Quote from: CRKrueger;943136The What is the least important part of the linear/sandbox divide, the more important questions are Why, How and most importantly, *IF*.

Expanding on the point.  If an entire world was made up of nothing but pre-purchased modules (which in and of itself would be kind of hard to do, simply because you couldn't make all the maps work together) but whenever you played one (taking G1 as an example) you chose to head there, you decided to use stealth and magic to steal everything the Giants had, then hightailed it to Greyhawk to drown yourself in Ale and Whores while the Giants started taking out innocent towns for vengeance and you didn't give a shit, then yeah, that's playing in sandbox style.  How isn't it?  With ONLY pre-purchased modules it's not sustainable over the long term though.

The problem comes of course, with there not being a module assuming the Giants, having drawn orcs, ogres, etc to their cause through reputation, have kidnapped Gnomes and put them to work turning the Hill Giant Fort into a stone keep, so when the Circle of Eight finds out what the PCs did, and Geases them to return and take care of this shit or die, you'll have to make things up.  Or, find another module and make some changes to it, but then we're running outside "pre-purchased" a bit.

Quote from: cranebump;943133isn't that really just me creating hubs for the mini-railroad?

If it feels like it part of the setting then no it is not a mini-railroad. Especially if you are willing to let players "trash" the module. Remember there are real-life situations that have a optimal path. A railroaded campaign is one where there is truly one path from start to finish. Even then there are some specific exceptions for example a campaign that winds up being centered on a single mission.

Quote from: cranebump;943133I guess my question is, how open does the world need to be to be called a true sandbox.?

The foundation of all sandbox campaign is the willingness of the referee to let the PCs "trash" the campaign. However optimal or non-optimal their choices may be. The sandbox campaign is a sum of everything that goes on, not one or a handful of situation.

Also note is more than likely, you will encounter groups or players that from their "point of view" there is only path to the situation you present as part of the campaign. If they are adamant in their views and unbending the best way to deal with it is to make sure in the next campaign they start in a time period or place within the setting that avoids the situation they have difficulty. Another are players who are very good at strategy in terms of game mechanics. Given time they make characters or organize the party in such a way that they can win most of the plausible encounters in the campaign. Because I ran the Majestic Wilderlands, I was able to evolve many situations so that it doesn't matter if you can kill everything that moves, it still doesn't "solve" the problem. It just creates a different set of complications to deal with later.

Quote from: cranebump;943133Because it seems to me that presenting a series of smaller, prepackaged "storehs" is no better or worse than having your group show up to hear, "okay, you find yourself standing before the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief."  I guess the difference is that you can ignore the bait, but is it still a sandbox if the world is entirely prepackaged bait?

I would say that only a 1/3 of my Majestic Wilderlands adventures over the years are original creations of my own. However I would add that 3/4 of the situations that SURROUNDS the adventures I put in are my own original work. And for the 1/4 where I just the background as written, it nearly always nicely dovetails with the details I created for the region.

I consider published modules are part of the Bag of stuff. I treat them as fully fleshed out locales. For example Steading of the Hill Giant Chief as originally presented by Gygax was one of the three giant modules where a cult of Drows were manipulating the Giant to attack the surface world to further their evil goals. Eventually leading to the D series where the PCs wind up confronting the Drow directly. In my hands the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, was one of three giant locales all involved in a plot of a ancient dragon named Pan Caulderax to attack the surface world to further the dragon's evil goals. Eventually leading to the Majestic Fastness a underground dwarven city taken over by the dragon.

As it turned out the PC fully exported the Steading and the Glacial Rift, but after they killed Snurre in the Halls of the Fire Giant King, they took what treasure they found and left. Never bothering to exploring the lower levels. So it took a few more adventures to figure out the source of the events they been dealing with was a result of Pan Caulderax plots.

Quote from: CRKrueger;943136How is any world not prepackaged bait?  I create a city, NPC's with goals and motivations, I determine stuff that NPCs are up to, figure out what PCs are likely to get involved with and detail those and draw up maps.  Is that prepackaged bait?

If something isn't prepackaged, it's procedurally generated or just asspulled on command.  

The facts that...
1. A threat exists.
2. This threat exists physically somewhere.
3. If you want to end the threat, travelling to the physical location will probably be necessary.
...don't preclude a sandbox.  A sandbox has edges, it is not the Sahara.  What makes it a sandbox is whether I can decide to go or not, whether I deal with the giants myself or call in a marker from the Great Gold Wyrm whose egg I returned to have her do it, whether I can take over the place and lead the Giants to a New World Order.

The What is the least important part of the linear/sandbox divide, the more important questions are Why, How and most importantly, *IF*.

Well, I sorta figured as much, but I wanted to ask the question anyway, because it just occurred to me that my own various entities here and there, while part of the greater, moving clockwork of the world, aren't spun whole cloth (and many of them are basically maps and threat stats, NPC motivations and so forth, backstory as to why they're there, and so on).

