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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8645916" data-attributes="member: 6670763">I've been pondering over the last couple of days about what people really mean when they are talking about sandboxes, hexcrawls, or West Marches campaigns. In many cases, people are simply repeating a term they've seen used for a specific campaign described with more or less detail, and assume that everyone using the term is thinking about the same parameters as in that one example. That does lead to some discussions about whether the campaign someone outlining is really a case of X as claimed, but I think even more often than that people assume they are talking about the same thing but appear to have some significantly different assumptions of what is actually being discussed.The most simple example would be the term West Marches. That title is literally the name of one specific campaign that the creator described very well with a good amount of detail. But in addition to the play procedures and game structure, that campaign also included the aspect of being an open-table game in which the GM left it up to players to organize parties for essentially serial one-shot adventures, which have to be completed in one go, and the players can't set up adventures with identical groups for metagame reasons. Are the organizational procedures of that group an integral part of the game structure? Some people assume it is, others assume that this has nothing to do with a campaign being a West Marches campaign or not.But you also have hexcrawls, where there isn't a clear consensus whether any campaign that uses a hex map is also a hexcrawl, or if it has to be a dungeon crawl shifted to a wilderness environment with a hexmap. And does sandbox mean the campaign just has to be open world, or does it include the additional element of the PCs changing the game world towards their desired state through their actions?No clue where all of this might be going or if anyone has anything meaningful to respond to this. But I think that when it comes to open world campaigns, there are actually many more unspoken assumptions than commonly established parameters regarding what kind of campaign people are actually talking about. Sandbox as a term covers such a wide range of different things, that calling a campaign a sandbox might actually introduce more confusion than narrow things down. Can we do something to bring a bit more structure into this very open space of vagueness and ambiguity? Are there actually distinctively different approaches to setting up and running open-world campaigns that would make useful categories to work with?</blockquote>

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