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Message: <blockquote data-quote="steenan" data-source="post: 5145479" data-attributes="member: 23240">There are several types of choices that players perceive as meaningful and get fun from them. A few of them are based on interacting with the setting in such a way that it requires a sandbox game to work. The rest is not - but the engagement with the setting, in general sense, stays crucial.What I mean by "engagement with the setting" is players' feeling that the fictional places, persons etc. they interact with are important. As long as they are only perceived as props, players will focus on concrete things represented in the real world - dice, numbers and miniatures. When they care about what happens in the imagined space, choices that affect it gain meaning. They may be world-changing or they may be extremely local (like a conversation with a barmaid that PCs will never meet again), but they have moral weight and create emotional investment.The engagement with imagined events comes in many flavors. It may focus on the story aspect, its flow and dramatics. It may focus on exploration of characters' personalities, on how they react to various situations and how these change them. It may focus on relations with PCs and NPCs, on various social issues. It may focus on exploring the world or on changing it to fit one's desires. Some of these are best served by a sandbox game, some work better with a predefined (although flexible) plot. The unifying aspect is the focus on what happens in game first and on the real world aspects (social and game mechanical) second.</blockquote>

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