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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cyronax" data-source="post: 5044437" data-attributes="member: 822">First, I didn't mean that focus on one quest to the exclusion of others makes a campaign lose elements of sandbox-style. I was trying convey that such an occurrence is normal, in fact it shows that the world ENABLES realistic planning and is more than just a series of site-based encounters. Somewhat a tangent .... but just look at our political debates in the real world. Over the last month the cable news has focused on one BIG domestic issue, which I'll leave unnamed. Then just a few days ago, the legislative schedule had cleared slightly, but we were then confronted by a big foreign national security crisis. I digress into real world examples, because I tend to look at the pace of events in the real world and try to figure out how different NPC's and factions would operate in a living complex sandbox. (With or without the involvement of the PCs). For instance, in my last campaign, I had a lot of airships and a lot of fortified bases that were being used for airship manufacture. It was a tense international situation, because these different fortified bases and airship flotillas belonged to several aerial-focused city-states. This was all in the background and had little relevance to the self-chosen quests the PCs were on. BUT the airship arms race actually affected who the PCs might run into in several instances, because some big NPCs were ordered to remain with their respective nation's strategic military-industrial nodes.  All this setup helped me figure out ways to make the world seem more complex and real to the PCs. That was my intent, it falls to my players to say if that type of planning was beneficial to all of their individual types of play. But that's an example of what plan for to build what I see as a sandbox style campaign. ---Also, I like the term 'trajectory' too. It sounds like something you'd use for Game Theory .. i.e. Prisoners' Dilemma. I took a few Game Theory classes for my international security/econ degree in undergrad, and I always found the modeling and underlying themes were helpful for worldbuilding and DMing. C.I.D.</blockquote>

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