Sandbox isn't working for my players, need to try a bit more railroading. Any tips?

"When in doubt set everything on fire, or start the zombie outbreak."

Seriously. There's no faster, "cleaner", and more efficient way to gather scattered tourists, ahem, I mean "heroes" together, then common threat.

You have to give them plot hooks. These are little snippets of information that signal to the players "this is a worthwhile direction to explore." Don't make the party work to find them, just place a few (three-ish) out there and let them choose what they think is interesting. This works better if you tailor the hooks to the character's motivations, of course.

"When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand."

• Chandler's Law

Yup, nothing kills a sandbox game faster than lack of motivation on part of the players. What I always do when this happens (and it happens, a lot, because players may cry about railroading but they get lost without guiding) is to make things personal:

Have an NPC double-cross them, introduce romantic interests, put in dire danger something they value, have them inherit a shop, let them help raise an orphan. One thing I learned pretty fast when running this kind of games is that you can't just point at a dungeon and say "the Sword of Calebriah is there, you can go take it if you want". No, you need to say "the only way to kill the demon that's possessing Annie without killing her is using the Sword of Calebriah" and have the players take things from there.

"Sandbox" and "railroad" are often treated as being polar opposites, but that's not actually true.

Railroads happen when you negate a player's choice in order to enforce a preconceived outcome. The opposite of a railroad is non-linear design without preconceived outcomes -- which is not what a sandbox is.

A sandbox exists when players can either choose or define what the next scenario is going to be. The opposite of a sandbox is saying, "I brought Keep on the Borderland tonight, so that's what we're playing."

I'm not just saying this for the sake of being pedantic. I'm saying it because I think the false concept of "the opposite of a sandbox is a railroad" is at least partially responsible for your problem. It leads to the belief that offering up scenario hooks somehow isn't appropriate in a sandbox.

Exactly the opposite is true: A successful sandbox requires lots and lots and lots of scenario hooks. They should be strewn around liberally and casually accessible. It also helps if there's a default actions that the players can take to find more scenario hooks if they don't have one that currently interests them.

For example, a common game structure for sandbox play is the hexcrawl. Hexcrawls work great because whenever the PCs are in doubt about what they could or should be doing next, they can just pick a direction and start walking.

Of course, this only works if the hexcrawl has been liberally seeded with scenario hooks: If there aren't any scenario hooks out there in the wilderness or if they would have to go some specific place to find any of them, then the PCs will just end up wandering around aimlessly.

In your current campaign, it sounds like the PCs are either unaware that they should be "picking a direction and walking" or they're wandering around in the wilderness and not finding anything. (I mean this metaphorically, although it could also be literally true.)

The other thing you need in a sandbox campaign (the thing that will keep it in motion once you've given it a little bit of momentum) is reaction. If the PCs piss off the Red Dragon Gang, some GMs seem to think that it's "railroading" if they have the Red Dragon Gang retaliate. Quite the opposite: Railroading is the negation of choice. Consequences are the rewarding of choice. (Note: Not all reactions are negative. Having hurt the Red Dragon Gang they might be given a medal by the mayor who also asks them to do him a favor. Or they might be contacted by the Red Dragon Gang's rivals who want to hire them as enforcers. Et cetera.)

I don't know enough about the specifics of your campaign to suggest specific default structures for delivering fresh scenario hooks, the scenario hooks themselves, or interesting reactions. But that's what you need.

Quite frankly, ask them what they'd like to see.

I personally never use Sandbox Campaigns. I know what my players like story-wise and I deliver. I semi-drag them along the story, without them ever realizing it. They make decisions that actually impact the story and change where the story takes them.

Start with something simple: present them the typical "necromancer in swamp" plothook or something similar, doesn't matter. Let that adventure be the start of a Saga. From this point on someone else comes into play, maybe someone was sponsoring the big bad, maybe some epic shit happens and the players have a bit of an understanding what is going on behind the scenes due to their heritage, knowledge or recent adventures.

From there, just keep the story-threads going. If they ever don't seem to know what they should do, either be more pressing in-game "The barkeep points you to the scary looking guy in the corner you've been ignoring for the last two hours" or out-game "Guys, this guy over there is where the plot moves towards, maybe you should as well".

Best way to find out what stories the players like is to check on their reading material, their movie-favorites and games. Ask around and see if you can find common elements. Everyone likes epic power-romps through fantasy? Good, that's what you need to deliver!

I'm terrible at both sandboxing and railroading, but I've found some success with episodic play. Every week (or between sessions, if you don't play weekly), you come up with a new challenge to throw at them, something that needs to be dealt with ASAP. It doesn't have to be the seed for some epic 5-year-long campaign, it just has to be something that you can spin out into one session of play. You play through it and when you run out of material you end the session. Then, you pick up an idea from the session you just finished and make it into a new plot hook, repeat. It's also useful because even if (when) your players completely derail your plot, you only lose at most one session of material.

I just read something in shadowrun 5th edition about running a game. You can separate campaigns into oneshots. These oneshots are just 1 session where they may or may not play their own characters and its rather straight forward in what they need to do, and you can give them challanges that you know they will encounter in your campaign at a later time, practically preparing them for things to come.

If you had them write down their motivations (or better, backstories), use those as hooks - a loved one is kidnapped, something precious is on fire, undead plague the McGuffin farm.

Having a loose idea for a plotline also gives them immediate goals. Rumors of a local town being plagued by kobolds. Following up on that lead, they travel to the town, talk to people, witness a kobold raid. They find clues about where the raids are coming from and follow those leads to the kobold lair (a nearby ruined fortress). The PCs wipe out the kobolds and discover that the kobolds were being paid by a secret group from an adjacent kingdom that is (ostensibly) the ally of the kingdom that they live in. Or they find strange, dangerous figures studying ancient runes deep beneath the fortress.

