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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4704409" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't agree with that at all.  I find non-sandbox games enjoyable.  I don't disapprove of that style of play, and have even run sessions with a non-sandbox approach where I put the characters on a railroad for the purposes of achieving some high concept or story event. But the two games are extremely different.To begin with, let's just look at the evidence of this thread.  On the one side, one group is saying that dragons should be placed far far away (or not at all) until such time that the characters are ready to face them.  On the other side, you have people like me saying, "You know I think it would be cool if an angry Elder Wyrm was the starting point of a low level campaign."  One the one hand you have people saying, "I think a stedding of hill giants should be located in a far away remote place."  And on the other hand, you have people like me who have started play with a stedding of hill giants located basically an overnight journey away.  In short, there is a very different style of game world being created by the two different groups based on how they tend to approach design.    Based on my own experience both as a DM and a player, sandbox play is more conducive to having RP be the focus of the game, because right from the start you immediately throw out the assumption that every single encounter can probably be overcome by combat.  In non-sandbox play, like say an adventure path, the purpose of monsters in the game is to be combat obstacles for the PC's.  Players raised in non-sandbox play are going to see everything ugly as something to fight, and will probably lay ambushes and roll initiative versus everything despite the DM's intentions - forcing the DM to go to cut scenes to try to keep PC's on the railroad.   Players raised in the sandbox are going to be much much more likely to parley with anything ugly to see if they can get it to agree to leave them alone, because they are never really sure whether they can handle anything that they meet.Based on my own experience as a DM and a player, non-sandbox high level plays often sucks.  It's one thing to be dragged down the railroad through tricks and traps and combat encounters when your player doesn't yet really have a stake in the game world, and combat is simple, and when you aren't yet emotionally invested in the character, and when you can always roll up a new one.  It's quite another thing to be dragged through a whole series of 'level appropriate encounters' when combat becomes a bloody complicated series of spell explosions and itterative attacks, with characters that you are emotionally invested in, who already have things that they care about and ideas of their own, and when creating a new character can take hours.  Equally, its annoying as you level up to notice that you are making no progress because every freaking thing you meet has leveled up at the same time.  The more that happens, the more you wonder, "Why in Hades do we keep using bigger numbers and making the math more complicated, just so we can keep playing in the same damn we played when we were 1st or 3rd level?"  I mean, if the world is filled with level appropriate encounters, for crying out loud, forget about the damn leveling up process, use the same stats for everything, and use flavor to tell it apart.</blockquote>

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