Back in July of this year I wrote about why I plan to go OSR. At that time I’d been running a 5E game that just recently concluded.

If I’m honest, at least with myself, I’d been wanting to go OSR since before starting that game. I’d ran a short Basic D&D and 2E game to shake off any lingering nostalgia. They weren’t perfect. So I figured why not kick the tires of 5E one last time.

The plan was simple. Build a custom setting based on Nentir Vale. Sandbox style play. Lay the tracks ahead of my players. Really see if I could fly by the seat of my pants in 5E.

I chose Nentir Vale because it has a lot of modules to cull for plots and maps plus more than a few stubs to develop. Also because I just like.

Now at the end I can say it wasn’t perfect. Was it me? Was it the rules? Other factors? Well yes.

The biggest “other factor” was prep time. There is just an amount of time it takes to get content into Fantasy Grounds. Even after cutting out all hope of pasting text into the program and creating line of site maps. Stat blocks, encounters, parcels and filling in maps just takes time. Often this took half the time I could spend prepping in any given week.

After half my prep time was swallowed by data entry the rest had to be divided into developing NPCs, developing locations, planning combat and tracking the plots of the various villains. Quite invisibly to my players I planned a lot of villain progress on a calendar to make sure they had a fair shot at interrupting the enemy’s plans.

Often there wasn’t really enough time to get all of this done before I wore out. As time passed it was showing mostly in meandering plots. This falls on me of course. I never really gave myself a week off to catch up on writing.

This was a mistake that in retrospect I could have corrected simply by seeding the game world with more small dungeons with simple plots. Doing so would have given me space to work on the greater world while the players were off dungeoneering.

Another experiment in design was creating a sandbox world that had a mix of civilized and uncivilized places. Prior to this I’d only run sandbox style games in locations in which everything was hostile. This colossally backfired as the players went from place to place making enemies of nearly everyone with any authority.

Incidentally I don’t actually care if my players want to overthrow a government. But their surprise and frustrations when as outsiders they attempt to legitimize a coup while fully admitting they won’t stick around for the aftermath. Or after leaving a power vacuum being surprised that it had been filled by a stronger baron.

But this is revealing about how players take to absolute autonomy. Some embrace the chaotic nature of the plot and others are just miserable. They feel, understandably, that they just can’t win.

So yeah. I probably won’t run a sandbox game with non-hostile areas again. But I will absolutely run more limited sandbox games in the future.

Having ran both Curse of Strahd and Out of the Abyss in addition to this and one other of my own creation I think I can safely say the 5E is difficult to do true sandboxes in. Both of those books are great but it seems to take several months and a design team to do what I once did with a few random tables and a boxed set.

Having thought all of this through here I also feel like I really failed myself in creating a sandbox. I kept trying to introduce a large over-arching plot since there was some demand for it but I also kept half-assing sandbox and campaign play. To paraphrase Ron Swanson I think it would have been best to whole ass one thing.

That’s the main lesson. Commit, prepare, throw out the hooks. Let the players create their own problem. Lesson learned.

But truthfully I won’t run another sandbox game with 5E. There’s just too much to prepare to get that game running. And there’s just too many problems players can solve with their character sheets. For the sandbox to work exploration and role-playing need to be first class citizens of the game. And they’re just not in 5E.

I guess in the end this was just a long hard lesson that I hope to learn from.