Successful Sandbox?

[Ixtellor]

Anyone out there ever run a long term successful true sandbox game in the D&D setting?

I've been wanting to do this for a while, and will start one in about 9 years when my old crew is all retired and has more free time. But it has dawned on me that in the 20 plus years of playing a lot --- it never actually occurred.

So if anyone can share their sandbox , where the DM established a world and just unleashed their players to 'sandbox' it with no DM agenda.

It has also dawned on me that a true sandbox can't work without very experienced players who are capable of having goals or an agenda of their own. (Unless I'm wrong and one of you has succeeded doing it with noob players)

Thanks in advance for sharing any pointers or experience.

[Kurt Kurageous]

There's a reason why what you are seeking is hard to find.

Creating 100% of a world that will be 95% unexplored is a lot of pointless work. I know 'cause I've done it. I thought it was the right thing to do. I was wrong.

It's much harder to offer advice without knowing what kind of game your players want. But in general:
Start with a source of conflict.
Draw a map, but keep it small. Sketch a region. Then redo it on hex paper 6mi/hex.
Pick a starting point in the middle of the sketch.
Limit backgrounds and races to what would be there. Minimize backstories to the character's motivations. There are no deposed descendants of kings/queens, no murdered tribes, etc. Just this group of friends motivated by your conflict.
Learn to say "no" during character creation.
Let the game grow around their choices.
Build no more than two sessions ahead.
You need to slow them down because they are heading in the 'wrong' direction/doing the unexpected thing? Give 'em a fight that will force them to exhaust enough resources to force them to camp.

And understand that, after you have done all of this perfectly right, an unforeseen scheduling conflict will cause it all to fall apart. Usually. At least that's how my longest running sandboxed ended. Long before level 20...

See what I mean?

I forgot to answer your question. Yes, I have, if you consider Curse of Strahd a sandbox. Which it ultimately isn't if the players play to win and the DM isn't going out of their way to kill them.

[One Step Two]

Last year I wrapped-up what I called a "pseudo-sandbox" game, I presented it to my players as thus:

The game is set in the Forgotten Realms, the party works for an adventuring guild in the city of Neverwinter and they have control over 2 options for each session:

Option 1 - Monster of the Week

Option 2 - Personal Plots

With the Monster of the Week, they could approach the guild for a mission of varying difficulty (Green, Yellow or Red which changes the CR or type of challenge the encounter is), such as hunting a monster or collecting on a bounty. This sometimes took 2-3 sessions depending on how difficult the mission, and preparation. And occasionally they'd run into a small dungeon complex that took a little longer to deal with. These were often based around the City proper, and the outskirts, the funds they acquired doing guild work fueled the second option.

With personal plots I explicitly told them they had the run of the setting writ large with the single caveat that they needed to remember travel times. The players could pursue any personal agenda they wished, solo or with their adventuring buddies.

To support their movements, I told them they could pick up Guild work out of any major city in the Forgotten Realms if they wished to travel to say Thay or Silverymoon. They began at 3rd Level, and we played with the 3.5 Ruleset.

That was more or less the preamble to the Sandbox I gave them, so here are the DM underpinnings:

I used a well-established setting to lessen my workload, tonnes of books for me to use, a world the players were familiar with gave them places they wanted to visit and explore, and still enough blank spaces on the vast maps I can drop a few unexplored ruins from time to time.

The preface of the guild provided a framework for the characters to have a reason to work together if they had any potential clashes. The monster of the week, gave the players an option if they wanted to just have some mindless combat instead of worrying over their plots and schemes. Also, loot!

I made it really clear from the outset that the players could treat the Guild members as just work associates or friends, and when it came to personal plots they were under no obligations to involve other players if they didn't want to. They players had to give their characters some long-term goals ideally, but they don't need to feel pressured to do so.

Exp disparity might come up if someone prefers to fight monsters or duels during their personal plot time solo, that can be nipped that in the bud by ensuring that the other players would get exp for non-combat challenges to keep them roughly on par.

The most important thing I can think to point to with a Sandbox, is that avoid the desire to make a plot outside what the players are planning for their characters. The world is by no-means static, but don't have a doomsday plot running in the background that will kill everyone if the players ignore it. That is of course unless one of the players is making a seasoned investigator who hunts down doomsday cults who are trying to end the world, be sure to include one for them to find.

Two pitfalls that came to mind:

I ran into was one or two of the players being indecisive, not knowing what they wanted their character to do. I recommend presenting some in-character options that might suit them, or asking one of the more pro-active players to include them in their schemes.

Being respectful of everyone's time, some personal plots can run away from you, especially if someone is demanding to do a purely solo exercise. Asking your players to pause mid-scene to check in on others can be jarring, but is valuable to making sure everyone is getting attention.

[Telok]

Here,
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1quCQJilfuNpel5q5JxVHVQ4b2vnKINM2
Have a bounded sandbox for d&d 3.5 that ran about 70 sessions. Ran it about 10 or 12 years ago. There's a game log somewhere on the forum if you search hard enough.

[Pauly]

I have been around 2 successful sandbox campaigns that ran for 5byears plus, although not as a regular player or GM.
The first was a Traveller campaign, with a kind of Cowboy Bebop/Firefly feel where the crew of the ship were always short on coin and taking whatever job available kept their ship in space.
The other was a GURPS campaign that started as survival/horror trying to keep alive in a 17th century Highlander setting while the Kurgan was trying to kill them which then changed gears into piracy then palace intrigue then cthulu horror then masked vigilantes a la the Scarlet Pimpernel.

My comments on these campaigns
1) Skill based systems as opposed to class based systems seem to do better. You avoid the power creep and power disbalances that happen in long running D&D campaigns. The player’s motivations and ambitions remain more stable as does their equipment and contacts.
2) Having a lot of written source material is great. The GURPS campaign I referenced was 90% straight historical locations, NPCs and off screen events. You are going to need more material than you can use.
3) player buy in at character creation is a huge deal. If you have 4 people doing X and the fifth doing Y then the campaign will break down sooner or later. Also a group motivation keeps the group coherent and working together, rather than having individuals splitting off to do their own thing.
4) Recognise the limits and strengths of the system and stay within that. GURPS is very flexible and allows genre switching, whereas Traveller is a hard sci-fi environment. Trying to force the system to be a square peg in a round hole doesn’t work. Find the groove of your chosen system and stay in the area that the system is good at.

[Yora]

Sandboxes can be a lot of thing, which all require different setups to work.

I would strongly suspect that the most common type of long running sandbox that works well is "let's search this frontier wilderness for treasure". If the process of going to a ruin in the wilderness and collecting its treasures is set up to be fun, the campaign can practically run forever. There is little in the way of preparation that the players need to do to get started, and the campaign can't really get stuck when the players don't know how to continue any of the current plots they have picked up. It's quite easy to expand the starting content as the campaign goes without needing set up a lot of content at the start of which most might never get used.

Going treasure hunting in old ruins doesn't have to be the whole campaign, but the day job of the PCs which they pursue when there's nothing else requiring their urgent attention. It's also what makes them keep running into new people and places, either in the ruins they explore or as random encountes while traveling through the wilds. Players can chose to get deeper involved with these people and what's going on locally if they want to, or just continue on if they don't. Since it's a sandbox where players take the lead, there is no need to prepare adventures with a specific villain who has some great plan that the players need to stop and all the kinds of clues and allies needed to let them do that.

[Stonehead]

The most important thing I can think to point to with a Sandbox, is that avoid the desire to make a plot outside what the players are planning for their characters. The world is by no-means static, but don't have a doomsday plot running in the background that will kill everyone if the players ignore it. That is of course unless one of the players is making a seasoned investigator who hunts down doomsday cults who are trying to end the world, be sure to include one for them to find.


I want to second this.

I've played in two (attempted) sandbox campaigns, and both of them ended because we didn't stop the end-of-the world event that we didn't even know existed until the prior session.

I know behind-the-scenes schemes and events are part of the draw of DMing a sandbox campaign, but I would limit those to redrawing country borders or npc assassinations. Nothing that ends the campaign.

[Yora]

The point of background events is to have areas change in some ways when the players return to them after a long time. Simply to create the apperance that the world has its own stories, and that opportunities will not be waiting forever for the PCs. Options open up in the sandbox, but they will also close eventually.
Events don't have to be big or dramatic for that. It can be simple things like some merchant who was selling great stuff to the party before no longer being in the town after the players haven't checked on him for two years.

[Ixtellor]

I want to second this.

I've played in two (attempted) sandbox campaigns, and both of them ended because we didn't stop the end-of-the world event that we didn't even know existed until the prior session.

I know behind-the-scenes schemes and events are part of the draw of DMing a sandbox campaign, but I would limit those to redrawing country borders or npc assassinations. Nothing that ends the campaign.

Yea, I keep seeing this over and over in modern D&D campaigns and I personally an not a fan of 'the world is ending unless you save it' --because in my mind its really just a form of a railroad -- ie the adventure the DM wanted you to solve the whole time.

I agree that the world should change and there should be dangers out in the world, but nothing that 'ends the world'.

[gijoemike]

This was nearly 20 years ago but we had a massive group of players ~20 people in our local area. We would all show up on a Thursday at the local gaming shop because there wasn't a card tournament on that night. 3 people would plan to GM and the rest would be the party. We constantly had shifting parties makeup. We were all part of a general community in the game.

Like others have said we used Forgotten Realms so we could pull on an established setting.
We had multiple storytellers that ran for 3 sessions or so. There were no end of the world/country/town plots.
Dragons SUCK. We learned that so hard. We had a dragon show up and cause problems across 3 DMs.

Cleric wanted to build a new temple
Wizard wanted to prove ye old magic shop could exist.
Rogue had a get rich quick scheme each week.
One of the fighters dedicated himself to building a sword style school.
The bard always helped keep everyone informed about local rumors.
2 people played twin dwarves exploring the world and just happened to find this area fun.


Sometimes a GM would dangle plot points in front of us, other times we would decide how to progress one of our goals or decide we want to go check out the rumor from the bard player.

[One Step Two]

I agree that the world should change and there should be dangers out in the world, but nothing that 'ends the world'.

I did the same thing for my sandbox, there would be changes like nobles sniping each other, a guard captain running away to elope with a chaotic good Drow priestess that leaves a small power vacuum. General rumors that the players can insert themselves into if they are interested in following a thread.

As an example, when they were looking for their Monster of the week, they did some rumor gathering and found a suspicious bounty in the guild. When they investigated it they learned that there was a long-standing rivalry between the guild and the town guard and it might have been more dangerous than intended. Long story short, they made allies with a Dragon, and ended up ruining the life of the lieutenant who sent them on the potential suicide run.

Also, as a corollary to my point about no world-ending doom cults, if you do include them, make them only active while the players are doing something about it. It's handy to keep a few vague plot threads hanging if they want for something to do, or they are interested in being the big damn heroes after all. It's a strong urge for some, and for your more evil players, a convenient set of bodies to fuel necromancy experiments.

[False God]

There's a reason why what you are seeking is hard to find.

Creating 100% of a world that will be 95% unexplored is a lot of pointless work. I know 'cause I've done it. I thought it was the right thing to do. I was wrong.

It's much harder to offer advice without knowing what kind of game your players want. But in general:
Start with a source of conflict.
Draw a map, but keep it small. Sketch a region. Then redo it on hex paper 6mi/hex.
Pick a starting point in the middle of the sketch.
Limit backgrounds and races to what would be there. Minimize backstories to the character's motivations. There are no deposed descendants of kings/queens, no murdered tribes, etc. Just this group of friends motivated by your conflict.
Learn to say "no" during character creation.
Let the game grow around their choices.
Build no more than two sessions ahead.
You need to slow them down because they are heading in the 'wrong' direction/doing the unexpected thing? Give 'em a fight that will force them to exhaust enough resources to force them to camp.

And understand that, after you have done all of this perfectly right, an unforeseen scheduling conflict will cause it all to fall apart. Usually. At least that's how my longest running sandboxed ended. Long before level 20...

See what I mean?

I forgot to answer your question. Yes, I have, if you consider Curse of Strahd a sandbox. Which it ultimately isn't if the players play to win and the DM isn't going out of their way to kill them.

To keep my response short, this is essentially my experience as well. And interestingly, CoS (or rather it's predecessor in earlier editions) is also the closest thing I've run to a sandbox.

In part, because Barovia and it's greater world of Ravenloft is HEAVY with detail but relatively compressed (there are few areas where there is NOTHING, as a full-scale world often has. Don't believe me? Visit Wyoming.), so the creators have done most of the work for me, I just need to "turn the game on" more or less. The world is well developed, the NPCs of note have detailed backstories, there's a variety of generally BAD STUFF*TM going on basically everywhere.

But, once again, even for all this detail, the players saw very little of it. They actually got murdered horribly shortly after entering, regardless of my warnings that this campaign setting's default difficulty was "Nightmare". And like many games, they thought they wanted to play this, but really were just looking for some mild gothic horror themes, without the intense gothic horror difficulty and so the game ended shortly after a half-hearted second attempt.

But creating all this on my own? It's not really worth the time and effort. I'll generally stick to filling out the local area and then filling in the blanks as players progress in any given direction. If you run the same setting repeatedly (which I do now) eventually it will fill out into a fully-detailed world, but it will be the result of countless hours of work and gameplay. It's just not worth doing it all in advance unless you're trying to create a product to sell, and even then there are reasonable limits. Even a "theme-park" like World of Warcraft's Azeroth would fill HUNDREDS of pages to detail out the current state of the world, not to mention it's history.

[Talakeal]

When people talk about “end of the world” what do they actually mean?

If it is literal, how is it achieved and why are the PCs the only one’s who can stop it? What about all the gods, and high level npcs, and even all the other villains who want to go on existing?

Normally “end of the world” is just a dramatic way of saying a lot of people will die, or a civilization will collapse, or a an evil regime will come to power. And if that is the case, why end the game?

[One Step Two]

When people talk about “end of the world” what do they actually mean?

If it is literal, how is it achieved and why are the PCs the only oneÂ’s who can stop it? What about all the gods, and high level npcs, and even all the other villains who want to go on existing?

Normally “end of the world” is just a dramatic way of saying a lot of people will die, or a civilization will collapse, or a an evil regime will come to power. And if that is the case, why end the game?

In the first example you mention, where it is literal, it's more interesting for the PCs to get to be the big damn heroes and save the world instead. Though, there might be some interest in playing masters-of-whispers to pass on news underground to high level NPCs to solve problems. But then equally, some people don't want to play as glorified informants, when they could be where the action is.

In the case where a Kingdom might fall, and the regime change sparks a civil war, sure that can be interesting to play in, but that changes the terms of the Sandbox idea if they are found in the middle of it for no reason, because the players might feel they are beholden to get involved in that.

For me, a Sandbox is where the players have the most control over their goals and stories. So let's take the literal end-of-the-world scenario off the table, and talk the end of a Kingdom:

If they hear rumors about a civil war or an evil King rising in the lands across the sea and want to explore that, sure, let's go down that path. It's their choice to get involved, and we're on board

If one of the players decides to orchestrate their way into becoming nobility though death and deception, and there's political blow-back which leads to civil war, then that's fine. Their choices lead to that outcome, and is more interesting for it.

If the city they are choose to live in with factors outside their control undergoes a revolution that sparks a city-wide riot leading to civil war, either the players feel they need to be involved, or forced to leave, then it's not their story, it's me presenting (or outright imposing) a story for them to deal with.

Why the contradiction? Because that is the spirit of the Sandbox concept I mentioned in my first post, their character plots and stories are the priority, not mine. Stuff certainly happens around them, it's a living world after all, but they get to pick the terms they engage with it.

That's largely my interpretation of running a sandbox, I cannot stress that enough, and part of that includes giving them a relatively stable base of operations. Unless they do something to get people angry at them, that whole Nobility thing in my second example? Actually happened, great fun for everyone, because they got to see their plans play out, though not always for the best outcome

Of course, dude was a changeling just changed his face, and tried again, this time simply marrying into a noble family under an assumed name.

[Telok]

When people talk about “end of the world” what do they actually mean?

If it is literal, how is it achieved and why are the PCs the only oneÂ’s who can stop it? What about all the gods, and high level npcs, and even all the other villains who want to go on existing?

Normally “end of the world” is just a dramatic way of saying a lot of people will die, or a civilization will collapse, or a an evil regime will come to power. And if that is the case, why end the game?

