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Yeah, it's a huge generational shift. Anime is king. My kid is a few years older than your oldest and is into Star Trek, Star Wars, Monty Python, Doctor Who, and D&D along with all the anime stuff. It's not all my fault, but I'm a long-time fan of all the nerd stuff including anime. But most of...

It's still a sandbox.

Exactly. That's really one of the major keys to keeping combats fun and interesting. Goals and motivations. If the only goal-motivation is "kill the other side" your combat is going to be boring. Only fanatics and mindless undead fight to the last. Everyone wants to get home to their friends and...

Depends entirely on what you're going for as a referee. Do you want to maintain the strict integrity of your prep, shoot for verisimilitude, or let the PCs have an easy win? Keep the dungeon the same. Do you want to challenge the PCs regardless of what you originally prepped for that...

It’s who makes the choice and when. The referee designs a linear adventure ahead of time for the players to follow. If the referee also removes choice, it devolves into a railroad. The players choosing to pursue their goals in a straight line does not make their choices a linear adventure.

As long as the broader campaign structure is still recognizably a sandbox, yes.

No. A sandbox is not some kind of quantum superposition the game is in only when the PCs-players are deciding between hooks to pursue.

It’s a perfectly useable term. The people who insist on fixating or taking it too literally will either find similar “problems” with the new term or force people to use overblown, hyper-specific nonsensical jargon to say the exact same thing. That is to say, the problem isn’t the term it’s the...

It's only infamous because it's a nonsensical question. The style taking the name from the old wargaming sandboxes in no way implies that there must be or must not be a box that limits the game's play space. I've literally run those games. Gave the PCs a Spelljammer or access to Sigil and off...

I'd suggest not using ENWorld as the place to try to define things. We can't even agree on what an RPG is, so trying to define things like railroading, linear adventure, or sandbox are going to be harder still. I mostly run open-world sandboxes. It's something like a mix of your moderate...

Nice. I had a roughly similar idea from reading some early Discworld novels. The interdimensional shop or whatever it's called. Instead of it being franchises, it's all one store with doors that lead to different towns. Think Howl's Moving Castle.

For some people it’s a mortal sin to even disagree with them.

It's also basic tribalism. We've been dealing with that since before we climbed down out of the trees.

Yeah. There's a particular...mindset that comes from a lot of gun owners. Which is why 30% of the people own enough guns that there are 120 guns per 100 people. The US population is about 350 million. Which means we have about 421 million guns in the country. But that also means that only about...

I’ve read and watched sci-fi all my life. Then one day I just stopped. Took me a bit to figure out why. Thankfully all it took was adjusting my expectations a bit. I’ve managed to stretch the Golden Age of Sci-Fi (12 years old) to cover most of my life.

There was a long stretch of time where I couldn't read sci-fi because the idea that we'd survive long enough for any of that seemed so utterly impossible I couldn't get invested in the story. I'm incredibly thankful I turned the corner on than and returned to escapism as the primary draw of...

I’m kinda the opposite. I want gonzo utterly unbelievable worlds. The stranger the better. I think I locked my disbelief in a trunk and threw it off a bridge into a river when I was a kid. I want the characters to act reasonably given the circumstances, but I don’t mind a bit of melodrama. For...

Here's to hoping there's intelligent life out there, because there's bugger all down here.

Or you don't bother worrying about the balance. Most OSR/NSR game don't bother with balance, Shadowdark included. Nothing's easier than a simple, "sure, let's use a la carte multiclassing."

The only requirement is including the CC-BY statement itself. Nothing is automatically released into CC-BY. But it’s effectively moot as you can include both in one document.