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View Full Version : DM Help Sandboxing and trying to create immersion



Blackhawk748
2017-01-15, 02:17 PM
Sandboxing, the ultimate form of freedom for TTRPGs. Also probably the biggest pain to DM. So i come to the playground with this question, how do you run your sandbox games? I've tried running them in the past and they have had mixed success. I mean people have fun, but i can't seem to get them interested enough to stop our game ADD from kicking in. Now i know its not all on me, but i also know that if i can draw them in, whatever their particular issues are will generally go away.

So how do you all run your sandbox worlds and how do you try to foster roleplay?

RazorChain
2017-01-15, 11:30 PM
From my point of view all proper RPG's that present a living, breathing world are sandboxes. So a game where you would present your players with a missions or dungeons to go to and they can't go anywhere else except HQ to gear up would not be a sandbox.


So a sandbox runs just like any other game I guess. I started my game where the players had a common mission that needed to be completed and after that they got the freedom to do what they wanted. As I run character driven games the PC's started with hopes and goals and a past that affected their choices and I had a few plots and events going on in the background and as things snowballed they have too little time to affect everything that want to be part of :) Now they have to choose and time is a limited resource (at least at this point in the campaign)


So my advice is a Character driven game. This means you will flesh out backgrounds and npc's with your players. In their backgrounds they will have friends and family, rivals and enemies and also leave you a mystery that has to be solved, problem that needs to be taken care of or a goal they are working towards.

Let's just take for examples from my current campaign

Roberto has a merchant family...his merchant house is feuding with a rival merchant house.
Luzio is a part of a Slayer Order (monster slayers ala Witcher) and his mentor got killed by a Slayer that has gone rogue.
Johannes had his father murdered and his mother almost died from poisoning, his twin sister also ran away some years ago. So Johannes wants to find his sister, find out who murdered his father and find a remedy for his mother who is invalid.
Alma is faerie blooded. She wants to find away to stop her step father from abusing her mother. She wants to find out who her real father is. She wants to get her younger siblings out of life of crime. She wants to discover her faerie powers.
Leneas Lost his mind after being tortured by the Inquisition, his father was burned for heresy but due his connection to an influential nobleman and a criminal kingpin Leneas was released. Leneas is delusional and thinks that killing 100 bad people, traitors and oathbreakers will make Orcus, an ancient etruscan deity his father believed in, release the soul of his deceased wife.

As you see, even with these short descriptions I have a lot to build on.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-01-15, 11:56 PM
They have to be character driven. You also have to have the right players for it, if the characters aren't interested in pushing things on their own then the game won't work, get buy-in on this before you even consider starting at all.

Beyond that, I assume you already have a system in mind for this, but consider stripping useful things out of other systems. For example, make players write goals for their characters, and accomplishing those goals is what drives mechanical advancement. I don't know if that's the right mechanic for your game, but things along those lines can help guide people towards the right way to play for the game you're trying to run.

Knaight
2017-01-16, 01:54 AM
I tend to focus on actor networks, where the major organizations, people, etc. are defined, they can interact in interesting ways, and the PCs are a part of it. This keeps interesting events happening, and prevents the potential issue where the gameworld feels sterile, like you're just exploring some unchanging landscape.

hymer
2017-01-16, 02:32 AM
So how do you all run your sandbox worlds and how do you try to foster roleplay?

How I run a sandbox world is a question with a very long answer, I think. :smallsmile: If you want to ask for something more specific, maybe that would make it easier.
As for what I do to foster roleplay, first off I don't expect a given group to be that interested in the role aspect. Some players just want to kill monsters and get bigger and better powers. But there are a few things I do:

In my current 5e sandbox, I require every PC to have a stated Motivation, which I'll weave into the world. One guy is looking for a particular book to prove his worth to his family, and I've put that book into the library of one of the big baddies. He's found out who has it, so now he knows (if he remembers, anyway) which faction he needs to be particularly dealing with.

I present situations that call for decisions, and therefore discussion which should be made in character. The local elves are not too keen on letting travellers enter their forest along the trade road unless it's early in the day. The forest becomes dangerous at night. So do you take the delay? Or do you try to persuade the elves to let you through? Or take a third option?

I include random encounters unlikely to result in combat: A band of hobgoblins testing the characters with threats to see if they can be bullied. A travelling merchant of an ambiguous species or culture, interested in trading with the PCs. The local druid comes to commend or correct the PCs on their behaviour in her/his territory. A knight and his retainers asking about ruins from a particular culture - actually there are four knights, each with their own personality and methods, but all competing towards the same (so far undisclosed) goal. A mad dwarf miner, convinced that there's mithril to be found somewhere around here, and very interested in trading for food but feels threatened by anyone with mining expertise.

shadow_archmagi
2017-01-16, 06:49 AM
I think the easiest way to get used to writing sandboxes is to have every session end with the players deciding what next session will be. After that, prepwork and running look a lot like a more conventional game.

