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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xetheral" data-source="post: 8437030" data-attributes="member: 6802765">Various approaches to content creation are definitely different things, but they don't directly relate to the sandbox spectrum, as I've defined it. The spectrum is only looking at one dimension of play: how often players are expected to make strategic choices from among specific options for that choice offered by the GM, rather than being able to make open-ended decisions. The various techniques for creating that content can each be used at any point on the spectrum.For example, a campaign that focuses on a particular plot and uses mostly pre-written content might have a table expectation that players usually choose from the list of pre-prepared options (thus tending towards the non-sandbox end of the spectrum) precisely because those are the options for which pre-written content exists. An exhaustively pre-written hexcrawl campaign, by contrast, might have the expectation that players can go anywhere within the setting and do anything (thus tending towards the sandbox end of the spectrum), despite being just as heavily reliant on pre-authored material as the plot-focused campaign was.Similarly, an improv-heavy "living world" style campaign can be somewhere near the sandbox end of the spectrum, while an informal "curated story" style campaign (e.g. something akin to an improvized, tailored CYOA novel) can be near the non-sandbox end of the spectrum despite both relying on the GM making up the content as they go along.As an aside, I think that the fact that different content creation styles can be used at all points along the sandbox spectrum emphasizes that the variable the spectrum is isolating (i.e. frequency of constrained vs unconstrained strategic decisionmaking) is an independent variable worth looking at when describing a campaign's style. (For the campaigns that fit on the spectrum, anyway.)First, I would rarely consider "going over the hills to the north" to be a strategic decision on its own. It's missing any description of strategic aims or purpose. Maybe it would contextually qualify as a strategic decision in certain unusual circumstances, such as a cross-country chase through unfamiliar terrain?To illustrate what I mean by "strategic choices", consider a situation where the PCs' goal (howsoever determined) is to free political prisoners from a particular Duke. The GM asks the players whether they want to try for a breakout, or instead to try to negotiate with the Duke first. If the table expectation is that the decision is constrained to the two options presented, this would nudge the campaign towards the non-sandbox end of the spectrum. Conversely, if the expectation is that the decision is open-ended, that would nudge the campaign towards the sandbox end of the spectrum. As an example of taking advantage of the open-ended option, maybe the players respond that they want to head to the (previously established, but not yet featured) capital city and instead apply pressure on the (previously established, but not yet featured) King to intervene, hopefully either getting the prisoners released or provoking the Duke into open defiance of the King (which would then provide legal cover for a forcible breakout attempt).Second, note that the spectrum is agnostic to later tactical decisions regarding how to pursue the chosen strategy and to the eventual mechanical resolution, whether via (e.g.) combat(s), ability check(s), skill challenge(s), player-facing fiat mechanics, roleplayed social encounter(s) decided by GM fiat, or any other sort of mechanic. So I don't think my spectrum is making nearly as many unspoken assumptions as you suggest. The only real assumption is that when talking about comparing two campigns' places on the spectrum (i.e. discussing which one is more sandboxy) the comparison only works if both campaigns fit on the spectrum in the first place. But I've been explicit about that assumption from the start by acknowledging that there are campaign styles that don't fit on the spectrum at all.Third, from my perspective a GM offering the players meaningless choices is just passive-aggressively constraining the players' options. So when trying to decide if a given strategic decision is constrained or unconstrained, I would simply ignore meaningless options even if they are ostensibly available to the PCs.What you should expect follows directly from how the spectrum is specified. (How could it be anything else?) Proportionately, the fraction of strategic decisions which are unconstrained by an expectation to pick an option from a GM-provided list is 50% higher in a campaign pegged at 60% on the sandbox spectrum than a campaign pegged at 40%. So you'd know to expect noticably more player authority over campaign direction in the 60% sandbox campaign, but that both campaigns feature a pretty even mix of times when the players are expected to follow the GM's lead and times when the GM is expected to follow the players' lead.(One might alternatively reasonably conclude that, in practice, the calibration issues with the spectrum that I've acknowledged from the start make 60% vs 40% within the margin of error of whatever methodology is being used to score the two campaigns.)I've repeated the definition of the spectrum many times, so I'm perplexed by how you wouldn't know what to expect to learn when comparing two campaigns' relative sandboxiness. To clarify in case I've created confusion: I'm not trying to say that the sandbox spectrum is some general-purpose analytical tool from which multi-faceted conclusions can be drawn about playstyle. Instead, I'm saying that one can look in isolation at how frequently strategic decisions are constrained or unconstrained in a campaign (if applicable) and the result will be somewhere between never and always. More simply, I'm saying it is meaningful to discuss the concept of sandboxiness on a range, rather than treating "sandbox" as a binary property or using the term as a label that refers to exactly one specific style of play.</blockquote>

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