One Ring as a sandbox

[buddhax]

Just curiosity, is anyone playing One Ring: HoT or Rivendell as a sandbox? I mean the players decide where to go without any particular plot there but the GM improvise the events following the info in the settings books as HoT, Rivendell or DoW.

[Hermes Serpent]

Sort of for two of my games. I do however throw in material from the published adventures when teh characters are in a convenient area. It works for some players, that are more proactive, and not for others that expect to be led.

[doctheweasel]

We are mostly doing that with DoM. The events aren't totally random or improvised, but aside from the major events, I never know which thread they will follow or what they will do in the Adventure Phase. You pretty much have to be ready for anything.

For example, in the last session, they were on the run from Viglund's people, and from the Forrest Gate were considering escaping by either heading south down the Anduin Vale to the Woodmen, or hiding in the Mirkwood and taking the Elf Path to Laketown.

I've made it work by not arbitrarily adding events during travel, and just letting the pace of the Adventuring Phase be set by the players.

The really tough thing is that you need to have some stuff for them to do the next Adventuring Phase (rumors, etc.) so that they have legitimate choices to make rather than just choose to do the thing the adventure requires.

[Amargen]

It's always been a balance for my games. some of the players want to go do something outside anything planned, so I plan for what they want to do. There's not a lot you can do about it without discouraging the players, so aside from some of the more asinine things it's best to work it out.

the world is turning and they're along for the ride. if they want to fight at the battle at the gates of Minas Tirith I'd warn them they'll in in their 80/90's by then...

[Majestic]

I do this very intentionally in my Star Wars game, trying to keep my players with about a dozen active plot seeds (that their information broker learns about); they can choose to go in any direction at any given time, and I usually wait to prepare stuff until they give me an idea of what they're going to do next. Ignoring some of them causes them to drop off the list (as the events still happened, they just weren't involved).

I've done it only a little bit with TOR. I give my players what's going on around Wilderland during the Fellowship Phase, and they tell me if and where they want to tackle anything. It's led to a few 'side quests' or other missions and adventures while they work through Tales from Wilderland as the 'main story'.

[Wbweather]

A couple of weeks ago we were down a few players and so I broke off from out current adventure (Kinstrife and Dark Tidings) and jumped back in time to the previous year. I stated that the players were telling the story of what they did in the fall between their major adventures and let them go exploring. I have a player who is an elf warden and who specifically has made it his goal to understand the evils that have corrupted Mirkwood. He suggested traveling down the old forest road and investigating the mountains of Mirkwood to see what evils might dwell therein. I ran it totally on the fly with HotW in hand. It went exceptionally well. I was able to pull in some interesting things that otherwise they would not likely have discovered, including the ruins of the elven refuge in the foothills of the mountains. They went exploring for lost elven artifacts, stumbled into a room of great bats and even fought and killed a vampire. I also used the adventure to introduce Bofri the dwarf, who they encountered scouting out the eastern edge of the old forest road. They will encounter him again soon during the Folkmoot. It was one of our favorite game sessions to date.

Last week one of our players chose the Search for Answers undertaking and investigated rumors of Mansbane. This week we will do a similar, more or less free roam adventure as we hunt down this menace.

I plan on using these impromptu adventures more frequently from here on out.

[Majestic]

Excellently done, Wbweather! I think Heart of the Wild is perfectly set up for this sort of thing, and TOR in general is much easier than many/most other RPGs, requiring less prep work up front and allowing the LM the ability to improvise.