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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 5123848" data-attributes="member: 2205">Not really.  That was what kinds sparked the original question, and why I started the thread.  To me, at least, a sandbox is nearly as negative as a railroad.  It suggests a game that has no point, no purpose, no focus, no theme, and one that ultimately isn't going to be fun for very long.Even in the computer gaming world, from whence came the term.  I think of my copies of Hulk Ultimate Destruction or Ultimate Spiderman which have missions, but also have "sandbox mode" where you can ignore the missions and just wander around doing whatever you feel like.  To a point, that can be kinda fun, but after a little while, it gets extremely boring, and so you go on and do the missions.  The idea that the sandbox mode could support extended play is, to my mind, almost ludicrous.Yet, that seems to be what a wave of folks is promoting, at least in regards to tabletop games.  I'm curious where sandbox took on this overwhelmingly positive approach; this almost sanctification of the concept (yeah, a bit hyperbolic, but I'm struggling to find the words here) came from.  To me, it's clearly a recent phenomena.Ah.  My bad.Well, that's an interesting discussion too, and one that I was kinda leading into in one of my earlier replies to... someone.  Maybe you?The difference between sandbox and railroad is one that is only apparent at the actual table.  I don't think any product can be termed a sandbox or a railroad, although certain products certainly lend themselves more easily to one or the other.Maybe I'm just slightly more forgiving of the early stages of a railroad than most, but here's my take on it.1) As a GM, I'm almost pathetically anal about making sure that the PCs decide what to do.  I understand that few players are so self-motivated that they can go make a game happen out of nothing, but I always give the players lots of choices in terms of what they want to pursue and how they want to pursue it.  So, although I facilitate the game by pointing out choices that exist to be made, the PCs are ultimately the masters of their own fate.2) As a player, I tend to understand that there's a implicit understanding that we showed up to play the game that the GM prepared.  If he offers us situations as hooks that are obviously THE hooks that we're meant to follow, then we don't fight it, we follow them.  This is not a railroad.  This is just, as Rechan stated earlier, "the game."  It's kinda what most players and GMs implicitly understand as what is done.3) To me, this veers into railroad territory when the GM disallows, causes to fail unexpectedly or unfairly, any attempt to follow the plot hook except exactly in the steps that he's predetermined.  To use an example from one of the adventure paths, in Burnt Offerings from Rise of the Runelords, it's not railroading that we're expected to discover and explore the minor "dungeon complex" below the glass factory in Sandpoint.  It is railroading if otherwise reasonable choices are arbitrarily disallowed, because that's not what the module has written in it.Right; exactly my point as well.  We're in complete agreement.  Whether or not a game is a railroad can only be determined on the ground, when there's friction between what the GM thought the players were going to do, and what the players actually decided to do.  If the GM railroaded them back onto his predetermined plot, then it's not a railroad.  If the PCs chose to follow the plot, more or less, and it just happened to be what the GM thought they would do: also not a railroad.  Railroads only happen when the PC's can't turn left or right because there's no track there for them to turn on.If the players can't tell if they followed what you thought they would follow or not, because the experience is the same for them either way, then chances are you are good GM and are certainly not a railroader.</blockquote>

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