Everybody out of the Sandbox!

[Toliudar]

I'm seeking feedback and others' experiences.

The sandbox games that I've been involved with (only D&D 3.5, if that matters) have been among the shortest-lived campaigns I've seen. My impression is that players love them because there is (at least the illusion of) greater control over your destiny, and DM's like the idea of them because it seems, going in, like less preparatory work than a structured story.

It's the latter assumption that I am more and more dubious about. My sense now, from both sides of the DM screen, is that Sandbox games require quite a lot more work for a DM to pull off. Has this been others' experience?

Who's got the success stories - how have you made sandbox campaigns work?

[jindra34]

Sandbox games that i have played in (and worked) generally require an understanding of what everyone's roles will be in and out of the game before hand; players who build characters with goals, dreams and desires as opposed to just numbers on a sheet; and a GM/DM who is very experienced in addition to one of: A full world on the GM/DM's part, a GM/DM who is superb at improvising, or players who take a more active role in world building (either before or after play begins). And thats assuming that the system chosen can support a true sandbox game (Dnd most definitely does not, GURPS almost defaults to it).

[Yora]

For any campaign, you need a raison d'être. By saying "you can do anything", you really just end up with everyone really doing nothing. Before the game starts you need to have some kind of goal. In a classic adventure the goal is defined by the antagonists, whom the PCs usually have to stop doing what he wants to do.
You can make a proactive campaign where the players decide what to do next, but you still need a goal that they would want to achive.

[Toliudar]

jindra, I'm intrigued by what you say about the system supporting or not supporting Sandbox. What is it about the Gurps and D&D systems that you feel makes one and not the other lend themselves to this style of play?

[LibraryOgre]

IME, sandbox games require something to be going on... usually, several somethings. The DM needs to be prepared for all of them, and the idea is to stick the players in a situation where they've got a lot of choices, and what they choose (or do not choose) will impact what goes forward. In order to go with that, it usually helps to start either in medias res or have a shakedown mission that gets everyone together.

For example, I ran a game years ago set in the Dalelands of FR. I had a number of plots going on, any of which the PCs could investigate or run into. Would they deal with the drow who were settling on the surface? The hobgoblins who appeared at the Dales Council and declared themselves a Dale? The elves who appeared at the same Dales Council and announced they were going to start enforcing the "all lands inside the trees are ours?" How about Sembian aggression northward? Lost tombs in the southern Dales? The recent war between the Zhents and Hillsafar?

I had to be at least somewhat prepared for all of these possibilities, while giving the players some hooks to not only get them moving, but to keep them together.

[jindra34]

jindra, I'm intrigued by what you say about the system supporting or not supporting Sandbox. What is it about the Gurps and D&D systems that you feel makes one and not the other lend themselves to this style of play?

GURPS (its an abreviation so all caps always) honestly is a poor example for one that supports Sandboxing because it supports everything passably, but what your looking for is a system that puts even weight (or tries to) at character creation on every aspect of the character, social and martial, mental, physical and spiritual, and so on. D&D has too narrow a focus (90% of the options deal with combat) to allow an open sandbox, as every instance where your interacting with something and not breaking, killing or looting it you can end up with rules disputes, plus breaking, killing and looting are the only encouraged action types.

[Yora]

Or you could just wing it. In my experience that gets the smoothest results. Needing rules for every time you talk to someone or make a descision more hampers the game in my experience than letting the players run with the flow of their characters personalty.

[jindra34]

Or you could just wing it. In my experience that gets the smoothest results. Needing rules for every time you talk to someone or make a descision more hampers the game in my experience than letting the players run with the flow of their characters personalty.

Winging it when it comes to rules on how things work (running a kingdom, build something major, fighting a war) tend to cause disputes between people if your players don't trust you absolutely, as anything that goes wrong could get you accused of cheating or metagaming (yes I have had that happen).

[Brumski]

DMing a 20th lvl (3.5) sandbox currently. We've had 7 sessions as of right now and everyone is quite enjoying it. One night one of the players (my roommate) wanted to study instead of play, so I offered the other players the option to play a board game or something else, it was unanimous that they wanted to continue the story, and before long my roommate joined in regardless (whether that was good or bad).

My sandbox world was far from complete, though I did have the basic geography, population centers, and areas of interest layed out. When we started out the only unifying idea I had was of these 5 home-brewed artifacts spread around my setting that I figured the PC's would stumble upon eventually, partially through plot hooks or simply because some of them are at the center of impossible to miss geographic landmarks. When they encountered the first possible quest giver (a bard-lich), I figured about an 80% chance they would see thru his disguise and quickly attack, so when they calmly pulled up a chair for a discussion, I was surprised, only partially prepared, and came up with the little details they asked for right then (bear in mind he was purposefully not willing to give out some info because as the DM I didn't want to pigeon-hole him into any backstory yet).

