D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[EzekielRaiden]

This does not strike me as sufficient for agency. Imagine a game of snakes-and-ladders, played not by rolling dice but by drawing numbers from a hat. The experience would differ depending on which lot a player chooses to pull out; but this change in randomisation method doesn't increase the player's agency.

I'd extend the analogy further: Imagine snakes-and-ladders, but instead of dice, you have piles of envelopes marked with "cautious", "pragmatic", "risky"--cautious only offers 2, 3, or 4 spaces movement and favors 3; pragmatic offers 1-6 in equal abundance; risky offers only 1 or 6 in equal abundance. You have some idea what your choice means, but it's still not really what I would call a meaningful degree of agency. (Alternatively, you could have players choose which dice to use; functionally has the same effect).

A well-written choose-your-own adventure does not have random coin flips at the junctures, though. There's more l I gical relation to the choice and result than just drawing of lots provides.

Sure. There's somewhat more agency. Somewhat more input. But you are still walking only on paths--branching or otherwise--that have been laid out in advance and which cannot, even in principle, be changed in any way not written by Ryan North (adapting Shakespeare). The only endings are those present in the book. The only paths to those endings are ones present in the book. Not one thing you do can, in any way, create a new ending, reframe or rewrite an existing ending, or add a choice that logically fits the situation but wasn't pre-written by the authors.

It isn't "a railroad" in the strictest definition. But if we're using a strict definition there, why should we not also use a strict definition of "a sandbox"? CYOA/"chooseable-path adventure" books offer pretty limited but nonzero agency. They are far, far, far away from being "a sandbox" in the strict definition. I consider the vast majority of ways D&D DMs can work with their players to be much more similar to a complex CYOA/"chooseable-path adventure" than to a sandbox, strictly defined. That would put many D&D campaigns more or less in the middle of the road, neither particularly strong for player agency, nor totally devoid of it--offering minor, or restricted, or partial agency, not broad and extensive agency--which is the sense almost always communicated or desired when one refers to things as "a sandbox".

I remember a thread talking about this and how "sandbox" and "railroad" can interact, probably a year or two ago. Terms like a "railbox" (a set of adventures players can choose between, but which have a rigid path to follow once started, and thus the end result could vary a lot based on when and which and the sequence thereof) and a "sandroad" (a series of linked, small-ish open areas, but you have to move from sand-spot A to sand-spot B to sand-spot C, so the overall arc is set even though the path to get there may meander a lot). A CYOA/"chooseable-path adventure", even one as complex and diverse as North's To Be or Not to Be, would fall far short of "a sandbox", even though there are many roads and many branches.

 

[Hussar]

If the DM pitched a campaign in setting X and the players, after accepting this and starting play, want to jump it over to setting Y then something bigger has gone wrong.

And I think it's well within a DM's rights to say "No, guys, I'm running in setting X. I [for whatever reason(s)] don't want to run setting Y; if I did that's what I would have pitched in the first place."

A DM saying something like this can still run her setting-X game as a full sandbox.

Not sure why you think I’d disagree.

But the argument is that because the dm can say yes to player suggestions that suddenly makes it a sandbox and non-linear.

I’m not sure how that works, but apparently it does.

 

[Hussar]

I do not see this as goalpost shifting so much as asking a question and believing that you misunderstood how we arrived at A, B, C, then D.

It was the players choosing to do these things in that order out of more available options, just like I said you have A-G for the starting player, H-R for the next step and S-Z for the one thereafter.

No. Absolutely not. That is wrong.

The players go to see the sage because they need the sage to find the portal. Without the sage they cannot progress. They need the portal to travel. Without the portal they cannot progress. They need to go to nexus because there is nowhere else they could go.

At no point can they skip a step.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Having owned and read said book: it's a bit complicated, don't you think?

You aren't allowed to choose anything other than what the book contains. Your paths are perfectly fixed from the very beginning. Sure, you get do select which branch(es) you flow along, and you even get a choice of characters at the beginning. But do you have meaningful agency? I'm not so sure. Especially because when people advocate for TTRPGs by talking about how open-ended things are; I would fully expect someone in a conversation on that topic to scoff at any CYOA/"chooseable-path adventure" as being trivially obviously a railroad, just one with lots of potential stopping points. Yet here, where we're starting from a position of defending a position as "well, surely this counts as a sandbox!", a CYOA/"chooseable-path adventure" can't possibly be a railroad because it's got so many possible endings you could encounter.

This is why I laid out a spectrum of options from almost totally superficial agency (Dragonlance, played as "you take on the role of this specific character acting through the pre-written metaplot") to almost absolute agency (an Ironsworn-style experience where a great deal is under the players' control). When people use the term "sandbox", they are almost always trying to communicate a pretty significantly high degree of agency--not absolute, to be sure, but active effort to remove DM control/influence and put player actions first for as many things as one possibly can.

