Running Very Short Online Voice-Based Sandbox Sessions?

This is a direct cut-and-paste of a post I just made on r/osr, thought I’d bring it here as I’m sure there’ll be members with valuable insight!


I’ve recently started a new sandbox campaign, inspired by an interview with Luke Gearing on Ben Laurence’s Into the Megadungeon podcast. Luke’s group are exploring a megadungeon through weekly online sessions taking place during his lunchbreak. As someone with young children and a relatively demanding job this struck me as a tidy way of running the kind of game I enjoy the most.

I’m only one session in so I’m very interested to hear from other people who’ve run drop-in based sandbox style games, especially online and especially with such restricted timeframes! For context I’ve been running games since the 90s, and have recent experience for running a “long form” sandbox game over discord.

My main worries/concerns are:

  • getting the most out of just one hour of play
  • ending sessions at a natural stopping point…
  • …so that it’s easy to pick up the following week
  • sharing information between sessions

What are your thoughts? Here’s what Luke and Ben had to say:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-megadungeon/id1698032870

…the episode also includes a great conversation about Gradient Descent

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Nothing informative to add, but for those who don’t use Apple Podcasts, there are links to the episode on many different services in the podcast host’s blog about the episode at Mazirian’s Garden: Into the Megadungeon Episode 06 “A Malignant Presence”.

The r/osr post mentioned is at Running Very Short Online Voice-Based Sandbox Sessions?: osr and includes a response from someone who’s played in the mentioned games.

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