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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Viking Bastard" data-source="post: 6507497" data-attributes="member: 509">This is pretty much my default style, which I've also seen described as a "story-sandbox". Just keep rapid-firing plot-hooks at the players and then follow their lead.I ran a full sandbox, for the first time in over a decade, in-between my 4e and 5e games. It was a consciously short and experimental game, as to let both me and my players stretch our wings a little between campaigns. While we had fun and it resulted in some memorable sessions, I'm going to rate it as 'so-so'. I did find it hard to keep up momentum, as the players did end up (especially in the first few sessions) mostly twiddling their thumbs and just kind of indecisively wandering around, much like  [MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION] described, until I shoved action in their faces, while I got too caught up in (and then was quickly overwhelmed by) the minutiae of tracking hexes, time and local activity. It brought two things into focus for me: Tracking things has always been my prime weakness as a DM, so if I want to try it again I should find more abstract ways of handling that stuff, and that even though you shove hooks under player noses, it doesn't mean they don't need a sense of direction to be motivated to choose one.One piece of advice, and one that I kind of failed at in the above game (I meant to, it just kind of fell flat), is to start it off with a bang--just drop them into an adventure for the first session and wait with triggering the full options of the sandbox until they've already on a course, even if that course will change. It's hard to gain momentum from a hard stop.</blockquote>

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