What was you best experience with Sandbox games? What was the worse? Would you recommend it for a newbie to run?

>>96013817 (OP)
Oh wow 500+ points of wasted prepwork what an amazing use of time

>worst experience
>retard DM tell us the word is our oyster and we can do anything and go anywhere, world map is big, point of interest are plenty, lore is meh but whatever
>we believed him
>proceed to railroad us in his stupid "you are the reincarnation of heroes of old age and must find clues about you past".
>most of the time we try to do something related to that we don't find anything or "you don't understand"
>we try to set some goals and shit but we never can because reasons, the fuck ?
>campaign devolved in us wanderring in location he choose for us, doing unfun stuff, watching his unsufferable character being absolute pain in the ass, treating us like shit even if we are supposed to be the heroes, throwing at us some bullshit encounter, barely giving us any reward, slow as fuck leveling. The session must play a certain way and only that way, every other solutions or choice is alway waved away.
>Me and one of my bro are fed up, we quit
>Another friend still play, everytime he speak about that campaign i know he is hurting inside but he is an addict to TTRPG and have no choice but to go to get his dopamine shot.

In retrospect, we had a shit DM. The amount of bullshit he tthrowed at us was really staggering and i hope he forever DM with players alway quitting on him because he is shit.

Best experience was with a good group of friend, we had our moments but the problem with those type of game is that without an overarching plot or a clear goal with constraint, usually we loose interest.

To use a metaphor, it's like a show with lots of episode. Sure, individually, some episodes can be really great but if they don't connect with each other, at the end of the show you wonder what it was really about. You had a great experience but it didn't give you anything else.

So my advice for newbie is to talk to the player about what it is about and set a strong goal to accomplish with constraint. If not, players will wander aimlessly and eventually loose interest.

>>96014081
I do this for WoD, usually we call them goals for short, medium and long term.

>>96013817 (OP)
Sauce for the image?

>>96014324
Assassin's Creed

>>96013817 (OP)
>Would you recommend it for a newbie to run?
Definitely not.

>>96013817 (OP)
Tabletop was made for sandbox games.

>>96013817 (OP)
I ran pf kingmaker and expanded content so there was something in evey hex, and changed most of the scripted encounters. Players had a ton of fun, and we made little post-it doodles commemorating the deeds of each explored hex. All the best times were my own encounters, but the adventure did provide a decent framework.
Wouldn't recommend it for a beginner dm. Focus on something that has some constraints. It's doable for a beginner, but it's not easy.

>>96014478
Non-sense. Good dungeons are not procedurally generated.

I ran a (semi-guided) sandbox game
every time I fleshed out an area to which the players had traveled, they would go
>damn, this situation looks complicated. let's go be pirates somewhere else instead
or some shit like that.

>>96014040
>Oh wow 500+ points of wasted prepwork what an amazing use of time
Filling the map or, hell, filling a room with "things to do" is the single biggest pitfall of DMing and one of the hardest to get over. More importantly, I've always found the urge to "fill in" the world to be a sign you're not exactly interested in running the campaign, but you're looking for an excuse to write a novel or do "comfort work" to busy yourself. God, I wish I could throttle me when I was younger! You should only be preparing the details of a scene the day before the session - or, to be kinder to the guys with jobs, the closest day to session you have free-time.

The greatest campaigns I've ever ran were done with me "winging it" because I had the skeleton of the story ripped from an existing module, and some of the worst campaigns I've ever ran were the ones that saw me spend an hour looking for the right fucking image for an optional NPC.

>>96014040
>>96015267
I absolutely know that feel.

>>96013817 (OP)
I think that there needs to be some discussion about what a sandbox game actually is, because it seems like most people on here make the immediate connection that a sandbox game is an old school hex crawl.

>>96015653
I was given to understand it was basically a campaign where the player characters are placed in a setting with numerous plot hooks and areas to adventure to such as a dungeon or relatively unexplored region, and told to make a choice on where they wanted to go. Like one of those old computer rpg games that start you out in a tavern where you assemble a party, stumble on out, and then the world is your oyster if you can survive in it.

>>96015267
>some of the worst campaigns I've ever ran were the ones that saw me spend an hour looking for the right fucking image for an optional NPC.
I'm a player in one of these campaigns, and I'm loathing it. The DM promised a game with a bunch of freedom for creativity, but started the first session by reading off a script. Then he required us to give him advance notice of anything we're thinking so he can plan it. Worst of all, he clearly uses ChatGPT and AI for everything.
Only reason I haven't left is that the other players seem happy, and I'm worried that leaving may kill the game.

>>96015671
Yeah, it sounds like you're talking about a hex crawl.

>>96015987
I usually think of hex crawls in terms of dungeon exploration, but that's a fair assessment

>>96015987
What would you call a sandbox then, any examples

>>96016002
This isn't an imperfect explanation, but I think any game where the GM builds some kind of structure (a geographic area, a political map, a conspiracy, a mystery) and the players are attacking that structure in any way. I think of Nights Black Agents, where the GM builds a vampire conspiracy in an org chart called the conspirimid. If done right, the starting scenario will give them a shitload of clues directing them to various lower points on the conspirimid, and it's up to the players to figure out their own ops to get more information to move up the pyramid. They are, at least theoretically, free to move forward however they think would work best; the GM isn't going "okay, this week we are going to Romania to fight the Romanian mob," they are going "you know that the Romanian mob, the Russian Orthodox church, this tech company and this pmc are all involved In the conspiracy are involved, and you know they have [resources and locations] how do you want to move forward?"

The same way that in a properly functioning fantasy exploration, hex crawl-y game, any location on the map will give you leads to other information on the map, to keep the players moving around.

>>96015671
Critical Role did 4 seasons of this and they became listless brooding losers.

>>96013817 (OP)
You mean best as "it was actually good" or you mean best as " it was least awful"?
Which I guess should tell you what is my experience with those.

>>96016097
>A sandbox is a hex crawl that advertises itself differently, so OSR spergs won't show up for the meet-up