NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6724777" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't think that drive by straw men are really helpful to the discussion.  Nor do I think anyone has used sandbox in that manner.  The idea that nothing exists except what the players choose to interact with is closer in concept to the idea of having "no myth" than it is to a sandbox, and is I think tangential to what a sandbox actually is.   I can imagine however a sandbox that works like that, where new 'chunks' of the world are only loaded into the world as needed.  In fact Minecraft works like this, and is clearly a sandbox, abliet a computer game rather than an RPG.  But we could easily play in a sandbox style in a PnP game where the DM created new parts of the game world through some process only as needed.What a sandbox doesn't have is a DM created goal of play and so it tends to lack content that is created for a specific narrative purpose.  Instead, the DM creating a sandbox is primarily creating content according to some rule(s) in his head formal or informal as to what is 'realistic' for the setting.  The DM's motives in a sandbox are less 'what would be interesting' or 'what would make a good story' than they are, "What would be here if this world was real."   And the DM allows the PC's to explore this simulated reality in their own way and at their own pace, without reference to metagame considerations like balance or story.  I should say "plot" is thrown around as a very loose term to mean two different things.  People will refer to "plot" is it relates to a story to mean: "the main events of a play, novel, movie, or similar work, devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence."  In that sense, a sandbox does not have a preconceived "plot", but only acquires something that resembles a narrative through the transcription of play.   But a sandbox can nonetheless contains "plots", if by plots you mean: "a plan made in secret by a group of people to do something".  It's perfectly reasonable and realistic that a fantasy world will contain various groups that are making plans to carry out various activities whether related to or unrelated to the PC's, and that the PC's can - if they go to the right places at the right times - discover these "plots".  But in a pure sandbox, discovery of these plots is triggered by the PC's going to the right places at the right times and if they don't discover the "plots", then that's ok too.   In a purely linear adventure, events tend to be triggered by the arrival of the PC's regardless of time and place of their arrival, because the PC's are meant to see each of the main events of a story as they have been devised and presented by the GM.</blockquote>

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