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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 6133049" data-attributes="member: 1165">I don't want absolute freedom. Sounds odd, right? Maybe I'm weird.I've been in numerous sandbox campaigns that failed due to, well, a lack of DM direction. There's any number of reasons for that. IMO, the most important was lack of party unity/long-term goal. Often the PCs didn't know each other beforehand (met in a bar, all had the same power source, etc) and often realistically portray how you would interact with dangerous strangers... meaning distrust them or even stay away from them. I made that mistake in a d20 Modern game several years back (it wasn't sandbox) and from then on told the players their characters had to know each other. (FATE, a game that does sandboxing very well, probably better than D&D, puts character relations into the character generation rules. You pretty much cannot be a party of strangers in FATE.)Sometimes you have players who aren't interested in the "main plot" (there may not be a main plot to interest them) and they'll go breed yaks or find ways of concentrating cocaine or what have you. (Yes, those are real examples I've been in.) Or the other extreme, where everyone is interested, but in completely different areas, so you have one campaign per player, and they're all competing for the DM's time.If the DM has no real idea what's coming up, instead of exciting encounters (combat and non) we end up with "the troll dies horribly. Suddenly, you are ambushed by a ferocious umber hulk! Roll for initiative!" (That was an RPGA ad, and never actually happened to me. But it's not far off from things that did.)I like the rowboating example. I also recall an example from a thread, probably a year or two back, where the railroad was "hidden". (Picture walking into a dungeon, but the rooms are "Schrodinger". However, the players never know what's in the room unless they interact with it in some way, such as opening the door, casting Clairvoyance, sneaking in ethereally, or what have you. That wasn't the example used, but it was kind of like that.) This way, you'll probably find the treasure your character "needs", probably won't run into the boss in the first room, and probably won't completely miss the boss or piece of info you're looking for too.This means if the players do something surprising, the DM should have the power to arbitrarily alter the world (parts that the players don't know about or the PCs haven't interacted with) to make the game more fun. If the DM created a 12 level dungeon for 12 level PCs, but the PCs are curbstomping everything, I think it's fair for the DM to start adding extra monsters to later encounters. I don't think they have to stick to the 25 orcs (or whatever) that they initially assumed. However, some people would consider this cheating.</blockquote>

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