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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9642286" data-attributes="member: 6790260">It is neither. Unless you think God is your Dungeon Master. Which, well. I certainly think some folks act like they think God is their Dungeon Master...and not in a good way.You (and others) are the one(s) pushing binaries here. I recognize a spectrum; I explicitly said so, and I recognized that just as how there are degrees of railroad, there are degrees of sandbox. I think D&D struggles with the fullest extent of what a sandbox should be (and I gave Minecraft as an example of that fullest extent, or Ironsworn as a TTRPG example in case a video game offends anyone's sensibilities). That doesn't mean you can't do a relatively lighter, closer to middle of the road kind of thing. But the sheer supremacy of the DM in D&D, alongside other rules structures, really gets in the way of the sort of thing "sandbox" points toward.The sandboxiest you can get with (not-heavily-modified) D&D is not as sandboxy as other systems just innately are, by design. That's not a criticism. It's just the truth as I see it. There are things D&D does very well and things it just doesn't do well. I don't think any edition of D&D is particularly good at political intrigue, for example, since the exact same mechanical experience governs intrigue, tomb-raiding, and library research, and said mechanical experience is pretty light on rising and falling action (as compared to its combat mechanics, I mean, where much arises from the changing mechanical state.) There are other things I think D&D does very well. As an example, D&D has always understood that class fantasy is extremely important, something that I think many freeform games lose sight of. Not everyone wants strongly supported class fantasies, but I'm pretty sure a majority of people do want that. Likewise, not everyone wants intrigue-heavy mechanics; I'm less sure about where the majority lies there.</blockquote>

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