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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ThirdWizard" data-source="post: 5612550" data-attributes="member: 12037">My eras:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Make Believe My first forays into roleplaying involved me or one of my brothers setting up an elaborate world with toys in one of the bedrooms. They would then act as the referee, while we brought in one toy which we would then play with, interacting with what the other guy said happened when we tried things. It was rudimentary, but a lot of fun, and we had no idea we were roleplaying!</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Sandbox on Rails My first actual D&D gamse were a painstakingly loving affair between myself and the homebrew campaign world, in which I detailed every year of its thousands of years history, ever inch of its giant landscapes, and all the political intrigues and diversions. Then, when game started, I promptly didn't use the myriad of detail I made that I could have turned into a grand sandbox and instead pushed the PCs along the tracks. We had fun, of course. We were young and foolish. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Story Driven Then, I went on to university after a few years not playing D&D. There I fell in love with plots and intrigue for the players to interact with. It wasn't on rails, but it wasn't a sandbox, and the main driving forces in the game wasn't combat but were the PCs and the unfolding story around them. I wanted a grittier, deadlier, more realistic world at this point, and I liked complex critical hit tables and tracked arrows and food rations.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Grinder Then of course was a 180 degree style totally devoid of most social interaction or back story where the PCs were little more than an elite killing group who would destroy everything in their path. If it breathed, and it didn't give them a quest, it died. That didn't last long. It was a nice diversion, but I don't think it was creative enough. That phase passed fairly quickly after only a couple of years.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Sandbox I had played Planescape before in high school, but with more experience, I opened it up for a true sandbox game, where the PCs made their own way. Most plot lines in that game were totally the brainchildren of players. There was an overarching plotline, but they were free to ignore it at any time, and often did, and they could approach it from any of a dozen directions at any time. Pretty much every game I ran after that was an open playing field, or at least as open as I could make it given time constraints. I went back to a more simulationist bent, though I wasn't interested in the minutia as much as previous.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Sandbox with Abstract Rules I think I've at this point fallen disenamored with simulationist leanings toward more narrivistic options. I still like the open play concept of the sandbox, without putting constraints on players, but as I read more and more different RPGs, I find myself being enthralled by abstract mechanics. I'm looking at ways to blend the two ideas as I find myself moving away from D&D toward other systems that suit my style better.</li> </ul></blockquote>

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