NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5123127" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think that its unfair to compare 'railroad' to 'sandbox'.  Railroad is generally taken as an endpoint of a plot driven campaign approach.  Sandbox is not generally understood to be the end point of an exploration driven approach.  Sandbox is probably in fact more a synonym for 'exploration driven' than it is a word for an extreme endpoint of an 'exploration driven' approach.The critical aspect of a sandbox is that it is difficult or impossible to prepare the game more than a few sessions in advance (without preparing everything) because you never know where its going to go.  In particular, while you can prepare locations, it's difficult to impossible to prepare events ahead of time because events happen primarily in responce to player choice.  It should be obvious why publishers gravitate toward 'Adventure Paths' whether we are talking about Dragonlance or Age of Worms.  With an 'Adventure Path' you can give the DM pretty much everything he needs to run the campaign using some obvious techniques.  With a sandbox, this is much harder, and the scope of the information you must provide is much greater and the skill required of the DM to fill in the missing details is generally higher.  The danger of a plot driven campaign is that its brittle with regard to player choice, and this can result in a 'railroad' where the player choice is disregarded in favor of dragging the player through the scenary on the DM's predetermined path.   The danger in a sandbox - or exploration driven campagin - is more akin to putting the players in a rowboat in the middle of the open ocean.  While they are free to go anywhere they want, there might not be anything very interesting to see.   DM laziness aside, in my opinion this most typically happens with a DM who wants to create a sandbox for idealistic reasons, but is by temperment more suited to running an adventure path.  The DM creates an ocean with a few widely scattered points of interest, fails to provide a map, and then blames the PC's for not finding them.</blockquote>

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