Well, in one case our dm wanted to run the d&d 5e 'demon lords pop up in the underdark' book. Before the game collapsed because he couldn't run it using the book we got a early ooc reveal about it being all "end of the world". Poor sod was aghast when we pointed out that as a bunch of above-grounders who'd been kidnapped & such we would be perfectly happy, in character, to let them wreck the whole underdark and just form up gangs of flying casters to fry anything that crawled up above ground. Even pointed out there were casters in the setting who, given sufficient notice, could spam simracula of themselves until they could probably one round KO the big bads.

Funny tho, all the "ultra doom cults" in my setting are just deluded or decieved people being lied to by the people or beings leading & profiting off them. Players never quite seem to cotton on to the pattern. They're usually happy to just bash & loot, only occasionally bothering to check if a cult could actually pull off anything bigger than blowing up a couple city blocks. The real kicker being its always been the pcs letting loose elder evils, demon lords, or opening gates to hell. Not intentionally, just by being sloppy or ignoring posted warning signs. The "heros" turn out to be a bigger threat to the world(s) than most bad guys.

[Quertus]

Have I run a successful long-term Sandbox? Yes, yes I have. My players described my style as, "Here's a world, go!".

However, setup is important. The Therapist doesn't buy 20 random objects from Wal-Mart, place them in a box with sand, and then ask the patient to sandbox their family. No, the choice of objects / toys is very intentional.

So, too, must the GM choose their sandbox content well. As others have said, starting with a published world with lots of content can do your heavy lifting for you. I, however, do not go that route. I make my own worlds. This works for me, is not a waste of time for 95% of the content to be unused, because a) I enjoy worldbuilding; b) no, seriously, it's "worldbuild" or "suffer ennui while standing in line waiting to pay for my groceries", "worldbuilding" or "suffer ennui while waiting for the teacher to teach to the slowest student", "worldbuilding" or "suffer ennui while sitting at a red light", etc; c) I use that worldbuilding content for my characters' backgrounds, it's not wasted.

But, just like for an adventure, or even a 1-shot, choosing the time and place for the curtains to rise (and the starting power level (and maybe even other constraints) for the PCs) matters to what they can know, what they can do, how they can interact with the world, how much fun they will have.

-----

Can I "share my sandbox"? I mean, if you've got a handy time-traveling Illithid Savant maybe? Instead, how about I share a few ideas for how to build your own. Let's start with something getting a lot of virtual ink in this thread: end of the world scenarios.

My RPG experience is rife with "end of the world" scenarios. Quertus, my signature academia mage, for whom this account is named, has over 100 worlds that owe their continued existence to him (or to parties of which he was a member, you get the idea). So, yeah, a lot of end-of-the-world scenarios. :smallamused:

However, in a sandbox? If the GM says, "I know it's only session 2, and only day 2 of the campaign, but I started you in Waterdeep, and, as it turns out, today, on day 2, Thay and Mystra both ended the world."? That's pretty obviously a terrible GM, right? So "end of the world" scenarios, run in a Simulationist manner, with random starting time and place, and as most GMs would run them, are bad.

But can end of the world scenarios be good in a Sandbox? Yes, yes they can. Let me explain a few ways.

First, the most obvious way, is if it's the premise of the Sandbox. "You were on your spaceship, the world blew up, go find a new home." "It's day 1 of the Zombie Apocalypse. You are here (or even 'where are you?')." "The gods have voted to end the world, Thanos has snapped his fingers, there's nothing you can do about it. However, you are all Quicklings, and 20 generations will likely pass between the snap and it affecting you. Your divinations have told you when the calendar will end; tick-tock goes the clock. What do you do?"

Another way that they can work is if, by default, the world doesn't end. That is, yes, if the evil princess succeeds in kidnapping a dragon of each color (gotta catch 'em all!), she will be able to complete her ritual to transform lovely Dungeontopia into the hellscape of Pokéverse. Fortunately, Sir Bravely (bard knight, mounted on a giant Python), Robin (an anthropomorphic bat Cleric of pugilism and vigilantism), and Sir Tophem Hatt (golem-crafting bfc wizard extraordinaire) are all aware of the problem, and any one of them could set things right. So long as the party doesn't really mess things up, the world won't end. And, if they should happen to want to get involved, they might even get to be responsible for saving the world.

And, of course, there's a difference between "the world is ending" and "the world is changing". Some have more tolerance for change than others in their medieval stasis elf games. Shrug. Session 0, know your players, set expectations, rule of 3, subtle hints, blah blah blah. And if your players really want to mass Mindrape / brain bleach the world to remove that stupid Justin B... who were we talking about again? Anyway, if your players really hate some Bard introducing a new song, and want to go to the effort to retroactively remove that song or that bard from existence, well, let them! You don't have to be afraid of introducing change, if you aren't afraid of the players changing that change.

Before I change things up a bit, let me expand on that last bit a bit, as I think I bit off more than one paragraph can chew. As others have mentioned, it's not the GM's story, it's the PCs' story. We're telling the story of these PCs. If the backdrop tries to take center stage, that's a problem. You don't tell the story of the tree that the artist painted in the background of the play, you tell the story of Romeo and Juliet. If your cameraman keeps the tree in focus while Romeo and Juliet are blurry, they've almost certainly done something wrong, right? Same thing here. If you find that the "camera" of attention and spotlight and cliff's notes can't focus on the PCs, that it spends too much time focusing on the backdrop - whether that's the setting details, the end of the world scenario, the actions of NPCs, whatever - you should probably go home and rethink your script.

The last thing is, I'll often have a half dozen or more "end of the world" scenarios running at any given time, they just aren't set to go off "right now". The NPCs don't move at the speed of plot, but they don't move at the speed the PCs are capable of moving, if they so choose. Yes, in a thousand years, the immortal Lich will have grown enough Black Sand in his secret underground rat farm to epic volcano spell darken the sky and cover the world in a miasma of death... but that's not relevant to the campaign unless the PCs decide that it is (or gain time travel powers or survive a millennia-long timeskip or some such).

-----

One last thing for now, lest this post lose the forest for the trees. For the record, noob pre-teen players can have goals and agendas of their own just fine. What is wrong with the players so many GMs seem to find? How can one be such a feckless milksop (or exclusively make characters who are such, to the detriment of the game) to be unable to have a goal or agenda in an RPG? :smallconfused:

[Misereor]

Anyone out there ever run a long term successful true sandbox game in the D&D setting?

Zhentil Keep: Resurrection.
Ran for 6-7 years.

Setting and premise.
Twist on an evil campaign. What do ordinary people that live in evil societies do?
Forgotten Realms without any of the established PC's or world altering events. Set around around ca. the time of the 1st ed. boxed set.
Players forcibly inducted into Zhentish penal legion that got all the dirty jobs. Think a mix between the French Foreign Legion, WW2 POW mine clearing "volunteers", and the Marx brothers.
Outlined plans for major events and plotlines in the calendar, but let the players decide if they wanted to get involved.

Placed them on the path, gave them openings for both good and bad, and observed what they did.
By no means a railroad. I would have let them escape it they put in the work, but interestingly, as long as they weren't forced to commit evil actions and were able to find social niches, they went along without too much complaint. All were good or neutrally aligned.

Highlights of the campaign included:
- Sabotaging the efforts of the faith of Tyr to establish a temple in Phlan. They did so by exploiting tension between Tyrians and Waukeenites that eventually erupted into open religious strife. The city council was forced to shut down the building project.
- The rogue building an informer network of street urchins in Zhentil Keep (and earning the nickname of "Fagin", which he didn't get...).
- The cleric creating his own underground cult to the Elven god of vengeance and retribution for the poor and downtrodden (never got around to doing anything with it though).
- Defending Zhentill Keep from even worse evil than that of the Banites. Hey, there were a lot of families in the city, including those of some of the PC's. Antagonists included Vaasan Orcus worshippers, nihilistic druids who believed blood makes the grass grow, Hobgoblin Khans with designs on empire, and genocidal berserker Kobold hordes (ok, that last one was mostly comical).
- Discovering that the stereotypical receiving a border barony to govern is a trap. Tyrannical lords squeeze their governors, and it can be difficult to find other options than to squeeze your subjects in return. They managed ok though, mostly economically growthing their way out of the problems (and of course making various new enemies along the way).

The party eventually got mostly wiped out when they accidentally awakened an ancient Dracolich and panicked instead of keeping cool and coordinating (I may have overdone the flavor text).
By then we were ready to play something else anyway, so we called it a day instead of rolling up a bunch of new chars.

[OldTrees1]

It has also dawned on me that a true sandbox can't work without very experienced players who are capable of having goals or an agenda of their own. (Unless I'm wrong and one of you has succeeded doing it with noob players)
This is important. PCs with active goals is important. It is not strictly necessary for a successful sandbox campaign, but it makes it much more likely to have a successful campaign. This is the summary of one of my early sandbox campaigns. It succeeded despite its flaws.

The purest sandbox I ran was when I was in high school:
I built a world. There is a mighty evil empire that has created colonies in the untamed wilderness. The empire places those colonies in dangerous locations to create xp farms for the magic item economy.

This particular colony was placed near a surprisingly cold mountain surrounded by temperate or tropic biomes. There was hostile megafauna that made travel difficult. There were several nearby threats to the colony (Yuan Ti temple in the jungle, Goblins relocated into the desert by the empire, a dragon, a few more I forget). There were some ancient ruins (dungeons) scattered about.

The party grew up together living with their sensei in a house built inside the wilderness. Since it was well hidden and out of the way they only needed to deal with the hostile megafauna while growing up. There is a strange circular trapdoor in the floor of the house but the sensei refused to open it.

There are some NPCs with agendas in motion. The most impactful example is, the surprisingly cold mountain contains an elder evil of ice and snow. They have been using a few weak minded colonists as cultists to undo the 5 seals that bind the elder evil.

The sensei just died of old age. You know the local geography, the location of the colony, and a brief summary of the short history of the colony. I asked you to come up with self motivated characters. Go. What do you do?


Did the campaign succeed? Yes, but. We were young. The players did not create PCs with enough self motivation to drive the story. There were flaws in my world building. There was a playstyle mismatch where the players preferred a sandbox with a bit of direction rather than a pure sandbox. It could have been a story where the PCs pursued a goal despite what was happening (Ex: opened a bar and then weather proofed the bar against the sudden climate change) or pursued a goal that had greater impact than events in motion (Ex: break the colony away from the empire and forge a peace with other sapient species). Instead it was a threat of the week where the PCs would be distracted each time one of the other threats made a move. Although when the colony had an internal power struggle the PCs stepped in an used their influence to create their own outcome.The PCs investigated multiple ancient ruins and unknowingly helped the cult break the 5 seals (only 2 broken by the party). The elder evil emerged and started to create an expanding arctic biome. The PCs showed up a few days later and defeat it.

[Stonehead]

When people talk about “end of the world” what do they actually mean?

If it is literal, how is it achieved and why are the PCs the only one’s who can stop it? What about all the gods, and high level npcs, and even all the other villains who want to go on existing?

Normally “end of the world” is just a dramatic way of saying a lot of people will die, or a civilization will collapse, or a an evil regime will come to power. And if that is the case, why end the game?

Well, in my case, the plane we lived on literally collapsed with the party still in it. Not much choice but to end the game there.

Still though, you bring up a good point. Technically, you should avoid "end of the game" scenarios, not necessarily "end of the world" scenarios. Now, I think there is a lot of overlap for most people. If you're pitched a heroic fantasy game, then you fail to stop the lich, and everyone in the kingdom becomes a slave to the undead horde, I can understand the players not wanting to play any more. Still though, there are groups who would find a turn of events like that an interesting twist.



Another way that they can work is if, by default, the world doesn't end. That is, yes, if the evil princess succeeds in kidnapping a dragon of each color (gotta catch 'em all!), she will be able to complete her ritual to transform lovely Dungeontopia into the hellscape of Pokéverse. Fortunately, Sir Bravely (bard knight, mounted on a giant Python), Robin (an anthropomorphic bat Cleric of pugilism and vigilantism), and Sir Tophem Hatt (golem-crafting bfc wizard extraordinaire) are all aware of the problem, and any one of them could set things right. So long as the party doesn't really mess things up, the world won't end. And, if they should happen to want to get involved, they might even get to be responsible for saving the world.

This can work, but it isn't fool-proof. If heroic npcs can solve all the serious problems in the world, then some groups would start to feel like all of these "save the world" missions are pointless. If they don't solve it, someone else will.

Now, not all groups would, and even if the do maybe that's fine, it would free the party up to focus on their own goals. But, if they want to be focusing on their own goals anyways, it probably isn't worth the screen time for the save the world plot hooks to even show up.



One last thing for now, lest this post lose the forest for the trees. For the record, noob pre-teen players can have goals and agendas of their own just fine. What is wrong with the players so many GMs seem to find? How can one be such a feckless milksop (or exclusively make characters who are such, to the detriment of the game) to be unable to have a goal or agenda in an RPG? :smallconfused:

Where do you find your players? In one group I DM'd for a few players struggled to come up with one (1) npc they knew during session 0. A full-fledged goal would be beyond their reach.

[Thrudd]

Where do you find your players? In one group I DM'd for a few players struggled to come up with one (1) npc they knew during session 0. A full-fledged goal would be beyond their reach.

I think it'd be acceptable to suggest starting goals for players who don't have ideas of their own - in some cases, it might even be appropriate to require that characters have some sort of shared goal to start out the game and get them proactively engaging with the setting you've prepared (assuming you've built the setting and have plans for the campaign before session 0). By goals, I mean very basic and immediate things that can drive the early game, like "make a name for ourselves as adventurers (whatever that means in your setting)", "search for artifacts and lost treasure in the ruins".
Give the players a starting point, the basic premise of the campaign. They can then start to work out why their characters want to search for treasure or become famous and powerful adventurers, either before the game starts or during it. All you need is for them to know they want to find some ruins, for example, and then they will start asking around for information and planning how to best succeed at the task. Even if some players don't think about it too hard at first, over time they may develop new motives and desires as engagement with you and the setting and the other players inspires them. And maybe some of them will be content to just stick with "be an adventurer" as their only goal, and that's perfectly acceptable so long as they go along with the group.

What you don't want is for players to come into the first session with characters that don't want to do anything in particular (or who won't tell you what they want to do) and have no reason or desire to team up with one another, expecting to have the DM cajole or force them into action. You then need to hope that they all agree to the meta-game expectation to team up on a permanent or semi-permanent basis, and you don't have any "my character wouldn't do that" types who want to pursue their own goals separately instead of joining the adventures. I've seen it happen too many times. This is why I want there to be at least a basic shared goal for everyone, agreed upon at the very beginning. If a character "wouldn't want to do that", then you need a different character who does want to "do that".

[OldTrees1]

Well, in my case, the plane we lived on literally collapsed with the party still in it. Not much choice but to end the game there.

Still though, you bring up a good point. Technically, you should avoid "end of the game" scenarios, not necessarily "end of the world" scenarios. Now, I think there is a lot of overlap for most people. If you're pitched a heroic fantasy game, then you fail to stop the lich, and everyone in the kingdom becomes a slave to the undead horde, I can understand the players not wanting to play any more. Still though, there are groups who would find a turn of events like that an interesting twist.

I think the plane collapsing could be an "end of the world" instead of an "end of the game" scenario. The first few ideas that spring to mind are:
1) You are now vestiges (3E Tome of Magic) trapped between the planes. You have been contacted by some binders. You get to roleplay as your character and the binder(s) that make pacts with you. The GM will decide how many and which binders make pacts with you each day but that will be influenced by your decisions. I suspect you will choose to continue your goals with the additional goal of being freed somehow.
2) You are now trapped in the space between planes. This is akin to being trapped in hyperspace without a way to renter normal space. Hyperspace is not empty, and others do use it for travel.
3) You are dead and now the campaign shifts to the afterlife setting.
4) The plane collapsed around you but did not cease to exist. You are still in the plane but it is a much more hostile and cramped environment now. Good luck surviving in the post apocalypse.

However this is all hindsight 20/20 without knowing the group or specifics and thus without bothering to verify if any of these outcomes would be possible or desired.

I mostly thought about it since I was remembering the sandbox I ran where "Let the world ice age happen and survive despite the conditions" was a possible option the PCs could take.

