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="Transformer" data-source="post: 5127076" data-attributes="member: 70008">My idea was to pinpoint Hobo's theoretical endpoint opposite 'railroading.' I don't think you would ever actually see a game where the players have all the choices in the world but the world doesn't really change and a plot can't really develop. I imagine if you got close it would look a bit like a video game: you can go to various places and do some stuff, solve some quests, but cities and nations don't actually change.Anyway, my main point was that the key idea here is that of an essentially GM-driven story vs. an essentially player-driven story. Hobo's original concept of the sandbox was just as a theoretical opposite of railroading, where the campaign is totally open but you don't get development or a plot or anything. I tried to describe what that might look like, and indeed, under that definition, a sandbox is a bad thing.But then the pro-sandbox crowd said that isn't really what they mean by a sandbox. Rather, the defining feature of a sandbox is that instead of the GM essentially crafting the plot (still offering the players meaningful choices, of course), he presents the players with set pieces and NPCs and locations and the players create the plot by pursuing their characters goals.Yes, I see that. I was having trouble expressing what I meant. What I really meant, I suppose, wasn't that in a good sandbox game the world is narrowed by the players' choices but that in a good sandbox game the campaign is focused by the player's choices. The GM presents the players with a whole world to interact with, but the point of the sandbox game isn't that the players interact with the whole thing or location hop; they might very well immediately focus on a single location and never leave it for the rest of the campaign. At the very least, they will eventually furnish a plot out of their character goals and so end up focusing on a particular corner of the campaign world. It's still a sandbox game as long as the whole world remains open to them and as long as its essentially the players who are creating the story.Would you agree with the following, pro-sandbox people? Under this "GM-driven story vs. player-driven story" notion of a sandbox game, the size of the area presented to the players is almost irrelevant. A game in which the GM designs a whole big world and walks the players through most of it, even giving them lots of choices where to go, but in which it's basically the GM who is writing the plot is not a sandbox game. On the other hand, a game in which the players have one small frontier to explore, but the whole game is driven by the players and the whole plot grows out of their goals, is a sandbox game.</blockquote>

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