Quote Originally Posted by Skrum View Post
OK so you're playing a sandbox, the concept of which I literally addressed. Directly. The Dm is coloring in the road the players are on just ahead of them...and that is exactly what I said. The DM isn't going to spend a ton of time rendering places in the world the players couldn't possibly reach, because that would be a huge waste.

I personally run a more world-forward game. Like, before the first game begins I come up with a couple different locations, make up the relationship between them, and then introduce some kind of event, NPC or NPC's acting upon the area, what have you. The idea being that this world existed before the players showed up, will continue to exist after they leave, and the NPC's have an agenda of their own. I'll probably have something like a Main Antagonist that's got some plan, and they'll make moves to carry out that plan, and the players can figure out how they want to interact with that. I.e., if I read my players and their characters correctly, they're probably gonna be fighting Vladdic VonVillainGuy at some point.

Also, modules. A lot of DM's use modules for their games. That's a great example of "can take lots of paths, but the paths end up in certain place."
Sure, and if someone said 'I run modules and I don't find out of combat abilities to matter' I wouldn't blink. But somehow this became something like 'of course everyone only runs modules, so how can out of combat abilities matter?'

Like people stopped believing in games that aren't modules being a thing. That's weird to me.

I mean heck, out of the three campaigns I described I'd only call the first an actual sandbox. The other two are just 'campaigns'. There's stuff that's going to matter no matter what, but there's lots more stuff that comes about because of what characters do rather than because of planning in advance. I guess you could call that a sandbox but it doesn't seem very far on the sandbox spectrum to me - like, 'it's not a railroad therefore it's a sandbox'?

Like, the infinite stair campaign was very much 'serial TV series' for the first half in structure, with almost no agency about where the next week's episode was going to take place. But if the characters wanted to do their act and get out, investigate the strange reluctance of people to look at the night sky, or steal everything and flee, or recruit talented people into their troupe, it's up to them. Even when it's something like walking into a Harmonium military occupation, do you perform for the troops or do you spread the ideals of the resistance or do you spy on the Harmonium commander or do you say 'skip this one, we stay on the stair'?