Veeky Forums. Is Sandbox RPG the best kind of RPG to play?

You're posting on the wrong board. Video game RPGs are not "traditional games". Go back to /v/, please.

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The closest thing I've ever run to a sandbox is where I just give players three or four paths to get to the same thing. No matter what I'm railroading you. Somehow someway you'll get where I want you to be.

Sandbox is an illusion.

The best kind of roleplaying games happens somewhere in-between sandoxing and railroading.

All the players and characters should be completely free to do whatever the hell they want, but in a meta sense there should be an unspoken agreement to stick to the scenario insofar it makes sense, or otherwise switch characters if necessary.

Sandboxing tends to lead to rootlessness for the players, not knowing what they want to do or where to go, let alone making them all do it together and have it all make sense for all the characters at the same time, and to frustration for the GM because he has no idea how to get the players to do anything, or how to engage them, and he has to somehow plan for anything and everything, or simply improvise everything all the time.

And railroading is just unadulterated shit.

Find a theme, find a scenario, do that together, and play it in a sandboxy manner, and try to not veer off-course.

In this case it's not railroading. It's just fate. Deal with it, player scum. :^)

As long as you don't actually call it a sandbox

This and whenever players say they want a sandbox campaign they either have no idea what to do with themselves, end up murderhobo'ing everything or end up doing some complete uninteresting bullshit like "let's open a tavern"

>Tfw I had a properly prepared Sandbox campaign on making of which I spent almost a year, with lots of interesting quests, well crafted plots, various stuff to do and an epic branching main story and players just decided to piss on everything even slightly more interesting and intellectually demanding than slaying stuff, looting and stealing.
>"So it's Skyrim-like sandbox, right? Fuck questlines then The Greybeards are still waiting for me XDD"
Sandboxes are a fucking meme, I tried to give you fags a chance, but back on the rails it is

>Is Sandbox RPG the best kind of RPG to play?
Very rarely. A sandbox requires a party capable of forming goals and trying to achieve them, as opposed to the more usual setup where the party is reactive to other events going on in the game world. Given the almost necessary information imbalance between the players and the GM, this is often hard to do.

Furthermore, even when it is achieved, it's very rarely the party that decides they want to do things. Usually, it's the story of Main Character McDrive who wants something, and his 3-5 sidekicks who are there to provide mechanical benefits.

You idiots are doing it wrong. Grab some sandbox module for start, for example Carcosa for LoftP.

>uninteresting bullshit like "let's open a tavern"

That's where you're wrong.
Taverns can be super interesting to run. If they want that? Give them challenges. Have their tavern and hometown threatened by the BBEG.

are you telling me you aren't down to run It's Always Sunny in Neverwinter?

No

Carcosa is fucking terrible though.

Carcosa's terrible though. It's a textbook example of how to do a sandbox incorrectly. Tons of hex entries could have just been rolled up on a wandering monster table with no sense of a fully fleshed setpiece. What's more, tons of the encounters feel ultra-isolated and don't really cohere into anything.

>Not buying a plot of land and starting a farm.

>Being a farmer and not a merchant

After reading this thread I'm glad my rpg group is awesome. Our DM does almost no planning after setting up the game, the characters, and the theme. Then us, as players, find meaning in the sandbox.

>The best kind of roleplaying games happens somewhere in-between sandoxing and railroading.
This

Is mount and blade even a good rpg

True sandboxes are terrible, hands down. The only two kinds of "sandbox" campaigns that can even be remotely good are hexcrawls and hidden railroads.

Maybe yours but surely not all

Nope. All. No exceptions.

A few exception

No exceptions.

Is Rhodock the best faction

Arguably, a sandbox is the only kind of role-playing game legitimately worthy of the name.

Anything else is step down the slippery slope to railroads, storygames, and other swineshit.

This. No exception

When you have limitless possibilities of what you could do, your mind tends to lock up because it doesn't know where to start.

It's why if you ask "what's your favorite color?" it'll take more people longer to answer than if you'd asked "what's your favorite color between red, blue, green, and yellow?" we just need choices to choose from so we know the limitations of our decisions.