I posited the idea of a world where the prepackaged became the adventure points because it seemed something of a nebulous area between the scripted and the non-scripted. For there are scripted elements within some of these modules(i.e., "if the players do X, then Y happens"). I'm not sure it would be too hard to tweak every module to fit a campaign map, or campaign conceits.

I do agree that player choice in where to go and how to approach the threat is the essential aspect of the sandbox. And I wholeheartedly agree there's a huge difference between taking on the Moathouse and following a string of events, a la Dragonlance and beyond.

I would also say that Estar's prerequisite that you have to be willing to let the players "trash" the campaign, ostensibly by ignoring anything you've bothered to prep, is an essential element in running the box. It's that sort of thing that has led to the evolution of my own campaigns. Players never did what I expected anyway, so I might as well keep things as general and open as I can. Less wasted prep, more organic outcomes.

Thanks for the replies.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;943027SHHHH!  You're facts are going to get you dogpiled on how WRONG you are for not following the all mighty OSR creed!

If there's an actual OSR Creed, I haven't been able to identify it. I would agree that there's been various styles in play for some time, but I couldn't speak as to how the game was played before the late 70s. Since I did most of my teeth-cutting with 2E, I would say there was a great deal of questing implied, based on the materials I was consuming (and not really playing) at that time.

As for the assertion that module styles=different play styles, I think another way to interpret that is that module content reflected a broad variety of scenario and genre even, rather than style. Ravenloft with its horror focus. Barrier Peaks with its alien tech. The open exploration of In Search of the Unknown. The Cthuloid echoes in...and now I can't remember the module name.:-)

I dunno...I always thought what made a module interesting was a mix of threats and perhaps a cool twist here and there. Then again, I've read more of them than I played, because I've always been waaaaay too lazy to devote myself to having to study the thing before I ran it. So, I'm not an expert by any means.

Aaaaaaand it's now "Definition Roulette" time.

I call time of death.

Quote from: estar;943130Nobody in the OSR claims that every module and campaign was sandbox based back in the day.

No but there are many who drank the Grognardia kool-aid and believe that it is the 'right' way to play and that the majority of play was in that style (truth is, no one really knows what playstyle was the majority back then, and besides, who cares?).  

Many resist the groupthink but to claim that there is no groupthink going on is pretty hard to maintain to any lurker on rpg forums or OSR blogs where you can see the same truisms being repeated ad nauseam. Just bring up DL and watch people repeat JMal talking points as if they thought of them. Of course as usual the actual creators tend to be more open minded than their rabid disciples.

Now I like a sand-box approach myself but when some push a single style of play as the only legit style based on some imaginary golden age it is bound to annoy.

Matt Finch's Primer is full of nonsense about how people 'use to play the game' before 2000 that strikes me as full of faulty claims. I know some gamers who played in the style of the Primer, but a lot didn't. You'd think from his Primer that the game wasn't rife with rules lawyers, OCD DMs and munchkins. It is false nostalgia.

Philotomy's Musings is so much better as Cone simply presents a style of play he enjoys and explains his rationale for it, no attempt to claim authority by referencing some gold-lit past.

As Pundit has said, I'm glad to see the OSR leaving the endless retroclones behind, the imitative retro art and trade dressing and instead focus on fresh settings and twists to the original system like in Patrick Stuart's work, Zzarchov Kowolwski, Hydra Collective, Michael Prescott's mini-dungeons, Beyond the Wall, Swordfishislands, etc.

Quote from: estar;942802For example not a lot of people agree with my assertion that RPGs are about running a campaign first playing a set of rules second. That the rules should always reflect what the character can do in the setting not the other way around. Some vehemently argue against me about it, many are indifferent, some find it a useful insight.

For what its worth, I have found it to be very useful.

Quote from: estar;943126...
The Necromancer's Games Wilderlands Boxed Set project crystallized this because it was the work of a dozen authors that were all been running Wilderlands campaigns for years. In the email discussions it was obvious that there somethings we did in common when running a campaign. After the release of the boxed set, people legitimately asked what was it good for and why it was worth $70. Somebody on the email list coined said "Why don't we call it a sandbox campaign, like those computer games, that have are called sandbox games because of their open world?" I was one of the early adopters as I consider the term a perfect fit. All of our campaigns focused on different things but one common thread was that the players were free to wander the landscape or interact with anybody they wanted to do.

For most of us this came about because the original Wilderlands had a comprehensive but combat list of where and what existed at the local level. So it was very easy to see what was over the next hill or what was on the next street. From that starting point the whole discussion about sandbox campaign as a distinct type of campaign ensued.

Thanks Estar.

(I assume "comprehensive but combat list" is a Freudian slip for "comprehensive but complete list". )

Quote from: Voros;942942People played in all kinds of styles when I was a kid and teen, some in the OSR seem to claim that every module and campaign 'back in the day' was sandbox-based but that is more just a retroactive projection than a fact. Seems to me that a variety of playstyles became the norm pretty rapidly and is reflected in even a cursory review of early modules.

