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One: If you can point me to where I said mutual consent is the only thing a sandbox needs, I'll be happy to address this point. Otherwise, I will pass on that straw man. Two: If someone else told you GM's can run games without the consent of their players, take it up with them, there's no point...

I don't see why it has to be a binary one or the other. From my perspective, it's both; without the cooperation of both players and GM, nothing happens at all. If the PCs arrive at a given location and play continues, it must be by mutual consent.

As long as we're talking about maps and sandboxes, I have discovered that maps based mostly on landmarks, combined with the Alexandrian's hexcrawling rules make for some of the most evocative wildnerness exploration I've been involved in.

If I'm confident that I'm going to a run a game or get useful material out of it that I will use when running a game, I will most likely purchase it. Most likely, it needs to have inspired me in some way, or fill a specific need I'd previously identified. The vast, vast majority of products...

One of the issues I've seen people mention about super light games as entry points to the hobby is they are actually built on a whole host of assumptions that you're probably not familiar with unless you are already familiar with roleplaying. As a starting point, your rules, taken without any...

(Emphasis mine) When you're saying such games are necessarily GM-directed, you seem to be agreeing with the point I just made -- if it's necessary to be that way, then clearly you believe that it is impossible for it to be otherwise. Some of us disagree that such games are necessarily...

It's covers pretty much the same ground as the Primer, albeit written in a way a lot of people find more approachable. I'm a big fan of the Primer (which was part of my introduction to OSR, after I'd pretty much ignored D&D in the 80s and 90s), but these days I'd direct a new player to the...

It seems pretty obvious to me that there are people in this conversation who believe it is literally impossible for a GM to provide players with sufficient information and to rule consistently enough for players to be able to make informed (edit: or meaningful) decisions and rely on the outcomes...

I stated that if the players only have four options in total for things they're able to do, that is insufficient. I'm not sure if your "previously" refers to me, but I certainly didn't say anything about rumours specifically. If the game has been going for any length of time there should...

This is correct. I do indeed look to run and design campaigns that I expect will be fun and not boring, and many of the design steps aren't done with a sense of impartiality (although some are). But, again, I will state I'm not interested in rehashing the entire discussion, especially since you...

Where are you getting this? My next sandbox will most likely be setting the 1e Forgotten Realms Savage Frontier. There are plenty of monsters in that area. A wilderness area beyond civilisation is a pretty standard setting for a fantasy, exploration sandbox. Dark Sun has all sorts of monsters...

I am not going all the way back to square one to rehash the previous hundred-or-so pages of arguments about whether or not it is possible to run a sandbox with the intent of doing so in an impartial manner. Suffice to say, in my experience, it is possible (with the proviso, as I mentioned, that...

The sort @Paul Farquhar is familiar with, apparently.

Please see the disclaimer I included at the end of my post in the (clearly misguided) hope it would prevent exactly this kind of quibble: If they did not exist, I would not generally add wargs into my campaign world on the basis a PC had a hatred of wargs because, in discussion with that...

Probably they didn't even consider that someone might actually ask if the sandboxes we're talking about are literally filled with sand, and misinterpreted the question on the assumption it wasn't some attempt at a petty semantic gotcha.

I would posit that, if your interpretation of other opinions requires that others believe or claim things self-evidently impossible (eg, everything in the world already exists and is fully fleshed out), then perhaps you need to consider that maybe you've interpreted it incorrectly. To make a...

Well, for the record, I disagree with anyone claiming that every single part of the entire world must be fleshed out in detail prior to play starting. I haven't seen anyone claiming that and, given that no one has a gameworld with millions of independently statted NPCs, updated daily for...

I don't understand what you're saying. Who is advocating a living world sandbox where the world consists of three or four adventure sites and nothing else?