story telling | Chromatic Chameleon

Sandbox Railroads

Submitted by Chromatic Chameleon on Fri, 01/11/2019 - 23:30

Sandbox vs Railroad
Over the last few years this blog has focused on player-centric themes, by using a four-part method. This month I'm going to deviate a bit by covering a topic normally reserved for GMs, and by doing a long-form essay. If this approach works well, I might keep the longer once-a-month essay.

While the railroad/sandbox duality is typically considered a GM problem, it's still true that the Players must play in this duality, so this is a topic that's of importance to them as well.

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The Best Offense is a Good Defense

I generally avoid talking about specific game systems, but recently I started a D&D 5E game and I have some experience that can help you in building characters. In one short game, I had our monk character go up against a friendly monk NPC in a fighting match. During the fight the PC had an ability to cause disadvantage and no matter what I tried, I could barely hit the PC. This allowed the PC to overcome the superior NPC―and could allow you to do the same. First, let's do a quick review. D&D 5E is designed to be a simplified game, and the main mechanic it introduced to do this was advantages and disadvantages, which are meant to reduce the number of die modifiers. The latter is a positive modifier while the former is negative. One obtains these modifiers through skills, abilities, feats, situations, inspiration and DM fiat. The mechanics themselves are simple: both advantages and disadvantages grant you a second roll.