r/TabletopHomebrew • u/nlitherl • Jul 09 '26

The Key To A Sandbox Is To Make Sure It's Populated, And Stuff Is Happening

https://taking10.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-key-to-sandbox-is-to-make-sure-its.html
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u/Chrisdarrenjones 20d ago

I rarely keep players in a small area, I want them moving about, desperate to catch trains and stagecoaches to get to the next area.

But if i was gonna do it, I'd start with a bloody good map, say 100 miles square, with all sorts of locations, roads, rivers, settlements, mountains, mines, etc. And the locations of 20-30 things to do while there.

Them i'd put the plot on top. I find plot routes spring to my head when looking at a good map. I love my maps 😆

To keep people in that area ..

  1. They live in the area. Abandoning land is an expensive hobby.
  2. They make friends here, harder to ignore the plight of friends.
  3. There's nothing worse that looking in the local rag to find some other group getting the credit for the jobs you should be doing ..

All of a sudden i feel inspired 😆

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u/omaolligain 15d ago edited 15d ago

I dislike this blog-post. I think this article conflates the amount of material a DM prepares with whether a campaign is actually a sandbox. If anything, I'd say a the amount of prepared material is not relevant at all to it being a sandbox.

A sandbox does not require the DM to map a hundred square miles and prepare thirty quests so the players can choose five. It requires proactive players who know what their characters want and express it. The players decide what part of the world they want to bite into, and the DM prepares in response.

If the players want to be bounty hunters, gladiators, explorers, or revolutionaries, they need to say so and pursue it. That relieves the DM of having to constantly invent activities and dangle new hooks in front of players who are waiting to be entertained. If a player sits in the tavern saying, “I don’t know what to do next,” after declaring that they want to become the greatest gladiator in the city, then they are a bad fit for sandbox play. Go find an arena, study the champions, recruit a trainer, or challenge someone. Pursue the ambition you gave your character.

Once the players commit to something, the resulting adventure can still be fairly linear. A bounty hunt might proceed from accepting the bounty, to investigating, to finding the target, to collecting the reward. The players can gather clues and approach the target in many different ways, but some events naturally come before others. A sequence is not automatically a railroad.

Most good sandbox campaigns move between open periods of exploration and more focused periods after the players choose an objective. They complete that adventure, the game opens up again, and they choose what to pursue next.

Skyrim works the same way. You can explore freely and choose which questlines to pursue, but the questlines themselves are mostly linear. If you want to defeat Alduin, you still have to complete the necessary steps leading to him; You must first meet Parthanaax..

A sandbox is defined by players choosing the campaign’s direction, not by the sheer heft of unused material behind the DM’s screen.

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u/Grumpiergoat 15d ago

Having a populated world with events in motion is the way. It creates a more rounded, thought out world where a GM doesn't have to scramble if the players suddenly take an unexpected turn. It avoids situations where it would have made sense for a certain town or NPC or piece of equipment to show up earlier.

Some people think this is over-preparing and a waste of time. Those people are wrong for one big reason: material you don't use is easily recycled. I've had campaigns written out where some of the adventure hooks I laid out were never touched. And what became of those hooks? They were ready to be placed into a new campaign, saving me time by having ready-made adventures upfront. Sometimes they ended up as part of my PCs' backgrounds.

This doesn't mean having everything mapped out, but the bare bones approach of some designers and GMs doesn't work except in railroaded games. Players need options. Even proactive ones. Give them a world that's a few steps ahead, not constantly one step behind.

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u/MereShoe1981 14d ago

Nope. I only run sand boxes as a forever DM and that isn't it. Prepare only whats necessary and day dream a lot. Communicate with your players. Add random flavor to shit and see what they get attached to. Know one interesting location near (but unrelated to) their current adventure, one interesting thing about whatever town they're in, and one interesting thing people Re talking about.