The most committed, "fullest" form of sandbox is difficult to square with some of the game design of D&D and its children/siblings. The centralized role of the DM/GM makes it difficult to get that unrestricted sandbox setup. Players frequently have agency in choosing how and/or when, but not what or why; as Hussar has said, it often still boils down to, "GM offered us this slate of things, we can pick from it but can't pick anything outside it." I certainly consider such a slate/menu/spread to offer players more agency than anything I would call a "railroad", but "more agency than a railroad" is pretty tepid, like saying "warmer than absolute zero"--both 100 K and 1000 K are "warmer than absolute zero", but I wouldn't call 100 kelvin warm by any means. Warmer =/= warm.

Can you give an example of the kind of choice you're saying the players can't make in a "typical" sandbox game (as the term is generally understood), what RPG does allow you to make said choice, and why, if you can't make that choice, your players don't have agency in that game?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If the DM pitched a campaign in setting X and the players, after accepting this and starting play, want to jump it over to setting Y then something bigger has gone wrong.

And I think it's well within a DM's rights to say "No, guys, I'm running in setting X. I [for whatever reason(s)] don't want to run setting Y; if I did that's what I would have pitched in the first place."

A DM saying something like this can still run her setting-X game as a full sandbox.

This seems a total non sequitur to me.

It isn't the players asking to suddenly jump from Forgotten Realms to Spelljammer (or anything more extreme, which folks are all too prone to invoking in discussions like this). It's that, for the vast, vast majority of D&D (and D&D-alike) campaigns, the players cannot choose to do anything the DM hasn't prepared. They can't forge into unknown territory, for one of various reasons:

1. They don't have any choice about what adventure to go on (railroad)
2. They think they have a choice, but they don't, because every path leads back to the fixed one (secret railroad)
3. They think they have choices, but they don't, because the DM will just no-sale anything off the rails (clumsy railroad)
4. They have choices...but those choices are only things the DM already has prepared (whether fixed-sequence or a "menu" of options or a nailed-down world they can hexcrawl through)
5. They have choices...but those choices simply pick one path through the branches the DM has prepared
6. They have choices...but that choice simply tells the DM where to complete the prep they already started

Etc.

Truly going somewhere else simply isn't in the cards. In fact, even for many games billed as "sandboxes", actually leaving the original area of interest is never even a possibility.

For comparison, I have always made clear to my players that they are free, at any time (within reason*), to simply bugger off to somewhere else if they feel like it. If they decide that the events going on in Al-Rakkah etc. just aren't interesting or compelling enough, that's my fault, not theirs. They are free to leave. I would be upset at myself, not at them, for having failed to frame scenes and conflicts worthy of their interest. Thankfully, that is not true, and my players are quite happy continuing to do stuff in the Tarrakhuna (the region where my game is set--inspired by Al-Andalus and a fantasy-ized Morocco/North Africa/Middle East.) I am quite fortunate that my players have become attached to this land (and, more importantly, the people in it), and could not accept the consequences of leaving it behind, when much is left unfinished.

*E.g. if they're 5 floors deep in an underground temple, their ability to bugger off to a faraway land is rather limited until they get back out of said underground temple. Doesn't mean they can't choose to do that, they just need to get out of the temple before they can proceed to leave the lands they're in.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Can you give an example of the kind of choice you're saying the players can't make in a "typical" sandbox game (as the term is generally understood), what RPG does allow you to make said choice, and why, if you can't make that choice, your players don't have agency in that game?

Ironsworn would be one such RPG (from the same general space as PbtA/FitD games).

That choice would be "leave the sandbox."

Your effort to enforce a hard binary where you either have agency or don't is not something I will accept nor support. You have less agency for not having that ability. Just as you have less agency over your food on a cruise ship than you have at home, because you can only eat the things the cruise ship chef is willing to make. Just because you have less agency doesn't mean you have none.

It is a false dichotomy to assert that players either have agency or don't. There are degrees of agency, and areas of agency. Most OSR-style stuff emphasizes near-absolute "about your character" agency, where it's considered an affront for the DM to ever speak for what a character would personally do or say, outside of a limited context like mind control or something. Other games have a different conception of agency, and accept some limited intrusion into "about your character" stuff, in exchange for greater agency in other areas.

"Sandbox", as it is generaly used in a TTRPG context, is supposed to be near-maximal agency, because it is contrasted against "railroad" where agency is often quite minimal. But games purporting to be "sandboxes" often fall quite short of anything like ultra-high agency.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This seems a total non sequitur to me.

It isn't the players asking to suddenly jump from Forgotten Realms to Spelljammer (or anything more extreme, which folks are all too prone to invoking in discussions like this). It's that, for the vast, vast majority of D&D (and D&D-alike) campaigns, the players cannot choose to do anything the DM hasn't prepared. They can't forge into unknown territory, for one of various reasons:

1. They don't have any choice about what adventure to go on (railroad)
2. They think they have a choice, but they don't, because every path leads back to the fixed one (secret railroad)
3. They think they have choices, but they don't, because the DM will just no-sale anything off the rails (clumsy railroad)
4. They have choices...but those choices are only things the DM already has prepared (whether fixed-sequence or a "menu" of options or a nailed-down world they can hexcrawl through)
5. They have choices...but those choices simply pick one path through the branches the DM has prepared
6. They have choices...but that choice simply tells the DM where to complete the prep they already started

Etc.

