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Which is exactly the same thing! Color, or whatever, depending on how the game goes. You can try to cut this any way you want, but the premise of the argument is BS.

I have no idea what you're talking about tbh. With quite extensive experience in both styles, and on each side of the screen, I can tell you that neither set of techniques particularly results in a less engaging or real-seeming milieu. This has nothing to do with perfection, and nobody expects...

Every single game does this. If a town in some detailed trad game world has 3000 inhabitants, how many detailed NPC descriptions do you think there are for inhabitants of said place? If it is a heavily focused on location that number might run into the several dozen, perhaps. Some additional...

Right, I'd be more concerned, with an inexperienced MC, that they would fail to allocate bandwidth to everyone effectively. That they might softball less assertive or confident players, etc. Obviously you can, theoretically, have a player so loud and pushy that it derails play, but I seriously...

Honestly, IMHO, the 'classic' sandbox lacks point 2. It's more a kind of static situation in which the PCs are the main instigators of action. As the character of the campaign moves more to a dynamic world in motion it gains more character of 'the GM show' and less of player's playground.

Certainly not getting into any argument. I think the usage back in the early The Dragon days is a bit more specific than you credit, but it is notoriously difficult to retroactively parse shades of meaning at an earlier time. IMHO We described Wilderlands of High Fantasy as 'sandbox' and used...

Yeah, as someone who played D&D when it was the only RPG in existence, my understanding of 'sandbox' (and I believe the term originated in the D&D community of the '70s) was simply a game free of meta-plot. The GM devised a setting, complete with adventure locations and such, usually in the form...

Well, I think when you get to high levels, D&D has traditionally pretty much broken down. 5e maybe is a bit less extreme than 2e or 1e (or I guess 3e, never played high levels there, it seemed to break at like 5). At that point most games IME devolve down to some form of either neo-trad (IE...

I gotta say, this is like an advert for the truth of the OP. My 1977 self totally gets you. Sadly, the world has changed... Well, some parts of it have. The RPG discussion group at my workplace is interesting. There are a lot of participants (LARGE organization). Some simply cannot imagine...

Wow, you've managed to sum up EnWorld forums pretty effectively.

Yeah, I just cracked my old 'Kinergh Campaign' notebook, a whole 3-ring binder filled with notes and whatnot. It is pretty 'front-like' in structure, although all the different threats kind of align to one overarching plot/timeline. As we played it looks like I basically collapsed a lot of it...

It has been a while since I read/played TB2e, so I won't swear I am remembering correctly, but AFAIK the players declare camp, and they make a camp roll. If that roll fails, then mechanically camp phase doesn't happen. In our play that was sometimes described as the conditions being so hostile...

The generating of a monster by authoring an encounter table, and subsequently rolling on it, is no less a process of GM decision-making than the TB case, except maybe you did it last Tuesday. Granted D&D has, often, some random generation, but that still is 'randomly choose one of the things I...

But you cannot escape the actual description of, and discussion about how things actually play, which UNDERGIRDS the way it feels and plays out in an agenda sense. You cannot get to your philosophy without first visiting techniques. That is, any attempt to better play will have to regard the...

Well, in all fairness, games like BitD and AW/DW DO say something to the effect of "If you don't like the thing that the GM said, then tell them you want to change something." It isn't delved into in much detail in DW, but if the GM declares an action triggered and the rest of the table is not...

Except those principles are written in the book (at least in AW/GW/BitD) so they're pretty objective. Of course people are people and they don't always interpret them consistently, etc. So, of course there's variation in quality. Even good GMs now and then botch something or at least put...

Except we get back to the dense forest of possibilities and interactions which exists within the realm of plausible outcomes of GM reasoning. The results may well be consistently plausible at some level, but they form almost no constraint at all on what the GM can say. Yeah, I don't. I know...

Agreed, it's not at all valueless in an RP sense. What became an issue was when it started requiring character gen resources to specify. 3e is really the poster child for this, proficiency slots are golden, so RP is now set against actual character effectiveness in mechanical terms.

The point is, and this undergirds the POV of people like myself, there are no 'intruders' to know or not know things! There's only a GM who is empowered to say something. D&D has always been rather poor at describing what the thought process here should be (there is no established game process)...

Sure! I think it is effective too. Obviously I don't have any experience with your games, so pacing and focus are things I can't comment on except in a general sense. I grew tired of the results this tended to produce IME. Long tedious slogs of play, dollhouse type play, and excessively gritty...