[Telok]

In one group I DM'd for a few players struggled to come up with one (1) npc they knew during session 0. A full-fledged goal would be beyond their reach.

Give them a list with a few, say 4 or 6, things on it and a "make up your own" option. For npcs its a list of safe contacts. 'Safe' means loyay, helpful, will never screw with or use the players, will never be hostages, etc. For goals its something that can be accomplished in about 6 to 8 sessions, will not screw up the character, results in a good thing (heirloom magic sword, unique spell, letter of marque, useful fame, powerful & helpful friend/family) when finished.

Its 4 or 6 because if they absolutely can't choose then they roll, and the low dice size is a good chance two characters will start knowing each other & having a connection. Make it explicit, write it in big red letters at the top, the stuff on the list is safe and good and will not screw with them.

...and now I realize I have to write these lists for my next campaign in planning... my usual players have the same damn issue.

[Quertus]

This can work, but it isn't fool-proof. If heroic npcs can solve all the serious problems in the world, then some groups would start to feel like all of these "save the world" missions are pointless. If they don't solve it, someone else will.

Now, not all groups would, and even if the do maybe that's fine, it would free the party up to focus on their own goals. But, if they want to be focusing on their own goals anyways, it probably isn't worth the screen time for the save the world plot hooks to even show up.



Where do you find your players? In one group I DM'd for a few players struggled to come up with one (1) npc they knew during session 0. A full-fledged goal would be beyond their reach.

If you go out to hunt a whale, yes, other fishing boats exist, and they could hunt that whale (maybe just as well as you, maybe not). But when you successfully hunt the whale, and bring it back for food and profit, does it really feel pointless to have hunted it?

And, unless you go out with mad scientists, let them experiment on the whale, and they not only give it super powers, but you specifically chose the set of mad scientists who will give it "Destroy all the boats" and "eat all the other fish" super powers, you haven't reached a "the city starves for lack of fish" fail state (and, even then, you might get players who can figure out a way to nuke the whales from orbit).

I think that the important thing is breeding the right attitude in people - players and GMs alike. The clue-by-four will never gather moss as I roll it around in my hands. :smallbiggrin:

So, as GM, the trick is to build a Sandbox with a variety of interesting Toys; as a player, the trick is to try to figure out something interesting to do with said Toys.

If nothing else, train players with sample questions like, "if the mindset of the Ravnica guilds (not the actual guilds themselves, just the mindsets) was present in a fishing town, which nonexistent guild would your character belong to, what would their job be, and what would they like to accomplish?"

Hmmm... we may be talking past each other. Let me try again.

"The worst thing to have in battle is a plan. Never go into battle without a plan."

I actually build my characters with very little in the way of initial goals. Not "zero", more "something to flavor the main dish with". So, say I built a new character who wanted to... create undead spaceships. There's a goal I've never had.

Well, that goal (along with the character's personality, life experiences, etc) is going to shape the way that they view the campaign, the way that they view the toys in the Sandbox.

And if the party is... Legacies, a bunch of people inducted into an organization through Nepotism, and the adventure is... a murder mystery, at their induction ceremony? Well, my character's goals are going to shape the way he approaches this scenario.

So, what I want and nurture is perhaps less "have a goal", and more "upon hearing a seed (like that there is a (modern) zombie apocalypse), they can think of multiple possible goals, they can grow that seed in numerous ways". You hear that there's pirates off the coast of Austin. Did you think about collecting bounties on the pirates, snitching on the pirates, joining the pirates, being an informant for the pirates, saving pirates to put them in your debt, serving as security on ships, investing in ground transport, solving the socioeconomic conditions that led to the sailors resorting to piracy, investigating how Austin became a port town, ignore it altogether? If not, why not? And, when you looked at the seed through the lens of a particular character, do you know how they would grow the seed (if they didn't choose "ignore it")?

And if the GM said that there's pirates near Austin, wildfires springing up like wildfires, NASA is selling "Space Grass", gene-spliced glow-in-the-dark herbivore dinosaur resurrection, scientists investigating new compounds found in meteor that struck the (former) coast, lotto officials involved in scandal where same numbers appeared 3 days in a row, okra has gone extinct, and, post merger, GoogleFaceSkynet has launched an amazing new dating service, do you hear anything that strikes your interest?

Skills can be built to allow GMs to sow the ground many good seeds, each capable of many growth paths, and players to see many good growth paths to grow various seeds. Building characters who are suited to creating such growth paths in a way that is entertaining to the group is an art, the skill for which grows with practice.

Does that make any more sense how it's... if not easy, then simple... to nurture that growth? And how "Saving the World" can be, but need not be, something that the party investigates / chooses as a goal?

[Stonehead]

I think the plane collapsing could be an "end of the world" instead of an "end of the game" scenario. The first few ideas that spring to mind are:
1) You are now vestiges (3E Tome of Magic) trapped between the planes. You have been contacted by some binders. You get to roleplay as your character and the binder(s) that make pacts with you. The GM will decide how many and which binders make pacts with you each day but that will be influenced by your decisions. I suspect you will choose to continue your goals with the additional goal of being freed somehow.
2) You are now trapped in the space between planes. This is akin to being trapped in hyperspace without a way to renter normal space. Hyperspace is not empty, and others do use it for travel.
3) You are dead and now the campaign shifts to the afterlife setting.
4) The plane collapsed around you but did not cease to exist. You are still in the plane but it is a much more hostile and cramped environment now. Good luck surviving in the post apocalypse.

However this is all hindsight 20/20 without knowing the group or specifics and thus without bothering to verify if any of these outcomes would be possible or desired.

I mostly thought about it since I was remembering the sandbox I ran where "Let the world ice age happen and survive despite the conditions" was a possible option the PCs could take.

So, most of those could have worked (although some would need a retcon, as it was established in universe that plane ending = total destruction), but none of them would have been what the DM wanted to run, nor what the players had built characters for. Just like it'd be frustrating to build a wilderness survivalist only to spend the entire campaign in a city, we built characters suited to the original world and tone. At the point where no one would be excited about the new setting or story, we decided it would be better to just start a different campaign instead.

To try to tie that into the main discussion, there are some events that change the world so much, that the game functionally changes genre. Often times, those events can be game ending, so they shouldn't be used as looming threats. Or at least, you should take great care when using them.


I think it'd be acceptable to suggest starting goals for players who don't have ideas of their own - in some cases, it might even be appropriate to require that characters have some sort of shared goal to start out the game and get them proactively engaging with the setting you've prepared (assuming you've built the setting and have plans for the campaign before session 0)
...
What you don't want is for players to come into the first session with characters that don't want to do anything in particular (or who won't tell you what they want to do) and have no reason or desire to team up with one another, expecting to have the DM cajole or force them into action...


Give them a list with a few, say 4 or 6, things on it and a "make up your own" option. For npcs its a list of safe contacts. 'Safe' means loyay, helpful, will never screw with or use the players, will never be hostages, etc. For goals its something that can be accomplished in about 6 to 8 sessions, will not screw up the character, results in a good thing (heirloom magic sword, unique spell, letter of marque, useful fame, powerful & helpful friend/family) when finished...

Yeah, I did end up coming up with a few suggestions, and they chose from there. IMO though, games (both from a player and DM perspective) are more fun when the players have a driving, motivating force beyond just picking up whatever plot hook seems interesting. That's just a playstyle preference though.


If you go out to hunt a whale, yes, other fishing boats exist, and they could hunt that whale (maybe just as well as you, maybe not). But when you successfully hunt the whale, and bring it back for food and profit, does it really feel pointless to have hunted it?

...

Does that make any more sense how it's... if not easy, then simple... to nurture that growth? And how "Saving the World" can be, but need not be, something that the party investigates / chooses as a goal?
(snipped because very long, I did read it though I promise)

Yeah, I wasn't trying to say that "Saving the World" isn't a valid goal, just that "Don't worry, if you don't, someone else will" doesn't always work universally (although it does work great in some groups). The whale is the perfect example actually, if you go whaling, it's probably because you want blubber or whale meat, or whatever it is that people hunt whales for. If someone else kills the whale, you don't get the blubber.

Many characters will go along with the "Save the World" plotline not because they want to be the one to save the world, but just because they want the world to be safe. A Paladin character might see all these heroic wizards thwarting doomsday plots every weekend, and reasonably decide he could do more good for the world by ignoring the doomsday plots and starting an orphanage or something. Now, maybe other characters do want to be the one to save the world, and whether or not its saved is of lesser importance. To them, the setup works great.

It's also not a big deal if the "toys" get ignored. I only brought it up because if a certain type of toy gets consistently ignored, it might be better to focus your effort elsewhere.

[King of Nowhere]

End of the world threats are all fine, if they are not immediate. Also, unless you subscribe to the strictest definition of sandbox, having the occasional quest they MUST do in between chasing their own goals is not bad. Sometimes you have to temporarily drop what you're doing to deal with an unexpected problem.

My current world has a crazy nymph with godlike powers intent on exterminating life to end all suffering.
She was hiding in a wild magic area, slowly gathering power towards her goal; she'd have remained there for a while, until the party accidentally bust her cover. Then she attacked the capital, and the party was forced to have a mission where they saved as much stuff as possible from a city overran by mutated beasts.
Then the nymp started expanding her domain... Slowly, a few km per day. And then she was stopped until she could overrun the next major city, and while it's clear she will eventually succeed, for many weeks she's stalled.
For complicated - but perfectly sensible in the setting - reasons, the party are the only ones that can defeat the nymph for good. But the treath is slow enough in coming, it doesn't end the campaign.
Which brings us to goals. It's ok if you set some overarching goals for your players; there is some overlap between railroading the players into a quest, and set a long term goal. There is some overlap, but on the other hand, without some overarching goal, the campaign feels a hollow collection of disjpined random wackiness.
Having some goal helps players when they are uncertain. Especially inexperienced players; don't know what to do? There's a crazy nymph bent on total annihilation. There are two evil empires who are using this chance to invade neighbors, betting that everyone else will be too busy to object and someone else will stop the end of the world anyway. Some players have character goals, others do not. An overarching goal helps the second type of player while not constricting the first type.

I say the most important factors in a successful sandbox is making players care. If they are invested into the world, they are more likely to want to explore it and have goals.

Another advice is to have the players be real life friends. It will be a lot less likely that one of them will drop off this way

For preparation, the best way is to ask at the end of the session - or online - "what do you want to do next time?".
This way they can freely choose, but you still have time to prepare. It's a lot better than having to improvise everything, or trying to prepare everything in advance.

[False God]

When people talk about “end of the world” what do they actually mean?

If it is literal, how is it achieved and why are the PCs the only one’s who can stop it? What about all the gods, and high level npcs, and even all the other villains who want to go on existing?
Well, because they're the players. It may seem flippant but honestly, the PCs are the ones who save the world because the PCs are the only beings in the game-verse that are being played by the players.


Normally “end of the world” is just a dramatic way of saying a lot of people will die, or a civilization will collapse, or a an evil regime will come to power. And if that is the case, why end the game?
Again, not to sound flippant, but because there's usually no other content planned.

The answer may be meta, but this is a game we're playing after all.

[AlexanderML]

Anyone out there ever run a long term successful true sandbox game in the D&D setting?


Not sure if a year is long-term enough to qualify but I once ran a campaign where I gave my players a standard save the village quest to introduce them to the setting then just let them loose. They focused on joining an NPC faction and got increasingly involved with stuff that had them plane-hopping and even time-traveling. I'm unsure how aware they were of the level of freedom they had until they sat down and thought through their options on how to use the time traveling powers they had (they told me never to do time-travel again). Was certainly a fun game which had about as good of an ending I believe a sandbox can have.

[Talakeal]

Well, because they're the players. It may seem flippant but honestly, the PCs are the ones who save the world because the PCs are the only beings in the game-verse that are being played by the players.


Again, not to sound flippant, but because there's usually no other content planned.

The answer may be meta, but this is a game we're playing after all.

That’s all true, but involves a lot of narrative finagling to make it all work, which, imo, is pretty anathema to a sandbox.

[Vahnavoi]

It has also dawned on me that a true sandbox can't work without very experienced players who are capable of having goals or an agenda of their own. (Unless I'm wrong and one of you has succeeded doing it with noob players).

This is untrue. I run sandbox games in conventions with lots of different players coming and going. How quick a player gets a handle of a free environment depends more on personality and internal motivation than experience. The whole term "sandbox game" appeals to the way children play at a sandbox, that alone should hint people that this isn't rocket science, but it apparently doesn't.

For example, one group of entirely new players (to the hobby, not just the specific game) decided they wanted to overthrow the emperor as soon as I mentioned there was such a thing as an emperor. For a second example, a group of literal kids (seven to ten year old girls) decided they wanted to rob someone as soon as I mentioned they were at a market place. These people had their own idea that these things were capable of being done, and worth doing, before I as the game master had even finished explaining the whole situation.

For contrast, moderately experienced players are often worse at choosing and pursuing their own goals, for several reasons:

1) they are accustomed to linear games; they expect a clear single path forward and get confused when there isn't one.
2) they are accustomed to thinking of rewards and motivations in terms of game artefacts; a thing is worth doing based on the game rewarding them with gold/experience/fate points/etc., replacing trying out things for their own sake.
3) they are trying to be mindful of a game master's plotted content, regardless of whether there is plotted content
4) the above goes hand-in-hand to being accustomed to game masters nay-saying most of their self-motivated ideas to preserve their plotted content

The end result is experienced players who either think their own ideas are not capable of being done or not worth doing.

The most obvious cure is to remind yourself of what actual sandbox play is, by going to play in a literal sandbox. Once you can derive some joy out of making shapes in the sand, you can think of how to involve other people to make a narrative around those shapes.

---

As for how to incorporate end of the world into a sandbox? Mechanically, this is dead simple. The two tools you need are a map and a calendar, to tell when and where the disaster will strike and how it will progress.

Conditions for stopping the disaster are optional. You can just put honest-to-God temporal limit to a game's setting. In an actual sandbox, this would be as trivial as saying that the box will be cleared of all constructs after playtime is over.

This doesn't ruin a sandbox. Anyone who's played at a real sandbox knows the things they build will be gone anyway. The outcome you should be working towards is enjoyment during play, not some big prize at the conclusion of it.

That said, figuring out stopping conditions for the disaster isn't hard. You know*) where and when it begins, so your players can know that as well. You know how it will progress, so you know where your players need to be and when to stop it in its tracks, and so can your players. Whether they care enough to gather that knowledge and act on it is on them.

*) technically, it's possible to randomize this to a degree that even you, as a game master, don't know. At that point, the most you can say to your players is that there's a non-zero chance their sandcastles will be kicked down, and they might want to keep an eye open.

[King of Nowhere]

Again, not to sound flippant, but because there's usually no other content planned.

The answer may be meta, but this is a game we're playing after all.

I don't get it. You start with a bunch of prepared material, and when it ends the campaign is ended? That's not how one empowers the players.
And the dm can always come up with more stuff. I set some general mechanisms for the world, and then i can always pull off new villains or problems.
I only ended the campaign when the players got so powerful that they had no challenges anymore - and it just would not make sense, for how the world has been set, to pull off some new epic threat out of nowhere.

As for npc power, it's an important part of creating a living world that the players care about. If all the npcs are hapless and incompetent, chances are the players won't give a damn about them.
Solving problems by creating a large coalition of npc forces is a perfectly legitimate way to deal with villains.
Indeed, my players put a lot of effort convincing the other powers of the world to help against the crazy nymph and her hordes. It involved haggling and politiking.
It's the mark that you got the players invested in your world, that they talk and argue about its politics.

[Vahnavoi]

End of the world does not have to have anything to do with running out of content in a sandbox. On the contrary, it can serve as a limit to how much content can be explored before a game ends. A simple example would be a hexcrawl where the world ends two year into the game, regardless of whether players have explored all the hexes.

On the flipside, it is relatively easy to use some combinational function to make a game that can in principle go on forever. A simple example would be a hexcrawl where explored hexes become repopulated by wandering monsters if players don't revisit them in X amount of game turns.

[Alcore]

If you must include “the world will end” quest in a sandbox please have it be solved by someone else… nothing ruins immersion when a world will not save itself. Hearing about another adventure party running around makes the world seem less grim dark and/or apathetic.

