Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="robconley" data-source="post: 8581676" data-attributes="member: 5636">It boils down to are you as the referee willing to let players "trash" your setting. If the answer is yes then you are probably running some sort of sandbox. If not then likely you are railroading the players in some way. I use the word trash deliberately as it has a negative connotation when it comes to expectations and plans.  I have been writing and blogging about sandbox campaigns for two decades and always have been consistent in the terms I use and how I use them. I was part of the group that originally popularized the term sandbox to describe a type of roleplaying campaign.  It was coined in the early 2000s as a way to describe what the $70 Wilderlands of High Fantasy boxed set was good for by the team of authors, including myself. To our pleasant surprise, it snowballed from there and its use grew beyond the discussion of the Wilderlands.There are a lot of nuances to running a sandbox campaign. But the core of it is the idea is that players can always go left instead of right.  That the worse consequence of doing that as far as the logistics of running a campaign goes is the referee saying "OK I need a week to prepare my notes on how to handle what the party plans to do". This is in contrast to the other approaches to running campaigns where there are out-of-game fences around what the players can and can't do.   Perhaps counterproductive to your idea of what an RPG is but not to mine.  What I do is create settings that have interesting places to adventure in as well as interesting situations to experience. I have a group of players make some characters that fit within the setting. I work with them to figure out where their characters are at the beginning of the campaign. Then after the campaign starts, they are free to do pursue whatever goals they have for their characters in the manner they see fit. I use the mechanics of a game to make this happen in a way that is fun and interesting to all involved including me. The use of a game cuts down what I have to explain on how the setting works. Game mechanics are an effective and concise way of communicating the most common options and their consequences to the players.  The use of a game allows me to resolve what the players try to do as their characters in a fair, consistent, and impartial manner. As for the illusionary part, there are limitations imposed by how the setting is defined.  Unless there are some fantastic or supernatural elements involved a character can't flap their arms and fly in a fantasy medieval setting.  But in a Traveller campaign where the characters are on a low-G world with a dense atmosphere, they may be able to do just that. Other than that, the players are free to do whatever their character can do within the setting.There is more to it but that is the general gist.</blockquote>

Verification