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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest 7034872" data-source="post: 8542878">So the YT pages for Matt Colville and Web DM have helped me a lot over the past year as I've put together this new campaign I'm going to run. In the course of watching all their advice videos, I came around to a notion as to why some people dislike railroad-y adventures and prefer sandboxes (which seems to be most DMs and players) while some others actually dislike the sandboxes and prefer railroads (which seems a minority). It was always easy for me to see why people wouldn't like being stuck on a railroad adventure: the illusion of agency is too often too illusory. But I struggled a bit to understand why a few folks disliked the sandboxes: "Why would anyone not prefer these?," I asked myself. I think at last I might have an idea why.I'm going to assume most EN World members read a lot of fantasy literature. But I'm also going to assume most members don't spend a lot of time with Homer, Virgil, Beowulf, or the like (I do, but I'm a weirdo). It occurred to me this afternoon when reading through two very helpful threads on rest mechanics that sandboxes tend to resemble classical adventure literature a lot more, while railroad adventures resemble the modern novel. In almost any modern novel, all the events therein feed into or off of some one or two driving, over-arching plot elements. You rarely read much about major characters engaging in any little side-quests "just because." But in the ancient and medieval epics, that sort of stuff is almost what the book is made of. Odysseus is stuck far away and needs to find his way back home. In working his way back home, he runs into all sorts of fantastical lands, people, and monsters, and has to use his wits and weapons to keep progressing homeward. It isn't exactly Grand Theft Auto MXIV, no, but the same basic notion is there: the main character's progress toward his/her ultimate goal is initially thwarted by all these NPCs s/he encounters and progress depends on successfully negotiating the encounters by whatever means.But when I've tried teaching stuff like Homer and Virgil to students, I've found, much to my chagrin, that most of them hate it. They can't stand reading five solid pages of the Iliad devoted exclusively to a description of Achilles' shield. The Divine Comedy is, to them, almost offensively boring. Even with the Odyssey, they just don't like all those random adventures crammed in there with no apparent plot advancement as a pay-off. But to a classical mind this is crazy. The beauty of the Odyssey is in all those wild adventures and it isn't some larger, artificially unifying plot purpose that makes them interesting: they're interesting because just in themselves they're wild and cool, and that's that.Sandbox adventures, it seems to me, resemble classical epics, while railroads more resemble modern novels. The people who dislike the sandboxes, I suspect, dislike them for the same reasons they dislike classic epics: they want a tightly defined, unifying plot around which everything else revolves, so they feel disoriented and disappointed when they don't find one.Anyway, that's my current hunch.But you know--maybe I read too much and would do better to get away from the books in order to see what's around me.</blockquote>

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