[OldTrees1]

If you must include “the world will end” quest in a sandbox please have it be solved by someone else… nothing ruins immersion when a world will not save itself. Hearing about another adventure party running around makes the world seem less grim dark and/or apathetic.

If there is another adventure party running around solving a "the world will end" quest, then that threat is not a "world will end" threat for the party. If world ending threats can exist, I would expect there might be multiple of them but most of them are handled (unless PC actions impact that trajectory). However you can still have a situation where there is 1 threat that is not currently doomed to be stopped by other NPCs.

How does that context interface with your immersion? Is it still detrimental to your immersion? Is it at least better than before?

You mention hearing about other proactive NPCs helps set the tone. Does that include hearing about proactive threats that get stopped, or is it just hearing about the proactive NPCs stopping the threats? Both? Only one, if so which one?



Sidenote: If using a "the world will end" threat, I also advise avoiding Omniscience effects in your setting. It is one thing for an threat to be known only to locals and thus the party gets involved. It is another thing for every powerful NPC (including ones outside the Sandbox) knowing about the threat, and it still be the party's agency that matters.

[Stonehead]

If there is another adventure party running around solving a "the world will end" quest, then that threat is not a "world will end" threat for the party.

You summed it up better than I did.

Basically, I would generalize it as "If you really want a sandbox, refrain from using quests the PCs need to go on".

[Alcore]

If there is another adventure party running around solving a "the world will end" quest, then that threat is not a "world will end" threat for the party. If world ending threats can exist, I would expect there might be multiple of them but most of them are handled (unless PC actions impact that trajectory). However you can still have a situation where there is 1 threat that is not currently doomed to be stopped by other NPCs.

How does that context interface with your immersion? Is it still detrimental to your immersion? Is it at least better than before?


Same as before; there is still a “world will end” threat that the party MUST deal with it… in a sandbox where they might not care to save the world. nothing was changed :smallsigh:




You mention hearing about other proactive NPCs helps set the tone. Does that include hearing about proactive threats that get stopped, or is it just hearing about the proactive NPCs stopping the threats? Both? Only one, if so which one?


A bit of both. If the tone is “adventuring parties are common” yet never hear about one then something is going wrong. All adventuring is only done by you (the party).

Much like Pirates of Drinax that built up multiple pirate bands… yet failed, for the most part, to make them more than static scenery; something I had to do myself.

[King of Nowhere]

"If you really want a sandbox, refrain from using quests the PCs need to go on".

this, however, begs the question of "how much of a sandbox you want?"

because a scenario like that, where there are no overarching plots, and the world doesn't really do much, can feel hollow. a world that doesn't really pose any limitation to the party's actions may feel empty, or fake, or pointless. "there's a market? let's try to steal something" may work for a one-shot, but it's not conductive to a long term campaign.

[OldTrees1]

You summed it up better than I did.

Basically, I would generalize it as "If you really want a sandbox, refrain from using quests the PCs need to go on".

Hmm. I might be a bit confused.

If there is a threat that ends the world, and no NPCs will get to it in time, the PCs still do not need to go prevent that threat. Letting the world end is a valid response from the PCs.

I feel I would understand your reply better if you elaborated.

Something completely unrelated but if the world were being torn in half and the PCs had to pick which half to be on, that is a choice the PCs would need to make (although making it through inaction is possible). Is this non world ending choice relevant to the concept you were getting at?


Same as before; there is still a “world will end” threat that the party MUST deal with it… in a sandbox where they might not care to save the world. nothing was changed :smallsigh:


A bit of both. If the tone is “adventuring parties are common” yet never hear about one then something is going wrong. All adventuring is only done by you (the party).

Much like Pirates of Drinax that built up multiple pirate bands… yet failed, for the most part, to make them more than static scenery; something I had to do myself.

Thank you for these insights.

While I do not find it immersion breaking for there to be some world ending threat not currently covered by other NPCs, it is good to understand that it might be an issue for some players. I will keep an eye out for that in my playgroup.

It is also good to know that both components (proactive threat and proactive NPCs stopping threats) are relevant to creating the tone you described. That helps me know how I can adjust the tone of a campaign.

[Vahnavoi]

@Stonehead: That's too vague. For anything you could possibly want to do, either in a game or in real life, there's some series of steps you need to take in order to get there. The actual relevant trait of sandbox games is that they allow players to set and pursue their own goals, so what they need to do is based on what they want to do. The corollary to that is that whatever steps one would need to do to stop the end of the world, you make no assumptions of any player wanting to do that.

[JusticeZero]

Here's my tale.
I made an Epic-6 Pathfinder 1 setting. I heavily restricted races and classes, using the bloat as extra parts to make what I wanted, because that's how I roll.
I started with a map with several cities listed that they had vague knowledge of, in a starting town. Then I invaded the town.
I had a general sense of how the different parts of the map were connected, and the different cultures.

They dealt with the incursion, then traveled to the next site. Importantly, when they decided to travel, I had them spend the rest of the session preparing for the trip.

Each town or location has a plot, even if I don't really know what it is in advance. Before the next session, I sketched out the next place.

They dealt with the immediate issue, then next session went to the next city (#2) and got caught up in things there for a few sessions, then sailed to the other side of the map chasing a clue (remember, things are interconnected) and spent a few sessions dealing with the problem there, then went to a third city (from the background of the archer) and dealt with a numen (angel/demon in the setting, as there's no alignment) there, then bounced off a fourth city that intrigued them and went back to kill a wannabe goddess in city 2, found that she had gotten her army because of a failed mine in city #5 - the home of the soulknife's people - went there and spent a lot of time dealing with an insurrection and failed state situation, promising a god in the mine some people to move into the mine. Then they went to city #6, which is in the Rogue's backstory, and are currently dealing with a war between undead originating from city #3 and numinous invaders from city #4 who as it turns out have a military artifact created by the gods from city #1.

Focus on getting each place an interesting and distinctive feel.
City #1 is swamp and wooden sidewalks and superstitious peasants.
Landmark 1.5 is an old castle with its weapons aimed inward, once a site of colonial horror, now an orphanage. A giant fulgurite is in the courtyard, created by the storm and wrath goddess they now worship from her treatment of the leader of the horrors.
City #2 was yellow stone and rigidity, until they killed the goddess who was remaking it.
City #2.5 is black stone, roses, and the living going indoors for the night to let the undead work and play peacefully all night.
City 3 is a pirate haven where they eat seaweed.
City 4 is black sand, irritating dust in the wind, glass armor, everyone wearing masks.
City 5 is decadent lycanthropes lording over impoverished peasants and ignoring the mine where they Dug Too Deep.
City 6 is spicy food, nettles in every dish, walls and furniture all broken and repaired to make the repairs stand out, everyone dressed in loincloth to display the scars that mark the story of their lives.

I came up with broad strokes in advance and decided things would be interconnected, then let them wander. There's no overarching story, and they do what they want. The game has run weekly for two years.

[thirdkingdom]

I've run a number of successful sandbox games, all of which have started with the same general theme: the PCs have a map, which may or may not be accurate, and a number of plot hooks right out of the gate. I typically start theses with PCs around 5-7th level, in OSR-style games. Here's an example of the hooks I've given:


With winter over and the bitter cold receding to the north the town of Junction comes alive once more. No longer choked with bobbing chunks of ice and slush, work continues to repair the great stone bridge spanning the Bel and promising to open up the west once more to the civilizing forces of Man. The streets of Junction are filled with explorers and tradesfolk, mercenaries and merchants, all drawn to the frontier town at the call of the Scarlet Prince and the promise of untold wealth.

Over dinner the previous night the party's factor, a lean, smallpox-marked man named Mr. Hand had spread out the wrinkled, faded map on the table and succinctly recounts what they know.

“Here,” he says, pointing to the road leading to the town of Rocky Mount, “a pride of manticores is said to lurk, devouring all who attempt to pass. Their lair is said to be in these mountains here, overlooking the forest below. I have spoken to a merchant who claimed they are denning halfway up an almost sheer cliff, with a difficult approach.”

“A man has made contact with me, wild-eyed and bushy-bearded, claiming to know the location of a lost gold mine that he is willing to sell for the sum of five hundred gold alcedes. Ordinarily I would discount such tales as the raving of a lunatic or the sugary words of a con man, but I have sources who confirm that there was at one point an attempt to mine a lucrative vein somewhere about here.” He points to a section of the map labeled “75.55”.

“Explorers tell tales of Pesh, a fabled city far to the west. However, in order to get there one would have to either pass through Rocky Peak or take a longer and more circuitous route south, and then west.”

“There are also tales that the land west of Junction and south of Rocky Peak are exceptionally fertile. They tell me the Prince has his eye on expanding this way, at some point, as his domain is somewhat lacking in rich soil.”

“The Prince is offering a reward of five thousand gold alcedes for the removal of the river trolls currently disrupting shipping traffic on the River Sarn, some one hundred miles south of here. Alive or dead, he wishes to see them removed.” Hand points to a section of the map labeled “71.51”. “They are believed to be laired here.”

“The Rufous Baron, ruler of Junction, has offered a reward of 500 gold alcedes for anyone able to clear the land opposite the bridge of all threats, so that he may garrison a squad of troops there.”

Mr. Hand takes a sip of wine and warns the adventurers that they surely will not be the only brave souls called to the frontier. “There is one other party that I am aware of currently in Junction, and more will certainly follow with the warmer weather. I have told you what I know, and leave the final decision to those more experienced in such matters.”

[Quertus]

Basically, I would generalize it as "If you really want a sandbox, refrain from using quests the PCs need to go on".

Yup. Whether that's as factual as you stated it (getting some pushback from others), or simply "in the GM's mind". Either way, I agree that that's an important feature of a sandbox.


this, however, begs the question of "how much of a sandbox you want?"

because a scenario like that, where there are no overarching plots, and the world doesn't really do much, can feel hollow. a world that doesn't really pose any limitation to the party's actions may feel empty, or fake, or pointless. "there's a market? let's try to steal something" may work for a one-shot, but it's not conductive to a long term campaign.

Well, pirates are gathering around Austin; the evil princess is abducting dragons; an ork army is on the march; a Necromancer is following the Orks, animating the corpses in their wake; a Nekomancer has opened a pet shop in your hometown; GoogleFaceSkynet has created a very successful dating service; NASA scientists just invented a $100 device that produces a gallon of gas per day out of common waste byproducts; rainbows were just discovered to be sentient, transdimensional beings; the cake is a lie. Contingent upon your character actually knowing about these events (some are literally being broadcast on the news to your home crystal ball, others are secret or unknown to the general populous), what would you like to do?

There's plenty of plots, but nothing that the PCs have to do.

[One Step Two]

There's plenty of plots, but nothing that the PCs have to do.

This is the most important part to a sandbox. When the players stop at a bar for drinks, and casually listen to rumors feel free to grab a the Reuters news feed, add a few twists to make it suit your setting, and sprinkle them in to make the world live and breathe. The world is a big place, lots of stuff is happening, but your players decide what they want to engage with.

All those things Quertus listed? All fantastic! If your players want to follow those rumors, that's cool. However, if your players shrug and get back to their drinks so they can plan their grand scheme to pull off a daring string of heists of pet stores across the spheres of time and space to create the Ultimate Inter-dimensional Black-Market Petting Zoo, then that's the game you're playing.
And if they don't have the means to travel across time and space, then that's the first step of the plan, obviously.

[Stonehead]

this, however, begs the question of "how much of a sandbox you want?"

because a scenario like that, where there are no overarching plots, and the world doesn't really do much, can feel hollow. a world that doesn't really pose any limitation to the party's actions may feel empty, or fake, or pointless. "there's a market? let's try to steal something" may work for a one-shot, but it's not conductive to a long term campaign.

I mostly agree, personally I prefer more story-driven campaigns. I don't, however, think that overarching plots require "quests the PCs need to complete". Overarching plots don't need to follow a villain's plot to take over the world, or awaken Cthulu, it could just as easily follow a PC's journey to become famous, or to get revenge against a monster or something.

It's not that the campaign world won't threaten or limit the party, it's that it doesn't risk collapsing in on itself and functionally ending the campaign. The game world can still cut off your arm, burn down cities, kidnap loved ones and all that good stuff. It just shouldn't collapse the entire plane of existence.


@Stonehead: That's too vague. For anything you could possibly want to do, either in a game or in real life, there's some series of steps you need to take in order to get there. The actual relevant trait of sandbox games is that they allow players to set and pursue their own goals, so what they need to do is based on what they want to do. The corollary to that is that whatever steps one would need to do to stop the end of the world, you make no assumptions of any player wanting to do that.

I didn't think it was very vague, but fair enough, I can try to elaborate more.

By "a quest the party needs to do" I meant a quest that if not completed, will end the campaign. If the party needs to get a boat before they can visit the island nation, that could still be a sandbox campaign unless if not making it to the island in time blows up the continent or something. End of the Game plots that only the party can solve need to be completed by the party, or else the campaign will end. If plots like this exist, then the players can't easily set their own goals, because they need to stop this one specific plot.

Not much time to start a bakery when the universe is going to explode.


Hmm. I might be a bit confused.

If there is a threat that ends the world, and no NPCs will get to it in time, the PCs still do not need to go prevent that threat. Letting the world end is a valid response from the PCs.

I feel I would understand your reply better if you elaborated.

Something completely unrelated but if the world were being torn in half and the PCs had to pick which half to be on, that is a choice the PCs would need to make (although making it through inaction is possible). Is this non world ending choice relevant to the concept you were getting at?

I probably shouldn't have said "end of the world" plots in previous posts, it's been pointed out to me that some campaigns can continue after the end of the world. There are plenty of threats however, that would functionally end the campaign if they come to pass (I think the world ending is usually one of these threats, but not always). The players could choose not to stop these threats, but doing so would end the campaign. So the choice is "Complete quest A, or start a new campaign". Which doesn't really sound like a sandbox to me.

I should also clarify, I'm not like a particularly diehard sandbox fan or anything. End of the World/Game threats can be a lot of fun. It just kind of runs counter to the main selling point of a sandbox campaign. Which again, is totally fine as long as that's not what you told your players you'd be running.

[Talakeal]

B
Well, pirates are gathering around Austin; the evil princess is abducting dragons; an ork army is on the march; a Necromancer is following the Orks, animating the corpses in their wake; a Nekomancer has opened a pet shop in your hometown; GoogleFaceSkynet has created a very successful dating service; NASA scientists just invented a $100 device that produces a gallon of gas per day out of common waste byproducts; rainbows were just discovered to be sentient, transdimensional beings; the cake is a lie. Contingent upon your character actually knowing about these events (some are literally being broadcast on the news to your home crystal ball, others are secret or unknown to the general populous), what would you like to do?

There's plenty of plots, but nothing that the PCs have to do.

I think my group might just be Weird. Big surprise to anyone who has been following my posts.

While those all spinds like interesting plots, if the GM doesn’t work in some hook to get me personally involved, I am just going to ignore those as background elements. Best case scenario I will use them as tools for my own personal goals.

My players are all the same way, except they usually don’t come to the table with existing goals.

[King of Nowhere]

Well, pirates are gathering around Austin; the evil princess is abducting dragons; an ork army is on the march; a Necromancer is following the Orks, animating the corpses in their wake; a Nekomancer has opened a pet shop in your hometown; GoogleFaceSkynet has created a very successful dating service; NASA scientists just invented a $100 device that produces a gallon of gas per day out of common waste byproducts; rainbows were just discovered to be sentient, transdimensional beings; the cake is a lie. Contingent upon your character actually knowing about these events (some are literally being broadcast on the news to your home crystal ball, others are secret or unknown to the general populous), what would you like to do?

There's plenty of plots, but nothing that the PCs have to do.

Now, reading all this, the OP - assuming he's still reading - may get scared: to have a sandbox, do I really have to prepare all that stuff?
That would be asking way too much to a dm, especially considering that most of those plot hooks will never get explored. So I want to clarify that a dm can't be expected and should not try to prepare so many adventures. The dm should start with some ideas; sources of conlicts of various nature. As the players choose which ones to explore, you flesh them out better.
What's the necromancer's name? what's the composition of the ork army that he's reanimating? you have no flippin idea, and if your players won't investigate, you'll never have to figure it out. One of my suggestion was to ask in advance what the players will be doing, so that you have the time to gather ideas and flesh out the plot they are chasing.

