, how, splitting up, etc etc. The more players you have, the more I think a decent set of "rails" is a real bonus. The most focused games I've played in, are where there's only three of us at the table, then we can easily decide what options to take and get on with it, and everyone still gets a decent amount of time in the spotlight. With lots of players, it's too easy for one or more people to need to run in their own direction, find their personal spotlight, etc, and if you present a heap of options chances are you'll get a group which wants to try and do them all, or takes forever deciding which one if any they might do. So with lots of players, limit their visible options and help them focus on doing one thing from a limited set of options, or even better give the illusion of choice where the choice is pretty obvious but they feel like it's their choice not yours via some NPC (e.g. show them, don't tell them). [/QUOTE]
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