@Zachiel ....Why are you trying to Pun-Pun? You know that even the creator of that eldritch horror said that it was an abomination that should never see the light of day, right?
right, it doesn't get more natural than "not enough natural". That's why I'm gonna get a viper familiar. Hey, the skill bonus is great too for my character
@Lord_Gareth my Complete Arcane says that it does.
@Zachiel yeah, so you have incantatrix cohort from Leadership, cool strong viper from Wild Cohort and a metric ton of ordinary vipers via Handle Animal
Must remember that I am not allowed to scream at dumb people on this site, must remember that I am not allowed to scream at dumb people on this site...
No, you should not.
Fixing party wealth means the players don't need to strive or explore in order to find good stuff, because Fate (you) will engineer events so that they're taken care of. That's the opposite of the essential nature of a sandbox campaign.
But what happens if they have pitiful ...
Hey, I already admitted that statting up a pre-gen world and then refusing to alter anything is a method of sandbox gaming; I don't appreciate the snide returns.
Hey all! Wanted to say the site is looking really good; @CRoss and I were reviewing site stats and we're up about 30% across the board (traffic, questions, answers) month over month and about double year over year. Healthy growth, and welcome to all the new RPG.SE'ers!
I really, really can't - at least, not in 3.5. If this was World of Darkness, I could understand it. If it was Scion...well, no, not Scion, because of the whole Fateful Aura thing, but essentially I could see it in a system where the emphasis is away from 'overcoming challenges'.
3.5, however, is literally hung entirely around the concept of player characters overcoming obstacles, whether they be slavering monsters or political opponents.
@Lord_Gareth You should realize that gamist is only one of the ways to play 3.5. I understand your opinion that "due to the rules that's what the game is about," but you have to understand people with wider D&D experience don'e necessarily accept that or play it that way, and they have fun and rewarding games nonetheless.
Not talking rules wise, but also thematically; the ways in which characters advance are all about meeting and beating varieties of challenges. Settings are created to be full of obstacles and 'opponents' of various stripes, be they unjust governments, Warforged rights activists, or marauding orcs. 3.5, more than almost any other RPG, revolves around the idea that conflict defines the lives of the PCs
Not particularly seeing where you're going with that metaphor.
Unfair fights happen even at CRs equal to or slightly greater than the party, and even a CR = Party challenge (assuming it's not a social encounter of some variety) is very legitimately lethal for both sides.
It's possible to have fights where you don't even really consider CR matching. It becomes the role of the PCs to be smart and figure out what challenges they can take on. Even in World of Warcraft you can go try to pass through a higher level zone. It makes the world more real.
Sandbox play of 'Go anywhere, do anything' doesn't mean you'll always be able to complete all the challenges in the places you'll go. This isn't Skyrim. ;)
"There's a vast horde from a dragon that was felled long ago, underneath this mountain. The only way in is through a treacherous series of caves that pass through regions filled with underdark creatures.. Hey. What are you doing? Wait, did you just contract an expedition with 50 dwarves to simply dig a new path directly down to the loot? You're cutting them in for 35% of the loot? But what about this dungeon I had laid out??"
If it's a social party, maybe there's multiple companies of dwarves competing for the contract and they need to keep tempers unruffled and cut a good deal
It's OK to not like sandbox play. But it's pointless to tell people they shouldn't like sandbox play or "that's not doing it right". I'm fine with people that like heavily CR'ed, WBL'ed, XP micromanaging, gamist 3.5e. I just don't play with those folks.
In sandbox setups, I'm used to players strongly believing that if they're doing something that takes extreme effort to accomplish, they expect it to work. As if risk magically goes away because 'it took a long time to do that!'
@mxyzplk My emphasis is less on the presence of high-level challenges (I've a talent for informing my players when they've stuck their neck in without having to explicitly say so) and more about scaling formerly low-level challenges upwards. Did the PCs ignore the tribe of goblins in favor of pursuing a bounty on dire bears? That's fine. If they come to the goblins later, the tribe has changed. Maybe the goblins are gone, wiped out by something much worse that's moved into their territory.
@MadMAxJr I too tend to prefer to inject sandbox elements into a more structured game, but I've run true sandboxes before, and I've found it better to keep the general challenge rating near the PCs if only so you don't start getting them whining about things being 'easy mode'. Players often enter into situations full of unknowns and sorta expect you to fill in the gaps.
Sadly all four of my truly sandbox games have ended in the same encounter, because my players are morons.
Yep. A sandbox for me is simply a fantasy world designed without game rules or balance elements kept in mind. Unfortunately a lot of my players are raised by MMO/console RPGs where they're used to the feeling of being able to go anywhere and do almost anything because there's usually encounter scaling involved.
In (my defintion of) a sandbox setup, none of that balancing exists. Don't go wandering the T-Rex fields, it's full of dinosaurs. If you get eaten and we reroll your precious 3-page-of-backstory character, it's your own bloody fault. :P
So I have to tune my designs to be a little closer to what the players think they want.
