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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5044410" data-attributes="member: 55271">Then why are you arguing with me? What part of, "There's nothing wrong with openly communicating with your GM about what your goals are and what you'd like to see in the campaign..." didn't you understand?OTOH, what part of "...but that communication with the GM doesn't require that your character sits on his ass and waits for God to deliver something interesting for him to do as if it were a pan pizza." didn't you understand?You're insisting that "OOC communication about what people want in the campaign" and "sitting on your ass waiting for the GM to hand you an adventure" are inseperable. They're not.In fact, the pairing seems quite odd. If you're being proactive OOC (by communicating what you want), why wouldn't you also choose to be proactive IC (by going out and looking for what you want)?Allow me to join the legion of posters saying, "Been there. Done that. Not going to waste my money on the t-shirt."This is probably a good opportunity to take a step back and revisit a point that Snoweel has been ignoring:(1) There are sandbox-compatible techniques.(2) There are techniques that are inimical to sandbox values.A sandbox campaign is defined by being predominantly made up of #1.But this is not a purity test. It's simply not useful to treat "sandbox" as if it were the campaign equivalent of sexual virginity.By the same token, it's ridiculous to suggest that railroading, for example, "makes a sandbox" because any given sandbox campaign can tolerate a little bit of railroading without ceasing to be a functional sandbox.A discussion about what techniques are sandbox-compatible, sandbox-beneficial, and sandbox-inimical seems valuable. Trying to come up with some sort of meaningless purity test doesn't seem valuable at all.There are different degrees of input, however. There's a continuum between "I want to fight a dragon!" and "Here's the lair of a dragon that I mapped up for my PC to go explore". The latter end of that scale would, IMO, move us pretty solidly out of sandbox territory; but the other end of the scale wouldn't.To play a bit of devil's advocate: What if only some of the players are part of drawing up any given part of the maze? Can it still be a sandbox?For a real world example: Unless I'm mistaken, Rob Kuntz continued to play in Gygax's Greyhawk campaign even after he became a co-DM and began developing his own portions of the campaign. I'd argue there's nothing in that arrangement that would be inimical to the sandbox.I dunno if I'd qualify that as "ceasing to be a sandbox", though. I don't think a sandbox stops being a sandbox just because the PCs have decided to spend 10 sessions pursuing a single goal.There's nothing about a "series of murders" or a "time table" that suggests linear adventure design to me. It certainly can be, but it <a href="http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/three-clue-rule.html" target="_blank">doesn't have to be</a>."Series of a ritual murders" is a toy in the sandbox that the PCs can either choose to pick up and play with or ignore completely. In this it doesn't differ from "dungeon infested with monsters". The PCs can go into the dungeon and explore; or they can go "into" the series of ritual murders and explore. Or they can ignore them both and head into the next hex.This is something that I think tends to be under-appreciated by people who haven't actually run sandbox campaigns: It takes a surprisingly light seeding of material before you'll discover the PCs getting involved in things you never expected them to get involved with.For example, in my last campaign I had prepped several "backdrops". These are basically timelines of events that run in the background of a campaign -- they're the news headlines and large-scale events that the actions of the PCs are unlikely to interact with (in much the same way that you and I are unlikely to interact with the death of Michael Jackson or parents convincing the world that their kid is stuck in a hot air balloon). One of these involved a political leader declaring rebellion against his Overlord.The PCs managed to trigger the leader's declaration of rebellion months ahead of time because they inadvertently handed him political ammunition that he could use to make it happen. And then they managed to accidentally stumble onto the site where this guy was going to betray and murder a bunch of the Overlord's sympathizers, leaving me scrambling to provide stats and specifics for an event that I never thought would be played out "onstage" (so to speak).The fallout from both of those events completely shifted the shape of local politics in the campaign and left the PCs deeply entangled in a series of events that I had originally planned to be nothing more than background scenery of the "larger world".And this kind of stuff happens all the time.I'd recommend checking out <a href="http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/prep-scenario.html" target="_blank">Don't Prep Plots</a>, particularly this <a href="http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/prep-scenario-example.html" target="_blank">example of using scenario timelines</a>.It all pretty much boils down to how you're using the timelines. If the timelines become straitjackets, then you're no longer in a sandbox. If the timelines are just a default plan of attack that is freely discarded or modified when the PCs interact with it, then you're still in the sandbox.Part of the art of running a sandbox is learning what constitutes useful prep and what constitutes prep that isn't going to survive contact with the PCs. In general, I find it useful to have a default that assumes the PCs don't interfere because it gives me a baseline to improvise off of. (And it also tells me what happens if the PCs don't get involved in this particular scenario.) Almost all contingency planning beyond that is useless, IME. It doesn't hurt to jot down a few notes on cool ideas you might have flitting about, but any time spent on trying to plan for "what happens if the PCs do X?" is generally a waste of time because the PCs are just as likely to do any of the other 25 letters in the alphabet.Used properly, a timeline can greatly enhance a sandbox: Without a baseline timeline, it's very easy for elements of the game world to default to a static "nothing happens unless the PCs are looking at it" state.OTOH, you're not a computer and you can't realistically keep an entire world running in the background. You have to pick your battles. As a general rule of thumb (which I'll violate whenever it seems appropriate), I try to design things in static holding patterns ("the orcish slavers continue operations as usual") until the PCs "touch" them and then I'll start tracking that element of the campaign world in more detail until the PCs "finish" it ("if they return within 2 days, the orcish slavers have sold d% of their stock; in 5 days, the orcish slavers have sold all their stock and started packing up their camp; in 10 days, the camp has been abandoned").The use of the word "trajectory" is quite brilliant, I think.</blockquote>

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