Truly going somewhere else simply isn't in the cards. In fact, even for many games billed as "sandboxes", actually leaving the original area of interest is never even a possibility.

For comparison, I have always made clear to my players that they are free, at any time (within reason*), to simply bugger off to somewhere else if they feel like it. If they decide that the events going on in Al-Rakkah etc. just aren't interesting or compelling enough, that's my fault, not theirs. They are free to leave. I would be upset at myself, not at them, for having failed to frame scenes and conflicts worthy of their interest. Thankfully, that is not true, and my players are quite happy continuing to do stuff in the Tarrakhuna (the region where my game is set--inspired by Al-Andalus and a fantasy-ized Morocco/North Africa/Middle East.) I am quite fortunate that my players have become attached to this land (and, more importantly, the people in it), and could not accept the consequences of leaving it behind, when much is left unfinished.

*E.g. if they're 5 floors deep in an underground temple, their ability to bugger off to a faraway land is rather limited until they get back out of said underground temple. Doesn't mean they can't choose to do that, they just need to get out of the temple before they can proceed to leave the lands they're in.

Has anyone in your experience taken you up on this offer and "buggered out"? If not, how can this even be a practical issue?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Ironsworn would be one such RPG (from the same general space as PbtA/FitD games).

That choice would be "leave the sandbox."

Your effort to enforce a hard binary where you either have agency or don't is not something I will accept nor support. You have less agency for not having that ability. Just as you have less agency over your food on a cruise ship than you have at home, because you can only eat the things the cruise ship chef is willing to make. Just because you have less agency doesn't mean you have none.

It is a false dichotomy to assert that players either have agency or don't. There are degrees of agency, and areas of agency. Most OSR-style stuff emphasizes near-absolute "about your character" agency, where it's considered an affront for the DM to ever speak for what a character would personally do or say, outside of a limited context like mind control or something. Other games have a different conception of agency, and accept some limited intrusion into "about your character" stuff, in exchange for greater agency in other areas.

"Sandbox", as it is generaly used in a TTRPG context, is supposed to be near-maximal agency, because it is contrasted against "railroad" where agency is often quite minimal. But games purporting to be "sandboxes" often fall quite short of anything like ultra-high agency.

If someone really wanted to leave the sandbox in my game, they could. I would figure something out.

It's never happened. Games have simply ended for other reasons before a suggestion like that ever came to fruition. I've had the opposite happen sometimes, when it becomes clear my players want a game with more direction and I have to retool, but never has anyone just decided to turn left and hop out of the box onto the grass.

As a result, while technically a possibility, I simply don't worry about it or agonize over the theoretical loss of agency it represents, and as far as I know neither do my players. It is not a practical concern, and no one to my knowledge feels that my sandbox game falls "well short" of the IMO high degree of agency the playstyle promises.

What do you mean by a game "purporting" to be a sandbox? Can you give me an example of such a game? Every TTRPG I ever saw that called itself a sandbox delivered.

 

[Lanefan]

If the DM is still setting "you can select from A-G until you've done all of them", that doesn't at all look like a "sandbox" to me.

More like "you can select from A-G until you've done one of them. After that, the selection might be between B, E, F (if not already done by the PCs), H, I, J, and K because the others have already been done and-or are no longer relevant".

 

[Lanefan]

This seems a total non sequitur to me.

It isn't the players asking to suddenly jump from Forgotten Realms to Spelljammer (or anything more extreme, which folks are all too prone to invoking in discussions like this). It's that, for the vast, vast majority of D&D (and D&D-alike) campaigns, the players cannot choose to do anything the DM hasn't prepared. They can't forge into unknown territory, for one of various reasons:

1. They don't have any choice about what adventure to go on (railroad)
2. They think they have a choice, but they don't, because every path leads back to the fixed one (secret railroad)
3. They think they have choices, but they don't, because the DM will just no-sale anything off the rails (clumsy railroad)
4. They have choices...but those choices are only things the DM already has prepared (whether fixed-sequence or a "menu" of options or a nailed-down world they can hexcrawl through)
5. They have choices...but those choices simply pick one path through the branches the DM has prepared
6. They have choices...but that choice simply tells the DM where to complete the prep they already started

In a sandbox campaign they can forge into unknown territory whenever they like and the DM has to (be able to) respond to that even if it means winging it without prep for the rest of that session.

For comparison, I have always made clear to my players that they are free, at any time (within reason*), to simply bugger off to somewhere else if they feel like it.

Same here, unless the in-fiction situation at the time prevents it (e.g. they're off-world on a small demiplane and stuck there until-unless they can figure out how to get home).