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Message: <blockquote data-quote="awesomeocalypse" data-source="post: 5428039" data-attributes="member: 85641">No sandbox has ever given me what I'm looking for first and foremost in an RPG, and that is the sense that I am not simply a person inhabiting another world, but rather that I am the main character (or one of them, at least) of a story. More than anything, I want to feel like the world revoles around me.  I don't want to be vanquishing a villain, I want to be vanquishing the villain. I don't want to be a hero, I want to be the hero. I don't want to pick up a magic sword, I want the magic sword. In the same way that Dumbledore is less a person with independant agendas than he is a plot device to help Harry in his heroes journey, in the same way that everything the rest of the Fellowship does is secondary to and less important than what Frodo does, I want every single monster, NPC and setting element to orbit, in some sense, around the star that is me. I am Harry, Luke, Buffy and Frodo all in one. The other PCs can share that status, but that's it...if I get the sense that any of the NPCs in the world are somehow more important than I, that there are quests more important than my quest, that there is someone out there whose agenda matters more than my agenda...I get antsy. So no, I don't like sandboxes. I don't want a million different plot threads that I could choose to pursue or not based on whather it interests me. i want *one* plot thread, that is so overwhelmingly important, and so intrinsically tied to me and my character, that the idea of doing anything else would be as laughable as Frodo deciding he'd rather go sing with Tom Bombadil than destroy the ring. This might sound like unabashed, absolute D&D narcissism. It is. I don't play rpgs because I want to compromise on what sort of gratification I get. More than any other medium, rpgs can be tailored *exactly* to what the participants desire. So why would I want anything else? Being the man around whom everything revolves *rules*.  So long as I have a bunch of fellow PCs who feel the same way, and a DM who relishes the chance to carefully craft a plot around a few specific PCs, then why would I want anything else? edit: I noticed earlier in the thread some people were saying that, when faced with a railroad, their first instinct is to do everything they can to derail it. Not to be disruptive for the hell of it (though that can easily be the result), but because they feel on some level like its one of the only ways they can take action with meaningful consequence. I am more or less exactly the opposite. Give me a tightly plotted story, where the principal appeal is seeing the plot unfold and finding out what happens next, and I'm happy as hell to stay on the plot and roleplay my character within the bounds of the story. But put me in a game where the appeal is simply being able to do whatever I want to do, and I tend to start treating it the way I do a GTA sandbox--take actions just for the hell of it, don't sweat the consequences, and more or less act like a mixture of a Nietzschian superman and a kleptomaniac psychopath with a death wish. This isn't to be disruptive for the hell of it, its simply the result of a massive shift in perspective. If I am the chosen one, main character of this hugely important story, than that innkeeper I just met might be a stepping stone to the completion of that story. Certainly, even if he isn't hugely important, it probably makes sense in terms of completing the story to treat him with decency unless given a reason to otherwise. But if there's no story, then who cares? Why *not* just rob that innkeeper or light him on fire? Sure, I might just get jailed or be killed by the guards, but the fight could be fun. And if I die, no biggie, I'll just roll up another dude who is just as capable of doing whatever the hell he wants as my current character is. I mean, its not like any of these characters are special or matter in any way. They're just random dudes in an imaginary world, and there are a theoretically infinite number of them. The removal of a central plot puts me into pure GTA mode--none of it matters in any larger sense, the characters are disposable, and the central draw is mainly just acting in ways I never could in real life, messing crap up and enjoying the chaos that ensues. A story keeps me from doing that by making the character I'm playing at that moment hugely important, and in a way that encourages him to engage with the world in a way that advances the story.</blockquote>

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