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Not an argument

Neither is your shitty opinion faggot.

And neither was your post. You're just asserting an opinion otherwise in a vacuum and declaring everything else explicitly wrong.

And even if you DID have an argument, why would you assume all responses must be arguments? That guy's not trying to convince you or anybody else of anything--he's insulting you. An insult doesn't NEED to be an argument. It's just derision.

The last time I ran a sandbox game the players were genuinely confused.

There was plenty going on and things to do, but they would argue in circles forever about what they should do. It was the amount of choice that drowned them. Every idea got shouted down by everyone else for a dozen reasons. Too dangerous, not dangerous enough, boring, unlikely to succeed, didn't like that NPC, not worth our time, did something like that last time, and so on forever. 'Rails' formed as the party started getting involved in certain plots, but then they would argue in circles forever about which rail they should follow and they kept switching focus at random. Like literally arguing the entire session, if left to themselves, then changing focus, then getting mad at each other for changing focus.

Eventually I gave up because people were getting upset. The only way to manage them was to tell them point blank what their goals were.

This is because most present-day gamers in fact have never played a role-playing game and wouldn't know how to play one if it were spoon-fed to them.

There needs to be a scenario present if characters are to fill a role. If it's just a sandbox with no conflict or stakes, it's a fucking make-believe about being someone else.

Not an argument

Brilliant observation moron.

A sandbox doesn't need to lack conflict or stakes. Ideally, you set it up with several conflicts already brewing, and the PCs decide if, and how, they want to interact with each.

I prewrite a bunch of events and characters that can happen at various locations before hand, but I never railroad my PCs into doing something. I just hand them little clues that there might be interesting things to do in certain places (there's some smoke rising off in the distance or some shit like that), and they can choose to pursue or ignore them as they see fit.

Okay, well how exactly is the average party supposed to figure out which scenario is most important to deal with at that particular moment?

That's the thing that fucks up sandbox games, the player is given multiple options that all might be important, so they get overloaded and end up doing nothing, expect maybe debate which scenario to go with first.

Last time I ran a sandbox, the players killed a guy because an npc they liked had a grudge, sided with the monsters in one area and then hired out an orc warband with their dungeon loot to take over a village.
By the end of it they had a small army of 100 peasants, lots of dissent, were trying to create a cult around one of the dead characters, were running smuggling operations in another area through agents.

The whole thing fell apart after a year of weekly play because the party split into 20 directions as far as what to do. With 12 players, they ended up in factions and doing sneaky shit against each other. It felt like I was a general manager for a bunch of sociopathic teens by the end of it.

>Okay, well how exactly is the average party supposed to figure out which scenario is most important to deal with at that particular moment?

By interacting with the relevant NPCs and deciding for themselves? Why is this a difficult concept?

Okay, well there's an Orc raid to the south that might threaten our home towns, rumors of a lich building an army to the north, and the eastern and western kingdoms are having a war that may or may not be caused by a 3rd party who is hoping to destabilize them both in a bid for power.

So based on this, what the fuck are we supposed to focus on first? They all seem equally important for different reasons and time spent doing one is time NOT spent dealing with the other shit.

Lord help you if the party splits over which one to go to first, then you have to account for like three different plotlines at once while juggling everyone around so they don't end up bored waiting to see what happens on their end.

Then you end up calling it early because you burned yourself out and/or the party is too indecisive to choose a single plotline and shit, so you go back to hiding the railroads so people actually get shit done.

My favourite way of presenting a campaign is the "Flashpoint" method. There's an antagonist with a motive, and objective, and some lieutenants doing his bidding. There's a definite 'end state' the villain is aiming for, and five or more places (the Flashpoints) where he is furthering his progress towards that end-state. He might be acquiring a powerful artifact, killing a potential rival, sowing panic or discord, gaining new allies, and so forth.