Keep also in mind that, in a real gaming table, the dm is human and flawed. Sometimes the dm has to come to the table and announce "i got writer's block last week; you wanted to investigate the sentient rainbows, but I couldn't come up with anything that would advance that plot. I can give you a random sidequest, or you can stumble around until you do something that will give me the inspiration to continue".
Sometimes, a plot turns out to be a narrative dead end. I had some really cool concepts for how widespread use of magic led to magic pollution that would result in all manners of mutated beasts and weird phenomena; however, after a bunch of quests to deal with such accident, nothing greater came out of it. there was no overarching plot, no villains, no real solutions; just a bunch of pest control to be done by low level adventurers.

Skill from the dm and players can reduce those flaws. A more skilled dm will be able to come up with better plots, while more skilled players will be able to stumble around and keep stuff moving when the dm is shooting blanks. Then there's also the mechanical side; maybe a dm is excellent at coming up with good plots, but terrible at handling combat. maybe a skilled player will solve most problems by himself, making the others feel marginalized. the players are human and flawed too.
The most important part to run a successful sandbox, then, is attitude. If you have a group that wants to make it work, then you'll push through all the problems. If you are not committed, then the group will collapse when something will start to go wrong.
My group has been very successful at this because from the start everyone was already friend with at least a couple of others, and we've always been willing to help each other - whether it was brainstorming a dm that was short on ideas, or keeping the wizard's power creep in check without being punitive, or finding ways to adapt an unconventional backstory into the worldbuilding, or adapting to various real life disruptions, we've never let it come to conflict.

[Quertus]

@Talakeal - I don't really have anything to add, but I just wanted to let you know I laughed quite a bit at your comment / delivery. Kudos!


Now, reading all this, the OP - assuming he's still reading - may get scared: to have a sandbox, do I really have to prepare all that stuff?
That would be asking way too much to a dm, especially considering that most of those plot hooks will never get explored. So I want to clarify that a dm can't be expected and should not try to prepare so many adventures. The dm should start with some ideas; sources of conlicts of various nature. As the players choose which ones to explore, you flesh them out better.
What's the necromancer's name? what's the composition of the ork army that he's reanimating? you have no flippin idea, and if your players won't investigate, you'll never have to figure it out. One of my suggestion was to ask in advance what the players will be doing, so that you have the time to gather ideas and flesh out the plot they are chasing.

Keep also in mind that, in a real gaming table, the dm is human and flawed. Sometimes the dm has to come to the table and announce "i got writer's block last week; you wanted to investigate the sentient rainbows, but I couldn't come up with anything that would advance that plot. I can give you a random sidequest, or you can stumble around until you do something that will give me the inspiration to continue".
Sometimes, a plot turns out to be a narrative dead end. I had some really cool concepts for how widespread use of magic led to magic pollution that would result in all manners of mutated beasts and weird phenomena; however, after a bunch of quests to deal with such accident, nothing greater came out of it. there was no overarching plot, no villains, no real solutions; just a bunch of pest control to be done by low level adventurers.

Skill from the dm and players can reduce those flaws. A more skilled dm will be able to come up with better plots, while more skilled players will be able to stumble around and keep stuff moving when the dm is shooting blanks. Then there's also the mechanical side; maybe a dm is excellent at coming up with good plots, but terrible at handling combat. maybe a skilled player will solve most problems by himself, making the others feel marginalized. the players are human and flawed too.
The most important part to run a successful sandbox, then, is attitude. If you have a group that wants to make it work, then you'll push through all the problems. If you are not committed, then the group will collapse when something will start to go wrong.
My group has been very successful at this because from the start everyone was already friend with at least a couple of others, and we've always been willing to help each other - whether it was brainstorming a dm that was short on ideas, or keeping the wizard's power creep in check without being punitive, or finding ways to adapt an unconventional backstory into the worldbuilding, or adapting to various real life disruptions, we've never let it come to conflict.

I guess an additional key or two to running a successful Sandbox is, "don't add elements you can't flesh out", "don't add elements you just have to see the players / PCs interact with", "add elements you understand and care about enough to flesh out and have impact the world (or not) on your own time."

So, I wouldn't include "sentient rainbows" if I didn't already understand enough about how they work for them to be a consistent element (a "no inconsistencies element"?) in the world. By the time I typed those words, I knew what they were, how they worked, and had some *general* ideas what might happen if the PCs did nothing.

If the PCs decided to focus on that bit, well, they could. And, depending on the PC, and why they decided to focus on it, it could be what they were after, or they could learn that they were barking up the wrong tree.

I actually knew the Necromancer's name, as he's "an existing character", so to speak. The Ork army composition... would involve looking up old war games army composition lists (and a little selective multiplication). I crib / steal a lot of my content. Makes life easier. I don't introduce these elements blindly; I want to know enough about them to know how they'll interact, with each other, the world, and, sure, the PCs.

But, yeah, "know what you need to know, and what you can flesh out later" sounds like an important bit to running a Sandbox.

[JusticeZero]

The key to my setting is that I don't have "A campaign world". I have "Several campaign setting pitches with tie-ins to each other". And I ask people what they intend to do next session at the end of the session.

[Vahnavoi]

@Stonehead:

I'm afraid there's still an underexamined premise or two there. Let's tackle this via hypothetical dialogue:

Paladin Imperius: "Rise, oh noble hero! The world needs you!"

Mr. Baker: "Nah. I'd rather found a bakery."

Paladin Imperius: "But if you don't embark on this noble quest, the world will fall to ruin! In a year, two years tops!"

Mr. Baker: "Is fine, founding a bakery takes me month, two months tops. So a year or two is enough for me to try my hand at it. Beyond that... eh, it's not like I expected to do it forever."

Paladin Imperius: "But surely you have something beyond that you want?"

Mr. Baker: "Not really."

Paladin Imperius: "But the world will end! There will be nothing left!"

Mr. Baker: "Yeah, but it will end sooner or later anyway. So what's so bad about it ending now?"

Paladin Imperius: "Excuse me?"

Mr. Baker: "Well with the rate these things keep happening, it's pretty much a statistical inevitability that the world will end...."

Paladin Imperius: "Only if the destined heroes do not stop it!"

Mr. Baker: "Okay, one, way to put pressure on select few. Two, if it really is all up to select few, like me, why can't I decide it's not worth it?"

Paladin Imperius: "But millions will die! You have no choice! It's your duty!"

Mr. Baker: "That's a bad faith argument. Appeal to external consequence does not remove my freedom to choose otherwise. So I invoke my radical freedom to say no and you can take a hike."

Paladin Imperius: "Argh! You are being impossible! Whatever. The boat to the adventure departs two days from now. Be there!"

Mr. Baker: "Nah, bro."

[Much later]

Mr. Baker: "Oh, is that a horde of demons coming to destroy my bakery? Oh well, it was fun while it lasted."

[THE END]

Or, in other words: you are implicitly imagining the end-of-game condition as an immediate obstacle for the players to overcome before they can do what they want. Effectively, we can imagine a game master who throws a fit and quits the game if players don't follow their stage directions, creating a need for the players to fall in line if they want to keep playing the game. This indeed precludes a sandbox game, but a game master doesn't have to conduct end-of-the-world conditions in this manner, or any other end-of-game conditions for that matter. Let's remember that all actual games must come to an end. In an open-ended game, the natural stopping condition is when players do no want to extend the game anymore. What placement of looming end conditions actually does, is move this negotiation to the level of game actions. The longer it takes for the end-game condition come to effect, the more room there is for players to just ignore it and do what they want instead. For conditions that take a very long time to take effect, players might finish all they wanted go do and quit before they are even realized.

[OldTrees1]

@Stonehead:

I'm afraid there's still an underexamined premise or two there. Let's tackle this via hypothetical dialogue:

Paladin Imperius: "Rise, oh noble hero! The world needs you!"

Mr. Baker: "Nah. I'd rather found a bakery."

-snip-

Let's remember that all actual games must come to an end. In an open-ended game, the natural stopping condition is when players do no want to extend the game anymore. What placement of looming end conditions actually does, is move this negotiation to the level of game actions. The longer it takes for the end-game condition come to effect, the more room there is for players to just ignore it and do what they want instead. For conditions that take a very long time to take effect, players might finish all they wanted go do and quit before they are even realized.

To be clear, since tone is hard over the internet, this is the tone I read from the example.
The Paladin's earnestness is only the NPC's voice, it is not the voice of the GM. The GM is not trying to encourage a specific choice.
The Baker's priorities are a valid option to follow in a sandbox.

[False God]

That’s all true, but involves a lot of narrative finagling to make it all work, which, imo, is pretty anathema to a sandbox.

Maybe. But a "true sandbox", ie: a cold uncaring world that operates entirely independently of the players....doesn't exist, can't exist. The GM can do their best, but as powerful as the human mind is, it can't run a WHOLE PLANET, much less a universe or multiverse. It can't calculate the infinite number of happenings all over the world.

Maybe there IS a powerful adventuring group undertaking the quest to kill the Lich King on the other side of the planet. But running essentially an entirely separate campaign in your head is a fools game.

What I think people forget about a "sandbox" is that it's limited. It's not the beach, and it's certainly not every grain of sand in the world.

It's a 8x8 box where someone can have mostly free reign. But this person is usually supervised in some manner, and often provided tools that expand or limit their capabilities, and outside of the 8x8 box, there's nothing.

It's a limited area in which a seemingly large, but not infinite, number of things can happen. Things that are often guided via toys and tools and overseen by some form of supervision. It's not an infinite and uncaring universe. A best, a skilled DM can only project that feeling, but it is illusionary, since at the end of the day you all want to play a game, you all want to have fun, and you all want to get back together next week and play a game and have fun.

Ignoring the meta creates a worse game regardless of it being a theme park, a sandbox, or a railroad. Because you are the meta. You can't ignore the real people at the table in favor of a gold star for "Most Sandboxy Sandbox".

[Telok]

Maybe. But a "true sandbox", ie: a cold uncaring world that operates entirely independently of the players....doesn't exist, can't exist. The GM can do their best, but as powerful as the human mind is, it can't run a WHOLE PLANET, much less a universe or multiverse. It can't calculate the infinite number of happenings all over the world.

Great, now I'm going to be wanting to run a game based in a DwarfFortress world. Mod an invulnerable adventurer race, map likely towns & caves, check rumors & quests, retire to check legends in order to keep up with the rest of the world...

[JusticeZero]

People are being too theoretical.
You have characters. There's lots of things they could potentially do.
They want to do X.
That's where the adventure goes.
Not some other direction the GM had in mind.
Boom. Sandbox.

[King of Nowhere]

People are being too theoretical.
You have characters. There's lots of things they could potentially do.
They want to do X.
That's where the adventure goes.
Not some other direction the GM had in mind.
Boom. Sandbox.

The winner

[Quertus]

People are being too theoretical.
You have characters. There's lots of things they could potentially do.
They want to do X.
That's where the adventure goes.
Not some other direction the GM had in mind.
Boom. Sandbox.

I think that that perhaps describes the key to successfully running a sandbox, rather than the key to running a successful sandbox? :smallamused:

[Vahnavoi]

Maybe. But a "true sandbox", ie: a cold uncaring world that operates entirely independently of the players....doesn't exist, can't exist. The GM can do their best, but as powerful as the human mind is, it can't run a WHOLE PLANET, much less a universe or multiverse. It can't calculate the infinite number of happenings all over the world.

This is completely superfluous. The term "sandbox game" has nothing to do with a cold uncaring world independent of players. It never had anything to do with simulating a whole world. Instead, it straightforwardly appeals to the idea of self-motivated play in a relatively free, interactive environment, like the kind children engage in when they're playing in a real sandbox. Everyone who has ever played in a real sandbox knows they're finite and that the players have to do interesting things for play to be interesting.

[Talakeal]

People are being too theoretical.
You have characters. There's lots of things they could potentially do.
They want to do X.
That's where the adventure goes.
Not some other direction the GM had in mind.
Boom. Sandbox.

I don’t think so.

Like, if every week I ask my players what they want to do, and then create a plot / scenario in accordance with their desires, I wouldn’t call that a sandbox.

[Stonehead]

Maybe. But a "true sandbox", ie: a cold uncaring world that operates entirely independently of the players....doesn't exist, can't exist. The GM can do their best, but as powerful as the human mind is, it can't run a WHOLE PLANET, much less a universe or multiverse. It can't calculate the infinite number of happenings all over the world.

Maybe there IS a powerful adventuring group undertaking the quest to kill the Lich King on the other side of the planet. But running essentially an entirely separate campaign in your head is a fools game.

What I think people forget about a "sandbox" is that it's limited. It's not the beach, and it's certainly not every grain of sand in the world.

It's a 8x8 box where someone can have mostly free reign. But this person is usually supervised in some manner, and often provided tools that expand or limit their capabilities, and outside of the 8x8 box, there's nothing.

It's a limited area in which a seemingly large, but not infinite, number of things can happen. Things that are often guided via toys and tools and overseen by some form of supervision. It's not an infinite and uncaring universe. A best, a skilled DM can only project that feeling, but it is illusionary, since at the end of the day you all want to play a game, you all want to have fun, and you all want to get back together next week and play a game and have fun.

Ignoring the meta creates a worse game regardless of it being a theme park, a sandbox, or a railroad. Because you are the meta. You can't ignore the real people at the table in favor of a gold star for "Most Sandboxy Sandbox".

That's a good point. I was kind of going off the assumption that if it didn't show up "on-screen", then it didn't happen.

I think it's also valid, and fairly common, to only "track" what happens in a 3x3 box around the players, so to speak. You do lose a little bit of the world's independent actions, as town[1][1] can't launch an assassin against the players in town[7][7], but the effort required is significantly lower, and the players can walk out of the box.

You still get things happening on their own though, as the DM can "apply" all of the changes to a city when the players return to it, and for all intents and purposes, those changes happened "while" the players were away.

[SimonMoon6]

While I have run several successful sandbox games, I have never tried to do it in the D&D setting because of the big problems with sandboxes in the D&D rules.

For me, a good sandbox game needs to be in a rules environment where two things are true:

(1) The characters don't get significantly more powerful after completing an adventure or two.

This is crucial. For example, if you dangle various plot threads for the PCs to encounter, but they're all going to involve CR1 monsters, once the PCs reach level 5 in a D&D game, none of those plot threads are worth picking up. So, you're going to need more new plot threads all the time.

(2) NPC character sheets need to be able to be created in about five seconds (while still being as effective as desired).

One of the main ways to make a sandbox game work is to have a bunch of possible plot threads for the PCs to investigate, but you don't want to have to spend a couple of hours making NPC character sheets for characters that the PCs might never encounter. So, instead, you have only the broad strokes of what the characters are like planned in advance.

When the PCs do choose a particular plot thread, you need to have those NPC character sheets though, so you need to be able to create them in a hurry.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Of course, D&D fails badly at both of those criteria. So, I am surprised when someone can do a successful sandbox game using D&D rules. I much prefer using a superhero game system (even if not in a superhero setting) for a sandbox game.

[Vahnavoi]

I think it's also valid, and fairly common, to only "track" what happens in a 3x3 box around the players, so to speak. You do lose a little bit of the world's independent actions, as town[1][1] can't launch an assassin against the players in town[7][7], but the effort required is significantly lower, and the players can walk out of the box.

You still get things happening on their own though, as the DM can "apply" all of the changes to a city when the players return to it, and for all intents and purposes, those changes happened "while" the players were away.

This concept you outline is called a simulation radius. The 3x3 box can be perfectly literal if using a square grid map. Arguably it also serves as formalization of how human memory and information processing works anyway. There are, however, several easy methods to hack this. A global calendar, for example, allows for plotting events like "town [1][1] attacks town [7][7] after X game turns have passed" regardless of where players happen to be. Another way is to keep a separate chart for relationships between characters or political bodies (such as towns) that's updated separately, for example, using a Chess game to model how a war between two countries is going on in the background (moves in the Chess game are made at rate of 1/X turns).

---

SimonMoon6:

I've has no trouble using old D&D and retroclones of D&D for sandbox games. Of these two, the latter is much more severe problem than the former, and the partial solution is having or making a monster book with premade reusable characters that can be placed in the box as needed and used as seeds for improvisation.

The former is largely solved by just placing a wide variety of challenges in a box, with the order at which they are tackled left up to the players. It's actually weird how you characterize the problem. The reason why monsters are set up to give diminishing returns of experience and treasure as player level grows in comparison is so that character power growth slows down and plateaus if stronger monsters aren't continuously injected into the game.