I prefer to have several set-piece scenes for every session, and allow the PCs to wander into them. They're always free to ignore the scene, but at that point they're just being intractable for the sake of it. Being a good player includes finding motivations for your character to be interested in the scenarios laid out for them by the GM.

Create a relationship map for your game. (Example from an older Shadowrun game: http://landfill.thesnakefarm.com/images/relationship_map.pdf) Once you start seeing how the NPCs and PCs should be interacting, you can add in things that directly affect them. Let's say you're doing a D&Dish game and one or two of the PCs are staying at an inn in the town, so they've got ties to the attractive barmaid there. What can you do with that? She gets mugged and asks for the big strong adventurers for help. She tells the adventurer that she's linked to that the innkeeper is being extorted, can they help? Her brother comes into the tavern and is frantic, looking for her -- she's been kidnapped!

With a relationship map, you'll also see which characters don't have any real ties to the setting or whose ties don't feed back into the game. In that PDF above, there's a PC named Eddie Godrick. He's got two NPCs that he's attached to that aren't attached to anyone else. We really should find some way to tie NPC Terry Porter to NPC Amanda Tapstone (who is attached to PC Sigmund LeVay). In your D&D game, you've got a dwarf that's tied to the dwarven ambassador and some things going on in the ambassador's council, but none of the other players have anything going on with those guys. Tie them to the rogue's theives guild. Next, make those links clear to the players. Tell the dwarf that his ambassador friend is getting squeezed by the local thieves guild. Tell the rogue that the the guild wants him to make things unpleasent for the ambassador.

Steal stuff from the party, you will be amazed how fast they will go after the guy who stole it.

The "Fronts" system presented in Apocalypse World and Dungeon World solve this problem nicely.

Essentially, make a few bad guys. Give them needs. Jot down the list of escalatingly bad steps they will follow to reach those needs. And then just present those steps to the players as background. If they follow up on one, then they are snared. If they don't, show them, graphically, the consequences of the plan in motion.

If they have backstories and motivations, tie the fronts to those.

Sandbox doesn't mean "no plot at all". In my experience, players in a sandbox game will latch onto a plot line and follow it like blood hounds; the difference is that since they are in part developing the plot line, it works better and appeals to them more.

Who's mad at them? Or jealous of them?

They at some point took a job, and someone else got the short end of that deal. Either by NOT getting the job, or having the job go against them.

None of their actions happened in a vacuum. Figure out who gained, who lost, and who's going to start rattling their cage first. Sandbox doesn't just mean they get to push everything, but that EVERYTHING gets to push back.

Just to get their feet wet, introduce a problem that's personal to one of the PCs. A family member or old friend needs help, or an old lover or enemy shows up to complicate things, or old business associates need his help for one last job. Hopefully this gives them a little momentum that you can spin into other plots and eventually lure them over to some of the bigger things you've set up.

Sometimes it can be hard for them to know where to find quests or story hooks. Try throwing stuff in their face or out of game give them some hints.

rain death to the nations of man in the form of fireball like meteors sent by a mad githyanki wizard

The most interesting character I ever played had an urgent personal quest that was more important to her than anything else. Of course, it was tied up in the main plot, so most of the time, she was the one who got everyone fired up and on track with the main plot.

I used OneNote to create a notebook for the campaign. Each page had a list of notable events and open missions for them to attempt. Basically it was a combination journal and menu.

The players loved it and were always looking it over for new adventures to attempt.

tl;dr: Redo the motivations until they are immediately urgent. Don't railroad.

I think you just need better tools to run based on player motivations, instead of relying on railroading. You can have structure without railroading.

Fronts, as mentioned by siebharinn, are a great tool to help you run a game without railroading.

It's part of your job as GM to make sure the player motivations are good enough for you to use in a game. There are lots of ways you might do that (Sorcerer Kickers, Burning Wheel Beliefs, In a Wicked Age Best Interests, etc). Take inspiration from those, even if not using those particular systems. Like you could model it after Kickers... make sure the players make a problem for their characters that is immediate, that launches the character into action, will inevitably change the character's life one way or another, and that nobody knows how it will be resolved.

An example for a fantasy world might be: I'm the third in line to the throne, and my parents and two older brothers were just murdered.

Great, the guy would definitely be under suspicion for murder. Who did the actual killing, and why? Is the PC the next target, or is someone trying to get him specifically onto the throne? Or are they going through one by one until they can find someone to manipulate? Character motivation like that is pretty wide open to play in many different ways, something that the character must deal with immediately, and nobody knows how it'll turn out. Maybe the player will find the murderer and kill him... maybe they'll work together instead. Maybe enough people suspect the character that others of the court try and murder him rather than have a killer on the throne. Or something else. Who knows? That's part of the fun of play, to find out those answers during play, yes?

Don't want to play a game with politics and backstabbing? Then it's your job to tell the player that's not a good motivation for this game... otherwise, it's a clear message from the player about what they want from the game, and your job to provide that.

Sorcerer Kickers, Burning Wheel Beliefs , or any other player motivation thing has always been really flat for me when I didn't properly vet it before hand. Keep pushing the players to change the motivation until it has proper bite, and you both are excited about playing around with it.

How are they paying for food? At some point they're going to have to go do some murderhoboing if they want to have money to eat.

I mean, it's not much of a plot, but Cowboy Bebop got like 7 episodes out of rumbling stomachs and empty fridges.