The first mission the PCs engage upon, by their intent or by pure chance, interferes with these plans and lets the PCs learn of this grand scheme. After that it is entirely up to them where to go, what to do, and when to do it. Places they prioritize first will be less prepared for their meddling, places they go to near the end will have learned of the PC's abilities and weaknesses and will plan accordingly. Resting becomes a valuable resource as time is of the essence. If they engage upon a side-quest it had better give them a significant advantage in the fight ahead. All of this culminates in a final confrontation, the first one with the true mastermind, at which point the PCs either succeed or fail in one glorious battle where all their efforts bear fruit.

Any consequences of the adventure carry on to the next, whether it's centred around the same PCs or other PCs in the same region dealing with the aftermath.

That's not how you set up your hooks, user. You try a hook, first. Hint at these conflicts, see where they go, then go from there. Most settings have background conflicts that are in the periphery. As GM you can do whatever you want, even have all three things come together somehow.

bannerlord when

my favorite kind of rpg is a Fiasco game because it is literally limitless and 100% designed to ensure that every session is an actually great story. the sandbox nature works really well there because (a) every character has clearly defined wants and needs, (b) every character has something that binds them to the others, so they stay connected, and (c) the story is finite so there's no "well, we did that, what next?"

all lessons any sandbox campaign can learn from

>bannerlord when
never

True

Fuck off. Bannerlord shall be release

wasn't supposed to come out this year? Where the fuck is the announcements

>can't spell rhodok
>doesn't recognize brytenwalda, which doesn't have rhodoks

Forget the BBEG. Turn it into a capitalism simulator. Force them to make ends meet while dealing with lazy/drunken employees, nobles who trash their rooms and expect to fuck the serving girls, soldiers who demand free board because they're ostensibly keeping you safe etc.

Let the big challenge be the district of the city the inn is located in is now quarantined due to plague. They now have to ride out the quarantine by securing enough food/water if they didn't already have it stockpiled, while trying to remain uninfected and keeping the guests calm.

There's a lot of things you can do with that premise.

I spend a lot of time thinking about and designing sand boxes. They are not a superior type of game, just a style of play with pros and cons. They're also incredibly difficult to do properly and easy to fuck up.

When people think of a sandbox they think of a vast open world to explore with various endless quests within. One definition that tends to be ignored is the sandbox approach to individual goals.

For example the players task is to infiltrate a well fortified and guarded noble house and steal an artifact.

To do this they could -
>Charge in head first
>Infiltrate it at night
>Pose as nobles for an upcoming banquet and steal it then
>Rabble rouse the peasantry to create a distraction
>Kidnap the nobles daughter and blackmail the artifact out of them
>The options are almost endless.

Video games due to the limitations of their game engines are generally unable to do this but in a tabletop RPGs everything is possible.

In this sense any game can be a sandbox, even a heavily plotted one , and this is actually far more rewarding for the players and their agency. In fact an 'elder scrolls esque' sandbox with nothing to do but explore random dungeons and settlements and kill monsters is less of a sandbox than a railroaded game that allows an open ended approach to goals within the railroad.

This is why creating a true sandbox takes a lot of work, because you have to craft an entire open area , detail everything that's in there, including NPC's with their own goals, then link it all together with a plot structure of some kind and within that create a series of open ended goals with additional room for the players to just openly explore or decide screw this we want to be farmers. You also need various encounter tables for the areas on your map and for most of this to be ready before session 1.

I run my game more or less as a sandbox. My players are pretty good at looking for things to do in the long term, like the one who latched onto what he thought was a plot hook when it was just an off the cuff explanation of why three guys have to sleep in one room. That plot hook ended up with him stabbing another PC and getting married to an emperor's daughter.

There's a few approaches to this.

I can understand the frustration from a player perspective. There's no good answer as if they go and say defeat the Orcs. Then the Lich will grow stronger as will the war. But if they don't the villages will be raised etc.

One approach is to effectively freeze the other events , they're still going on just at a stalemate. This allows the players to resolve each in turn but it does stop the world feeling alive and in motion.

You can allow the other threats to progress and escalate but still to a level the players can deal with. So the players return from killing all the orcs , the lich has raised a dragon the players can slay and an army has arrived at the capital.

