I want an honest response:
Has any GM here, any at all, set up an open world sandbox campaign where the PCs were well and truly on their own initiative to set their own goals and pursue their own adventures and you just turned that into the adventure and it worked out well?
Or did it fall apart?
Or was there a lead-in adventure? Some short, semi-linear adventure to start the players on to get them familiar and comfortable with the world before letting them loose?
I have done this many times. Here's the catch: Every single time, it was a one-on-one RP. Just the player and me DMing.
This shit NEVER *EVER* works with a group.
Nah, it can work if the players have a common objective: It takes a leader the party want to follow.
>All it takes is squishing agency of everyone than the single person
Yeah... ask me how I know you are moronic
>I don't play at all, I just shitpost all day
Oh really? You don't say!
Reformat your post
Make me.
> than
> "then" don't fit either
> thinking a common cause removes agency
> calling others moronic
K
>agency
There's that buzzword that gets tossed out by morons because they read some subplebbit, despite having no understanding of its meaning. If the group doesn't have a common goal in a sandbox campaign you might as well run 4-5 different one-on-one games. That has nothing to do with "agency".
Why can’t your players just come to a quorum on what to do? I don’t think you really get the idea of sandbox play
That post didn't say anything about not letting players choose the goal, only that lacking a common goal is a problem.
Reading comprehension is a serious problem on this board. Then again, since most of the folks here are 5e-shitters I shouldn't be surprised.
Okay samegay
Don't hurt yourself defending your precious 5th edition. Keep carping about 'muh agency'.
I'm sorry that your moronic post was bad and that people effortlessly made you look fricking stupid and that you're seething about it, anon.
I'm not seething, you fricking butthole! I am the smartest boy in my class and definitely a mega genius compared to a abrogate like you.
No need to be assblasted he was right, anon.
>common goal
So don't make them pick, DM.
If you don't put a ticking clock on two objectives at once they can just decide to do one first and one second.
Source?
Appears to be concept art by Eric Huang from something called Battle Chef Brigade, character is Mina Han.
Most thorough answer I've ever gotten on Ganker (or anywhere) and I've been here since 2008
God bless you anon
fpbp
I would also add it only ever works in PBP format, but with a bit of effort, it can be done at a table, too.
This. 100% this. A "sandbox" campaign is great when you run it for a single player who has a clear idea what they want to do within the world.
As soon as you add a second player who wants to do something else, you're not running a group game, you're running two separate games in a shared world... and that becomes an exponential clusterfrick the more people you add and the more they have to compete for your limited attention and DM time. That or you're just running for a normal campaign party, who are never going to decide on a leader or what they actually want to do unless you guide them hardcore... at which point it's also not a sandbox anymore.
Zoomers and homosexual millennials can’t deal with any form of conflict or disagreement
That's where the "box" part comes in. Open world games can work when you set the expectations.
>you must cooperate as a group on major goals
>you may not divide the party for extended intervals
>the game is about characters exploring the underworld and wilderness to get treasure, other goals are B-stories
The "box" can be very narrow and specific and still leave plenty of room for player agency.
>the group cannot leave Skull Island except by finding the Levitation Engine for the crashed airship at the northeast tip of the island
>Your characters will all be outlawed warriors from the same clan on a viking ship that's gone ashore on an uncharted island
And so on.
>you must cooperate as a group on major goals
Why? That's the issue, in a Sandbox game there is no reason for them to cooperate or even be a party.
>you may not divide the party for extended intervals
See above, literally no reason to be a team because there isn't one unifying goal for the party to work towards.
>the game is about characters exploring the underworld and wilderness to get treasure, other goals are B-stories
Uh oh that doesn't sound like a sandbox to me champ, that sounds like storyshit railroad! You're telling the players what their characters should be doing instead of letting them come up with their own goals! Also, that's a dogshit game premise that's boring as hell.
>the group cannot leave Skull Island except by finding the Levitation Engine for the crashed airship at the northeast tip of the island
Railroading.