So these artifacts became a drive for exploration much earlier then I expected. Not to mention the Roc they encountered rolled a 2 on it's Will save Vs. Charm Animal, leading the group to an island floating in the sky populated by venerable cloud giants and steampunk gnomes. This had my players grinning from ear to ear, feeling like they'd found some awesome video game easter egg.

I would say a sandbox needs definitive broad strokes, cool stuff for the PCs to pursue (or not pursue), and quick improvising of the details. The third one is obviously the toughest, but its need can be mitigated by ALOT of planning, or you can just have a smart, quick-thinking DM

[Cybren]

Players are always tourists in the campaign, but inexperienced or insecure GMs put them on a bus instead of handing them a map.

[jindra34]

Players are always tourists in the campaign, but inexperienced or insecure GMs put them on a bus instead of handing them a map.

Honestly its that attitude towards the difference between a regular game and a sandbox game that I believe causes problems. Yes you need to be a more skilled GM to run a sandbox game, and yes you are handing over most of the control of the campaign's direction to the players, but you still need to do more than simply hand them the campaign and ask what the want to do. What you need to do depends on your style and is hard to explain but essentially involves more out of game discussion, and a willingness to let the campaign world change without the PCs interactions.

[Lapak]

It's the latter assumption that I am more and more dubious about. My sense now, from both sides of the DM screen, is that Sandbox games require quite a lot more work for a DM to pull off. Has this been others' experience?

Who's got the success stories - how have you made sandbox campaigns work?

Your assessment is right - if the DM wants to be able to roll with whatever the PCs decide to do, they have to have a LOT of groundwork laid or be among the very best at improvising on the fly, or things will fall flat in a hurry. It doesn't require having every little detail mapped out, but it does require having all of the broad strokes in place. That's a lot of work.

For any campaign, you need a raison d'être. By saying "you can do anything", you really just end up with everyone really doing nothing. Before the game starts you need to have some kind of goal. In a classic adventure the goal is defined by the antagonists, whom the PCs usually have to stop doing what he wants to do.
You can make a proactive campaign where the players decide what to do next, but you still need a goal that they would want to achive.

Indeed, and part of the reason that some sandbox campaigns peter out is that the goal is set as something achievable, and new goals have to be continually thought up to keep things moving. One of the more useful ideas I came across in blogland was the idea of setting the final campaign goal right at the beginning and letting the players work out how to get from their level 1 beginnings to the (very specific) goal. The example given was setting up the Tomb of Horrors as a heist caper.

That kind of goal-setting at the beginning can go a long way towards giving the party forward momentum. When whatever they choose to do - seek cash, seek secrets, whatever - can be seen as being in service of a greater goal, that gives them a feeling of progress without needing an explicit all-encompassing plot. You could do this with any huge, seemingly-unattainable goal at level 1.

[Calmar]

It's the latter assumption that I am more and more dubious about. My sense now, from both sides of the DM screen, is that Sandbox games require quite a lot more work for a DM to pull off. Has this been others' experience?

That's my experience, too. The more freedom the DM leaves to the players, the more he has to be prepared for everything;
NPCs for many ocassions,
Details on all places the players can visit, people they can meet,
The role and history of each place and person,
and many small plots to give them players the opportunity to actually do something concrete instead of just hanging around.

[Frozen_Feet]

I recently finished a year-long campaign that was a wide-open sandbox almost from the start. I've written a more thorough list of things I think are needed for a good sandbox, but all in all: it didn't require much preparation on my part. I only did preparatory work before few sessions (mostly drawing or printing out maps and new character sheets), and each batch of additional material lasted me for a half-dozen or so sessions. Mostly, I improvized.

It helps, though, that I do setting building in my head constantly. I have years' supply of unused ideas floating around at any given moment, waiting to be let out.

One thing of note: what game system you use, and how its "reward mechanisms" work, will significantly affect what your players are going to do, and if they're going to do anything. For example: D&D 3.5 rewards killing monsters. This likely means that an unrestrained munchkin player will aim to kill the biggest monsters around. The only thing you have to do, then, to give the campaign a direction, is to put a big steaming pile of XP somewhere on the map (preferably far away from the player), and the story will flow naturally from there as a series of random encounters and exploration as the player pursues their freshly-decided prey.

In my campaign, XP was awarded based on value of found treasure, so even the vaguest hints of valuable items were enough to get them moving. In addition, since ships were some of the most valuable things around, they quickly developed a taste for wanton piracy and looting and fixing derelict vessels, which shaped more than half of the campaign as they sailed around and fought perils of the sea.

