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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6063142" data-attributes="member: 42582">For me, personally, that is railroading that I can't stand.For me, the main difference betwen sandboxing and my preferred approach is that, on my approach, the elements of the gameworld are designed by the GM to deliberately push the buttons that the players have built into their PCs. That's the metagaming aspect I mentioned upthread.A side effect of this playstyle is that, compared to some sandboxes, there is probably less prep-in-advance, and more build-backstory-and-situations-on-the-fly. Because the GM has to build on the fly to keep on responding to the twists and turns of (i) player interests as manifested through PC build and behaviour, and (ii) unexpected results of action resolution in prior scenes.From the point of view of a certain sort of "pure" sandbox this is GM cheating or arbitrariness - in my preferred playstyle, for example, the players can never "outwit" the GM to make things safe or quiet for their PCs, because the GM is always deliberately framing and reframing situations to keep up the pressure (in the style I'm describing, it's also very important to distinguish scene-framing - which the GM is absolutely expected to metagame so as to keep up the pressure - and action resoution, which absolutely has to follow the rules or else player agency in engaging the scenes via their PCs will be thwarted). This is that same element of metagaming.To try to put it briefly: what happens to the PCs, and what they do, should be suprising to everyone at the table when it happens; but that something happens to the PCs, and that they do something surprising but engaging in response to it, is no surprise at all. It's the point of play.In my own case, particulalry when I was still developing my preferred approach to GMing, I have had games start out as sandboxes but (inadvertantly) morph into my sort of game. These days I know what I like and don't take the detour through the pure sandbox.</blockquote>

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