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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tom B1" data-source="post: 7949510" data-attributes="member: 6879023">To me, Traveller (early years) felt like a D&D 'sandbox' game. There were adventures, but there was no long adventure path, the adventures were not so heavily adapted to one place and could often be moved into a personal universe easily enough, and there was a lot of room for player direction and agency in where the game was going. Later D&D versions provided lots of examples of the fixed plot adventure paths (aka the railroad).I have come to regard the GM as someone who creates a number of NPCs, organizations, and events, and the NPCs and organizations have goals and strategies, and from those Actors come actions. If the players choose to involve themselves (or sometimes get involved by incident or accident), then an interaction happens that can, afterwards, be called an adventure. My job as GM is to serve as a creator of colour in the universe which players can choose to engage with or they can create some themselves by initiating choices and creating new situations. I'm basically the universe's resolution engine. The players ought to have the agency, with opportunities sent their way to consider. The GM should not have all the power.That said, AW has a couple of problems in my mind: They treat it like improv and the GM is supposed to respond to anything (rather than saying 'ah, no... let's not go that way'). That's fine if the GM has the context to understand and do something useful with every suggestion the players make .... but it still runs the chance of creating some things that can really screw up a somewhat coalesced and coherent campaign. I don't think that AW acknowledges that the GM has something to contribute and that some things players might suggest cannot be easily adapted to the particular themes and flavours of a given setting. A lot can, but some will just be a net negative.  Beyond that, you often find players that do not WANT to drive the game - they love being tourists in someone else's scenarios and they will respond, but never initiate. An AW game dependent on those sorts of players would fall flat.There's a balance in the middle. As I age, I lean more toward the sandbox + GM-as-resolution-engine + GM-as-event-hook-generator model, vs. the GM-as-tour-guide + GM-as-director-of-storylines + pre-set modules/paths. The one thing I will say, you need to be sharper, more think-on-your-feet with the former approach, versus the latter where you can rely on pre-written product. That can be hard to learn and you need to have a simple system (skill system and a sense of the setting) and then be able to flow with player idea and throw out some hooks without having them fully developed (because the players will either invent a new hook and you'll agree to go with that or they'll pick your least favourite one.... because that's what they do... lol).I'm really feeling we ought to be moving out into a new Traveller thread. I like the discussion, but it has strayed a long way from board game design or the role of creativity in game production.</blockquote>[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]

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