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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5007489" data-attributes="member: 26473">How were the players introduced to the villain? How did they come to be pursuing the villain? How did they learn of the villain's plot?How they become vested in the events of the game is one of the important characteristics of sandbox play, in my experience.Characters have goals and pursue them, putting off or aside other options, in sandbox play, too.Choosing how the adventurers will pursue their goals, from among multiple options, is not the same kind of player choice as whether or not to engage with the situation in the first place.In a sandbox game, dungeons are explored for the characters' reasons, not the referee's.The other day I was fiddling around with what some gamers would probably call a 'relationship map' of some of the significant NPCs in the <a href="http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/le-ballet-de-l-acier" target="_blank">Flashing Blades campaign</a> I'm working on. 'Relationship map,' in my estimation, is just a fancy term for a flowchart, so I was struck by the comment upthread that a dungeon is also an elaborate flowchart, because when I look at the boxes containing the names of the different NPCs and the lines showing the relationships between them, well, darn if it doesn't look like a lot like a dungeon.From this perspective, characters are 'rooms,' some with one or two connecting 'passages' (relationships), others are major intersections with a half-dozen or more connections. There are 'secret passages' as well, relationships that are out of the public eye. Each 'room' may offer hazards and rewards, in the form of the goals and resources of the character.The adventurers can explore the 'rooms' and 'passages' in the course of the game. The thing to remember is this: I'm not deciding for them what rooms and passages they will follow. They can visit as many or as few rooms as they want, engage as many or as few of the non-player characters as they choose. They may find that in the course of their explorations that challenges flow from some rooms across the 'dungeon' to find them: make an ally in one room, and you may find that gets you an enemy in two or three other rooms elsewhere.So sandbox games don't require 'sites' to be physical localities, in my opinion.</blockquote>

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