Note that this is actually how a lot of railroaded games work but without giving the players options as to what they tackle. So module 1 is hunt the orcs , module 2 is defeat the army and module 3 is slay the lich.

You can have NPC groups , by the players choice , deal with the other threats. So the players deal with the orcs, they send the paladins order against the lich and hope the mages guild can resolve the conflict with the army. While this removes the players getting to be the heroes who resolve everything it does resolve the issue of them having to deal with everything Of course there can be additional complications and failures when they return to hear about how these groups did that the players can then step into resolve.

Further never split the party like that. It's metagamey but they do for this to work need to decide on one thing together.

So basically run an actual campaign as opposed to a "you can LITERALLY climb that mountain" open-world adventure, gotcha.

I don't think you understand what a sandbox actually is.

>OP is clearly an idiot asking for validation that open-world VRPGs are closer to tabletops and thus somehow arbitrarily better than linear VRPGs, presumably because someone on /v/ trolled him
>Veeky Forums is too autistic to recognise this even though OP posted with a picture of Mount&Blade, which is clearly a videogame, and gets angry at him for saying open-world TTRPGs are the only good ones rather than for talking about vidya on Veeky Forums
lmao good thread guys

I understand what it's supposed to be on paper, I also understand what generally happens in practice when you tell people to choose from an infinite number of possibilities.

They either do nothing or they want to do fucking everything.

>infinite number of possibilities
>Your own example had 3...

What if the playing table is a literal sandbox ?
What if the setting is a literal sandbox ?

Those were only the options that I cared the most about. In a sandbox game, you can literally do anything, even say "fuck this shit, I'm going to open up a tavern" or some shit.

All over YouTube.

Sandboxes are fun until some miscreant inevitably comes up with the idea to shit into it.

Yeah I bet the sandbox people would rue the day of Turdgeddon

>an epic branching main story
So it wasn't a sandbox after all.

t. animeposter

t. absolutely the same guy

what good experiences you have had with sandboxes, user? storytime please?

Yes, but a sandbox doesn't need to be static or lacking in conflict. As GM, you just roll with the punches and retaliate by having one of your more developed plot threads interact with thge tavern and lay more hooks for the players.

In a regular game, they never get to open the tavern, that's the difference. You not wanting to recognize it doesn't change the fact.

Not him, but I have one.

>Meeting new group at university
>Don't really know any of them, so throw together a couple of lazy "Go here, get X" missions while I both develop the game world and get a feel for the pulse of the group's dynamic.
>Start slowly alluding to a Big Villain rising off somewhere, but leaving it vague and open to further development
>Along the way, send them on a fetch quest in some dead archmage's tower for some book.
>Tower is filled with lethal traps, self-repairing golems, magical forcefields, hell, just getting in the front door was a major task, since it couldn't be picked, bashed down with physical force, and none of their magic users had anywhere near the kind of skill to dispel the warding spells.
>After much adventures and about 3 sessions, manage to dodge enough of the hazards to get the book and get back out.
>And then, as they're returning it to their employer for the payout, one of them asks
>Who owns McClellier's tower anyway? I mean, it's sitting a couple of miles from that village, right?
>Ehh. quickly spin a yarn about how it would have reverted to the government, and if they want to purchase it, I suppose they could, but nobody is really interested in a deathtrap tower.
>After some discussion, party buys the tower
>And begins what I can only describe as a systematic war against the automated defenses, clearing it out room by room and hallway by hallway, either tricking it into accepting them as the masters of the place, or just breaking things past the point where they can self-repair..
>Go on external adventures to either acquire capital (this stuff is expensive) or to acquire esoteric magical knowledge in order to either bypass defenses or access various features.
>Eventually falls apart due to player idiocy, but we had a long run of good sessions.

Bear in mind, I wasn't planning a sandbox, but it just kind of turned into it.

