And I see experienced players who aggressively demand to be spoon-fed an adventure and not have to 'search for the fun' by making their own decisions re exploration etc.
I fear this is the way my group leans.
As an aside, it's funny what you said about players coping with oppressive railroad-y DMs by becoming mo passive. I feel like I need to cope with passive players by...I dont know...becoming more oppressive?
Sounds good.
But since you do have at least 1 active player, why not just cater to him and let him
drive things? My sandbox campaigns have tended to end up that way anyway,
with the one alpha-personality player ending up as the star of the show.
Because, like me, it's hard for him to be one man carrying the show. It's the dynamic of interacting with other active players that makes it fun, same as acting dramatically in character. If you're the only one at the table doing it, it falls flat and you feel silly.
I think that, by framing the issue as a railroad/sandbox spectrum, you may be slightly obscuring what I think might be a more productive approach. A sandbox is about the players choosing from among a suite of game elements you offer them. It seems fairly clear your group aren't that interested in that. But given what you've said about their readiness to innovate at adventure level, I woud be trying to build a non-sandbox player driven campaign - ie one where you bring the action to them, but it's the action that they are pushing towards rather than action that you are railroading them into.
In other words, the standard indie-game model. At least in my experience, it can appeal to players who aren't that interested in world exploration.
Something like Fiasco, right? With very explicit strong scene framing? And then within the context of the adventure, let them go hog wild.
Yes, I see the difference, and it's what drove me to begin the campaign with a "Bang!" event and strong scene framing, because I knew most of the group's proclivities to a more passive style of play.
It's when we are at a crossroads, one adventure ends and another is about to begin, that the trouble arises. I feel torn about doing strong scene framing like:
After days in town, you catch wind of a wendigo and set forth to hunt it down, hoping to claim the bounty and rescue the townsfolk. We pick up with your adventures a week into tracking the beast thru frosty mountains." While it might work better with this passive group than a sandbox, it also robs them of agency and assumes motivations for their PCs - two things which I understand as fun-killers.
I guess I'm just having trouble handling such a passive/reactive group of players. So far everyone says they're having fun, so maybe the only one with an issue is me. I am thinking of passing around a player questionnaire next session with leading questions/multiple choice to see if I can tease out more of about what they would like.