[Quertus]

While I have run several successful sandbox games, I have never tried to do it in the D&D setting because of the big problems with sandboxes in the D&D rules.

For me, a good sandbox game needs to be in a rules environment where two things are true:

(1) The characters don't get significantly more powerful after completing an adventure or two.

This is crucial. For example, if you dangle various plot threads for the PCs to encounter, but they're all going to involve CR1 monsters, once the PCs reach level 5 in a D&D game, none of those plot threads are worth picking up. So, you're going to need more new plot threads all the time.

(2) NPC character sheets need to be able to be created in about five seconds (while still being as effective as desired).

One of the main ways to make a sandbox game work is to have a bunch of possible plot threads for the PCs to investigate, but you don't want to have to spend a couple of hours making NPC character sheets for characters that the PCs might never encounter. So, instead, you have only the broad strokes of what the characters are like planned in advance.

When the PCs do choose a particular plot thread, you need to have those NPC character sheets though, so you need to be able to create them in a hurry.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Of course, D&D fails badly at both of those criteria. So, I am surprised when someone can do a successful sandbox game using D&D rules. I much prefer using a superhero game system (even if not in a superhero setting) for a sandbox game.


SimonMoon6:

I've has no trouble using old D&D and retroclones of D&D for sandbox games. Of these two, the latter is much more severe problem than the former, and the partial solution is having or making a monster book with premade reusable characters that can be placed in the box as needed and used as seeds for improvisation.

The former is largely solved by just placing a wide variety of challenges in a box, with the order at which they are tackled left up to the players. It's actually weird how you characterize the problem. The reason why monsters are set up to give diminishing returns of experience and treasure as player level grows in comparison is so that character power growth slows down and plateaus if stronger monsters aren't continuously injected into the game.

Mostly just seconding this. IME, the "trick" to running a sandbox is to... well, to play CaW, to completely and utterly trash the concept of a "level-appropriate encounter", to just throw everything in the box, and let the players have their PCs go after a thread when they think that they're ready. To let them gather intel, collect(/build/buy/etc) tools/resources, poke allies, and otherwise approach preparing for the problem however they want. So, if they hear about giant bees, and contract ursine lycanthropy, and use both smoke and undead, and clear the "EL 10" encounter at level 2? Go them! If they wait until level 8-12, and approach it when they feel that they "should"? Go them! If they wait until level 18, and power their way through without casualties? Go them! If honey just isn't the bees' knees for them, and they never touch that thread? Go them!

Older D&D allowed perfectly cromulent NPCs to be created trivially between sessions.

So, I'd say that the key to running a successful Sandbox is -1 (that's "negative one"): the PCs need to be able to significantly power up after completing an adventure or two. Or by using their brains, gathering intel, and properly preparing. Or by leveraging other advantages.

Corollary: the hidden-information hex crawl model of "oh, this hex has an Ancient Dragon. With +69 to stealth, it auto-hides, gets a surprise round on the party, breathes for orders of magnitude more damage than your 1st level characters have HP, TPK, game over" is bad for a successful Sandbox.

[King of Nowhere]

Regarding power creep, gaining power is fun.
The party starts from nobodies doing odd jobs, progresses to second-rate guys who take care of secondary objectives while the real champions take the spotlight, to world heroes who have to pick up the pieces when the former champions are outclassed.

And 3.5 is slow because it has so many options. Sure, i can make a generic fighter in minutes, but i can put in the extra effort when i want to make someone more memorable. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
I don't know anything about superheroes systems, but from what i picked up in this forum they involve too much dm-may-i for my tastes. I want a system with objective rules that will let me engage the players in actual challenging combat. That system should then include a resurrection spell, because actual challenging combat will occasionally require it.

[Telok]

I don't know anything about superheroes systems, but from what i picked up in this forum ...

GitP is not a heavy supers games forum. I would not use the impressions here to make generalizations of the (extremely wide & varied) supers genera.

Basically there are supers systems that are straight ports of every D&D, narrative, light, heavy, GURPS, a Palladium/Rifts verson, VtM supers knock offs, "high school supers slice-of-life sitcom", and the assorted stuffvthe actual comics companies have put out. Its a bit insane. But with a bit of effort you can find something with your desired system attributes, the in-progress-pay-to-playtest-can't-tell-if-its-a-dumpster-fire-yet Marvel 616 thingy system seems likely (so far) to not rely much on DM fiat...yet.

[Stonehead]

This concept you outline is called a simulation radius. The 3x3 box can be perfectly literal if using a square grid map. Arguably it also serves as formalization of how human memory and information processing works anyway. There are, however, several easy methods to hack this. A global calendar, for example, allows for plotting events like "town [1][1] attacks town [7][7] after X game turns have passed" regardless of where players happen to be. Another way is to keep a separate chart for relationships between characters or political bodies (such as towns) that's updated separately, for example, using a Chess game to model how a war between two countries is going on in the background (moves in the Chess game are made at rate of 1/X turns).

Oh cool, I didn't know it had a formal name. If you aren't using a physical grid, it's pretty easy to only track things that are "conceptually adjacent" to the players. So even though they're several dozen miles away, Kingdom[7][7] is still worth tracking, because the Fighter upset their king so much that the kingdom is sending assassins to get revenge.


While I have run several successful sandbox games, I have never tried to do it in the D&D setting because of the big problems with sandboxes in the D&D rules.

For me, a good sandbox game needs to be in a rules environment where two things are true:

(1) The characters don't get significantly more powerful after completing an adventure or two.

This is crucial. For example, if you dangle various plot threads for the PCs to encounter, but they're all going to involve CR1 monsters, once the PCs reach level 5 in a D&D game, none of those plot threads are worth picking up. So, you're going to need more new plot threads all the time.

(2) NPC character sheets need to be able to be created in about five seconds (while still being as effective as desired).

One of the main ways to make a sandbox game work is to have a bunch of possible plot threads for the PCs to investigate, but you don't want to have to spend a couple of hours making NPC character sheets for characters that the PCs might never encounter. So, instead, you have only the broad strokes of what the characters are like planned in advance.

When the PCs do choose a particular plot thread, you need to have those NPC character sheets though, so you need to be able to create them in a hurry.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Of course, D&D fails badly at both of those criteria. So, I am surprised when someone can do a successful sandbox game using D&D rules. I much prefer using a superhero game system (even if not in a superhero setting) for a sandbox game.

I think these complaints are valid more in combat-grindy campaigns. The more combat-focused the campaign is, the more important it is to have balanced encounters to keep the combat intense, and unique npc stats to keep combat from getting stale. The more focused on intrigue, or city-building a campaign is though, the less important close combats and varied builds become.

If the pull of the "Get revenge on the man who killed my husband" quest is "solve the mystery of who killed my husband", then it's not super important if the players steam-roll the fight when they eventually confront the killer. If the main pull is "kill the murderer once you find him" though, then he should be a tough fight.

Same thing with npc stats, just using simple templates like villager, noble, thief, guard, etc, can be sufficient, provided combat isn't the main appeal. If the main appeal is manipulating political relationships, does it really matter if all the different kings have the same mechanical stats? I don't think so, as long as they have unique goals.

I know a lot of people feel super passionately about this kind of thing, so I should qualify everything by pointing out that a combat-focused campaign is just as good as a mystery-focused or politics-focused campaign.

[Quertus]

So, @Ixtellor, you've got 2 threads open that I've been reading. In one, you're asking for advice on a successful Sandbox; in the other, you ask if it isn't better to have a GM write a character's backstory in order to give the GM more control.

Putting those together, it seems incumbent on me to point out that giving the GM less control, and removing the GM's impetus for control (generally from their psyche, often with a clue-by-four) is a key to a successful sandbox. You can't really run a successful sandbox if you're still trying to run it like a linear adventure. Seeing as how those are, you know, kinda opposed virtues.

On a related note, a key to running a successful Sandbox is having content that is worth exploring. As a really bad example, on my homebrew world of Placia, "Deity" (ie, those who can crowdsource their magic) is a race, not a position. There is no mechanic for elevating beings to godhood. This one simple fact has then trickled down into a large number of eccentricities about Placia's deities (they way they create religions and interact with mortals, the way their spheres of influence don't follow traditional D&D lines, the path of religions throughout history, the way the religions interact). If anyone had ever wanted to investigate those little things, or leverage them as tools, the firm underlying structure of *why* things were this way had already been created.

Dragons, OTOH, are bounded by belief. So long as belief remains low, they sleep. When the party started putting together clues, like how the Elven Martial Arts were all about giving penalties to foes, which they evaluated as horrible for fighting more populous races like humans or goblins, and only made sense if the Elves were the ones ganging up on a singular powerful foe, and started trying to figure out what could possibly fill that ecological niche compared to the sparsely populated Elves, the Dragons stirred in their slumber.

IMO, creating a world of depth and consistency, where you start with root causes, and work through to the elements visible to the inhabitants of the world, is key to getting the right kind of players to engage with and explore the content of the sandbox.

Of course, if you don't have that kind of player, and you are *only* creating the world for the game (as opposed to me, who creates it as the home for my PCs, and as something to do other than suffer Ennui), then there's little point creating such thought-provoking content, if your players aren't the type to think about the content. Also, little point if you lack the skills to present the content in a way that your players can grasp. If they would care about it, but can't find any handholds into the world from your descriptions, then there's little value added to the game by you adding such details in.

I, personally, very much prefer having players who, when I present seemingly incongruous (or even simply anomalous) data, will (break to OOC and ask "are you sure?" before they) break out the magnifying glasses and start investigating, at least some of the time. Thankfully, I've had several groups with players like this, because that's what my GMing style is geared for: creating worlds to explore.

So, more generally, the key to running any game, not just a Sandbox, successfully, is trying to align the styles of the participants. Or, to switch to advice, "don't try to run a multi-year Sandbox, especially as 'probably the last game we'll ever run', if you have no experience with running a successful Sandbox with this group, and have no idea what will and will not work with this group".

Instead, run a series of tests, a series of one-shots, moving to adventures of increasing length, as you calibrate the skills and expectations of everyone in the group, yourself included. That - proper testing, not going in blind, making informed decisions - is key to a lot of successful things, games included.

I'm just grouchy that my player doesn't seem to be well calibrated for this "IRL" thing we've got going on (they thought Charisma was a dump stat, for example!), and am hoping that they'll either run me in something I'm more suited to, or revise my character sheet for the reboot. :smallamused:

[False God]

This is completely superfluous. The term "sandbox game" has nothing to do with a cold uncaring world independent of players. It never had anything to do with simulating a whole world. Instead, it straightforwardly appeals to the idea of self-motivated play in a relatively free, interactive environment, like the kind children engage in when they're playing in a real sandbox. Everyone who has ever played in a real sandbox knows they're finite and that the players have to do interesting things for play to be interesting.


This concept you outline is called a simulation radius. The 3x3 box can be perfectly literal if using a square grid map. Arguably it also serves as formalization of how human memory and information processing works anyway. There are, however, several easy methods to hack this. A global calendar, for example, allows for plotting events like "town [1][1] attacks town [7][7] after X game turns have passed" regardless of where players happen to be. Another way is to keep a separate chart for relationships between characters or political bodies (such as towns) that's updated separately, for example, using a Chess game to model how a war between two countries is going on in the background (moves in the Chess game are made at rate of 1/X turns).

Huh, didn't know there was a term for that. Cool to know. IME though, this is not how sandbox games run by others have operated. They have typically been a poorly or completely un-directed tossing to the wolves of the party, while the world continues to turn around them and often in spite of them.

I agree with everything you said about what a sandbox should be, just IME what I've played from others that isn't what they've been. Maybe I've only played bad ones and it's skewed my perspectives.

[SimonMoon6]

On a related note, a key to running a successful Sandbox is having content that is worth exploring.

I would certainly agree with that that helps.

I'll mention a few of my sandbox games (none of which used D&D):

(1) Back when TSR's Marvel Superheroes RPG (with FASERIP) was reasonably new, I used to try to make the setting (the Marvel comics universe) into a sandbox, which is hard because superhero stories are almost always "A bad guy is doing bad things; the heroes have to go stop him." And the fact that the heroes are just trying to maintain the status quo, rather than overthrowing a big bad evil guy (even someone like Doctor Doom), also makes it hard.

The things I did to help were to give a "newspaper" that I would write up, which would not only show how the world saw the events that the heroes had been involved with, but also gave lots of teasers about possible plot threads for the PCs to investigate.

And as much as that helped, it was still sort of "choose which railroad you want to go on, but it's still a railroad once you choose it".

But the thing that made it more of a sandbox was that the world was the friggin' Marvel universe. Most of the player were intimately familiar with the setting, while everyone else was at least somewhat familiar with the setting. So, when the players were finding things too difficult, they could go to another part of the world and meet up with other known characters. One PC even begged for help from Doctor Doom in return for an "unspecified future favor" which I think came to bite him in the ass (but I don't recall because that was over 30 years ago).

But standard comic-book superhero worlds have problems with being a sandbox unless the world really gets shaken up (like it was when I let one of the players play a master villain).

(2) I had a game set in a multiversal setting, where each multiverse was an established well-known universe (Call of Cthulhu universe, DC universe, Star Trek TNG universe, Doctor Who universe, a generic D&D universe, several universes from Michael Moorcock's novels, etc.)

There was so much to explore that once the players got powerful enough to travel at will, they could go anywhere to do anything. This was one of the most fun and craziest campaigns I've ever run (or seen). After the main villain was defeated, they even got to make their own universes to play in. Like one guy raised an army of zombies to attack a city in the Dreamlands that another PC was ruling after marrying a princess. When that failed, he studied genetics and tried to make an army of superpowered servants by splicing genes from various superheroes. Eventually, he built bombs that were too powerful and ended up exploding the entire planet a massive battle took place on. Meanwhile, another PC was just trying to study brains and psionics and stuff in one of the more science-fictiony universes, along with his mind flayer girlfriend.

(3) Another sandbox game took place on a mosaic world, where there were lots of 1000 mile by 1000 mile square areas, each with its own setting (like generic fantasy, cheesy horror movie, fairy tale, GrecoRoman fantasy, superhero, sci-fi robots, opera, beach party, martial arts tournament world, etc.). While there were McGuffins to seek out, there were some in every patch of the mosaic, so they could go where they wanted to find these McGuffins. And sometimes they split up to check out different parts of the world.

[Vahnavoi]

@Quertus: it isn't necessarily intuitive, but a game master making the player characters and their backstory isn't opposed to sandbox play. The reason is simply because control over game set-up isn't the same as being controlling during play. Mr. Baker's freedom to flip off Sir Imperius doesn't go anywhere even if Mr. Baker's premade character sheet reads he's the Hero of Space, Champion of Princess Hilda, wielder of the Rectangle of Bravery.

[KorvinStarmast]

... wielder of the Rectangle of Bravery.
Is that, by any chance, a toaster? (https://y.yarn.co/d504cf8f-5161-47d9-9621-437dd43d81ff.mp4)

[Quertus]

@SimonMoon6 - those games sounds like a blast. Still in contact with your old players, to see if they remember their Doom?


@Quertus: it isn't necessarily intuitive, but a game master making the player characters and their backstory isn't opposed to sandbox play. The reason is simply because control over game set-up isn't the same as being controlling during play. Mr. Baker's freedom to flip off Sir Imperius doesn't go anywhere even if Mr. Baker's premade character sheet reads he's the Hero of Space, Champion of Princess Hilda, wielder of the Rectangle of Bravery.

Depending on the background and its perceived purpose, I don’t disagree. It’s simply the stated good of “give the GM more control”, and the subsequent implications, that I was objecting to as being opposed to successfully running a sandbox.

[King of Nowhere]

On a related note, a key to running a successful Sandbox is having content that is worth exploring.

this is certainly one of the most important parts of running a sandbox. perhaps the one most important part: if the content is worth exploring, generally the players will want to interact with it meaningfully, and all manners of virtuous cycles will start.

unfortunately, it's also very uninformative for a wannabe-dm, because we are very bad at judging our own content.
I mean, how many dm think "i made a lot of super duper interesting stuff! I'm so good at this :smallcool::smallcool::smallcool:"?
How many, instead, think "awww, my world is stupid and pointless, my players will puke all over the table and then quit and find a better dm:smallfrown::smallfrown::smallfrown:"?

you can never know if your world is interesting until you unleash the players on it

[SimonMoon6]

@SimonMoon6 - those games sounds like a blast. Still in contact with your old players, to see if they remember their Doom?

