At the crossroads between Railroads and Sandboxes. Another OSE / B/X session:

“What is this road?” (on a map)
“That is the road where you should have gone.”

We rolled up a party with a macro; one click to roll it all. That worked absolutely fine for me when I tried it before game time, but during game time the button was not where it was earlier, and also at a different spot than where the DM pointed to. Much confusion ensued.
That was a bit of a hold-up, but this is just part and parcel of modern technology — just one thing to keep in mind when planning a slot. Anyway, we soldiered through and managed to create our party.

Search Party

Five people looking for adventure: A thief, a wizard, a cleric and two fighters. We went into a weird little tent city where we were supposed to be hired to find an earlier party of missing people; see if they could be rescued, or if they even needed rescuing.

However, the guy who hired us insisted that he would speak to only one of our number, and that this one person had to negotiate for the whole group.
Why? “Because it is more practical that way”. More than one of us entering the tent would disqualify us from the job offer.
I immediately judged him as untrustworthy because of that. Why divide us and isolate one negotiator? That smelled fishy as fish.
Then they said they could hire only 1 group, either a bunch of NPCs (who were already there) or us, after a bidding contest. Each side hat one negotiator and that person had to hand in our offers. Our negotiator demanded 10 gold per day, for the whole party. The NPCs demanded only food.

The “questgiver” opted for the hungry NPCs and told us “sorry, you are out. Go away. But you can find another job at the job board.”

For some reason they did not see the opportunity to hire two parties for one job… even though one of them didn’t even demand any gold.

One board to rule them all

“Okay, fine, we go to the job board then.”
Turned out, “the” job board was not here in this tent settlement, but in another village altogether, two days south of there.
THE ONE job board.

I figured we could stay here, make our own luck, follow the undernourished NPC party and pick up the pieces once they ran into trouble and got eviscerated by something. But that plan didn’t really get through to my fellow players, probably due to audio issues — it was understood as “attack the other party”. Rather than trying to explain my actual intention I decided to drop the issue… especially since it was not a very attractive plan anyway .. to shadow a couple of NPCs creeping through the wilderness was a big gamble for possibly little reward. Not my most stellar idea.

My second idea was to nab the gold of the quest givers – make some ruckus outside, and while they go investigate, our thief grabs the money and makes a run for it. I was sure they could not have expected to find someone who would work for food alone… since they were hiring adventurers they would have to be prepared for someone who demanded pay, so they would very likely have a paychest in there somewhere. Alas, the rest of the party feared that if we were to nab their gold, they would hunt us down and kill us.

I did not think that likely … after all, they had just hired a bunch of hungry people for a simple searching mission. How many armed personnel could they possibly be able to throw at hunting us down if they did not have the personnel for their initial quest?

Anyway, most of the party said they were lawful and would never steal anything, so our caller decided that no, we were doing the travel for the job board.

Bad Halflings

Meeting two halflings after a day’s travel halfway between tent city and job board village: Both of them were quite rude and the Halfling lady explained that we can do a job for them: We can go and bring them a feather of a cockatrice, because they want one for some secret purpose [let’s take a wild guess there and say it might be for the creation of a magical item, so the Halfling lady might be high level magic user].

When one of our party asked for a reward, the halfling boss lady scoffed: “A reward? Well, aren’t you mercenary?”. She said we might get a reward, maybe, if the specimen we would bring was satisfactory. And it would be her sole discretion to decide if the specimen would suffice.

When she got asked more questions, she cut them off: “Do you want to enter into a formal contract, yes or no? Go ahead, make up your mind, don’t waste my time.”
“What do you mean, waste your time?” asked one party member. “You are sitting by the fire with us, what else are you gonna do?”
Again she scoffed and retreated into a tent, while her hench-Halfling offered to provide a formal contract for us. He had it right there on him and started reading it out. The contract called the Halflings “Masters” and the party “Servants” and re-stated what she had said earlier: All the risk was to be solely born by the Servants, there was no obligation whatsoever on the Masters side, and they would decide if they would reward the work, and how they would reward the work, after the delivery, as they would see fit.

