Sandboxy enough for me

Sandbox. It’s a gaming term that many people will have a somewhat different definition for. What is it?

Well, unless you are all about totally “winging it” as a GM, you need to do a lot of prep on a lot of locations when you are thinking sandbox. Have all your ducks in a row, as they say. If you start players in a location, they can hear about and choose from a variety of directions and places to go. Head to the hills up North where rumors of giants with sacks of gold come from, or go to the Western Forest to visit the old abandoned wizard tower the barkeep has told you about. Maybe just head south and explore some wilderness hexes. The GM has something to offer no matter where the players might go.

Is this really sandbox, or are you just creating enough railroad tracks to make it seem like a sandbox (paraphrasing Frank Mentzer, I believe)?

In my teens I took a rare break from my own gameworld to do a few sessions of City State of the Invincible Overlord. The players made up characters, and I had them be non-natives showing up at the city gates. From there, they were free to go where they wanted. Go into that tavern and look for action? Sure. Go into the bath house and talk to the dolphin that just appeared in a pool? Whatever. Go down in the sewers to investigate rumors of a Wraith Overlord? Fine by me. It was a lot of fun, but lets face it – every one of those locations the player visited where set encounters with their own preset plot hooks and rumors and such. Was that true sandbox because the players decided which stores to go to first? I dunno.

I guess it is still something to taste that is very debatable. What do I think of trying to sandbox? Well, as a kid things seemed more freeform. But as adulthood started I was doing more plot driven things. I would not say railroady, because I have always thought the character freewill was important to the games. But If I start a game and say “you guys hear about a newly discovered system of caves under the city rumored to have monsters and treasures” and the players say “Naw, we’d rather go out in the woods and explore unmarked hexes” then I am probably already running a shit campaign that the players have no respect for anyway.

I think my current players want some freedom to do some things in-character that they want to do, but as far as the main adventure I think they want some fairly well defined goals. Go visit that dungeon, go explore this abandoned tower, go find that enemy who left us for dead.

Like right now I'm doing a 1st ed. campaign set in the Night Below. Pretty linear, right? But a couple of games ago a (rolled encounter) Minotaur hunting group appeared out of a side tunnel and eventually got defeated. Appearing to come from a larger group (they weren't bearing lots of supplies or water), the players decided to go down the side tunnels and look into it. The party druid changed into a bat and swooped down many miles of tunnels where I had to randomize everything, including a small minotaur fishing village and a minotaur giant maze city (something I had been thinking about for a while, and got the chance here to display it) that the players found mighty cool and unexpected (sadly, they decided to leave that place for their currents tasks at hand, maybe to return and explore more one day).

But players deciding to "got north instead of south to the dungeon" is great in small quantities, but I would get tired of that sooner or later no matter how creative I am. It's more fun for me if the players can decide on a solid goal and follow through with it, instead of going in the opposite direction from what I've prepared or burning down inns on a whim or whatever.

If I create a dungeon I want the players to go to it, not go in the opposite direction. I can handle it if they do, but they can think a little bit about my fun too. I'm a DM, not a damn civil servant.

Those old City state sessions from my teens were the most open and free games I ever ran, and the experience and challenge made me a decent and capable GM later in life. Generally, I think it is great to have some choices, but also for the DM to light a fire here and there to temp the players into certain actions. The best games are a combo of choice and available plot hooks. Sure, I could just tell players to go wander willy nilly and crack open the Old School Encounter reference and randomize every little thing. Hex by hex wilderness crawl or whatever. But I think most players want a GM to have certain plans for them (and those plans are at their best when they come in the form of the DM being inspired by the characters), while leaving some wiggle room for improv adventure.

The party knows about an old haunted tower outside of town that perks up their interest. But the party thieves want to go do a bit of pick pocketing at the market place while the rest of the party hits up the beer tent to buy some rounds for locals and maybe hear some rumors about the tower. That's cool. Sandboxy enough for me.