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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 6506181" data-attributes="member: 907">That's because sandboxes of any appreciable size are very hard to produce in a form usable by others. Some dungeons make up small-scale sandboxes - they are places where Things Are, but not necessarily where Things Are Happening. I'm exaggerating somewhat here to make the differences show up more clearly, but bear with me.A Platonic railroad adventure consists of a series of encounters and events. The designer has a great deal of control over what happens. That means they can focus all their attention on just those particular things, and similarly the DM can focus on the current step of the adventure in order to understand it and present it well. That's a fairly easy thing to produce.A Platonic sandbox, on the other hand, is wide open. There's a fey glade in the forest, that the PCs may or may not investigate or even find. There are orcs in the hills - will the PCs do anything about those? The Mayor is in league with dark forces - will the PCs learn that, and what will they do about it, and what happens if they don't? That requires a lot of work on the part of the designer - and it's likely that a significant portion of that work won't be applicable to any given campaign. It also requires a lot of work on the part of the DM, who must familiarize himself with the sandbox enough that he knows what happens when the PCs push various buttons, and he needs to know what parts interface with other parts. For example, if the PCs locate a bandit camp and want to know how many the bandits are, the DM will either have to find that information in the material, or make something up. If the DM doesn't remember the info and says "a few dozen", and later notices that the bandits were placed in the adventure with the intent that they could be recruited to help against the goblin horde, and the designer thought of them as at least a hundred... well, now the DM's going to have to figure out a way to patch that.If you're making your own sandbox, you know your players better than the designer. You also know which parts of the sandbox are important for other parts, and which ones are open to improvisation.</blockquote>

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