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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ydars" data-source="post: 4577480" data-attributes="member: 62992">I agree with the idea that there must be something happening in the world around the PCs and that this is not railroading, just the world taking on a "life of its own". I also agree that the most interesting games are ones where the PCs get to choose who their enemies/friends are. I ran a Ptolus based game where the PCs discovered that the "gods" of Praemal (the world) had actually done something essentially "evil" which was lock the souls of everyone living on the world of Praemal into a kind of eternal battle with the Galchutt (evil avatars of chaos). You see, anyone on this world could NEVER escape it (this is Monte's explanation for the world; that is was made as a trap for the evil avatars of this universe, the Galchutt). I then invented two "good" factions; one who thought that the correct thing to do was to break "the arch of time" and release the Galchutt into the universe to end the suffering and give final rest to the souls living on Praemal. The other faction wanted to Galchutt confined to the world and never allowed to leave, as the gods intended, but this had the side effect of dooming everyone on that world to an endless cycle of suffering, warring with the Galchutt. So the PCs got to decide which philosophy they followed; I even set the game up so that some people in the same party could choose differently and work against each other. I think the game worked very well because D&D is good at handling this kind of morally ambigious campaign. So this was NOT a sandbox but the players choices were very meaningful in that they decided if the "ends justified the means" in terms of the gods.</blockquote>

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