>Your characters will all be outlawed warriors from the same clan on a viking ship that's gone ashore on an uncharted island
Railroading.
If you have this much trouble figuring out what you want to do in a fantasy game, how do you even survive and make decisions IRL?
Not everyone is a bad enough dude/fricked in the head and greedy as your ragtag group of adventurers to go dungeon delving
>there is no reason
The reason is: this is the kind of game I'm running, and it's boring and inconvenient to run three separate games at the same table.
>literally no reason
See above. This isn't a fiction writing exercise. A game of chess has player agency within the bounds of the rules, nobody asks if advancing towards checkmate goes against the knight's backstory. Within those bounds, the pieces under your control have millions or billions of legal moves.
>waaaahhhh railroading
By your definition, any restraint on player choice is railroading.
>I know this is a medieval fantasy game but I WANT to play a cute anime girl with a giant space robot!!!
But you already knew that
Here's a cool thought - what if the setting itself is one which encourages players to work together, and since all your players are likely to be sentient beings with an innate knowledge of cooperative principles, working together is what drives them to stay together? It's really not that hard. Groups need a variety of skillsets to succeed at a variety of job offers, and working with a known quantity is far better than continually taking chances on new hires. Sticking in a cohesive group is almost always safer than going off and lone-wolfing it; did early humans go "THERE IS NO REASON FOR ME TO STICK WITH YOU GUYS" to the rest of their hunter-gatherer tribe and just frick off because they felt like it?
The common goal here is "we have worked well in the past together, and you are a known quantity for which I am willing to continue working". That's it, that's all the framework you need. If your player has a goal, and they're not a shitty player, they'll speak up of their own initiative and say "Hey, X and Y other characters have a skillset that would benefit my character's motive here".
> did early humans go "THERE IS NO REASON FOR ME TO STICK WITH YOU GUYS" to the rest of their hunter-gatherer tribe and just frick off because they felt like it?
Probably. a few at least, but those people ultimately died horrible deaths as a result and that ‘lone wolf’ mentality was purged from the gene pool. That’s how evolution works baby!
>what if the setting itself is one which encourages players to work together
Pointless suggestion, players should come to the table with the intent of working together as a party, unless the game is specifically intended otherwise.
This entire thread is pointless and just an exercise in shit-flinging about "GM NO GIVE REASON FOR PC TO DO THING" and "PC BE DIFFICULT AND NOT WANT DO THING".
In reality, if you have a good group of folks none of this moronation happens. If you play with gays from /tg/ obviously it's an issue, but since the vast majority are nogames cucks it doesn't matter really, in practice.
>As soon as you add a second player who wants to do something else, you're not running a group game, you're running two separate games in a shared world...
like
says, there will be situations where even the edgy lone wolf will be forced to find companions for what he wants/needs.
Want to take vengeance on his noble, rich and powerful brother who usurped and exiled him?
Well, better find out trusted companions who will aid him and not backstab him at first chance.
Once that's done, he can keep going solo adventuring. I mean, Gygax did 1-on-1 games for his players.
Just dark crystal that shit or something. Awesome powers tied to an object that can't be moved, the longer you stay away the more your power drains until you start wither away. Other forces seek this power so it must be protected. Everybody can do whatever you want but have the common goal of maintaining your power and protecting it's source.
>playing with a shitting GM and shitty players
damn, must feel bad. But don't pretend like sandboxes can't be done
They don't work. If the players have no impetus to be a party, then the game falls apart. Unfortunately, sandbox games have no unifying call to action for an adventuring party so there's no reason for the party to even work together in the first place, especially since sandbox games require an entirely hands-off approach as a GM.
Why do you need any more impetus but to acquire gold & xp, and eventually found a domain?
You literally described Clash of Clans, a dogshit mobile game for morons.
>If you have this much trouble figuring out what you want to do in a fantasy game, how do you even survive and make decisions IRL?
It's more that everyone's goals will run counter to each other. They have no fricking reason to cooperate with the other PCs. This isn't a problem with, say, Skyrim but in a TTRPG it's a cooperative game, the party needs a unifying call to action else there's no action to be had.
