Sandboxes kinda fricking suck and I don't know why they became so popular in DM circles when they're not really any easier to run.
Sandboxes kinda fricking suck and I don't know why they became so popular in DM circles when they're not really any easier to run.
Eat shit
>i need a guided tour and my hand held to "play"
Your bloodline is weak and will end with you.
Ask me how I know you've only ever played DnD.
OD&D and 1e would like to have a word with you.
>you've only ever played DnD.
you meant 5e
> nothing they push is worth anyone's time
>people enjoy things I don't enjoy
/osrg/ doesn't enjoy anything, they're bitter grog pretenders that simply claim everything that isn't B/X or 1E is "wrong" (with a side order of OD&D purists)
What games are you playing exactly? OSR mostly pushes sandboxes, at least /osrg/.
/osrg/ still believes gold for XP is the only proper character advancement path, nothing they push is worth anyone's time
Gold for xp justifies encumbrance, hexcrawling, etc.
They're not popular, almost nobody actually runs a sandbox to any meaningful degree without flopping within the month, it's just some dragon for whiteroom imagineers to chase. The closest generally successful type of campaign to a sandbox is one with a clearly defined main path but isn't afraid to pivot if the PCs display a desire to focus on a different aspect of the setting.
Honestly why do you make it out to be so much harder than it really is? Just generate a few POIs on a 10 by 10 hex map and iterate as you go, PCs more often than not can’t tell the difference between random encounters and scripted events. The PCs will come up with their own narrative out of the initial seeds that you can riff on between sessions. In the first few sessions I’ve hardly had to do any work but indulge their collective worldbuilding for flavor.
What kinds of points of interest do you populate the world with? I've played in a few sandbox games, none of them really landed. I want to figure out what my group is doing wrong.
Into the Wild (for OSE) has you rolling for X% chance of Y feature on Z terrain, often the features themselves have bonus content like a 10% chance for there to be something special about this feature, a chance the cave you rolled is a 100-600 chamber system that you can turn into a dungeon and has a chance to be connected to the under dark, or the feature is just some flavor text you can read off
There are plenty of tables of rumors, encounters, POIs on the OSR trove, they’re shared on /osrg/ and common in OSR zines
You can just use the generators as inspiration or when suffering from writers block, if you’re feeling lazy slap down some modules or a lair from Book of Lairs
For hexes, Welch Piper has a method of generating a lot of terrain that I personally like, recalculated his proportions for 6 mile hexes where he uses 5, and I’ll tweak it afterward if I want an atlas hex full of sea or want to create nearer features. Or, I’ll used mixed terrain types as a way to skirt some of his proportional rules
They are easy to manage unstable tables where players are constantly leaving and/or new players arriving since it just give a vague excuse for PCs to come and go.
Very MMO-like.
It's the burden of modern gaming, no one has that much time for it so you gotta have that escape valve.
The funny thing is that MMOs themselves are a huge time commitment these days so things like battle royales are more popular.
This. Main reason I run a sandbox for my 9 player campaign. Its the only way it works.
Call me a schizo but I honestly started to think people just go away and come back to the table so they can have free advances to level their PC with the rest of the group.
Is that even a thing in OSR? I thought they were hardcore about no catching up mechanics, if you die you start again at level 1 and have to deal with the shit the rest of the level 9+ party have to deal with, etcetera.
It’s not a thing, start at level 1, you’re the party waterboy until you’re within 4 levels of everyone else
What happens when you inevitably run into powerful monsters? Hope RNG is kind or just crumple the sheet?
Parley or run, hope you were smart enough to buy a riding horse and watch encumbrance
Ah you mean your low level 1, hang back at ranged and pray I guess
You can always be the mule and torch bearer I suppose, a torch does d6 damage in B/X.
Why would anyone play a game where he's the party waterboy instead of spending his free time on something fun?
Fun = woke
Because there’s more to do than combat in these games and it doesn’t become a problem till you’re more than 4 levels apart, if the campaign is fizzling at level 10 it’s time for your characters to retire and you to bring in fresh blood. Even if you’re just level 1 with some level 6 party, you’ll catch up in a few sessions and might fill a valuable role during hexcrawling if say you play ranger or fill some other gap the party is missing. It’s ultimately about teamwork
The power gap is much narrower in B/X as well, and it caps out at 14
If you’re a good roleplayer during reactions, or a good problem solver with dungeon traps, you’d be an asset even at level 1 since that has more to do with player skill. Many DMs don’t provide a map in these games, so it pays to have a mapper and that is more than enough to keep you busy the entire session.
