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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 5128209" data-attributes="member: 2205">It's neither charitable nor uncharitable.  It's an attempt to describe the approach with some objectivity.The problem I have with your approach is one that I've seen many times in this specific discussion over time: people who like sandboxes, or profess to, and people who don't, when you get to brass tacks and start really describing their games, they sound eerily similar for folks who are supposedly coming at this from diametrically opposed philosophies.Which leads me to the conclusion that people who profess the sandbox approach are merely conflating the term "sandbox" with "reasonably well-run game."  When your description of a "charitably characterized sandbox" focuses at least as much on elements that aren't unique to sandboxes, then I have to wonder why there's such an impetus to label such a game a sandbox, exactly.Which goes back to a point I made earlier; it seems that much of the pro-sandbox crowd has created such an inclusive interpretation of the term, that it means very little that's more specific than "anything that's not a railroad."  That doesn't strike me as a particularly useful label to have.This is perhaps where I find myself at odds with the sandbox approach.  Maybe I'm reading too much between the lines, but much of the tenor of sandbox discussion online seems to have this Mel Gibson shouting "Freedom!" at the top of his lungs, all the while subverting the games in the name of an abstract principle.  Hyperbolic?  Possibly.  Except, of course, that I've seen too many examples of it in play to not be wary of it.As a GM, I hate the concept of a railroad.  I'm almost religious about making sure my players have enough environmental feedback to have several meaningful choices with regards to direction in which the campaign can go, and I'm equally religious about not planning more than a few hastily scrawled notes about what each of those potential directions really means until I see what the players actually do.  To me, that sounds very nearly exactly what you describe as the action/reaction model of campaign running, except without the unnecessary pejoratives overtones of "if you're not very imaginative, maybe Adventure Paths are for you after all."  So why don't I call my campaign a sandbox?  If it looks and quacks like a duck, it must be one, right?And I think the difference is in the approach.  While I like freedom as much as the next guy, and I like my campaigns, both the ones I play in and the ones I run, to have enough freedom for me to explore both the setting and the character, to some extent, there's also a very strong element, to me, of "this is the game the GM brought to the table tonight.  Are you going to engage it, or insist on doing your own thing the detriment of the session and the group overall?"  Too strident a passion for sandbox seems to me to be pushing the limits of the implicit social contract.  Again: am I reading too much between the lines?  Possibly.  But I've seen an awful lot of that vibe from many sandboxy supporters.  Most likely, they've got a group where the social contract is a bit different; where the GM doesn't expect to come with a "game for tonight" so to speak, so there's no friction between players and GM.  Which you describe in one of these posts here as a good thing, but I never would.  But contrary to apparently popular interpretation of my posts, I'm not trying to claim badwrongfun on those who like it, merely understand why it is that this has suddenly popped up as a gamestyle that has a lot more visibility than it used to.  If, as you say, it's a natural evolution of the very concept of roleplaying in the first place, why, thirty five some odd years after the advent of the hobby, is it now become such a term du jour?That said, it's also my experience that a "narrow-wide-narrow" approach leads to games that I enjoy better.  When you first start up a new campaign, few players have a good handle on the setting or their characters either one.  If you just throw descriptions at them and expect them create something out of that, it tends to be a frustrating exercise in spinning wheels until they get a bit of traction.  Rather, I'd prefer to lead with a slightly heavier hand as a GM until the players have a better sense of what's really out there for them to do, at which point I let go of the reins and let them decide the course of the game.And I like a nice satisfying conclusion to campaigns, so some GM intervention to bring things together into one is a requirement for me these days.The idea that the sandbox approaches "real life" in its multiplicity of options and control by the characters is, I think, also a false analogy.  Rather, it's what happens when the GM expects every player to be an entrepreneur. In real life, people act on "plot hooks" that come their way, and then follow those plot hooks to where they lead.  They naturally narrow down their subsets of options into those that look like they have the most potential in a way that is best replicated by the GM giving them some solid "direction" at various points in the game, rather than continually telling them that they can do whatever they want to.Then again, that's not so different from what you said either, below.I don't disagree.  That's not anywhere near where I wanted to go at any point in the discussion.  But, it happens anyway, sometimes.</blockquote>

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