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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5817426" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, I can't of course know how any given person runs their campaign...That being said, I think if you were to closely examine what you do in enough depth you'd find that there are a structure of conventions that are a bit like arms limitation treaties. The DM and the players abide within certain 'boxes' and if they don't then things can break down. Even the finest sandbox can't be detailed enough to tell you exactly, without any DM adjudication, exactly what the members of the thieves guild can and can't get up to when someone messes with them. You may have a list of how many thieves and whatnot of what levels and what items they have, and etc. but in a real living society there are so many other factors. How much time and energy do they have to put into a vendetta? Which officials exactly can they bribe and how often and at what cost? Which of the various secrets of the city do they know exactly? Will they torch a whole block of the town to get back at you or is that really beyond what they're willing to do? Yet these are exactly the sort of questions that "full war" will bring up. The DM will have to rule on these things, even if those rulings are made rather subconsciously and not explicitly. We choose what tables to roll on, and when, and how to interpret the results. We decide when and how the bad guys will come up with and execute plans, etc. It is my thesis that FAR MORE of what actually happens, even in the most structured sandbox, is a reflection of the DM's will and unspoken and unacknowledged conventions about the boundaries of what will and will not work in play. So in the end 'CaW' is really more of a limited sort of 'brushfire' between the players and the DM than an all-out war. Each side knows (or soon learns) that there is some 'territory' within the whole space of possible game play where the 'fun part' is. Several things bound this, but one of the primary ones is that the players need a significant degree of agency in order to stay interested in the game. If all they do is react constantly to almost unanticipateable attacks from enemies that have no precise limits on what they can do then they'll tend to lose that agency, so the PCs are generally far more the 'active' participants in the story by convention. Other bounds are things like propriety, there are generally certain sorts of acts and imagery that are 'not fun' in a game, and it is VERY uncommon for those bounds to be exceeded (though I know of a few groups who's limits are less strict than others).</blockquote>

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