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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 8242868" data-attributes="member: 16586">Back to the main topic. One of the issues I have personally experienced with traditional sandbox techniques (particularly OSR style sandbox techniques) where a GM will spend months designing a setting with the expectation that players will want to actively explore it is that on both sides of the screen it often feels like space aliens coming to a new planet. Characters seldom feel like integrated parts of the setting, often because there is very little effort in actually building out a real life for them. Games like RuneQuest, Classic Traveller, and their modern cousins like Conan 2d20 feel slightly better here, but often the setting is constructed too high a level for my tastes. I find a lot of sandbox design tends to over focus on social groupings and not enough on characters as people with real relationships and connections to the outside world. In gaming I think there is often an over intellectualization of setting material where GMs often fall into the economist's trap of treating everyone like rational actors. In my personal experience most people (myself included) are phenomenal at posthoc rationalization, but not often guided by their rational minds when making decisions. This might be actor's bias creeping through though.To  a certain extent I think sometimes making exploration a central goal of play can harm the sense of being there in the moment. Mostly because I want my characters to feel like they live in the world rather than like they are exploring it. Things that are part of their everyday lives should not feel new to their player.Generally when I'm playing a character focused game I do not want to have a detached view of the fiction. Within reason I want sense of my character's perspective of the world. That includes intuition, what they know, what they have experienced, who they care about, and their emotional responses to the events unfolding before them. I want things to feel like personal and not in a performative way. Not saying people using more traditional sandbox techniques do not want that, but in my experience that sense of integration can often be lacking. That's why to a certain extent I tend to be a strong believer in a more integrated and ongoing approach to setting design for more character focused play. I tend to prefer that authority over framing and backstory still remains firmly in the GM's hands, but think a focus on the more immediate situation and the character's daily life is beneficial.This all does assume that you are not really playing an adventuring game. My character focused games tend to focus on characters whose normal existence pretty much is an adventure.</blockquote>

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