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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aenghus" data-source="post: 6732727" data-attributes="member: 2656">I'm not Pemerton, but I've seen sandboxes go wrong before, at least in the eyes of the players, in a variety of ways. This isn't to say that these things are happening in your game, but I've seen them happen in others to the detriment of those games.First, a sandbox game can hinder communication between the DM and the players. DMs who run sandboxes often won't talk about issues of style and genre, as they want the players to explore the sandbox and discover the content rather than discuss it beforehand. This can make player experiences more "authentic" but it also risks the players rejecting some or all of the content for various reasons (thematic, aesthetic, ethical, being boring, depressing, over the top, unrealistic etc etc). Such rejection can't help but impact the DM negatively even when they deal with it well rather than defensively.The DM is aware of lots of content of various sorts just waiting for the players to encounter it, and being human probably wants them to interact with at least some of it. DMs who like to run sandboxes tend to be worldbuilders and gain enjoyment from it in and of itself. Meanwhile the players have imperfect information on the potentially small subset of content they hear of or encounter, and that together with individual player agendas can result in players ignoring, burning down or running away from lots of content. If the DM is unwilling to move more fitting content into the path of the players, the players can by dumb chance continue to evade anything interesting to them for extended periods of time. DM frustration often leads them to railroad players into content at this point. The railroading in part comes from issues of style and genre, where what's happening in the background  propels the gameworld in directions the players aren't interested and the DM is. The events happening in the gameworld on and off camera may not engage the players. Preventing such events may require styles of play the players want to avoid e.g. intrigue and skullduggery, backstabbing and treachery, wheeler and dealer politics, hack and slash dungeons, high society hobnobbing etc etc. The players are technically free to interfere with game events, but this doesn't mean they want to or would enjoy such play if it happened. And again, this damages communication when player complaints over game events are met with the response "You could have done something to prevent it", thus discouraging them from providing honest feedback in future.P.S. how do I do mentions properly, following the FAQ instructions doesn't seem to work.</blockquote>

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