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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 5132953" data-attributes="member: 2205">A sandbox is the opposite end of a playstyle spectrum from a railroad.  A sandbox, a "pure" sandbox, puts all of the control in the hands of the players, with no prompting or prodding from the GM.  The players, if they so choose, can simply wander around interacting with any element in the setting that they encounter.  This also means that the setting needs to have an extraordinarily robust level of detail behind it, or barring that, an extraordinary amount of material allowing the GM to simulate that detail via randomization.I don't consider my own games to be sandboxes, because as a GM I work collaboratively with my players to develop a campaign direction.  I don't just sit back and wait for them to tell me what they want to to, I'm actively and wildly putting potential activities in front of them to see which ones they find interesting, and once they "bite" on something the others tend to fade into the background and we concentrate and collaborate together on the plot potential that they've elected to pursue.  In addition, I strongly believe that for every group I've ever run for or played with (and barring exceptional circumstances, every group I ever will run for or play with) that the players in particular need some direction at the start of a campaign.  I also plan from the beginning on the idea that my campaign will be of limited duration and will end at some point, probably six months or so from when it began, so as we get closer to the endpoint, the campaign arguably becomes even less sandboxy, because I stop giving them new things to react to and start closing in on open campaign elements that I don't want to leave "dangling" at the end of the campaign.Also, in addition to all that, my background into RPGs was that I was a fan of fantasy fiction first, not wargames.  As such, I like to take tricks, tips and techniques from literature, including session pacing, campaign pacing, and other elements that cause the end result to more resemble a fantasy novel, just one that we're writing collaboratively instead of one that I'm writing, and integrate them into my game.So regardless of how much I value player choice, and it's quite a lot, I think my approach and paradigm about the game are fundamentally not really the same as the sandbox style.</blockquote>

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