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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 8242878" data-attributes="member: 85555">I actually agree with a lot of this. I might quibble over specific phrasing in instances, but I agree that one of the big challenges of sandbox is getting players to feel connected to the world they live in initially (this is why I think in most of the advice and even in the Justin Alexander video there is usually a phrase like "eventually the sandbox should run itself because the players are finding their own hooks". It takes time to get the point where the players know enough about the setting to do that and where their characters have enough connections in the world to feel like they truly inhabit it. In my experience the first couple of months of play are sort of like movies where an out of town character shows up in the big city for the first time and they need to get their footing. I also agree about exploration. I don't really see exploration as the focus, I see characters as the focus and I agree about PCs and NPCs not being purely rational actors. This is why I talk a lot about intuition and emotion. When I am running an NPC, obviously I know their stated motives and goals on the page, but I also feel how that character responds to the things and that guides my judgement just as much, often more. And I think something you said here reminds me why things like family ties are so important. The more sandboxes I've run, the more I've tried to establish with players what their family background is and who their living relatives are (and I often let them have a lot of creative control here, though I will push back simply to avoid it being wish fulfillment----since I think their family members need to have goals, secrets and desires of their own). This has really helped make my sandboxes work much better. When characters are rooted to family it definitely makes them behave differently. That is also why I think characters getting married and having children can really be beneficial in a campaign.</blockquote>

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