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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 5012661" data-attributes="member: 21169">I don't see improved player motivation to be a strength of sandbox. After all, the players have already chosen to turn up. They've travelled maybe some distance. They've selected this GM's game out of many activities they could be doing. The players are already motivated to play in whatever the GM serves up for the evening's entertainment. Whether he has prepared one, or several, adventures doesn't matter.What I feel is the great strength of sandbox is that it makes player decisions matter. The players are more important. They can affect the course of the campaign at a more macroscopic level than in a non-sandbox game.A possible flaw in a sandbox is if the adventures on offer are too similar. This makes the players choice less important. It doesn't really matter if you have a choice of a dozen different adventures if all those adventures are basically the same. The Caves of Chaos in the module The Keep On The Borderlands suffer from this problem to a large extent. The humanoid lairs are very, very same-y. Guard post, common room, females and young, prisoners, chief, treasure hoard. It's basically just the same lair repeated six times over but with different hit dice. D&D in general suffers from this problem - too many dungeons. Too many monsters. Too many fights.It could be said that this great strength of sandbox, the players ability to choose adventures, is only an improvement over non-sandbox within the course of a session. In a non-sandbox game, the GM can still prepare adventures according to player desires between sessions. It's only within the confines of a session that he's more restricted.Here I'm using sandbox to mean the GM has prepared more than one adventure prior to each session. So it's perfectly possible, even in a non-sandbox, for the GM to select his single adventure according to the events of the previous session, and/or the desires expressed by the players.</blockquote>

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