Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8165396" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, I am not really sure when I first heard the term 'sandbox'. It may have been quite far back, or maybe not so much. I have the impression we used it in the 90's, but its tricky to really say for sure. I think terms like 'OSR' are a bit more recent coinage, but I didn't really engage with online RPG community much before about 2008, so I could be wrong there. My impression is it was a 'thing' around the time 4e was released. In any case, aside from the period 1974 to about 1978, during which time modules and canned settings were largely unavailable, I think 'module based play' (essentially APs or at least 'adventures') were vastly the most common form of play. Starting with Blackmoor's 'Temple of the Frog' it became more and more common to have some sort of dungeon. Holmes Basic came with a module (variously B1 or B2 IIRC) or else a set of 'geomorphs' and 'monster and treasure assortment', which included some tables that basically let you generate a random dungeon. I would say that, by the time G3 was published and the D series was being released, it was probably vastly more common to just run modules than anything else. These are pretty hardcoded, there's a bunch of rooms, you push through in a fairly linear fashion, etc. I guess what I'm saying is, Gygax certainly outlined all the elements of a sandbox in the 1e DMG in '79, but they were always effectively a pretty rare form of play, post 1977 or so. Before that most everything was 'map and key' which is really just a way of saying 'sandbox'. Even so, Arduin Grimoire kind of hints that it was never universal, even uncommon/non-existent in some place.</blockquote>

Verification