Okay, but why should they split the loot with anyone? Obviously if all adventurers in your setting is this sociopathic then the clear move is to betray your "party" at the first opportunity for all the marbles. Again, not conductive to a good TTRPG experience.
You're playing a game, you don't HAVE to be a homosexual even if your character is a sociopath
> Obviously if all adventurers in your setting is this sociopathic then the clear move is to betray your "party" at the first opportunity for all the marbles. Again, not conductive to a good TTRPG experience.
I don’t know, it might make for a good roadside encounter to have the PCs come up on the aftermath of another group of adventurers who all turned on each other to get all the loot and ended as such situations do, with a mutually assured party wipe.
But hey, free loot for the PCs discovering the grisly scene! Am I right?
And that's why sandbox it's just the Minecraft of ttrpgs
Sandbox was the original playstyle, I don't give a shit about your homosexual ass character concept
Like I said, shit players.
With actually good players sandbox is the apex of rpg experience
Nah.
>Has any GM here, any at all, set up an open world sandbox campaign where the PCs were well and truly on their own initiative to set their own goals and pursue their own adventures and you just turned that into the adventure and it worked out well?
I can answer all parts of this question as yes until you wanted to know if it worked out. Sorry anon, I can't help you out here.
One-on-one was the closest I ever got as well, and that was with another guy who was really good at GMing.
I’m playing in one but the DM is top notch. Bad DMs shouldn’t attempt open world.
The DM is rarely ever the problem in my experience. In my experience the problem is everyone wants to pursue their own goals... and the rest of the party has no investment in those goals. This leads to the party kind of falling apart, or being forced to go along with someone and losing interest in the game because they wanted a sandbox and aren't getting that.
Stop playing with children.
Children work as a team much, much better than adults, unfortunately. I would much rather have them as players.
You could also just not indulge players backstories.
Ah yes, run a sandbox where the selling point is player freedom... then completely ignore what your players want to do (pursue their backstories). Brilliant. Why didn't I ever think of that?
They shouldn’t even have more than a 2 sentence backstory at first level tbqh, it sounds like you just don’t know how to run a sandbox, which makes you a bad DM.
>a sandbox where the selling point is player freedom
You're describing the exact opposite of sandbox playstyle. Sandbox is narrative freedom, not PC freedom.
The trick is don't let players have established backstories coming in. The events of 1st Level should be their backstory. This leaves the players more willing to engage with the world you put in front of them rather than chase preconceived backstory goals that they came up with before even sitting down to play.
Very true
Maybe this kind of campaign needs a more substantial session establishing either a shared goal/background (brothers, veteran comrades), avoiding in-party intrigue; or the backgrounds don't have loose ends and merely inform the PCs' personalities, in this new, shared chapter of their lives.
t. I have never played ttrpgs, only DMed once, for 1h, via skype, 5e, frick you, I'm right
What do you do when a player drops and you gotta introduce a new one?
Align them to the style of characters/play in a tavern over drinks, similarly to a session 0 for the starting party.
Also, general comment for the thread theme, commandeer your players. You are the Dungeon MASTER, not Steve's little b***h. Grow a spine if you're gonna build a world.
t. same anon, probably the least experienced person itt, still 100% correct
What if you need to keep introducing new players as other ones drop or are unavailable?
DMPC an enabling alcoholic bossy sergeant that quickly, over drinks, keeps the merry-go-round that is your party aligned as described above.
t. I might own, like, a dozen dice total, yet you WILL listen to me
The only thing I hate more than a railroad is a featureless plain. Give me a set of roads and a rough destination that can be updated.
Stop trying to play 5e as a sandbox since it just doesn’t work
DnD honestly doesn't work for literally anything that's not a resource-management and combat-focused dungeon crawl. And even for that, there are far better options.
