Using Sandbox Gaming Techniques in your Regular Game
Introduction On Friday, I gave a keynote speech at my Dungeons & Toast Toastmasters group. This is the first-ever Toastmasters club designed to meet the needs of RPG players and gamemasters. The speech was called "The Three Secrets of Tywardin" and began with the story of a lost city found by characters deep in a large forest. I went on to explain that the characters only found the city because the players showed an interest in some scene details and improv turned into a multi-day storyline. I explained that the shift from the normal improvisation of details to enabling the characters/players to help direct the story is called Sandbox gaming (also known as open world gaming.) I then provided some tips on how to easily add sandbox concepts to existing games without changing those games. The speech was a big success, and I was asked to provide notes on it, so people could go back and refer to it. Rather than writing down the whole speech, I'm going to summarize it, wh