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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6732478" data-attributes="member: 42582">What you describe is the sort of approach to GMing that I generally try to avoid. Eg I don't work out stuff that &quot;goes on without the players&quot; which they can discover if their PCs ask the right questions. That's just the sort of thing that I said, upthread, is too railroad-y for my tastes (my approac is that, if the PCs &quot;ask the right questions&quot;, then in response I'll work out some stuff that is happening.). Of course tastes differ.In a typical sandbox game, if the players don't engage the GM's content then there is no game. The GM might generate a lot of content all over the place, but the players aren't free to engage none of it yet still be playing the game.That said, at a certain point the sandbox you describe could bleed into a type of &quot;no myth&quot; play. If, in fact, all the content the GM is generating is improvised in response to hooks and signals provided by the player, then that's not the sort of thing I find railroad-y. But I don't think that's what is typically meant by &quot;sandbox&quot;, either.In my post to which you replied I used the phrase &quot;problem solving&quot;. Are you treating &quot;puzzle-solving&quot; and &quot;problem-solving&quot; as synonyms?As I said, I think that sandboxing and problem-solving are basically orthogonal. Most problem-solving in RPGs is either mechanical/technical, or involves interacting with the fiction. I don't see that sandboxing has any special connection to the presence or absence of mechanical/technical problem solving. Nor does it have any special connection to interacting with the fiction, does it? Sandboxing is a method for generating fiction, but not for adjudicating interactions with it when it acts as a constraint within which problems are solved.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6732478, member: 42582"] What you describe is the sort of approach to GMing that I generally try to avoid. Eg I don't work out stuff that "goes on without the players" which they can discover if their PCs ask the right questions. That's just the sort of thing that I said, upthread, is too railroad-y for my tastes (my approac is that, if the PCs "ask the right questions", then in response I'll work out some stuff that is happening.). Of course tastes differ. In a typical sandbox game, if the players don't engage the GM's content then there is no game. The GM might generate a lot of content all over the place, but the players aren't free to engage [I]none[/I] of it yet still be playing the game. That said, at a certain point the sandbox you describe could bleed into a type of "no myth" play. If, in fact, all the content the GM is generating is improvised in response to hooks and signals provided by the player, then that's not the sort of thing I find railroad-y. But I don't think that's what is typically meant by "sandbox", either. In my post to which you replied I used the phrase "problem solving". Are you treating "puzzle-solving" and "problem-solving" as synonyms? As I said, I think that sandboxing and problem-solving are basically orthogonal. Most problem-solving in RPGs is either mechanical/technical, or involves interacting with the fiction. I don't see that sandboxing has any special connection to the presence or absence of mechanical/technical problem solving. Nor does it have any special connection to interacting with the fiction, does it? Sandboxing is a method for generating fiction, but not for adjudicating interactions with it when it acts as a constraint within which problems are solved. [/QUOTE]

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