I am playing WFRP though
No. It varies from table to table: there's no one true way there. A common thing is handwaving it, or just advancing a hireling to PC status that is the same level or one below.
People trying to emulate OSR without understanding all the fine and subtle details of what makes a sandbox game work. Also players thinking they want something but in reality they don't know how to handle it. I played sandbox games where I was the only one taking the lead.
This is pretty much the only other reason to run a sandbox game. I dislike it when an entire game is held up because somebody can't make it that day.
Skill issue.
They aren't more popular. the vast majority of DMs are basic b***hes who just run published modules strung together. You fell for a /tg/ meme, it's just a buzz word. Sandboxes are more difficult, and only certain types of group even want to play in one. Playerscum THINK they want a sandbox but if you give them one they stim out with option paralysis.
Also seconding this
>Playerscum THINK they want a sandbox but if you give them one they stim out with option paralysis
I gave my players a wonderful sandbox to play in, but the second we started they just didnt know what to do without me essentially choosing for them. They almost never decide on their own to do anything. They know where stuff is, generally, but they can never decide. And the second I give them your typical linear storyshit, they love it.
My campaign went from a sandbox in the early levels but has since turned into a standard campaign. Which is fine, but I wish they actually liked sandboxes more.
IMO many failings in a DnD style adventures are caused by a lack of urgency; a "you need X money by Y date, go out there and try to gather it" kind of premise might help with that even if I've never actually played a sandbox
This is why you need to designate a shot-caller among your players.
What does a caller do? Do they just play everyone's characters when they're not in combat?
They just say what the party's actually doing.
They look at the map or the notes on hooks that the party has found and say "alright, we're going to Mt Doomskull, the mountain that looks like a big skull. Hopefully that's where the dragon lives. It's thataway, we'll need at least three weeks of provisions round trip."
That still doesn't sound good. You're still giving one player more sway over those decisions than everyone else.
Maybe, maybe not. It might just be that groups lack a unified voice to tell the GM exactly what they wanna do, and assigning someone to be their speaker after they’ve all agreed on something can be helpful
If you unironically need a caller you might as well stop pretending and boot up a roguelike.
Incidentally, what CRPGs are there where travel mechanics are a big deal? Supplies, terrain, time, etcetera.
Curious Expedition
I don’t care if they’re a big deal. I care if they’re fun
Im a sandbox dm and they suck because my players are moronic despite knowing them for like 15 years now. Idk how it is with other groups but mine need to be handheld less they just sit there and do nothing
>hey became so popular
Pro tip - they didn't.
You are just experiencing echo box effect when browsing /tg/
ITT geefcee discord groomers
I created a world my players and I get to explore at the same time. The players are in charge of direction and what they want to go explore and their exploration forces me to write more details about the world I created. Its a lot of fun for everyone involved because the players feel like they have more agency, and I get to do more than come up with monster stat blocks, npc planning, and reading a poorly constructed adventure book. It also includes fighting and role playing.
I've never felt that sandboxes are popular with GMs. Players maybe, they have that "go anywhere, do anything" allure, even though it doesn't usually play out that way since the PCs really only want to be doing one thing at a time anyway, but not GMs.
Skill issue. Sandboxes require a GM who can make a game level that doesn't depend on scripted events, and players who have souls and don't need to be told what to do or care about. This is far outside the ability of most TTRPG groups.
Describe your ongoing sandbox game in detail, poser
That's just the Traveller setup. Which isn't bad, mind you.
A sandbox is really not any harder to run than a linear campaign. It just requires more up-front prep and some improvisational chops so you can riff off of random encounters if the players decide to ignore all of your prep and run off the map.
