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<blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9640148" data-attributes="member: 907">&quot;Sandbox&quot; is generally applied on a &quot;strategic&quot; level. Players can go wherever they want and explore what's there, without an overall narrative forcing them to go to location A, then location B, and then location C, and so on. At the extreme end it either leads to hyperpreparation on the part of the GM (who prepares many locations more than what are actually encountered) or a campaign highly based on random events/encounters. IME, a full sandbox is generally not highly satisfying, but it's possible I've just never run into a good one.You can also have more limited sandboxes, usually with some sort of impetus for the PCs to explore it. For example, Pathfinder 2 has an adventure path named Age of Ashes, which as PF APs tend to be is split into 6 parts. The overall structure is pretty linear – you're going to different regions of the world to deal with different threats (or different aspects of the same threat). But one of the sections is a partial sandbox/hexcrawl where you need to explore a particular region of jungle in order to find a bunch of locations before attacking the baddies' main HQ. And of course there were a whole bunch of locations/encounters there that weren't directly linked to the main plot. This was fun, because it allowed us to feel a sense of freedom while still having an over-arching goal.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Staffan, post: 9640148, member: 907"] "Sandbox" is generally applied on a "strategic" level. Players can go wherever they want and explore what's there, without an overall narrative forcing them to go to location A, then location B, and then location C, and so on. At the extreme end it either leads to hyperpreparation on the part of the GM (who prepares many locations more than what are actually encountered) or a campaign highly based on random events/encounters. IME, a full sandbox is generally not highly satisfying, but it's possible I've just never run into a good one. You can also have more limited sandboxes, usually with some sort of impetus for the PCs to explore it. For example, Pathfinder 2 has an adventure path named Age of Ashes, which as PF APs tend to be is split into 6 parts. The overall structure is pretty linear – you're going to different regions of the world to deal with different threats (or different aspects of the same threat). But one of the sections is a partial sandbox/hexcrawl where you need to explore a particular region of jungle in order to find a bunch of locations before attacking the baddies' main HQ. And of course there were a whole bunch of locations/encounters there that weren't directly linked to the main plot. This was fun, because it allowed us to feel a sense of freedom while still having an over-arching goal. [/QUOTE]

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