I agree that DnD’s scope should be narrow, name the better options
Yup. Been at it for a while. The thing with sandbox is that a lot of people think it means it's making shit up on the spot (which it is, but in another way). You gotta prep heavy upfront and create procedures and random generation things that'll help you generate stuff on the go whenever you need to.
The most important thing here is that in OSR systems, most of them use XP for Gold, so in that sense players are incentivized to head out and get that gold, which is awaiting somewhere behind monsters and dungeons in the sandbox. Eventually, they'll come to follow their own goals when they have mastered the setting.
Also, like how an anon said earlier, I run mainly for 1 player, though at this stage I have many players in the same world with occasional intersections.
DnD works fine, at least older editions. I've never touched 5e, but I'm told many feats and spells nullify the dangers of wilderness exploration, which would probably make it a lot more dull.
No one mentioned 5e, you're obsessed.
Yes, they're called hexcrawls OP.
I am running one right now in B/X D&D for players who are more accustomed to semi-linear module style adventures. It's been a few sessions and they are starting to adjust to the system and playstyle and are getting a lot more confident. It's going great! I credit that to a few factors: 1) Gold for XP + bringing in the Major Projects system from WWN gives them a clear driving goal: Acquire gold, because gold is levels, gold is retainers and equipment, and gold is power to shape the world at large. 2) I keep things dynamic by having dungeons, roaming enemies etc both level-appropriate and much more powerful. They have places they can be reasonably confident about exploring, and bigger goals (last session they poisoned 4 wyverns to death that had been harassing them, instant level up). 3) I make a few rolls between sessions to keep the world's factions interacting, and give them rumors to show how things are changing and hint at new or lost opportunities. I'm far from perfect so far but it's a blast.
I give them wide tubes to run inside they think are sandboxes, players haven't complained so far.
Running a Homebrewed Talislanta 4E+1E AD&D logic with Hexcrawl procedures and Domain level play,
Works great.
Players travel wherever they want, talk to whoever they want, die to snake bites and have their mules stolen by displacer beasts.
Yep, it works
It looks a little silly and gonzo at times but I'm having more fun running it than I have in more linear or "serious" campaigns, and the players seem invested.
One thing I think is underrated is communicating meta game goals. I tell them plainly that if they want to explore the wilderness, they need to give me lead time to generate that content. So they can "go anywhere and do anything" as long as they respect the "drawing speed" of the GM and tolerate the consequences. Foolhardy excursions have already led to near TPK.
Adding to this--I've found it helps to have a frontier or points-of-light type of setting. I wouldn't attempt a nuanced feudalism sim this way (though it could turn into that if the players pull things in that direction)
Also, I make players responsible for keeping maps and notes about their encounters. If they forget things or lose a set of notes IRL, they are lost in the game. So far this is incentivizing them to pay attention to the fiction, though it could be a little better.
I want to experience a sandbox but I also want to keep my 5e/PF superhero character. What do?
Stay miserable until you realize why that's moronic.
Also this. This Anon hit the nail on the head. Your DnD bullshit superhero hero is not suitable for anything except DnD bullshit dungeon-crawls.
What should we be playing instead?
Did OP ever say he was using D&D?
>I want to experience a sandbox but I also want to keep my 5e/PF
He wasn't replying to "OP" but yes, the person he was replying to literally said DnD 5e and Pathfinder. Learn to read.
Actually this entire D&D and 5e dialogue all stems from this post here:
which seems to come right out of the blue.
I always use a lead-in but it's only linear in that there's a clear objective. I don't really care how they accomplish it.
All I need from the players is 'why is your character here specifically doing (whatever the lead-in scenario is?)'
The lead in is always the promise of gold
Or not dying. That’s usually a good motivation for any PC of any background: complete the task so you don’t die a horrible, humiliating death.
>Has any GM here, any at all, set up an open world sandbox campaign where the PCs were well and truly on their own initiative to set their own goals and pursue their own adventures and you just turned that into the adventure and it worked out well?
To my eternal shame, I had grand dreams of running a sandbox campaign, with player-specified goals and proper freedom and heroic (or tragic) unfurling events.
