How do I DM a sandbox game online?

[TheOneHawk]

Hi, I'm looking to start a campaign soon and I work 21 day rotations at an oil camp over 1000 miles from my players. Once a month we can play in person, but the rest of the time gaming needs to be done online. Normally we just run modules, and since the railroads are pretty set, it's easy for the DM to prep ahead of time what exactly each encounter needs and save it in roll20 or maptool and when we play it just load it up and we're good to go. However, I was planning on running a sandbox game and now that I have a good chunk of the world realized, I was about to start building encounters and stuff and suddenly realized I don't know where the players are going to go. Any tips? Are there virtual tabletops where you can make a decent map super fast? Should I just say **** it and throw railroads on the whole thing? I'm a bit upset at myself for not realizing how much extra work doing it online would be.

[Kazudo]

Actually your best bet (in my experience) is still to do it probably on roll20. It'll take a startup time investment to do and quite a bit of creativity and time. Your best bet for a wide-open-sandbox is to actually start with a small sandbox and expand the sandbox over time. It's not railroading, it's putting up invisible walls. Within those walls, the players can do whatever. These walls can take the form of political boundaries (no leaving the limits of the city and its property without permission, which can only be obtained by individuals of status [involving players leveling up and performing deeds throughout the limits]), physical boundaries (nope, mountains are too high and too cold. We lack the strength, stamina, and resources to do it. Or worse, the forest is filled with monsters we can't hope to tackle at this low level, so...uh...turn back?) or personal boundaries (Wait! Are you really going to leave your city in such shambles when it's obvious you can do something about it?). And while they're in a fully fleshed out small-ish sandbox geared for levels 1-5, you build on a larger sandbox somewhere else. Maybe a neighboring principality or district, maybe a new landscape (desert as opposed to temperate forest, etc.) so that by the time they've fulfilled the necessary criteria to leave the smaller sandbox, they're now in a larger sandbox that includes the smaller sandbox with its own boundaries designed for levels, say, 5-10. Then you build on the bigger sandbox while they mess around in these two sandboxes until levels 10-15, then if it's still going you've got the majority of a whole continent, maybe even more depending on how your design process works and how big you really want the sandbox.

Then you've got a sandbox.

[TheOneHawk]

That's mostly how I was planning on doing it, I'm basically just worried about straight up combat encounters. I either have to build every possible combat encounter they could get themselves into ahead of time (oh god) or build them to order. I haven't actually built an encounter on Roll20 before but I expect it takes more than a minute, which is how long I feel I'd have before people start to lose interest. I could take guesses at where they're going to go, if they're following a quest line or something, but the second they switch gears, what do I do about the encounter maps?

[GilesTheCleric]

I run a sandbox on R20, and find it's not really that difficult. My techniques: prepare several encounters appropriate to wherever the party currently is; include plenty of roleplay opportunities; ask the players what they're planning to do for next session.

Edit: Re: encounter maps when they deviate: If you and your party are okay with it, you can always just use theatre-of-mind-style play. Alternatively, load up a whole bunch of tokens for creatures that they'll likely face, and then make some generic maps. You can even put in several encounters into the same map -- just leave all the creatures on the GM layer/in the fog until you're ready for them.

Also, depending on how you run your game, an "encounter" doesn't always need to be combat. It could be a non-combat situation, such as a new piece of information that moves the plot forward (an overturned cart by the side of the road, hoofprints, and blood), or it could be a social or environmental encounter. Also, not every combat encounter needs to be unique and complex. Sometimes fighting bandits on the road is okay.

[Callin]

Pregenerate a few possible random encounters. Maybe have a few maps on standby if needed. Make a dungeon map with a very generic outline so you can populate fast. Ask the players at the end of each session what they plan to do so you can better prepare.

Sometime just make stuff up on the fly. Create stats later if needed. Make notes though.