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="Haltherrion" data-source="post: 5110304" data-attributes="member: 18253">It seems our experience varies or at least our definition of a sandbox variers. I've done both and am basing this on my own experience, including experience as recently as my last few gaming sessions. In preparation for a new campaign, I have spent the last 5 months [edit: guess it is more like 9 months, how time flies] building up a new campaign world (I've always liked world building). On the sandbox <-> ref-sets-story spectruum the new campaign is more on the sandbox side although not hard so. As the group is also transitioning to 4E, I have separately run 3 one-shot sessions with the 4th one tomorrow. I have spent far more time preparing the world for a game that hasn't even started yet than I have for any of these one-shot sessions and for those, being a ref that works from notes, I still have prepared various docs of 8 to 20 pages on each session (they include monster stat blocks so not all was personally generated). So, I'm not pulling this out of thin air. If you have an established campaign setting or are using someone else's setting, then you can reduce some of that effort but that established setting represents a large amount of work I'll warrant. And you will need to invest a fair amount of time mastering the source material if you are using a published setting. I'm not knocking a sandbox approach. I'm not knocking refs who leave more of the "story" to the players. I will confess an urge to counter-point posts when refs say "I leave it all to my players; I don't do story." Having played both sides of the spectruum, more extremely in my past, at least on the sandbox side, but still both sides of the middle now, I think the "ref driving story" side needs its advocates as well. Campaigns where the referee intervenes to create the story can be very successful. I've run in and participated in both before. I do therefore assert based on my experience that such campaigns can be just as viable as more player driven games and to put it as a negative that player driven games are not therefore superior to ref driven games. I don't recall seeing that explicitly stated but I do see enough statements that strongly imply player-driven is better. I don't make the converse claim that story driven campaigns are superior to player driven ones but to be honest, I think there are game groups where a story driven game would serve them better than a player driven game. One good ref can drive a story but a group needs several fully engaged players to drive a story in my experience. Obviously be sensitive to your players and back off if they want to take the reigns. Again, what you do is up to you. I'd just like to see refs consider the full spectruum of options if they are at a point where they are mulling their own styles and games. Sandbox is not inherently better than other game styles. Myself, I like variety, regularly make new settings and run both types of campaigns. And I do more setting definition for sandbox-ish campaigns and less for more story driven campaigns with about the same amount of pre-session prep so for me, sandbox means more work.</blockquote>

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