I don’t want to call it a sandbox

Can you write an essay or a story for next week? You probably can, because you've been given jobs like this since high school. Would you write the same essay or story right now, in the next 10 minutes? Most people can't or won't try and in the long run the result will be much less than it is. Now, one of the tasks of the Dungeon Master in Dungeons & Dragons is to tell a story that connects players with smaller stories about their characters' actions. And one of the big differences between the different Dungeon Masters is how well they prepare for it. For the past few years I have mainly played adventure campaigns published by Wizards of the Coast, now Curse of Strahd. And first because of the pandemic, and now because people have moved, we play on a virtual table, in our case Roll20. I purchased the Curse of Strahd module in Roll20, so now I have all the cards, tokens and flyers ready. Most importantly, Curse of Strahd is a campaign with a specific story, with a specific ending. At the end of the campaign, players will be strong enough to enter Ravenloft Castle and the Campaign Archbishop, Vampire Count Strahd von Zarovich. I don't know exactly what the players will do in each session, but I can prepare a great story; and when the players enter Ravenloft Castle, I will have the battle cards and tokens ready and I have probably researched the contents of the castle in the campaign book.

Now it's perfect for playing D&D without preparation. You can improvise and play in a completely isolated campaign with no pre-planned stories. But there's an obvious price to pay for it: the story the DM had to create to explode is probably not that epic, and the world isn't as logical, not as logical as something made up. This makes the game session quite stressful for the DM because not only does he have to guess the world and the story in a short period of time, but he also has to take notes so as not to contradict what he says to the players in the game. future. . The session. . what he says now. And this sandbox style of play is best suited to mind games without tokens or cards. Or play with a blank map, quickly draw the land by hand, and represent enemies with common symbols. In Roll20, at least the chips can be quickly removed from the draw, but any good card must be prepared. As a DM, I don't like completely improvised play.

However, there is a weak point: the DM can set up the world and populate it with location cards, fragments of stories and NPCs. Think of it as a sandbox and you don't start with a flat sand surface, but you already have some pre-planned sand castles and structures. The master does not need to guess the name of the kingdom and the name of the king to fly, he is trained in tools such as Roll20 or World Anvil. Players still have a lot of freedom, they can decide whether to ignore this king, work for him or kill him and conquer the kingdom. But at least when players ask what the kingdom is geographically, it has a map that the DM can draw. The campaign is still player-driven, indefinitely, with no predetermined bits at the end.

This is what I want to do in my next post on the Curse of Strahd campaign. After initial discussions with my players, we chose a pirate-themed marine and aquatic adventure campaign. I will use the original Ghosts of Saltmarch material, but not necessarily all of the adventures in this book. And certainly not all newspapers, because there are a lot of low-quality black and white sheets in that book. I will not prepare more than one mission in advance and will use player input to select or create missions. This will require players to be rewarded for multiple contributions; but it should be enough to simply ask what they would like to see in such a campaign and then create something to answer that question. Everyone has ideas for pirate stories, treasure hunts or naval battles with a ghost ship. I don't want to call it a sandbox campaign, but rather a "player driven campaign".

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