Has anyone tried to run a more sandbox’ish campaign with Dungeon World? Tell me about your thoughts / experiences!

Has anyone tried to run a more sandbox’ish campaign with Dungeon World? Tell me about your thoughts / experiences!

Has anyone tried to run a more sandbox’ish campaign with Dungeon World? Tell me about your thoughts / experiences!

13 thoughts on “Has anyone tried to run a more sandbox’ish campaign with Dungeon World? Tell me about your thoughts / experiences!”

  2. Good counter-question 😛 Well, in case of a classic fantasy game, I describe sandbox as handing my players a map of the region they’ll be playing in, giving them a list of things to do there / showing them where the adventure is, and having them choose what to do. No prepared plot, no railroading. 

  3. Well, DW as written goes further than that. This is how DW proposes to start a campaign:

    – The players make and present characters

    – The GM asks questions about the character to develop the setting

    – Then the GM asks (loaded) questions until he knows where the players are, what they are doing, and why they are doing it.

    – Play first session through

    – The GM makes suitable fronts in preparation for the next session

    It doesn’t get much more sandbox than that.

  6. Markus Schmidt I have never been much of a sandbox DM with D&D, usually I had a proposal for a game and the players would buy into it before we started, it wasn’t a railroad, but we had a strong focus, which was tied into the characters at creation or the first few sessions, if they decided to drop that focus for another I just went with it.

    I am GMing a DW game that has had two sessions so far, I went unprepared into the first session, with mere outlines of what the party could be (they settled on pirates) and we created whatever the world aroudn them was with the character creation, the entire 1st and 2nd session was made without me telling them anything about where adventure might be, they chose their own path the entire time, including what they were doing when the game started.

    So far I can say I have went from storydriven (where I have some preplanned plot and unveil it in front of the pcs, letting them interact, change and bash it around) to sandbox style overnight, I am not entirely comfortable yet but I am having fun and so are the players, even one who was extremely reluctant to try a new system.

    Overall the draw maps leave blanks thing works great, for your description of sandbox it is pretty much how the game advices you to start a game, with a great difference, open and blank spaces on the map, even going as far as asking players what could be done in one of those empty spaces.

  7. I’ve always run D&D as a sandbox, from before the word was even used – that was just how it was played. I’m hoping to do the same with DW, too, using the old Judges Guild Wilderlands campaign. At the moment I’m running a pretty sandboxy old module – G1 – Steading of the Hill Giant chief. As others have said, DW by its nature & design is sandboxy, so I’m interested in particular to see how sandboxy you can get with fronts, etc – specifically using them to drive “random” encounters.

  9. I think DW would work really well for a sandbox-style setting; the main thing would be making sure you have enough interesting Fronts for the PCs to explore, and to take into account the various Fronts interacting.

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