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Message: <blockquote data-quote="neonagash" data-source="post: 6382590" data-attributes="member: 6778280">Sounds like you have an inferiority complex. Thats usually the case when a person feels like someone else is being "elitist" about something that has absolutely no effect on  their life, but decides to be offended by it anyway. Well I am willing say it. Railroad games are bad. They are boring, rely on trivial, cliched hooks that cant be tailored to the players in the game and the PC's actions are irrelevant to the outcome. Its a railroad, whats gonna happen if they are great is the same as what would happen if they sucked. So who the hell cares?Common themes I see a lot with sandbox games is that the DM does the following things:Actually sandbox games are a lot HARDER to GM. You have to do a lot of thinking on your feat. Any half arsed rookie can run a sandbox. Actually no. None of those things are pointless. You as a player chose to do them. If you didnt want to do them you shouldnt have. Thats part of a sandbox, you tell the GM what you want to do, the other players tell the GM what they want to do, and a story ensues  based on what the players wanted to do. Side note, why do so many of these stores sound like 1 on 1 games? No other players or characters are ever mentioned. Its like its just totally made up as a way to support a presupposed conclusion that railroads are better because.... hmm, no one ever actually says why they are  better. The railroad GM's just attack the opposition without offering anything positive about their own side as a comparison point. But I digress.  Actually they would. As GM's we buy lots of stuff to rape for ideas rather then running word for word. Everything from player supplement books to adventures. Hell I've bought published adventures just because i dont like drawing out maps and its worth a few bucks to have a big stack of pre made maps for me to dig out whenever the characters wind up underground. I doubt I'm alone in that. And in 20 years of playing and GMing I've never once found a railroaded adventure interesting or fun. I dont play RPG's to walk through some other guys fan wank wannabe adventure story. When I'm a player I want to play MY characters story. I want to follow MY goals, not some writer or GM's idea of what my goals should be. I dont care about loot, or random killings. I want to help drive the story of MY character and his allies going through a dangerous and difficult life of adventures. Doing what WE think is interesting. Not whatever some guy wrote down. So instead of asking about good sandbox games, or looking for advice on how to make one, or run one yourself you decide to crap on the entire idea over and over and tell the rest of us that while our entire way of gaming sucks hairy balls and we're wrong, we shouldnt get defensive over it. Or point out any issues in your style of gaming. Ahh okay i get it. This whole thread was about you crapping on us and us " thank you sir, may I have another" ? I dont think so. Crap on the challenge rating system. Its not good to start with and even in the best of times is way to dependent on certain assumptions of gear, magic and party composition. But yes part of the point of a sandbox is its a living world. So if at first level you hear rumours about the ogres blocking such and such trade route and causing trouble and decide to wander up there because "hey the DM wouldnt put a group of ogres in front of a 1st level party" well yeah, your getting smushed to paste by ogres. You were told they were there, and the ogres dont ask your party CR first and then wander off if its too low. Thats part of building a realistic world. It doesnt scale with the PC's. Its a world with stuff in it. That stuff is there doing what it wants to do whether any PC ever looks at it or not. "If i tree falls in the woods without a PC there to hear it does it make a sound...... Look, based on how you are replying to people, I'm sure I know what I'm about to get myself in to. But I'm going to take a stab at this and see if we can discuss it maturely.You seem to be very pro sandbox, to the point that you're willing to even tell a guy that his sandbox game is a railroad game just so there isn't a blemish on your preferred style. But the guy has very valid points, because I've experienced the same thing. And I know what the difference between the two styles of games are since I've been at this long enough.I am noticing one thing here though. You are focusing more on the campaign being a sandbox rather than the adventures like the OP (oh that's me) was focusing on at the start. There is a difference. Here is what I mean:I run lots of railroaded adventures. But I like to think that I try to keep my campaign world as sandboxy as possible. The PCs are free to do as they wish (within reason). They help build the story around the adventures that I provide for them. I even encourage them to be pro-active and do their own thing so that I am not spoon feeding them content. What I do though, is railroad my adventures so that they integrate with what it is the PCs are doing. I've said it before, it's the illusion that I am not railroading. I want to run an adventure because it sounds exciting for me as a DM to DM, I paid for it, and I've prepared it. It will not go to waste, and it will be fun (well, I hope...we've all had a few stinkers whether self-written or not). The key  is, not to jump the gun. If the timing is not right, I will put it off until I can somehow weave it into what the PCs are currently doing. Even now, I'm itching to start my epic adventure and the PCs keep going off on a tangent and we haven't started it yet. It's been two months, with another month to go it seems, and I haven't started it. Right now I'm just rolling with the punches and making things up as we go until they are finished doing what they are doing. But we will start this adventure. I've never once had a player complain about how I run adventures because they are having fun and it isn't obvious that I do railroad them into doing what the adventure expects of them. Or maybe they do notice sometimes and they just don't care cause they are having fun. At the same time, I'm not railroading a single outcome. If they fail, they fail. And boy did they fail when I ran Dead Gods. Orcus came back in full force thanks to the PCs failing. But I managed to railroad them into completely every single chapter in that adventure. The thing is, they felt like they made those choices themselves.</blockquote>[/QUOTE]

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