What they consider a sandbox and what I consider a sandbox aren't the same thing.
Whereas I reject that reasoning for 3.5 (and/or Legend) in favor of emphasizing narrative agency. I don't try to murder my players, but I also make it very clear that I'm not going to save them either.
Well yes, there'd be clear warning and indicators that this is a giant, crushing, muscle powered kill-machine dinosaur field, but they'd still expect to be able to explore/adventure there.
I guess if they want the adventure to be about running constantly in fear, sure.
Giving them towns and cities to wander around seem to work best. Limited sandboxing. They have a main objective in town/city but time to kill. Various ongoings in the meanwhile keep them occupied.
I do wish that after the first time he killed all of them, my players would've decided to leave Kvalistrax the hell alone.
But he appears to have become their white whale
Kval is a vampire dragon (shadow dragon) souldrinker that occupies an area of the underground relatively near the surface. He preys mostly on mind flayers, drow, and the odd beholder or two, when he can get them. His treasure horde is not especially large for a dragon, and his depredations have yet to affect a PC race or even a good-aligned one.
Nonetheless, my players seem insistent that one day murdering him will be their goal. Nevermind that the guy can hit the entire party for three negative levels per attack action (five on the one who's his primary target), regenerate his spells thereby, and shoot soul-lasers at them with every hit.
This not mentioning the whole, you know, "He is also a vampire dragon" part.
Oh no, Kval doesn't leave survivors, @Zachiel. When he TPKs the party he murders them with negative levels, turns them into wraiths and forces them to guard his (now slightly larger) hoard
So they keep pitching entirely new parties into his waiting maw well before they have any ability to deal with him.
Depends on the campaign, actually. Normally that's the point at which I say, "Okay, this campaign's over, we're running something more structured." Once that's over, we talk about if we're going to go back to the sandbox and how we want to do it.
Kval's a fixture, so he's always there for them to eventually kill themselves on.
Except in this particular case all the loot is in Kval's lair. However, I have had games in the past where we heard about other parties the DM had run for and managed to find their stuff.
It's an interesting feeling, holding up an item and realizing that as cool as you think it is, the former owner (who was placing at least part of their life in its 'hands') is dead.
"Why don't we just kill them and take their loot?" "Uh, one, they've done nothing wrong, and two WHAT PART OF 'PALADIN' ON MY CHARACTER SHEET DID YOU MISS?"
@Zachiel, adventurers have more lethal combats every day than they do meals, and make their wages by living large sections of their adult life in that fashion. Of course they have problems respecting the dead, especially after a long career of the dead getting back up and disrespecting them pretty severely.
@MadMAxJr I guess some character had this nightmare of the other party recurringly appearing at loot places before they did and the paladin got backstabben in his sleep as a consequence XD
Joe was a great barbarian. However he was pretty darn powerful. We can't just bury him here. Hey Bob, bring the necromancers tome over here. We'll make his corpse walk home.
@MadMAxJr I played a Crusader devoted to Wee Jas. She kept her last will on her at all times, stipulating that her corpse was to be donated to the temple so that acolytes could practice necromancy on it.
"Okay. We wanted to simply animate the piglet skeleton. Instead you've unleashed a wraith upon the hall. On the one hand, you pulled off an incredible feat there. On the other hand the withering corpses that was the rest of the class might disagree."
That crusader was en-route to Windicator levels, and I had a lot of fun playing her. Our first dungeon involved a kobold sorcerer experimenting with dangerous necromancy and threatening a small town. When we finally got to him she picked him up by the neck with one hand and informed him, calmly, that he was going to be brought before trial.
And he asked what made me any different from him, and she replied, "First, I do not disrupt the daily lives of the innocent with irresponsible depredations. Second, I pay taxes." Then she punched him out and tied him up.
Hrm. Sandboxing is my absolute favorite approach, but there are two major elements to my sandbox style that I don't see mentioned very much here (not saying they're entirely missing, just... not emphasized as much as I would).
First and most importantly, if one of a sandbox's primary purposes is to simulate a 'real' game world, it must be impressively dynamic. There are plots within it, because NPCs have motives and goals and act to achieve their desires.
The world changes, because that's what worlds do, and it will change in direct response to PC actions, because PCs are disruptive by their very nature. The PCs become vortexes that twist and unravel the plots and machinations of the worlds' NPCS, often entirely by accident, and so those plots wrap around the PCs quite naturally.
Second... eh, I'll bring that up later once I've woken up enough to find the words to say it without being offensive, because I really don't intend to be.
No, you should not.
Fixing party wealth means the players don't need to strive or explore in order to find good stuff, because Fate (you) will engineer events so that they're taken care of. That's the opposite of the essential nature of a sandbox campaign.
But what happens if they have pitiful ...
How would you describe the concept of sandbox play?
How about to someone who is used to adventure modules or adventure paths?
