The Shaman
First Post
Or as I like to put it, I'm neither the director nor the screenwriter - I'm the location manager and the production assistant who herds the extras.
What makes a Sandbox?
- Thread starter Witty Comeback
- Start date
Actually, here's my cool new definition. A sandbox is a world that operates according to certain internal rules (many of them embodied in random generation tables). It is a world that can be beaten, and it is a world that doesn't pull its punches, either. For this reason, player choices are meaningful. They can lead to re-naming cities in their own honor, or they can lead to stupidly trying to fight an ancient dragon at first level ... and dying.
Sounds like what I prefer to DM. The ancient dragon's over there, the skeletons are over here - fight either whenever you want at your own peril. All of the world's challenges are not keyed to the PC's given level. I imagine the original Dragon Warrior video game.. At level one, I can hang out around the castle, killing slimes and saving for some better armor, or I can charge into the swamp, hoping to get lucky and find a set of armor in a chest, but I'll likely die.
Sadrik
First Post
It is not just a DM style it affects the whole table, players included, and they have to buy into it as well.
In my own game a lot of the details of a situation have to come up on the fly and I really require my players to jot down notes and names and details about things that I am winging. Perhaps I have a bad memory or I have too many threads going but I do like the notes to help refresh their memory and my own. The other thing that the players have to know is that they can and will not be penalized for turn the cheek, nothing will be lost if they decide, "You know what, lets come back to this later."
I have seen games where players just want minis on the table and expect the DM to string balanced encounters together for them to kill. This is antithetical to the intent of a sandbox game. Ironically, many dungeons are just this too. Not a bad way or wrong way to play but not my own preferred way to play.
In my own game a lot of the details of a situation have to come up on the fly and I really require my players to jot down notes and names and details about things that I am winging. Perhaps I have a bad memory or I have too many threads going but I do like the notes to help refresh their memory and my own. The other thing that the players have to know is that they can and will not be penalized for turn the cheek, nothing will be lost if they decide, "You know what, lets come back to this later."
I have seen games where players just want minis on the table and expect the DM to string balanced encounters together for them to kill. This is antithetical to the intent of a sandbox game. Ironically, many dungeons are just this too. Not a bad way or wrong way to play but not my own preferred way to play.
This is where you leave the world of definition, and wander into editorializing, I think. You don't get to decide what is "meaningful" for others. We each find meaning where we may. Other than that, the definition looks imprecise, but accurate enough, i suppose.
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pawsplay
Hero
I don't think those folks represent a mainstream opinion. Historically, I believe the term arose as a retronym to describe something that was dissimilar to the usual "JRPG" format and became a tabletop RPG term sometime in the early Internet era. It originally referred to the playing environment, not to a resolution system, and I think it remains clearly only if it is used in that way.
Obviously, terms change over time, but suggesting that sandbox, therefore status quo, doesn't seem to add anything and it does suggest several logical contradictions in the idea of a status quo encounter. First, imagine you are playing Fantasy Craft. If you try to set up status quo encounters, you will quickly discover they scale, to a great extent, based on PC power. On the other hand, imagine you set up a world in which more distant opponents exist and are training... if the PCs meet them later rather than sooner, the NPCs will be corrrespondingly more powerful. Is that status quo or tailored? On the other hand, the logical problems evaporate immediately if you take status quo/tailored to mean literally whether you adjust the encounters to match the PCs. Instantly, we see that Fantasy Craft encounters are primarly tailored, and in the second case, it depends on whether that training is mechanistic or defined in some metagame respect based on PC ability.
"I can go here, I can go there, I can do anything" does not assume anything about how encounters are resolved. A Cr 18 dragon presupposes a level-based system with tiered monsters; no such thing exists in Fantasy Craft. Although we might imagine a dragon as having CR 18 statistics, in fact, that whole system is an artifact of a particular combat resolution system and experience system. If you replaced d20 with "d02," you would have the same dragon, but the PC would have an even chance of winning, regardless of when and where they met the dragon.
I'm not crazy about the term "linear"... I usually say programmatic to mean the GM prefers a certain series of encounters.
pawsplay
Hero
I believe there was also a DW game where the monsters quietly leveled up with you, making advancement futile, but preserving essentially the same exploration model.
pawsplay
Hero
It's not laser precise, but meaningful choice is a good term. You can argue about how meaningful a particular choice is, but I've seen wide agreement in how it is defined.
Erm, in an existential sense, perhaps. I was talking about whether player decisions do or do not affect outcomes. In a game.
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