I don't know how you would define it, but for me a sandbox is a campaign where there is more than one available scenario that the players can pursue at any given time. In a fantasy campaign that might be multiple dungeons/locations that the party can explore or ignore as they please (abandoned mine, orc stronghold, haunted monastery), or multiple job offers or general plot hooks that the players can pursue if they find them interesting (request for caravan guards, mysterious murder of a local wizard, spat between rival cults, etc.). The point is that you let the players know about all these possibilities through rumors or floating plothooks and then let them choose whichever scenario strikes their fancy. The 'more prep' part comes from the fact that you need to have multiple scenarios prepared, whereas in a linear campaign you normally just need the first scenario you plan on running.
Why so many sandbox threads lately? Is the same guy pushing this? But why?
Some 5e tards won’t play anything but DnD 5e, ran a sandbox and had a terrible time, and now have a hateboner over sandboxes.
>muh 5e boogieman
Not a boogieman, it's just that your game doesn't really support a sandbox style so running a sandbox game is basically a meme, where it would be the default with another system and there would be much more DM support for running that kind of game.
He never said he was playing 5e, you just assumed it because you're obsessed.
People think sandboxes will be a mill house for hilarious shinagains and le epic green text stories
Any kind of game can work well if your players aren't frickheads. If they require handholding and railroading in a sandbox then they would've required handholding and railroading in a story driven campaign. 99% of problems with RPGs are actually just problems with players. Sandbox is no better or worse than storydriven and both can be easy if your players are engaged.
You're missing out on the GM side of the equation though. No game lives without the GM and it's really easy for prep to die out because the GM got bored rolling hex after hex of random terrain. You can also say "but the tables mean you don't need prep at all, you just gotta be Creative (TM)" and end up with improvised sessions that have all the allure of Starfield procgen. Players can be perfectly spherical gamers and actors but sandbox mentality can actively make games worse if the GM is just riding a /tg/ fad.
I run a sandbox. its not a hexcrawl and I dont pregen a lot. my players have a great time. i enjoy it. I dont literally just use the random tables alone though, they are just creative prompts and nothing says you have to abide by the rolls exactly. We are currently playing Worlds Without Number and that game has ROTUND tables. there are like 7-8 tables for each thing you might want to generate. but I dont need all of it. When arriving at a town Im only gonna need about half of those tables to establish a premise and hook. I might focus on a religion, artifact, location, species, faction or character(s) but really each location needs only 3-4 interesting persons, places or things. if you exhaust that than its likely the adventures thus far have added context that you can easily expand on.
easy example.
>players get wind of a ritual where the local priest uses divine inspiration to choose a new chief
>only nobles are invited
>decide to forge papers of nobility to claim a county long lost to orcs
>tacitly accepted
>locals know the gods wont pick them even if they participate
>gods of course do not pick them
>the players hit me with the technicality
>being allowed to participate has backed their claim to that county
>one player is now a legitimate titled count
>future quest to raise an army and fight the orcs and take the county
its not flashy or exciting but very little was directly planned by me and now my players are engaged and one is actively plotting the reconquest and its going to be a major milestone.
Sandboxes are the most fun you can have with RPGs, but they are also too difficult for most playpigs these days. They're all brain damaged little coomer freaks with no attention span.
Tell us about your game
The premise of the game is that the PCs looted an impractically large amount of treasure from a tomb, in the process making several enemies. I had each of them design characters using two traits, one ethnic and the other religious, to help them fit into the setting. I don't use random encounters. I don't use hexcrawling.
>I don't use random encounters.
Did you write out every single possible encounter in advance?
No, I just have stats for characters and a timeline of important events.
>his sandbox is railroaded
why
nta but 'a timeline of important events' isn't railroading, you fricking halfwit.
It means he knows what NPCs are going to do and when IF they're not disturbed by the players.
If knowing that, if nothing changes, Lord Nobleson is going to march on the neighboring city state in two months somehow equates to railroading to you, then I don't know what your definition of railroading is. Is having a map railroading?
Ecstasy of gold plays every time I begin a B/X sandbox session
The starting Land has a small amount of hexes, but It contains over 40 landmarks, comoposed of tinta caves, rock formations, clearings etc. that serve as points of reference, though some also trigger small random eventos
There are also mapped dungeons, mapped caves, mapped tombs, the central megadungeon, villages, abbeys and cities, in which players can meet NPCs, find missions and rumors, buy specific items etc.
Would you recommend not letting PCs see the hex map?