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To clarify about DL1: The abortive affair was not memorable enough for me to recall details. I have only rounser's word that whatever particular bit he has in mind is "considered a railroad". There was just in sum too much that we choked on while the DM tried to shove it down our throats. I...

How about we try going somewhere else? We tried just that back in the '80s, and got pretty quickly fed up. If that had not been enough, then a later scenario that has the players getting captured and recaptured and trundled about like so much baggage -- then literally told where to go -- would...

It really comes down to the attitudes of players. I can enjoy playing WotC-D&D on occasion, but I have refused to DM a campaign partly because the player-culture I have encountered demands an approach that is too limited for my taste to what's in books. This is not a big problem due to a...

I agree -- and observe that there is another thread for it already.

If you consider real life "a railroad" (as rounser apparently does), or lacking meaning (as a habitué of these boards who shall remain nameless apparently does) -- then it may be that you will find the same qualities in a game campaign of free moves. The old-style dungeon is very simply and...

Walls in a "classic" dungeon serve to present clear alternatives -- just as do the streets of a city, paths through a forest, passes through a mountain range, crossings of a river, and so on. This is not a matter of a plotted story, since even with but three options at each juncture, the number...

I think the jargon of "narrative" and so on just confuses the issue. It's a cant cooked up for talking about stuff that was/is very self-consciously NOT the old style campaign. It brings along as heavy a load of connotations as "railroad" -- except that "railroad" is negative precisely because...

Giving my own answers to questions chauchou posed to pemerton and The Shaman: (1) Exploration: The pioneering RPGs were/are games of limited information. That is the prime need that the GM fills, more than procedural adjudication (which can be minimized in the "rigid kriegspiel" model to which...

Speaking from experience, I will say that this kind of trip is so different from where the familiar RPG vehicle goes that you may as well leave that baggage behind. Unexamined preconceptions, and legacy systems with no warrant but "how it's always been done", will mess you up. Why are we...

We can "empower players" to do all sorts of things, but if the scope of those things "doesn't involve exploration" then it is an innovation beyond the role-playing games we're talking about -- which in turn went a step beyond the wargames from which they evolved. Getting creative enough to come...

Alternatively, one can so sequester the activities of a group of initiative-lacking players that their "sub campaign" only rarely interacts with the wider, more rough-and-tumble milieu. Some or all may by stages develop the skills necessary to graduate to full participation. Breaking out of the...

Avoid do-nothings too lazy even to exercise the common sense that reveals that there cannot be "nothing to do" when the notable difference is that there is more to do than just one thing! There are plenty of more passively consumed entertainments for such folks. Even in the RPG field, more...

How, pray tell? What's the difference? I certainly intended my references as examples of the latter (in pertinent respects) in any case. It is the very same question of more opportunities to use the same material, whether we distinguish "multiple games" or are looking at the "same game" that has...

On demand generation of material between sessions is facilitated by Referee control over scheduling sessions. "Hey, G.O.D., since it's going to be a while before the Holy Rollers get back from the Otiose Oubliette of Ozymandias, John and I want Sargon and Zog to sail the Black Swan to the...

Procedurally generated material has played a huge role in the hobby. Gygax's Dungeon Masters Guide in 1979 was just the latest source of algorithms to generate, for instance, terrain for impromptu wilderness expeditions.

It is no more a matter of a lot of material we expect not to use than it is when we draw up the maps and armies for a game inspired by the Seven Years War or the Second World War. It may not be the case that every piece or every space is directly involved in a battle every game, but the scope...

I don't give a fig how much "material prep" someone has done! I care about whether I am free to make any legal move, to go all over the map just as in any of the countless boardgames, and engage in activities not previously defined as in many of the Game-Mastered games and campaigns, that...

Please, could you recap what the quite different "responsive aspect of the GM" is? I also wonder, what is your source for the paradigm of what you consider a paradigmatic sandbox?

By your peculiar definition, maybe. It looks to encompass everything not taking place in a vacuum! That is not the definition that I have observed in use over decades of playing Dungeons & Dragons.

These are two separate issues. "It is the players' adventure" makes a critical, fundamental difference in who is choosing what the player-characters will undertake: with which events they will choose to interact further, and how. The only difference it might make in "creating events that...