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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 8711137" data-attributes="member: 85555">One thing I have learned is there are different kinds of sandboxes and different ways to approach sandbox (and much of that is going to depend on how your brain works as a gm and what your players do, how they think; as well as the overall chemistry of your group). I would distinguish between more focused sandboxes (where there is a premise: i.e. we are all going to be bank robbers!) and a more open one (drop the players in a village and see what happens, letting them drive the direction of the campaign). The latter can easily become the former but it is usually just more organic and can change more easily over time. But the former is usually a little easy to flow into because expectations are all pretty similar whereas the latter is a discovery of expectations. For the more open approach, I think a key thing that is very important for it to work is having players who feel they can take initiative (which might just be their style but might be something the GM needs to convey to them if they are more accustomed to receiving quests from NPCs). The other part of that is being comfortable adapting to the players actions as a GM (which I think can be tricky and I would liken it to being able to truly listen in a conversation rather than just waiting for your turn to speak). What works for folks is going to vary. What has worked for me is the idea of the living adventure (not so much the living world concept but the living adventure concept outlined in Feast of Goblyns, where you treat NPCs as active forces in the adventure itself, pieces that move around of their own volition and respond to the PCs, have clear goals, etc). Essentially treating them like PCs or living characters, then extending this thought to things like the organizations they belong to. So having a good sense of what conflicts and situations exist in the setting can be very useful here. I don't need an adventure so much as parts of the setting with enough tension and conflict that once the players insert themselves there they find there are a lot of options, and their actions open up further options on my side. Dungeons and monstrous threats are also something I find useful. Those are things that can come up in play in a variety of ways but I like linking them to the social fabric of the setting. So in my wuxia campaigns many of the dungeons will be things like tombs related to an ancient sect, or a temple that was destroyed and is now haunted. They may house key martial arts manuals or relics, and players might choose to seek them out because they want a particular technique, they want to stop a foe from finding that technique, they need an important relic to raise their own prestige in the martial world or assist a sect they are part of. Personal preference for starting a campaign is I like to just drop the players in and see what happens, then  do my prep around that between sessions. I tend to take the attitude of "I don't care where the campaign goes, and I don't care when the 'adventure' stops or starts". Some of their exploration will be them finding things I have put in the setting, but some of it will be things I haven't thought of that they suggest. If I drop them in a village and I've only planned out things like the headman, local wine shops, a couple of relevant sects to the area, a local tomb, encounter tables, and some monstrous threats that hunt people in the nearby wilderness; but the players ask if there are any cults in the area because they want to join one (perhaps with the aim of taking it over), I will have to consider that and say yes if it sounds reasonable: then quickly sketch details for them on the fly. Same if they ask if there is a merchant shipping operation between the village and the nearest city along the river. Ideally you have a lot of this stuff thought out before hand but there are so many in between places on the map that stuff will need to grow organically through Q&A tooNow I don't always run sandbox campaigns. Sometimes I want a more monster of the week game or just want there to be a campaign with more regular adventures. But this is a style I find quite rewarding because as a GM you are surprised just as much as the players</blockquote>

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