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This prioritized wide differences in capability as a defining trait of "superhero stories". That's hardly been universally true.

Well, if the GM was tolerant, they could effectively force it off into more of a sandbox situation, but that requires the GM to go along, which he's not required to.

Though I think acting like they're still playing and not engaging with the extent adventure, after they'd agreed to go with it is pretty bad form too. Just outright say "We don't find this at all interesting, can we do something else?" Then the GM can go "I'm not really interested in something...

I think their point was that while that might be the only difference, its a heck of a big one in terms of the experience.

Well, that gets pretty complex: part of it is that they're still thinking in terms of adventures, where a really classic sandbox didn't necessarily have a lot of those in the way we'd think of them. They just had--situations. People are less likely to have single-path things when they think of...

Though the easy answer to that is "It just looks like a sandbox. Its a railroad with illusionism laid over it heavily."

The classic answer to that is "If you want him dead, talk to the legal system. Complaining Batman isn't doing it is about like complaining that the cops aren't functioning as judge, jury and executioner." Trying to return to that when there are also perfectly good in-setting reasons it...

That's fine, its just not a great idea to think that the hobby is dominated by people who want to get into the guts of decision making every session. At most for a lot of people it's an occasional side gig. Point is, significant, distinct choices that cause major plot changes isn't a priority...

But there are plenty of people who are perfectly happy to follow the lead and take the opportunity to play with the mechanics and do the incidental roleplaying along the way. Complicated decision making is the last thing they want.

Again, there's a distinction between "despite" and "because of".

Its entirely possible to view enjoyable gaming despite problem processes and not view it as because of them. There were a lot of things I did early in my GMing career that I don't think were exactly ideal ways to do things, and the fact I managed to pull out some good games while doing them in...

I think it matters when you do that. Its not a railroad if, at the start of the campaign the GM says "You need to all design characters who want to do X when it comes up, because that's what the campaign is about." That's constraining the initial character-set, but isn't forcing the point in...

But if only some characters have to use it for survivability, as far as I'm concerned that's a design flaw. When they're entangled, I'm going to talk about them together. If that upsets you, feel free to ignore me. You said most, but as far as I can tell it only follows if you accept that's...

For a more Watsonian explanation, its also extremely questionable that the tolerance for superheroic vigilantism would continue if they were regularly killing the people they were fighting against, especially when it isn't necessary. Most supers are perfectly capable of taking down opponents...

Well, for some people some of those things are so intimately connected in their view that they aren't really separate in the sense others would think.

You could set it up so, as the saying goes, "all roads lead to Rome" not in the sense where everything the PCs do will continue the plot as intended, but so that if they miss or destroy one node, there's other routes allowing them to reconnect. Its just that its both a pain in the behind to...

This ignores the case in a sandbox campaign where the players simply decide they're not going to engage with the problem at hand any further no matter what would do that and bail. In a linear adventure its sort of assumed they won't do that, that the players will attach motivations to their...

Usually it because the players understand how things are going and don't need to be forced at all once they've signed on. As I noted before when this came up, when I ran Scion 1e, in practice the PCs needed to stay in their lanes and the players were well aware up-front, because in their areas...

That's certainly a big one, but there's also the issue of how the PCs get from points A to B to C to D, which can, even if the overall experience is similar, make the details feel quite different.

Except the breadth they take it to is--startling. For example, if you're running a game where the PCs are part of a military unit, the first time a player decides his character is going to go AWOL and head over the hills, you're apparently supposed to continue running the game for him in...