>Warband
I hate that game because I love it.
I love it because it's overall a great medieval rags-to-riches simulator.
I hate it because it gets really boring really fast. After getting enough wealth to maintain a massive and fully upgraded standing army, enough renown/cha to maintain an army of 100+ men, the game grinds to a halt. You can now destroy all enemy armies except royal armies singlehandedly, and you may even be able to take a lightly guarded castle/town or two. But you cannot win sieges against a large garisson, and you cannot start your own kingdom because you'll get ROFLstomped and even lords you have good relations with will rarely join you. Then you quit not out of rage, but out of boredom. Boredom caused by hours of running around the map, defeating armies and replenishing your very meagre losses.

This is my experience as well

Maybe you're both shit players?

Look, sandbox games are fun enough as single player computer games - well, I don't find them all that fun anymore, but you can still goof around, go through dungeons, however you feel.

But in a TTRPG, with other players, it gets frustrating. Having endless ways to play the game doesn't make up for the fact that a sandbox RPG can feel unfocused, especially if the party themselves doesn't have any direction. And what do you do if the party members each want to be a warrior, merchant, landless noble, and bandit? How do you get that to work all in one party?

I would much rather have a GM sit me and the party down and go 'okay, we're going to be playing a political sort of game.' That way we all make fitting characters, and we don't have to wander around for several sessions before half-heartedly deciding to be mercenaries and pissing off the members of our group that didn't want to be mercenaries.

But the absolute worst part is the biggest way it's not like a sandbox game like TES or Fallout: it seems like GMs who run sandbox campaigns, in my experience, will never ever drop a questhook. You have to scrabble and search and dig for it, every time. I don't know why - maybe they're afraid of railroading - but when you're put in a setting with no idea of your options, let alone what you really want to do, that makes for a bad game very fast. I am tired of vague games that don't go anywhere because GMs aren't willing to introduce drama and motivation when the game desperately needs it.

Can anyone post the Tracks in the Sand pdf?

Here you go user

>doesn't recognize it's viking conquest
Shame on you

As someone who has read the thing, I disagree with a lot of what's in there. It literally suggests you copy the way modules are written, as if modules were notoriously good at not railroading.

The person who wrote it can't keep their advice straight, either. You can't use islands AND module-style at the same time unless you're prepping two completely different ways, and they completely fail to realize islands can let you sandbox without any of the problems they claim the format has.

Thank you very much

>As GM, you just roll with the punches and retaliate by having one of your more developed plot threads interact with thge tavern and lay more hooks for the players.
That's not rolling with the punches though, that's forcing the players along a railroad so that the party actually engages with one of your plotlines.
>In a regular game, they never get to open the tavern, that's the difference.
From what I can tell, they don't get to open a tavern in your sandbox either for long before the plot comes in to force them onto the rails again.

How does having one of your developed ideas interact with the tavern forcing them out of it/railroading? That just sounds like a lack of imagination

Is Viking Conquest good

Because the demon lord of Vaz'quath presumably has better shit to do than fuck up some random no-name tavern in podunk middle-of-nowhere and if his army is large enough to cause problems for them by proxy, it is (or at least, it should) already too late for them to do anything about his army.

If anything, once it becomes clear that the group has no interest in being heroes, the demon lord's army should already be dealt with by individuals who do have an interest and are willing to put their necks on the line in order to deal with that army since the world is (or again, should be) much larger than the PC's with various entities having their own vested interest in making sure that the demon army is dealt with.

If that's not the case, then why even call it a sandbox in the first place since you're so adamant about having your campaign be used regardless of player agency? Just run an actual fucking campaign with your idea as the primer or some shit.

That is literally me. What is wrong with it though?

You need money to make money. The farmer makes money.

viking conquest is brytenwalda, only they added a shitty storyline and charged money for it

a minecraft roleplay server perhaps

>And what do you do if the party members each want to be a warrior, merchant, landless noble, and bandit?
Before opening the game into a sandbox, force the players to work as a group. Remove their individuality. The group shall never split. So at first make them become a company or some shit, give themselves a name(a group's name, their individual names shall then be worthless). Make it so nothing will ever be accomplished unless there is full consensus on the group. After that you shouldn't have that problem.

So are sandbox games the best for building teamwork skills?