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/folde...VHVQ4b2vnKINM2
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.

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?

[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?

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.

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.