[PhallicWarrior]

Currently GMing a M&M sandbox campaign, and it's going swimmingly. It's a sort of sandbox mystery hybrid, in that I've given them a dozen little short adventure hooks they can follow up on, and if nothing they know of currently interests them they can do their own things. I find that the key is to keep things from getting stagnant. A static world is one that the players have no investment in; at the very least have semi-plot-relevant things happen without their input or action from time to time.

[tensai_oni]

Players are always tourists in the campaign, but inexperienced or insecure GMs put them on a bus instead of handing them a map.

What an offensive statement. Best games I played had illusion, not real freedom. Players could affect events and thus the world and other characters in ways the game master did not predict, but the plot was set in advance. It made the games better because the game master could focus on storytelling and character building. To call him inexperienced or insecure only because he prefers this over freedom is an insult.

Sandbox games are not much harder to run than railroaded games, but are much more work. This is because the game master has to prepare several hooks and hope players bite or stumble on one of them - just like your normal game, only with choice on which of multiple quests to participate in. If there are no hooks and the game is uneventful or just random fights with monsters... then no surprise players are getting bored and the game dies quickly.

Also, games where players are proactive and their characters have a personal motivation are rarely sandbox in my experience. The game master knows the motivation and can prepare the universe's reactions to the players' actions in advance. If railroad gaming is a novel and sandbox is a choose your own adventure book, then a personally motivated game is the reverse, a "write your own adventure". It's almost like the game master and players switched places, only the game master knows the characters' motivations and can predict them, as long as they stay in-character.

[Yora]

The golden solution is a railroad network. A preplanned structure that can take different directions depending on the players actions. And more than Victory and "TPK before they killed the BBEG".

[Mnemnosyne]

I do think that sandboxes require a lot more preparation, myself. When running a relatively structured campaign, you know the players are going to be trying to do a particular thing. They may take unexpected routes to get there, but in general, you don't need to know about anything else going on in the world except if it is related to the plot the players are on.

In a sandbox, you need to know everything that's going on. Everything. You need to make sure NPC's are active and doing things whether the players are there or not, you need to know exactly what the goals of every major and minor force in the area are, what their resources are, and then every session, you need to figure out, 'while the players were here, what did everyone else do to advance their goals?' so that the players can see the results of all the other actions at the next session, and use that as part of their decision making process as to what to do next.

[TheCountAlucard]

The golden solution is a railroad network. A preplanned structure that can take different directions depending on the players actions. And more than Victory and "TPK before they killed the BBEG".

The golden solution is a hidden railroad network, with large tracts of it directly cribbed from the motivations of the player characters before the game started.

One more reason I like the idea presented in Exalted for character motivations - with those in place, you can be as sandboxy as you want, because you already have a general idea of what the characters are going to do.

[UrsielHauke]

Personally, I've always seen sandboxes as a sort of chance to try the what-would-happen-if... and the you-know-what-would-be-cool? hypotheticals. Ergo, there is a much higher chance of going off the rails, and it will hence require a much greater degree of prep-work.

[jindra34]

Personally, I've always seen sandboxes as a sort of chance to try the what-would-happen-if... and the you-know-what-would-be-cool? hypotheticals. Ergo, there is a much higher chance of going off the rails, and it will hence require a much greater degree of prep-work.

Sandboxes are supposed to be player driven. This means that while it may be appropriate to drop plot hooks as a GM, it is not proper to think in terms of the campaign having rails. To use the earlier analogy of PCs on a bus, a sandbox campaign has them driving while the GM acts as a GPS.

[Xyk]

I ran a pretty successful sandbox campaign, but I did have some preset limits. I made it really dangerous to leave the city so that I only had to construct that part of the world. I made the city complex and detailed and more than big enough to occupy their interest so it worked out. Yes, it was a ton more work than the more structured campaigns.

In the structured ones, I could usually decide roughly what would happen in a session like two hours before everyone showed up. In the sandbox, I had to keep track of all the character's motivations and have something prepared to engage them in whatever direction they decided to go. It did involve a whole lot of improvisation but it also required a ton of preparation.

[Emmerask]

You are correct op, good sandbox campaigns require a ton more work on the dms part then any railroad module campaign.

For a railroad campaign the only thing the dm has to do is simply create the areas where the players will be and the npcs that inhabit that area and create the plot for the day, while this is a good days work its not all that much for a good dm.

Now lets consider the sandbox world, the dm has to do pretty much a complete world with hundreds of important npcs, kingdoms, organizations their interaction etc and in the end all that has to make atleast some sense, this alone is a tremendous undertaking but that is not even the most workload in the project because this has to be done only once mostly...

A lot of people seem to think that a sandbox means that only the players are actually doing anything active but that is absolutely wrong, in a good sandbox game the dm has to handle hundreds of npc/organization or even kingdoms reactions and actions to what was done last time (or even what is done during the session).
Nothing is more unsatisfying then doing something in a sandbox campaign and there is no reaction/interaction.