The players didn't bother with a single one of the changes that required even the slightest effort or out-of-session thought from them, and the campaign became linear. It was well received, but I grew to hate it and to resent my own capitulation.
I ran one in VtM back in the 90's. Party was a group of Anarchs turn Sabbat wandering the US for somewhere to "live free". Ended up taking over Portsmouth
& Hampton Beach, New Hampshire and feeding with the Prince of Boston.
I have. It helps to have factions that lead to their own narratives that the players can choose to follow or not.
Much like a videogame.
And if you do, you should especially make sure to take a page out of Pathologic's book and make the organizations that the players ignored or avoided play their narrative out without the players.
This can lead to you having an opening to make a mirror rival team to dick around with the group.
As well as keeping a plot that you liked more than what they chose still happen, but be sure only the ramifications and conflicts are what the players have to deal with. (such as two factions that want the same magic item, letting the other get it first can be good.)
Pathological book?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/384110/Pathologic_Classic_HD/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/505230/Pathologic_2
I fricking love sandbox campaigns
A few times, in AD&D & Traveller, but you do need a good bunch of players, New players are best, as they havnt got used to the usual "I am the DM and I have worked out this plot before the game began" type games.. Helps if you have a world/universe set up for them to explore (OTU, Greyhawk, etc). Lots of random encounter charts (Classic Traveller and early D&D was particulalry good for this) help, with the DM and players rolling with whatever the results are. beware though, once you have played this, you will HATE railroaded adventures afterwards.
Tried it twice, didn't work either time, nothing interesting happened until I introduced some sort of end goal for the party to work towards.
Sandbox games are a dumb meme from Ganker by nogames homosexuals.
Honestly, I tried to set up a sandbox game a handful of time over the last 15 years, with different groups. It did not work. When granted that much freedom, it seems most people did not know what to do. If a clear path was not provided then the players did very little and spent most of the time just chatting out of game. This may not be every ones experience but this is what I have experienced.
>When granted that much freedom, it seems most people did not know what to do.
It's more that players don't want to put in any effort or invest anything of themselves into the game.
Lazy, chickenshit players must fricking hang.
>invest anything of themselves into the game.
Good, they aren't their player characters. Self-inserts are cringe and gay.
I don’t think so.
I think more often the problem is choice paralysis: sometimes players can have too many options put before them and it gets overwhelming, especially if too much emphasis is put into their choice, they become so worried that they’ll make the “wrong” choice, or pass up a better, more interesting adventure, that their brain locks up and they make no choice at all.
And in an open world sandbox campaign, you start with infinite options. Makes for an ideal breeding ground for choice paralysis.
You don’t start with infinite options, that would be impossible to plan for. That is not at all how successful sandboxes are run.
The solution is pressure. You have to do something, because doing nothing will result in disaster. Problem solved.
me every single time I DM. I tell my friends I'm writing campaigns but really I'm just making it up as I go along because I'm a lazy c**t. sometimes its been a flop, sometimes its been great.
Saying no one plays sandbox style and it is a video game meme could only come from someone who only entered the hobby during 3e/5e
The best campaign I ever ran was pure sword-and-sorcery sandbox in a setting cribbing heavily from Al-Qadim. It had no overarching plot and everything revolved around getting treasure or dealing with the villains and factions that my PCs came up with in their backstories. It was great.
I don't run games to 20 any more (combat turns to shit in D&D past ~15, I don't think they even playtest the game at levels that high.) but I do only run my games in this way now. I have had zero desire to run a game that is MY FIRST DRAFT FANTASY NOVEL THAT YOU MUST NOW PLAY THROUGH ever again since weaving their shit together generated so much more played engagement and gave me such unexpected and interesting plots to explore.
I don’t respect my players as people, so I’d never run a sandbox for them.
I don't see how it's even possible when today's playoids demand you have maps for everywhere they might possibly go drawn on advance.
