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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5145988" data-attributes="member: 26473">First, as a player, I vastly prefer sandboxy games. Left to my own devices, I am more than able to stir up enough trouble for any three parties of adventurers, provided the referee has his feces collected.Second, it's been my experience that gamers who entered the hobby starting roughly in the mid-Eighties or later assimilated a model of roleplaying games which put a strong emphasis on having a plot, or at the very least a series of structured adventures. What I've found, particularly on returning to gaming after a break from about 1989 to 2002, is that player expectations were heavily molded by the adventures and settings prevalent in the hobby since that time.For many gamers, in my experience, adventures have a plot, with villains and climactic encounters, and the goal of the adventure is to deliver the adventurers to that climax after passing through a series of tension-building encounters; settings, which might on the surface appear to offer sandboxy play, are heavily metaplotted, often backed up by the adventures published for that setting.The advice to referees was similarly slanted toward this style of play, whether in the pages of the rules or in the articles published in the different gaming rags. One Dragon article on structuring play like a television series stands out in my mind.So I think quite a few players are conditioned to expect this from roleplaying games. Asking these players to take the initiative in the game is asking them to step outside the comfort zone which in some cases is what they've literally grown up with as gamers.Third, as Sammael and Raven Crowking described upthread, it doesn't take a whole party of players like me to make a sandboxy game work; usually one or two is more than adequate, and the rest can use those players' initiative in pursuing in-character goals as a substitute for the referee-driven style of play with which they are more familiar and comfortable. It doesn't take four or five Tony Robbins' clones sitting around the table to make a sandboxy game work, in my experience.Fourth and last, as was alluded to in another thread recently, discussion about sandboxy games has taken on a slightly higher profile on forums like this one. The discussion was always there, but it was mostly buried in threads about this or that topic. Now sandboxy play is the topic with a bit more frequency, so more referees are expressing interest in trying out a style of play which may be wholly new to them, or simply one they haven't done since they were quite young and are curious about how age and experience might have changed their approaches to it.Since most rpg forums seem to be heavily weighted toward referees, it's not much of a surprise that interest among referees could be greater than among players. Much of the discussion is directed to and for referees rather than players - a new thread on playing in sandboxy settings might be useful, actually.All in my humble opinion and personal experience, with expectations about mileage subject to your variation.</blockquote>

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