Overall yes, sandbox campaigns are a lot more work then a simple module railroad campaign!

[BRC]

Personally, I find that the best way to run a Sandbox (or something Sandboxish) is with a "Next Time On..." style system. The DM ends each Session with the PC's facing a choice on what their next step should be. The PC's make their decision, and the DM plans accordingly for the next session. The player still get control over the path of the story, and the DM does not need to worry about planning for every contingency (or else being an AMAZING improviser).

Of course, a good Sandbox campaign in my mind does not mean a campaign with no direction, it means a campaign where the Players chart the path the story takes. A DM shouldn't just say "You are adventurers, you are in a forest, what do you do?". There should still be a goal, a dead family to avenge, a dark lord to defeat, a world to save. In a Typical (non-sandbox) campaign DM saying "You must defeat the Dark Lord Skullguy, who can only be slain with the ancient Sword of Heroes, which has been lost to the ages!". The Players know the routine, get the sword, kill the dark lord. It isn't exactly Railroading, but the path is prescribed by the DM.

A Sandbox game should be more along the lines of "The Dark Lord Skullguy threatens the world, legend says that he cannot be killed". The PC's then choose whether they want to rally the nations of the world against Skullguy? Do they try to research ways to defeat him? Do they join him? Do they leave killing him to somebody else, and just try to survive his reign of terror?

A "Pure" sandbox game must face the question: Is the freedom to do anything really worth it if it comes at the expense of anything interesting to do?

[Raum]

First question - what's your definition of "sandbox"? I've seen definitions ranging from 'DM does nothing' to something more like the goal driven campaigns I prefer to run.

jindra, I'm intrigued by what you say about the system supporting or not supporting Sandbox. What is it about the Gurps and D&D systems that you feel makes one and not the other lend themselves to this style of play?

While I'm not a big fan of GURPS, I do agree with jindra34 on D&D not being a great fit for player driven plots. I'll expand that to include most level-based systems. Reasoning is fairly simple and may be the issue you ran into - it's a lot of work to keep NPCs relevant. It's also not easy to justify keeping the local city guard relevant to PCs when power is measured by the number of monsters you've slaughtered.

In my experience, a system which does support less scripted play allows the players to do about one third of the job done by GMs in scripted games. There's just as much work done in general - but a significant portion is taken off the GM's shoulders. Of course it does require players who are interested in initiating some of that 'work'. But the result is synergistic - often better than one person would have done on their own.

[Maerok]

I have an idea to run a sandbox game and use Tarot cards as a means of working out characters and areas faster. You can lay out cards in a grid to make a rough map and in pairs/triplets to build the basics of an NPC and their backstory.

[Siosilvar]

The golden solution is a hidden railroad network, with large tracts of it directly cribbed from the motivations of the player characters before the game started.

If you want to take this analogy even further, some of the railroad is built (or rerouted) around what the players do.

At that point, you start stepping away from "sandbox" and more towards "traditional game with a really good GM", though.

[Emmerask]

A "Pure" sandbox game must face the question: Is the freedom to do anything really worth it if it comes at the expense of anything interesting to do?

I think that is a misconception, sandbox does not mean that there is nothing interesting happening or that only the players decide what is happening.
In a sandbox game there should be plenty of stuff happening that could interest the pcs, in one part of the world 2 nations might be at war and a third party is providing them with weapons, in another part a crime lord is taking over a city, in another kingdom a plague is breaking out, somewhere else a fleet is trying to make a voyage around the world...

A sandbox does not mean that everything is waiting for the players to make a move and is frozen in time otherwise, its a living and breathing world where the players can do whatever they please (until stopped^^).

[Totally Guy]

My preferred GMing style is to have explicit character goals that I can challenge. Then I prepare situations, not plots. Then I play to find out what happens.

I don't think this is a sandbox. But it's not part of the plot vs. sandbox dichotomy.

[Mastikator]

[snip]
Sandbox games are not much harder to run than railroaded games, but are much more work. This is because the game master has to prepare several hooks and hope players bite or stumble on one of them - just like your normal game, only with choice on which of multiple quests to participate in. If there are no hooks and the game is uneventful or just random fights with monsters... then no surprise players are getting bored and the game dies quickly.[snip]

I'd contest that a game with multiple plot hooks is really a sandbox game. I'd say it's a normal railroad game that lets the players select their rail.
I'd say that a sandbox game has to let the players be proactive rather than forcing them to be reactive. And this means that the onus of making "plot hooks" falls squarely on the players, not the DM, and the DM instead handles the game world not as an author writing a story but as a game designer creating a game world.
Sandbox games require experienced players even moreso than experienced DM's imo.