The contract ended with: “If you agree to be formally bound by this contract, say anything, or grunt, or growl.”

I said “Hmmm”, one guy said “No!”, two mumbled other things, only the Thief was smart enough not to make the slightest noise, and therefore only four of us entered into this formal contract, mostly against their will.
Then one of the fighters grabbed the halfling with the contract to drop him into the fire.
“Ah! ah! Help!” cried the halfling, and rolled out of the fire, surviving.
The halfling lady came out of the tent.
I was ready to bash her head in while she collected her concentration to sling spells at us.

Derailing the Sandbox

At that point the adventure derailed completely, as the DM asked: “Do you want to retcon this attack or do you really want to go through with this incredibly stupid attack on a named NPC?”

“Okay, if you want to attack them I will have to prepare that for next session, and for now we can switch to playing the other party.”
He turned the screen to another game. “We can continue this game instead.”

The players did not really want that, but the DM said it was the only way to keep playing if we really decided to attack a quest giver. I voiced my impression that the DM did not want us to attack that Halfling, but he insisted we were truly free to do that, Sandbox game and all, free choice … just that it was really a bad idea to attack a named NPC, and more, a quest giver, and that we would have to break off for today because he had not prepared for such a course of action.

And we had the discussion again about alignment: One player said usually he would be down to play evil parties, but this time he had made a stupid character.
The party took a vote and 3:2 decided to NOT attack the halfling. Instead, our magic user asked OOC what he knew about cockatrices. The DM sent a secret message with information about that critter to this player alone, and remarked: “While I infodump, you can keep on being murderhobos — or you can decide if you are murderhobos or would rather play like a normal D&D party, I don’t care.”

I kind of took umbrage to these statements — evil characters, and murderhobo — because I felt the attack was justified, given the unethical way of binding us to a contract between “master” and “servant”, in a world with magic. In my view, the Halflings had needlessly started the conflict, and throwing that little lawyer into the fire was the first sensible act in the session.
But well .. lost the vote there, ride the train.

Freedom of Choice

The DM asked “Do you want to accept this side quest or do you want to continue on to the job board? I am perfectly happy with you to keep travelling, but you can accept this side quest. This is one of the things about the sandbox that really ruins the game day.”

Again I took umbrage: this time at the words “side quest” and at the idea of a ruined game day due to decisions in a presumed sandbox.

In my personal view,

a) There is no difference between side or a main quest, they are all just jobs to take up or leave; and there are ventures to dare that don’t involve a quest giver at all.

b) Errors in judgement are possible, of course, but being named does not make anyone inviolate, nor does it make an attack on such a named NPC “incredibly stupid”, or “evil”.

c) I fail to see how free choice ruins a game day. Free choice is the whole reason I play these games. And neither choice, travelling on, or turning back, or taking the quest, or killing the Halflings, or burning down their tents, or selling our armor and gifting the money we gain to a temple, or deciding to hunt cockatrices for our own benefit, not for that of any Halfling — none of that could ruin a game.

Choice IS the game.

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It is all a question of perspective of course: From a social media post I gather that the Halflings were, in the mind of the DM, being “friendly”, and therefore the negative reaction to them, “evil”.

Who knows, maybe they ARE friendly, and their harsh “I pay you what I deem fit, servant! Maybe!” might be laying the groundwork for a nice surprise for the battered survivors… (“You remember I said I wouldn’t pay you? See: Here are 40 gold! Out of the goodness of my heart.”)
Who knows! It is possible.

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Addendum: Bandit’s Keep has made a video that fits the topic, and it deserves – as usual – high recommendations. For some reason this guy throws out excellent advice after excellent advice. You just can’t go wrong with this channel.

Addendum 2: Aaaand another one:

Image: James Peacock auf Unsplash