You should have maps, but you shouldn't be handing them out to your players
People say sandbox campaigns are impossible to DM for and only good DMs should do it, but it's the reverse. It's easy as frick to DM, you just need good players who are proactive and have good characters. Most people struggle making actual characters with desires, foibles, feelings, backstory, etc. so they'll generally putter along and do anything you put in front of them while their character never grows or changes.
Playing a character and crafting their story on the fly requires some media literacy which many people sorely lack, and they'll use tropes as crutches instead of tools.
I tried doing one where the players were to be the initial sparks of the french resistance: a squad of players in Nazi occupied Paris, freedom to lead the fight as they wished.
They didn't do shit, even as the Nazis kept increasing restrictions onto their freedom
The only time I’ve seen it successfully run it was literally just a con.
What I mean by that is 3/4 of us wanted to run the game in our free form way with bro-tier dm being more than willing to do it so long as one of us was leading and co-ordinating the group so it doesn’t turn into 4 one on one sessions with the dm.
As I was selected to be the leader I guided us as the weaver of fate for our watchtower slice of life rpg.
Everyone loved it.
My secret?
I took all the ideas my friends came up with and collaborated with the dm a week or two before each session, effectively making the campaign run by 2 dms. My pc was merely a player controlled npc.
The only hold out to this idea was also me, because though I liked the idea in practice I knew it would turn me, a forever dm, into a pseudo-dm alongside the real dm.
It was still fun, but I think if I could do it all over again I’d just have the dm take encounters and hooks and shoehorn them into the sandbox game my friends wanted with me being another petitioner to the pseudo dm
I've tried it twice and had it fail miserably twice. The only way to get them on track was gentle railroading, and the hexes became destinations with obstacles rather than "what's that"
I don’t like sandbox games and by extension no one else can like sandbox games.
I like how you made up an imaginary person in your head and then got mad at them.
what the heck is a sandbox campa- *yawns* *falls asleep*
Things like PC cooperation, loot sharing, et al have to be written on the box. If some theater kid needs five hours of boring RP to "establish character motivation" they are a shit player who can't be bothered to exercise basic politeness. Even if you don't really like a particular board game, you should enjoy it as best you can instead of flipping the table because the tophat isn't able to wander off the board and become a wacky tavern keeper. Or just quit.
PC's do need a shared goal as a basic conceit of the game (collect loot and advance your character to domain level/major NPC status, uncover the mystery of the haunted mansion, Kill Bill, avoid getting killed by Camarilla goons while building influence etc). The open world comes in when they decide "how". Do they recruit allies? Quest for powerful weapons? Build a blackmail network?
Traveller encourages you to come up with bullshit that ties your party’s characters together in the form of connection bonus skills
Not hard at all to do
I started a Storm Kings Thunder campaign but there was little collective interest in actually pursuing its story beats and they went to Waterdeep to get completely torn off the rails sidetracked. They instead became incredibly interested in achieving status through reputation as heroes who (briefly) helped stabilize the local area from Giants / the favorable dealing in the trade ward and then through illegitimate means (Zhentarim pro quo pro to something something forgery one of the party members as the heir to nobility something something).
Before they could make good on that they went to Undermountain for the lulz and then became interested in seeing what Skullport and the home of the Xanathar Guild was like way too fricking far down. I was pulling my hair out connecting it to the original Giants campaign since a big bad faction also operates down there and Xanathar himself wouldn't want his parasitic relationship to Waterdeep ruined by its destruction but I had GM burnout and was completely ruined by the weight of mental health troubles.
The game went on permanent hiatus. I wish they would have wanted to see the Giants stuff. All the extra research on Waterdeep and trying to staple the Mad Mage campaign content onto it and way long out of print info about Skullport made me lose my mind. 🙁
>my players were really engaged with my game and having a ton of fun with the shit I was making up
>but they weren't sticking to THE SHITTY INCOHERENT OFFICIAL WOTC CONTENT NARRATIVE
>this destroyed my mental health
JFC why are other DMs like this
I never properly done a sandbox although all my games tend in that direction: i prepare the area with concentric increasing levels of details (having the starting place being the most detailed and the confines of the region just outlined), then make as many baseline level of different plot hooks as possible and design a main plot hook as campaign kicker (i usually put the PC in media res) and design a lot of scenarios with modularity in mind. I then adjust the campaign one session at time following the players decisions.