Not really, sorry.

One more thing I remember was how, when I let a player play a master villain, he gathered together an army of villains from the Marvel Universe. In my particular campaign setting, five DC villains had accidentally crossed over into this universe and got stuck here, so they were included in the villain's army. Those five were the Fatal Five.

One of the heroic PCs had a plan to use illusions or shapechange or something to pretend to be one of the villains in the army that had been assembled. The plan was to use this particular villain's influence to try to talk the other villains into... doing something, something like fighting against the leader or going their own way again or some other clever thing like that. But this plan would only work if the villain was a tough badass villain that the other villains would be scared to fight against. So the player (who wasn't really a comic book reader) asked me which of the villains was the most physically intimidating. Well, naturally, I said Validus of the Fatal Five.

So, the assembled villain army was soon addressed by Validus, who gave a very intelligent, sophisticated, erudite speech on the matter.

The other villains instantly knew that this was an impostor because Validus generally doesn't speak in anything other than growls and screams (at least not since he was first mind-controlled by Tharok in his first appearance and even before then, he spoke like a child or the Hulk).

[Vahnavoi]

you can never know if your world is interesting until you unleash the players on it

Sure, there's empirical element of trial and error to making interesting content. But the basics are hardly rocket science. You find some things interesting because of your personality and background, so it's a reasonable bet that people with similar personality and background will find similar things interesting, more so if they have known shared interests.

Considerably harder part of holding a sandbox game is actually living with all those decisions your players find interesting, but you don't.

[Yora]

Probably the most important thing about making any sandbox campaign work are solid incentives. If the campaign is about progressing a story, incentives don't really matter that much. The plot dedicates what the players need to do next, or at least need to accomplish next. A sandbox doesn't have that.

The players continuing to play because they are having fun is not an incentive. Having fun playing campaign is the goal that we are trying to achive. Fun isn't the cause the of fun.

Incentives come in two forms, the pulls and the pushes. A pull is everything that provides the players with a reward for taking an action, reaching a goal, or accomplishing a task. Money for the PCs can be a pull, if they can use that money to buy things they want. But in many RPG systems, this is a fairly weak incentive. Usually much more important is character advancement in the form of experience points or something similar. Players always enjoy that. The critical part for a sandbox campaign is that there always need to be multiple possible sources of XP, but also that the players know what such sources look like and how they can find them when there's currently none within reach. Players waiting for quests to come to them makes for poor sandbox play. Players knowing how to go looking for quests is much better. This is why the treasure hunting exploration campaign style works so very well for sandbox games. The players know that there are many dungeons in the wilderness, and that those dungeons have treasure, and when they find the treasure they get XP. That is something the players can easly act on on their own initiative. "Let's go find a dungeon!" is an easy thing to do for players, even if they don't know anything about the game world they are playing in yet. They can always walk into the next village and ask around if anyone knows of a ruin, cave, or monster lair in the area.
Another really great thing about rewarding the players for getting treasure is that it's an objective that has no clear "completed/failed" state. You only fail at treasure hunting if you don't find a single piece of treasure. But if you are running a rules system that in addition to treasure rewards also offers minor combat victory rewards (like roughly 3:1 for example), then even a treasure hunt that produces no treasure still provided a few XP to the characters from the enemies that got into fights with while they were searching. When exploring a dungeon and collecting treasure, it's up to the players to decide if they have found enough, or if they want to continue looking for more hidden stuff. This is different from a task where they have to slay a beast or rescue a prisoner, which is something that they either manage to do or don't. And unless they have failed with certainty, the players generally feel compelled to keep working on it until they either reaches a completed or failed state. Which usually is a state that has been defined by the GM when the task was given. But in a sandbox campaign, the players being able to shift their priorities and head to greener pastures is a big element of their agency.

But another really important factor, that is mostly specific just to sandbox campaigns, are the pushes. A push is everything that makes continuing to wait for or looking for something fun unsustainable. When players have infinite choices for tasks to pursue and can always continue to keep looking for something that seems more interesting and fun if none of the current options is really pulling them in, there's a real risk of things starting to drag and meander, with players reconsidering their options in circles and continuing to go looking for more rumors. A push is anything that makes it impossible to keep doing this for long, or at least makes indecisiveness come with a price. The typical forms of this are some kind of permanent upkeep that constantly goes down slowly. Running costs for the PCs staying in town considering their actions. As GM, while the players are debating their options how to continue after a completed adventure, occasionally announce that the PCs have been staying in the current town for another week, casually looking for work but mostly burning through their money. Maybe not every 10 minutes that the players are talking, but peehaps every 30 minutes or every hour, depending on how these things play out in each campaign. Eventually the players will get sick of loosing money and decide to go and do something that is available, even if it's something that isn't sounding particularly exciting right now. Which is exactly what we want. Continuing to debate options will not make the choice any easier. Being out on adventure and having things happening shakes up the current situation, and after the current quick adventure of neccessity is done, the players might have a much better idea of what they want to do on their new situation. If not, the cycle continues and their newly acquired supply soons runs out again. Doing those quick jobs that nobody is terribly excited about doesn't have to be mindless grinding. It absolutely should not be mindless grinding. It should still be a fun adventure. But it doesn't need to be the big epic dream adventure that the players wish they could go on but can't define. After all, they never now what they will actually encounter when they go to explore a place. Even if it doesn't sound terribly interesting to check out from the description they have, actually being there won't be nearly as drab. The important part is that the players need to keep playing adventures instead of going in circles looking for adventures.

The key idea behind all of this is that with both pulls and pushes, the ultimate decision to act always comes from the players. As GM, you never tell the players "You have A, B, C available, please finally pick one now!"

[Quertus]

this is certainly one of the most important parts of running a sandbox. perhaps the one most important part: if the content is worth exploring, generally the players will want to interact with it meaningfully, and all manners of virtuous cycles will start.

unfortunately, it's also very uninformative for a wannabe-dm, because we are very bad at judging our own content.
I mean, how many dm think "i made a lot of super duper interesting stuff! I'm so good at this :smallcool::smallcool::smallcool:"?
How many, instead, think "awww, my world is stupid and pointless, my players will puke all over the table and then quit and find a better dm:smallfrown::smallfrown::smallfrown:"?

you can never know if your world is interesting until you unleash the players on it

You’ve misunderstood. While “interesting” is a good goal, and I agree that it’s… somewhat subjective and audience-dependent, I was talking about the content being built in solid foundations. Crunch, not fluff; substance, not style.

Gar don’t use guns. Why? Because it’s worth 2 character build points to take that flaw.

Batman don’t use guns. Why? Because his parents were shot & killed in front of him at a young age.

Both have the same fluff (“don’t use guns”). And while, yes, it’s nice if you’ve picked fluff such that some of it is interesting to the players, only one of those examples has fluff that is rewarding to investigate further, even though it’s the same fluff.

My advice for building a sandbox with content worth exploring was to start at that founding event, and work out to the visible effects. That way, if anyone decides to dig, there’s actual substance there already.

My examples were how, on Placia, “deity” is just a race, and only uses followers to crowdsource their magic, whereas dragons are actually dependent upon belief. No players have ever interacted with those mechanics, but, had they dug into the player-facing bits (the unusual nature of Placian religions, the way dragons acted when finally awakened (which wasn’t actually initially player-facing; that became player-facing after one group chose to dig into several other players-facing bits, like how traditional elven martial arts (based off giving penalties) made absolutely zero sense for the constantly outnumbered fey race)), they would have found actual consistent substance awaited them.

A lot of GMs, their worlds have all the substance of, “doesn’t use guns is worth 2 build points”, and just aren’t worth exploring.

(EDIT: insert obligatory “Armus moves to protect <PC with better defenses>” reference)


But another really important factor, that is mostly specific just to sandbox campaigns, are the pushes. A push is everything that makes continuing to wait for or looking for something fun unsustainable. When players have infinite choices for tasks to pursue and can always continue to keep looking for something that seems more interesting and fun if none of the current options is really pulling them in, there's a real risk of things starting to drag and meander, with players reconsidering their options in circles and continuing to go looking for more rumors. A push is anything that makes it impossible to keep doing this for long, or at least makes indecisiveness come with a price. The typical forms of this are some kind of permanent upkeep that constantly goes down slowly. Running costs for the PCs staying in town considering their actions. As GM, while the players are debating their options how to continue after a completed adventure, occasionally announce that the PCs have been staying in the current town for another week, casually looking for work but mostly burning through their money. Maybe not every 10 minutes that the players are talking, but peehaps every 30 minutes or every hour, depending on how these things play out in each campaign. Eventually the players will get sick of loosing money and decide to go and do something that is available, even if it's something that isn't sounding particularly exciting right now. Which is exactly what we want. Continuing to debate options will not make the choice any easier. Being out on adventure and having things happening shakes up the current situation, and after the current quick adventure of neccessity is done, the players might have a much better idea of what they want to do on their new situation. If not, the cycle continues and their newly acquired supply soons runs out again. Doing those quick jobs that nobody is terribly excited about doesn't have to be mindless grinding. It absolutely should not be mindless grinding. It should still be a fun adventure. But it doesn't need to be the big epic dream adventure that the players wish they could go on but can't define. After all, they never now what they will actually encounter when they go to explore a place. Even if it doesn't sound terribly interesting to check out from the description they have, actually being there won't be nearly as drab. The important part is that the players need to keep playing adventures instead of going in circles looking for adventures.

The key idea behind all of this is that with both pulls and pushes, the ultimate decision to act always comes from the players. As GM, you never tell the players "You have A, B, C available, please finally pick one now!"

I’ve been in a lot of groups where your “pushes” would have resulted in the party murdering the entire town, animating the corpses, and calculating how many decades they can keep planning based on the loot obtained (especially if the food can be preserved / “purify food and watered”). :smallbiggrin:

[Yora]

Would that have been bad?

[King of Nowhere]

You’ve misunderstood. While “interesting” is a good goal, and I agree that it’s… somewhat subjective and audience-dependent, I was talking about the content being built in solid foundations. Crunch, not fluff; substance, not style.


yes, consistency is important for worldbuilding. perhaps the most important factor - at least for some people. I am certainly a very inquisitive person, I think of consequences, and if something does not hold to scrutiny, you lose me. So I think a lot on how elements of the world interact with each other.

On the down side, that alone does not guarantee the world is interesting.
Personally I am good at working at a macro level - I have built wikipedia-style articles on several in-world nations, and I have a good idea of their reciprocal relationship, governance, and social issues. But the small scale eludes me.
Here is the big elven nation of Tal Calel. They have a major magical disaster zone in their middle, spawned a century before during a large battle between lots of spellcasters, and they enacted various measures to contain them. they have some social friction between the elves and the humans, the elves are afraid that with human high reproductive rate soon they'll no longer be an elven nation, human resent that the elves have longer career and get all the important jobs. i can give relations with other nations, i have a pretty good idea of how much high level power they can call upon in need.
So you are in the capital, there is the wall keeping the creatures from the magic area out, i have good details for how it is defended. is the wall never bypassed by flying or tunneling creatures? actually that's part of the plot, because there is a villain in the magic area that's controlling those creatures and wants the defenders to grown complacent into their wall. all great and detailed.

Ok, you enter the pub. err.... yes, there is a pub. You talk to someone. ok, i'm sure there's someone in there with whom you could talk. what does the city look like? well, besides a couple of monumental places, it looks like a city. remarkably city-like.
I need a plot hook for the next session... well, I have a couple major villains plotting in the shadow, but as far as concocting some decent adventure for a mid-low level party, I'm shooting blanks.

[Quertus]

Would that have been bad?

Depends on the group, and how they feel about that, I suppose. :smallbiggrin:

But I've known numerous groups who were really into planning, and several who would happily level even friendly cities just to not have to worry about minutia during their planning. :smalleek:

Of course, so long as I'm the one animating all the dead, I suppose I won't complain too much about the loss of one town. :smallamused:


yes, consistency is important for worldbuilding. perhaps the most important factor - at least for some people. I am certainly a very inquisitive person, I think of consequences, and if something does not hold to scrutiny, you lose me. So I think a lot on how elements of the world interact with each other.

On the down side, that alone does not guarantee the world is interesting.
Personally I am good at working at a macro level - I have built wikipedia-style articles on several in-world nations, and I have a good idea of their reciprocal relationship, governance, and social issues. But the small scale eludes me.
Here is the big elven nation of Tal Calel. They have a major magical disaster zone in their middle, spawned a century before during a large battle between lots of spellcasters, and they enacted various measures to contain them. they have some social friction between the elves and the humans, the elves are afraid that with human high reproductive rate soon they'll no longer be an elven nation, human resent that the elves have longer career and get all the important jobs. i can give relations with other nations, i have a pretty good idea of how much high level power they can call upon in need.
So you are in the capital, there is the wall keeping the creatures from the magic area out, i have good details for how it is defended. is the wall never bypassed by flying or tunneling creatures? actually that's part of the plot, because there is a villain in the magic area that's controlling those creatures and wants the defenders to grown complacent into their wall. all great and detailed.

Ok, you enter the pub. err.... yes, there is a pub. You talk to someone. ok, i'm sure there's someone in there with whom you could talk. what does the city look like? well, besides a couple of monumental places, it looks like a city. remarkably city-like.
I need a plot hook for the next session... well, I have a couple major villains plotting in the shadow, but as far as concocting some decent adventure for a mid-low level party, I'm shooting blanks.

Well, yes. There's layers. My experience is that many GMs don't start at a good foundation, and so, once you try to dig through the layers, what gets returned is valueless. Which only matters when there are those who actually do the digging.

But once you have a setting built from firm foundations, to run a successful Sandbox, you need to position the PCs at a point in time and space such that there are plenty of interesting toys for them to play with.

Let's look at your Tal Calel elves.

If they had been *my* Tal Calel elves, I would know...
Who they were beforehand, and why
How the major magical disaster zone in their middle, spawned a century before, changed them
Why there were lots of spellcasters in their middle; what the outcome was
Why there is friction with the humans; what that looks like
How this event has changed them


OK, so, it looks like the elves and humans live together, but apart. When did this start, and why?

I don't generally like trying to back-fill to pattern match, but this isn't terribly hard to work with. So, let's say that the Elves in question were your somewhat generic forest tree-fort-dwelling hippie warrior mages, following traditional patterns laid down in a time beyond memory, presumably by one or more of their ancient heroes / deities. A portal from Beyond opened in the middle of Tal Calel, and a huge fight erupted between the native Elves and the incursion of Illithid Slavers, wielding their strange "magic" (psionics). The Illithids were defeated (boo!), but some of the human former slaves remained. Because the humans understood a little of their masters' craft, they helped devise and still help maintain the anti-psychic obelisks around the affected area.

The Elves, being super long-lived, have the huge advantage of centuries of experience (and XP). They're individually more powerful than the humans, and the humans die off so fast, that doesn't look to be changing, like, ever. So of course they hold and will always hold all the positions of power. So they're not worried about losing leadership roles. Unfortunately, that's exactly what has the humans upset. And the upset humans breed like cockroaches. While they might individually not be a threat to elven superiority, as they continue to grow, they may someday become a majority, and flood the elves through sheer numbers, like the Goblins of old.

Now, if this is a Sandbox? Then you don't "need a plot hook for the next session". If the players want to play Elves trying to create non-psionic versions of the obelisks, so that they can then move to exterminate the cockroach humans? Go them! If they want to play disenfranchised humans, who invented Ice Cream, but then had Elves use their superior skills to produce superior Ice Cream, and pushed them out of the market, and these humans now seek to make their mark on the world with Psychic Ice Cream that the elves *can't* reproduce? Go them! If they want to play Descendants of slaves and like-minded young elves, who want to take the fight back through the rift to the Illithids? Go them! If they want to play the human beastmasters who "encourage" monsters to rampage through the human slums (on ground level), and try to blame it on the Elves, to fan the flames of friction between the races, in order to seize power themselves? Go them!

In a proper sandbox, you don't need to create an adventure or a plot hook, just a setting rife with possibilities, for the players to tell their own story in.

As for the appearance of things... I kinda choose / steal aesthetics whenever I create a race / culture. And ask how events would change that.

