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See, this is where I think a lot of people have a problem with this idea that a DM driven sandbox is actually quite as free with player choice as is presented. For example, if your "living world" is so important that you are constantly advancing various events into the world as time moves...

Here's my question though. Why are they trying to discover these things? Why are they exploring physical geography or a town's social network? These aren't goals in and of themselves. These are means to an end. The point of exploring physical geography, for example, is to find stuff that's...

But, I got absolutely pilloried for suggesting that this is a lot of work that the DM needs to do before starting a sandbox or indeed, even being able to consider the campaign a sandbox. Huh.

Note, that is one version of sandbox and not one that I ascribe to. The idea that in order to have a sandbox, the DM must be the sole source of details is a particularly idiosyncratic version of sandbox that only supports one, fairly narrow playstyle and insists that anyone doing anything...

Sorry for swimming way upthread. Holy moley you guys are fast. :D But, I'd point out that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how player driven play works. Take the cliche of bribing the gate guard. In traditional play, the DM/GM knows if this guard is bribable or not. Thus, the...

I have a possible term that might help instead of railroading. Railroading, to me, is a somewhat different animal in that the DM is forcing play to a specific end when there are plausible other paths forward. Might the term "roadblocking" not be apt here. It's a term I use for DM's who insist...

No... well... kinda... Dungeon levels roughly corresponded to character levels. Sorta. If you were 5th level, you could expect to proceed down 5 levels in a dungeon and be reasonably successful. If a trap dropped you down three more levels to Dungeon Level 8, you were in big trouble since...

Hang on a tick though. I was just told that this is not a sandbox. This is, more or less, proceedurally generated content. Thus, it's not a sandbox. So, you can see my confusion. Holy crap, I just realized how far back I was in reading this thread. Ok, going back to do a LOT of reading...

Discussions of railroading always seem to get lost in the weeds. Before we can make any reasonable discussion of railroading, we have to have a working definition that we can all live with. Otherwise, there's no point. To me, railroading is a degenerate form of play where the DM (I'm going to...

Just finished our fifth (or sixth?) Out of the Abyss session and they just left Sloobludop. This was a freaking EPIC scene. The party fleeing by raft as the village was being destroyed. And one of the few times I've ever gotten to drop a unique D&D monster (as in singular entity - only one)...

Thank you. I honestly didn't know and I was asking an honest question, so, it's nice to get straightforward answers. So, how is this so different than a company using crippled content under the OGL?

By that definition, I can see why you would say things like Dungeonworld or whatnot would not qualify as sandboxes since there's no actual sandbox to trash. At least, not at the outset. Although, I wonder, if a game where the players have more direct editorial power over the setting might...

No. I don't think I will. I really don't believe there's any point.

Like a lot of things in RPGdom, I think that "length of use" is probably one of the biggest points of departure for a lot of people's experience. I'll admit that I do not reuse settings to any great extend. A campaign has a setting, and, by and large, a half life of about 1-2 years. At the...

That, @Remathilis is a FANTASTIC analogy. That really illustrates things nicely. And puts it in such a great way that in no way tries to claim that one is better than another. Thank you.

I have to amit that I agree with @AlViking here. Sandbox, to me, is a setting where the action of the game is largely driven by the player interactions with each other and the elements of the setting - whether that setting is 100% authored by the GM or 0% or some value in between. IOW, a...

Again, you just pulled a single sentence out of a three or four paragraph post in order to what? Since I have now repeatedly clarified my point, and apparently everyone else here is perfectly clear what my point is, even @Bedrockgames and we NEVER agree on anything, :p I'm kinda wondering...

Now this I strongly disagree with. The idea that proceeduraly generated conted will be inconsistent (or more inconsistent than any other RPG campaign) is something I don't find true. Proper note keeping solves that pretty well, same as any other campaign. And it is no more limiting than...

I don't know. You seem to know. You are the one claiming that the CC-BY allows producers to not release anything at all. I'm asking if you know anyone who has actually done this or is it hypothetical? After all, we know OGL producers who have published crippled content, but, according to...

That being my point. This approach to building sandboxes - while certainly successful - also requires a lot of front end work to get things off the ground. And there are systems out there for which that isn't true. Thus, some systems are faster and easier for creating sandboxes than D&D...