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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9543462" data-attributes="member: 4937">I have seen plenty of people argue that what he said was literally true.The GM is continually engaged in this process. Agreed, but it's that "open to their efforts" that I'm talking about.  The GM is also rooting for the players.  It's not really all that fun if the players can't resolve the issue.  So GMs are all the time subtly putting their finger on "the story so far is" and rigging what is likely to happen next.  If my party of 2nd level characters decide to go into the boot legging business, it's one story if I have J.C. Wilhelm a 7th level fighter and quite another if he's a 20th level fighter.  What's the right answer there?  What story should I be planning for?  I think most GMs would err on the side of making J.C. Wilhelm potent enough to make a great threat, but not so potent that he can crush the PC's like a grape.  But which ever one I decide on is setting not just the backstory but the fore story.  And in fact, to avoid giving GMs this dilemma, some game systems that want to empower this sort of play very much take these sorts of choices out of the GMs hands.    I am very hard to insult or offend.  So far I haven't seen any sign that you are the sort of person that would do any of the things I'd actually find offensive.  Be as frank as you want and disagree as strongly as you like.It's almost certainly the later, since I have a lot more experience with sandboxes than I have with you.I'm greatly mollified by this explanation; however I'm not fully convinced.  Sandbox work is extremely heavy and intense up front but I agree it can because you've done all that work ahead of time become light week to week.  But it can take years of work to prep a sandbox well, and I'm not as convinced as you seem to be that it becomes low prep just because you did all that up front.The key feature of a sandbox is that you do much more prep than you ever intend to use and you are content to have prepped a great many locations and characters that you will never use.  If it doesn't have this feature, it's not a sandbox.  It's an entirely different situation that is often confused for a sandbox.  Let me try to explain why.Suppose I make a castle and draw maps for it and populate it with personalities.  It's just a location where events might happen and where the players might go if the story turns particular ways.  I don't yet have any exact purpose for the players being there as I might in an adventure path.   Now at some point in the story the PC's are perhaps contracted by the leader of the thieves guild to steal an emerald necklace from the castle and in exchange he'll give them something they want whatever that happens to be.  When that happens I already know what defenses the castle has, where the guards are, what the personalities of the inhabitants were and so forth.  I created all that before I knew that one of the purposes of the castle was to be the setting for a heist.  So it's already possible to then steal the necklace in any of ways by forging relationships with the inhabitants of the castle, sneaking about it, or even slaughtering the inhabitants.  Everything I've created was created before the plot about the necklace came into existence and before I was aware that the Baronesses love for fine jewelry would become a plot point, or perhaps at most when I created the master of thieves I noted in his biography that among his goals was stealing some of the Baronesses valuable jewelry.  Now suppose however that I'm running a campaign using player created plots but I haven't created a castle.  If then in the player driven story the PC's are contracted by the leader of the thieves' guild to steal an emerald necklace from the castle, then that castle comes into being as the focus of a heist and it is now impossible for me to not think of it primarily in those terms.  If I wait to prep any portion of this castle until the PCs begin discussing plans, then it is now impossible for me to not think of the castle in the terms of the PCs plans.  In this case, even though on the surface the story is driven by the players, only the GM has any meaningful agency.  The only agency the players have is what I decide to allow for, to either validate or not validate their ideas as they are presented to me.   A linear adventure path probably affords more agency to the players than the actual process of play I have created.  The longer I delay in reifying the castle, the worse the situation gets.  This second situation is not a sand box.  It's an open world but not a sandbox, and I have become over the years quite sensitive to the difference.Remember, one of my tests of whether there is a railroad is how much is the GM metagaming.  Open world campaigns are typically defined by a single rail car that never really moves.  The players are on a large stage and as they purpose to go somewhere, the GM changes the drapes and the furniture on the stage and brings in some props and new players, but there is very little in terms of defined space.  You generally cut from scene to scene based on where the players say they want to be because nothing exists until the players go there, so there is generally nothing between point A and point C save a handwave.  All props are manufactured as needed according to the dictates of the story as the GM sees it in the moment.  At best, you might get the GM deferring some of the time to a random table as a prompt for ideas, but at worst the GM is just listening in to the players talk and deciding what ideas he thinks is clever and wants to use.  The whole game is nothing but one long metagame by the GM against or for the players, but because the GM isn't cognizant of their own process of play and because they are accepting player prompts they imagine they are empowering the players.  The truth though is that you are setting on a single rail car doing nothing while the stage props are moved by the windows and the GM decides to yank your chain or not depending on what he thinks at the moment is a good story.Back in the early 90's I played with this group that insisted as players that the get into a huddle and whisper their plans to each other so that the GM couldn't hear them.  At the time I thought it extremely silly and adversarial and immature.  Looking back I'm not at all convinced of that.  I thought it extremely silly because my theories of how to game master well made the players planning openly how to do something irrelevant.  But the GMs in that group when they GMed largely engaged in open world play where they took player input on what the players wanted to do and then let them do it, and in the years playing with them and in the years afterwards reviewing those games in my head, the players were being extremely functional in their play to not reveal to the GM their wants and plans.  It was really the only way they had to claw any real agency from the almighty GMs according to the way they thought the game was to be played.</blockquote>

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