So the elves I picked are kinda generic, favoring woodland colors and clothes ranging from "serviceable" to "flowing" (I think modern LotR has this covered). Their "buildings" are part of the trees, usually added on with lots of rope walkways, but in rare cases actually grown from the trees.

Because fire is such an issue, they build close to rivers and streams, are skilled with fighting fires and making fire breaks, and metal is rare. What metal is forged is done with magic (and "mined" by elementals, who just earth glide down, and bring up the desired metals).

After encountering psionics... gems and crystals went out of fashion with the Elves, being considered "low" (ie, human) things (as humans are literally low, living on the ground and all). This is also pragmatic, as the human Psions need the gems to build the psionic devices (like their portion of the obelisks that keep the rift closed).

The humans live in stone shacks (created via Wall of Stone & Stone Shape) beneath the elven trees, or in designated clear-cut areas (where their forges won't endanger the forest). The general aesthetic is rounded, natural looking (Yoda's hut, I think?), not boxy like one might expect. Their furnishings are likewise stone, favoring benches over chairs, and pillows are a big thing ("BYOP"). Their clothing is generally primitive (bear skins and the like), as the elves don't have enough of the source of their clothing (spider silk) to clothe the humans, too (and haven't taught the humans the trick of it, to further classism), and the humans don't have the source of their Illithid-provided clothing (sheep, for wool, which the elves have never seen, and laugh at human about their ancestors' stories of "clouds with legs"), either.

Members of both races may wear little obelisks, although the exact meaning of doing so isn't quite as simple for either race as the other believes.

So, if you wanted me to describe an area, or a group of people, or wanted to interact with a specific person, it's easy for me to work with when starting from that base of "who are these people?".

But it's starting with that foundation, with "Bruce Wayne's parents were shot and killed in front of him when he was young, and therefore...", and building from there to a setting rife with toys, that I was advocating.

[Yora]

Continuing to give the players plot hooks for prepared adventures is not going to get them to become proactive themselves. It can work quite well to give the players an introduction to a new world they don't know, by introducing them to several people and places and the local structures of power.
But to become a successful sandbox, the players have to take over defining their own goals eventually.

[King of Nowhere]

But to become a successful sandbox, the players have to take over defining their own goals eventually.

yes, but I still need to prepare stuff for them to do, if I don't want to rely solely on my (limited) improvisational skills.

So, the party decides to investigate the magical hazard. They already know pretty much everything that's common knowledge about it, due to two of them picking backstories directly related to it. People have been trying to experiment with it for a century, so there's a well-established body of academic literature there. so they ask in the university, and they don't really find anything more than they already knew. they go to several experts, but none of them actually knows much more. If they can think of any experiment to try, you can be sure someone else already tried it. Maybe they notice that only certain kind of monsters attack the wall, or they notice a handful of other hints I left - but everybody assumes it's normal. it's how things have been for the past 70 years, since the wall was built. Some people may agree it's weird, but they certainly have no other input to offer.
Meanwhile, I know that the main villain is biding her time deep within. Nobody knows of her exhistance. Nobody even suspects she may exhist in the first place. She keeps to the inner area - a place so rife with magic radiation that no divination, teleportation or other long range recon magic works, so deadly that even 20th level people have disappeared in it without traces - true resurrection didn't work, miracle didn't work, the gods themselves cannot see in there.

So, I have a few possibilities:
1) i let the players bash their head against this stone wall of lack of information until they get tired
2) after they randomly try stuff for a while, i let something work
3) i figure out some way to trickle informations in a way that would be sensible

In a completely realistic scenario, 1) should happen. There are other instances of similar magical accidents, and they all baffle researchers. They have been a major issue worldwide, and a lot of resources were devoted to finding ways to deal with that problem. There's no way a bunch of greenvines can unravel it.

At your tables, maybe 2) would happen. the players try stuff, until you decide something works, even when it really shouldn't. Or perhaps you created a mistery that was easier to unravel - and just pretend that the villain has been able to hide there for 70 years despite those glaring weaknesses in security that allow a low level party to discover everything. Or perhaps you are better than me at going from large to small scale, and you have figured out a few ways for the players to be successful already.

Me, I have to go with 3). I have to figure out some way for the players to find stuff that nobody else could find before, in a way that won't look ridiculous in hindisght. Either they are at the right time in the right place for something that is just happening this one time. Perhaps I can pull off something from their backstories. Regardless, I need to find some ways to break down this huge, impossible task into smaller tasks that the players can solve.
Regardless of the way, I need to be prepared with something. Otherwise, there is a strong risk of devolving into a dm-may-i scenario where the players sstumble around until i decide to let them succeed in some way. And this has happened, and sometimes it has worked greatly - sometimes the players making the right questions allowed me to figure out some stuff I was still missing. Other times, it was indeed a dm-may-i game, and the best I could hope for was that it wouldn't be too obvious.

In the specific case, I decided - plot hook - that there was a plague of undead animals coming out of the wild magic area. the players investigated and found a lot of discrepancies, those weren't common undead and didn't behave as common undead. So they investigated, and discovered that those undead were not caused by normal necromancy, but by bacteria. further investigation discovered that those bacteria were reacting specifically to uses of turn undead.
long story short, those bacteria were meant to gather and store divine power. they were invented by two brothers who wanted to ascend to godhood; they disseminated those bacteria around to cause zombies, the zombies would get turned, the bacteria would absorb some divine energy from that and would carry it to the brothers, who would store it until they had enough for ascension. But those brothers were not evil people, and they did put a lot of safeguards to make sure the plague wouldn't get out of hands; it only affected large animals (a zombie bear looks bad, but it's an easy fight for a mid-low party or for a platoon of soldiers; can you imagine zombie mosquitoes spreading with their bites?), and they did not become aggressive, and they were still afraid of man. And nobody had discovered it before because everyone knows that the wild magic zone is full of weird stuff; zombies behaving strange? must be tuesday already.
in turn, the brothers were hiding inside the wild magic - one is a druid and invented the bacteria, the other is a wizard and he invented the best abjuration for it, stuff that nobody else knew; and the wild magic was the only place that could hide the signature of so much divine energy.
the party eventually found them by tracking the bacteria, and basically got bribed into letting them hide somewhere else. but the new hideout wasn't as safe, and the main villain could now detect their presence. so she kidnapped the brothers, but she was used to hiding in the middle of wild magic where nobody could come close to her without growing tentacles or worse, she wasn't any good at spy games, and so she left a ton of clues. And by now nobody had as much direct experience in the wild magic area as the party, and so it would make sense that nobody else tried to take the investigation from them...
And it worked great, and there were no glaring plot holes. And all the while I was scrambling to figure out the details before the next session. How exactly were the bacteria going to the brothers? If I make a misstep, I risk contradicting myself. I had to think things through to make sure all the details checked.


tldr
After this long winded story, I'm realizing that probably what I'm calling plot hook (hey, there's a bunch of zombies coming out. want to fight them? But hey, they did behave real weird, want to investigate?), you guys may call clues. As in, sprinkle clues that the party can follow. I am bad at that, I don't have them figured out in advance when I set up the world, and it's better if I don't have to make them up on the spot, else I'm likely to create plot holes.
If the party had no bitten into the zombies, I'd have had to devise something else.

[SimonMoon6]

yes, but I still need to prepare stuff for them to do, if I don't want to rely solely on my (limited) improvisational skills.

So, the party decides to investigate the magical hazard. They already know pretty much everything that's common knowledge about it, due to two of them picking backstories directly related to it. People have been trying to experiment with it for a century, so there's a well-established body of academic literature there. so they ask in the university, and they don't really find anything more than they already knew. they go to several experts, but none of them actually knows much more. If they can think of any experiment to try, you can be sure someone else already tried it. Maybe they notice that only certain kind of monsters attack the wall, or they notice a handful of other hints I left - but everybody assumes it's normal. it's how things have been for the past 70 years, since the wall was built. Some people may agree it's weird, but they certainly have no other input to offer.
Meanwhile, I know that the main villain is biding her time deep within. Nobody knows of her exhistance. Nobody even suspects she may exhist in the first place. She keeps to the inner area - a place so rife with magic radiation that no divination, teleportation or other long range recon magic works, so deadly that even 20th level people have disappeared in it without traces - true resurrection didn't work, miracle didn't work, the gods themselves cannot see in there.

So, I have a few possibilities:
1) i let the players bash their head against this stone wall of lack of information until they get tired
2) after they randomly try stuff for a while, i let something work
3) i figure out some way to trickle informations in a way that would be sensible


Or, (4) give them information in a non-sensible way.

In a world where the PCs aren't special and can't investigate things in any way that hasn't already been tried, then you can't rely on them getting anywhere in that sort of plot. So, if non-special characters are going to get involved, it's probably going to take an act of god or ridiculous coincidence.

So, the players walk along and the ground gives way and they find themselves at the entrance to the big baddie's basement. Nobody else walked exactly on that spot before.

Or a meteor crashes down and makes a big crater. What a coincidence.

Ok, maybe not a meteor, but a purple worm traveling through the area leaves big open holes in the ground.

Or one of servants of the big bad suddenly quits and shows up near the PCs who can now investigate that character.

Incredible coincidence is one of the best tools of a DM, as long as it's not abused too much.

On the other hand, maybe the PCs can't find anything. Not everything that can be investigated needs to bear fruit. Just let them know that they're not getting anywhere so it doesn't use up valuable play time.





tldr
After this long winded story, I'm realizing that probably what I'm calling plot hook (hey, there's a bunch of zombies coming out. want to fight them? But hey, they did behave real weird, want to investigate?), you guys may call clues. As in, sprinkle clues that the party can follow. I am bad at that, I don't have them figured out in advance when I set up the world, .

And for me, that would be the problem. When sprinkling these clues or plot hooks, you have to have in mind what the PCs can do to investigate and where things are going. You don't have to know all the details yet, but you have to be able to flesh things out once the PCs get there or else the clue is worthless.

For example, I might give PCs a clue of "People have gone missing when traveling through the forest. You know, that forest over there where a bunch of druids live." And the PCs could go there or not. They might even find bodies killed by animals... so obviously the druids are behind it! The PCs could talk to the druids or fight the druids. If they talk to the druids, they'll say that they're not responsible but a bunch of gnomes have been acting weirdly lately (and using their ability to talk to burrowing animals to sic those animals on passersby). The PCs can then investigate "Gnome Man's Land" and find that there are blue-cap gnomes and red-cap gnomes. The blue-caps are friendly, but the red-caps have been going kind of crazy lately.

After investigating the red-caps, the PCs will learn that the gnomes have been infected with chaos, especially the gnomes in a certain area. That leads to a gnome-filled dungeon, where the gnomes are super-annoying with sneakiness, illusions, and traps. Also riddles and puzzles galore because gnomes are effing annoying. The gnomes are also infected with chaos mutations.

Other monsters to encounter are chaos beasts and gibbering mouthers. Later bosses will include slaads, who have a plan (to be figured out later if necessary, something like gathering an army of chaos gnomes or turning gnomes into chaos beasts or something) and there may be a boss beyond the slaads (maybe a vampire or something).

Not all the details have been worked out, but I can flesh that part out easily once the PCs start to interact with the story. I still only give the PCs the plot hook of "maybe the druids are murdering people" but it can lead somewhere if the PCs care to investigate.

[Thrudd]

Has anyone mentioned "Worlds Without Number" yet? One of the best toolboxes for building a sandbox campaign I've seen, with tons of tables for determining the features of your world, locations and adventures off-the-cuff, or to help you prepare in advance. It comes with its own setting, but the world-building and adventure building features are applicable to any swords & sorcery D&D-like game. There's a free pdf version that includes a lot of useful stuff (that's the only version I've personally looked at). I'd recommend everyone check it out.

[Easy e]

Well, I maybe crazy but the best "Sandbox" I ever ran had zero planning. The world evolved around them as the players built their backstories and characters and then started to play.

As the GM, I only introduced potential hooks and then we followed the paths the players decided to follow to see where they led. As they did stuff, new hooks appeared, and as they followed those they learned more and more about the world. I had no idea what was going to happen and where it led, until they started doing it.

This was co-operative world building as much as anything else. Creating a lot of "foundation" for your players to maybe dig through is a lot of work. Instead, only build on what players want to interact with, and get their help in building it as much as you can.

Of course, I am a lazy GM and pretty good at improvising on the spot.

[Quertus]

Well, I maybe crazy but the best "Sandbox" I ever ran had zero planning. The world evolved around them as the players built their backstories and characters and then started to play.

As the GM, I only introduced potential hooks and then we followed the paths the players decided to follow to see where they led. As they did stuff, new hooks appeared, and as they followed those they learned more and more about the world. I had no idea what was going to happen and where it led, until they started doing it.

This was co-operative world building as much as anything else. Creating a lot of "foundation" for your players to maybe dig through is a lot of work. Instead, only build on what players want to interact with, and get their help in building it as much as you can.

Of course, I am a lazy GM and pretty good at improvising on the spot.

Never forget: being crazy doesn't mean you're wrong. :smallwink:

Being good at improvising, and having a group onboard with cooperative world-buildng? Yeah, that's definitely a good recipe for success. Just as one may want tomato sauce in a pizza or in lasagna, but probably wouldn't want it in cheesecake or General Tso's, what ingredients you use / what ingredients you will find useful will vary based on what your intended outcome is.

So, yes, I agree that that is a good recipe for a different type of sandbox.

However, I do have to disagree on the idea that creating a lot of foundation is a lot of work.

First, because one need not have a lot of foundation to create a lot of player-facing content. That is, "gods are a race, not a status" directed the creation of pantheons and religions - something I was kinda going to do anyway. It's just that *starting* from that foundation and working out to player-facing details meant that those player-facing details had the solid foundation to produce consistent answers, should the players have ever started digging. So it's not *necessarily* necessary to create a lot of foundation, just enough to get you to the necessary player-facing details (like "what religions are available in the world").

Second, because... it's not a lot of work? Like, "Bruce Wayne's parents were shot and killed in front of him at an early age, and therefore..." ... a) he decided to train b) to become a vigilante superhero c) and doesn't use guns. "He had a really scary experience with bats while exploring a cave, and therefore..." ... a) he dresses up like a bat b) to scare criminals c) because he thinks bats are scary d) and that scaring people is effective, and e) he made his secret lair in said cave, for reasons.

Is that really harder than... uh, "Rat Man"... dresses as a rat, shoots criminals, lives... somewhere... gets his guns... and ammo... uh, somehow... uh... and, when his guns fail, he... uh... I donno? What skills does he have? Uh...

Or, for a "real" character, and one that I can maybe answer a lot of the "what" but not the "why", Superman... dresses in red and blue... and probably deals with criminals (and not just major disasters)... somehow (probably not by punching them if they're normal humans)... and lives... in an apartment... and has a fake identity as a reporter... and generally acts like a big boyscout?

Is it really harder to invent a thing (a character, a piece of world-building, whatever) by starting at the root causes, than by just randomly picking things?

Even if you somehow find such random generation easier, my senile self sure doesn't find *remembering* those random details anywhere near as easy as ones that I can trace back to / from root causes. (Which is why my players often commented on how good at "improvising" I was, when, in actuality, I think I'm pretty terrible at improvising, and I was just remembering all the core components & working out to / thereby remembering the calculated bits).

[King of Nowhere]

laying out the fundations is not a chore to me, because it's the kind of stuff that I think in my free time. I have ideas rolling around in my head.
it's figuring out the minute details before a session that's the chore.

[kyoryu]

Well, I maybe crazy but the best "Sandbox" I ever ran had zero planning. The world evolved around them as the players built their backstories and characters and then started to play.

As the GM, I only introduced potential hooks and then we followed the paths the players decided to follow to see where they led. As they did stuff, new hooks appeared, and as they followed those they learned more and more about the world. I had no idea what was going to happen and where it led, until they started doing it.

This was co-operative world building as much as anything else. Creating a lot of "foundation" for your players to maybe dig through is a lot of work. Instead, only build on what players want to interact with, and get their help in building it as much as you can.

Of course, I am a lazy GM and pretty good at improvising on the spot.

One of the advantages of not writing a whole bunch of stuff at the beginning is that you can figure out what the players find interesting, and build off of that.

If you're running a game for a consistent group, it's pretty safe to say that they will be more engaged with the things they find interesting than the things you find interesting.