So instead of

DM: "Okay so I just bought Treason On Dragon Mountain, so that's the adventure this week."
PCs: "Cool. I want to play a mermaid with no ability to survive on land. A saltwater mermaid."

You just do

PCs: "We want to go to Dragon Mountain with that Duke we trust a lot."
DM: "Cool. Next week: Treason on Dragon Mountain!"
PCs: "Wait what"


Knaight also makes a really good point. Keep track of the game at whatever scale you're interested in, and then have entities of approximately the player's powerlevel with conflicting goals to create specific scenarios. Write "wants more bears" under the description for Duke Wizard, and then "Has a lot of bears" on the description for Lady Elf, and then if the PCs are ever in either of their territories, you can have them fighting over bears and the PCs pick a side. Or working together to make a giant bear farm, but zombies keep attacking. Whatever.

Darth Ultron
2017-01-16, 07:51 AM
So how do you all run your sandbox worlds and how do you try to foster roleplay?

A lot like other games, you need a good story and plot and a good hook. A pure sandbox is just random unconnected encounters and few sandbox games do that. Most sandbox games are just a ''sand screen'' for a DM to say they have no plot and story and...somehow...the game runs itself(yet the DM is there doing DM things all the time). Though in a sand box, the DM does not make up the whole adventure at once, they only make up the next action or so.

So you want to have a good hook for your players. Sometimes....not often, players will hook themselves, but most of the time the DM must do it. Even with the sandbox of ''ok, players, do whatever you want to do'', I lot of players just don't do anything. So this is where you add something you know the players want, but they can't exactly say or express. It does require you to know your players, of course. Though, even if they are strangers the classics of greed and power work very well.

Once the players pick a hook, then you need to build a plot and story around it. In true sandbox fashion you can leave all the details vague so you can change things and quantum ogre things later. You can even be as vague as ''a dark cult'' and then drop that idea to the players and let them pick a ''dark cult god'' and then make it so.

Though after a game or two you will have lots of details, and even in a sandbox, you can't really change everything on a whim. If the king has three daughters on Monday, you can't say he has only one on Friday and say ''it has always been so'' (you could have two daughters die, of course). So you need to come up with a plot, and for a sandbox, it will need to be one the players ''like'' and ''will follow''. Again you can leave plot details vague, but you do still need at least an outline. The same is true with a story.

Yora
2017-01-16, 11:03 AM
My approach in my current preparation work is to start with defining what the role of the player characters will be in the campaign, at least for the beginning phase. It's effectively impossible to prepare thematic content and give the players things to do before you know what the theme will be and what the party will be doing.
The default oldschool assumption is "treasure hunter" but it can also be "pirates", "political conspiracy", or "barbarian clan wars". For the campaign I am currently preparing I have chosen the theme "exploring the mysteries of a magical forest". The only requirement for making characters (aside from race and class restrictions) is that all PCs have to be interested in learning about the magic in the forest together with the other PCs. That's not a terribly restrictive requirement that shoehorns the PCs into being any specific archetypes or doing specific things. (For a pirate campaign the requirement would be that the PCs want to spend the campaign at and on the sea.)

My current preparation consists of filling the map of the sandbox with four big dungeons that each have a central mystery, eight smaller dungeons in which the players can find information and magic that will help them reaching and surviving the big ones, and a handful of settlements that the party can use as bases for their expeditions. The second step (that in practice happens more or less simultaneously) is to come up with people and intelligent monsters that can be encountered in these dungeons or are in the settlements and have some interest in them To make things more interesting, the inhabitants of the dungeons also often know a bit about the other dungeons and have some minor interest in them.

And that's mostly it. The players get a map with most of the settlements and a few dungeons near the starting town and get told to go looking for the magical wonders that are in the forest.
I deliberately decided to not use a hex map and let the players explore one hex at a time. Instead they first have to know that a place exists and how it can be reached before they can set out on a journey. New locations can be learned from maps in dungeons or by talking with NPCs.
Since the theme is dungeon exploration and the characters have to be dungeon explorers, I am not putting much work into town content. Mostly it will be supplies traders and various people with knowledge about some dungeons. The majority ofNPCs are the inhabitants of dungeons who are searching for something or want to keep something out of the hands of others. I don't design them as either enemies or allies. How they will react to the PCs depends on what priorities they have and how the players are behaving.

Segev
2017-01-16, 11:36 AM
The next time I try to run a sand box, I intend to give a "hex crawl" a try. The idea behind a hex crawl is that you make your overworld map with hexes representing reasonably large zones (the angry GM suggests 6 miles across), and that you place an encounter in each of them, with random encounter tables to encourage expeditious travel. Let players learn rumors and legends about some things, and have people with quests to send them to others. Players will explore the map as they go to initial destinations, and eventually they'll start developing their own "to do" lists.

If I'm feeling particularly ambitious, I might even have active plots of various factions in play, which advance on their own timelines in ways I fully understand...if the players stay out of them. Player intervention will, of course, shift things and make me rethink how things work with the changes to what resources are available to whom.