That is the kind of sandbox OSR people are thinking of, except maybe without the “main” plot hook
You are all miserable, it sounds like you either have shitty friends to play with or bad DM skills.
this is how you do it, and if things gets stale, you throw problems at the players to deal with.
I've been running one for a few years, and the biggest problem I've encountered is choice paralysis. Given too many options, it becomes difficult to make a choice.
I've seen some people say that the party's disparate desires disrupts the game. I couldn't disagree more because this organic conflict adds to the game. As many monsters and gods as I threw at them, the real villain was always the party rogue.
Zooms can't handle that very minor conflict, they'd rather not talk about what they want to do and their campaigns end up deathspiraling.
Both! It did work out well, but it also fell apart after a couple of years; that's inevitably how such a campaign will eventually end, a necessary consequence of there being no story and therefore no natural ending. I ran a Westmarch-ish open table for anywhere between 1 to 4 groups at a time, each meeting once or twice a month. The game used D&D 5e because expeditions happened at in-person tables, so despite living in a large city that's what I needed to do to get players. Away from the table, time passed according to the real-world calendar, events and upkeep happened on once-a-week turns, and activities inside walled towns happened in play-by-post. All of this was possible only because I built a strong "infrastructure" for handling the cognitive load, designed a setting specifically for this style of game, and let random tables do a lot of the hard work for me. I'm not a "killer DM" but I told players when they joined that I didn't have a story to tell, and though I had emotional investment in their having an enjoyable experience, I had no emotional investment in their characters living or dying. It was a dangerous setting, the dangers were not balanced to character level but increased by distance from walled towns, food/water/sleep/temperature were strictly checked, and I used some of the 5e variant rules that make the game tougher. The biggest homebrew rule was awarding XP for treasure because using all these rules makes getting into a fight a lose-state as often as not. Players started with two 1st-level characters, and each character started with a randomly generated rumor as a potential lead; what was randomly generated was a vague description with a direction & azimuth from town, and where on the map that pointed to provided the content of the rumor. Dungeons and other adventure sites were likewise generated from tables for the broad-brush strokes, and I filled in the specifics as necessary.
I always run a semi-linear adventure first. It helps me gauge the initiative of the group and what they're goals and aims are. I also seed 2-3 secondary things the group can strive for after.
This has worked for Rogue Trader, Forbidden Lands, Shadow of the Demon Lord and Blades in the Dark so far.
https://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/
>https://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/
What edition? I've never played or heard of West Marches, just hear it mentioned here and there lately
The original campaign was run using DnD 3.5E, but I've also heard of people running it using Forbidden Lands or Barrowmaze. Should be compatible with any OSR style system really, at least as long as you are willing to go though the pain of making all the necessary maps, tables and hooks
The titular campaign was run using 3.5E I believe, but I've also heard of people running it using Forbidden Lands, Barrowmaze, or even 5E. Any OSR system should fit as long as you do the necessary work of making a map, the necessary tables and treat the game with care instead of just handwaving "boring" parts or something you are not good at, like most GMs often do.
Now that I think about it, I did kinda do a sort-of sandbox once. It was a Star Wars Edge of the Empire campaign where the players were largely free to take their ship anywhere within the Star Wars galaxy, but still gave them objectives that needed doing (how was at their discretion) and a BBEG (who was not the Empire, they were usually an occasional annoyance and one time metaphorical devil to make Faustian bargains with) who would continue to periodically make an appearance and make their lives miserable. So it wasn’t 100% “do whatever you want” but it got close.
Actually it was a lot of fun until the Pandemic and GM burnout conspired to kill it.
yes and it works fine because I play with people who have the ability to invent goals and motivtions for their characters.