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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8167549" data-attributes="member: 6785785">So this is an interesting thought and it touches on something I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been catching up on this thread. Very often, a sandbox is about discovery....the exploration of a geographic space and learning what is out there. Very often, these spaces are described as frontiers, with all the inherent dangers that would imply. But I don’t think that this is the case for all sandboxes, by any means. To revisit Blades in the Dark, it’s definitely a sandbox. But the characters are all denizens of the city. They know the sandbox, geographically speaking. So the players’ goal, and the characters’ as well, has to be about some other form of discovery.  Then I was just kind of thinking that there is no actual geography, of course....it’s all fictional, the geography of the map is just an illusion that creates certain pathways. It’s a kind of flow chart. This format can be applied to the unknown frontier or to the city the characters grew up in, or a space sector or any other setting. It’s just that the setting will demand different uses of the “boxes” on the flowchart. It seems to me that what’s in each “box” on the flowchart and how it’s determined are, perhaps, the point of differentiation when it comes to sandbox play. Perhaps even all play.</blockquote>