There was no "OSR" in the late 1970's and early 1980's. And no one in this thread is claiming every module and campaign back in the day was a sandbox. Because they weren't. As estar (and myself) pointed out - the terms we're using now are based on the experiences that emerged from people that played through the general evolution of RPG's since *then*. A cursory review of that material will show that the elements that we're euphemistically calling "sandbox" (and to an extent even OSR) are all present in that content in one form or another - though it's not expressly called that. Because as some umbrella idea they didn't exist.

Quote from: Voros;942942Gygax's modules were only partly sandboxes for instance, Keep on the Borderland and Vault of the Drow are there but so are the fairly linear G1-3, Dungeonland and Through the Looking Glass, Temple of EE, etc. I'd say the premier sandbox is Isle of Dread but that was written for B/X. B/X may be popular with the OSR but I remember as a teen it was hard to get anyone to play since it was considered the 'kiddies edition.'

See my response above.

Quote from: Voros;942942Blaming video games for a supposed lack of sandbox-style play is very 'get off my lawn!' If anything today's mainstream big budget video games are so obsessed with sandbox structures that it is tiresome.

You're mixing your sub-genres indiscriminately. *NO* videogame is a sandbox (in the way we're using the term for tabletop games). Simply because no videogame can produce the same level of interactivity with the campaign as a good GM. There are open-world single-player games like Elder Scrolls that attempt to give those experiences to you, but they're 1) single-player 2) still using quests that are ultimately linear 3) non-interactive because they're single-player.

Then there are your more manicured experiences like JRPG's that highly linear affairs with massive amounts of grinding between set-piece linear threads.

To ignore the impact of videogames on the younger tabletop RPG playing public is *incredibly* cognitively dissonant at best. It's like pretending hip-hop music doesn't exist just because you don't listen to it.

I will point directly at World of Warcraft which directly is influenced by D&D from the mouth of Chris Metzen himself, and has been reflected back at *millions* of new players that came up in 3e/4e/Pathfinder, including those that designed for those systems that were greatly impacted by elements of that particular MMO. I can tell you with first-hand experience in discussions I've had personally with Mike Mearls that Warcraft was definitely something that we both talked about *a lot* - not just in terms of ripping off, but in terms of the abstraction of mechanics and encounters and how to better express them in 3.x. I see a lot of those discussions present in his Iron Heroes, and 4e is ridiculously obvious (even though he had no direct say in that).

These are merely signposts tacked onto a tree. They're not the forest. But if you read the signs, they will most certainly tell you what part of the forest you've blundered into. And you're standing on a lawn. Whose lawn? Who cares? But you're still standing on it.

Quote from: Voros;943217No but there are many who drank the Grognardia kool-aid and believe that it is the 'right' way to play and that the majority of play was in that style (truth is, no one really knows what playstyle was the majority back then, and besides, who cares?).  

Many resist the groupthink but to claim that there is no groupthink going on is pretty hard to maintain to any lurker on rpg forums or OSR blogs where you can see the same truisms being repeated ad nauseam. Just bring up DL and watch people repeat JMal talking points as if they thought of them. Of course as usual the actual creators tend to be more open minded than their rabid disciples.

Did you read this thread in its entirety? No one is saying any of this. No one is proclaiming One True Way. The only reason we're talking about sandbox play is because a relatively new player that loves his Storygames is trying to pretend that his issues aren't issues and can't be resolved by Sandbox-style play. Which I maintain they can - the problem is with the GM. And this goes far beyond this thread.

Quote from: Voros;943217Now I like a sand-box approach myself but when some push a single style of play as the only legit style based on some imaginary golden age it is bound to annoy.

No one is doing that. In the privacy of your own home, if you want to shit on the table and read it like tea-leaves to Storytime your players's "their adventure" as your method of having an awesome RPG session? Rock the fuck on.

In the interests of honest discussion, however, let's not pretend there is not a difference between "Sandbox" and "Storygame" (whatever makes you feel good to call not-that). Let's not pretend we don't understand what is being discussed under the umbrella of terms that don't really demand the level of definition people seem to require for the purposes of arguing where no argument really exists.

I'm not understanding the whole, "People never played that way, the OSR is all a lie..." thing.

A bunch of people have gone back and looked at old products and read about old play styles and cobbled together, intentionally, a style of playing they find effective. (I am one of these people.)

There's not declaration that "everyone" played that way in the past, or even that any given person played that way all the time. Only that there are ways of playing that, used with intention, produce an enjoyable kind of play.

I'd offer that many of the techniques when used in the past were never formalized or written down... often because they were assumed in the gaming culture of the time (Referee-driven war-games, for example, or earlier roots of the hobby like Braunstein). Often, then, techniques and playstyles were haphazard and even working at cross-purposes. This would especially be the case if someone (like me!) picked up D&D without any other context.

I'm baffled how some people actually picking through the options and ways of playing RPGs and making up a style of play out of those pieces can keep being called out for "Bullshit" and other absurd terms... since those options certainly existed back in the day. Again, the only difference is players today are having to discussion them, hash them out, and make choices about what to keep.

Quote from: Voros;943217No but there are many who drank the Grognardia kool-aid and believe that it is the 'right' way to play and that the majority of play was in that style (truth is, no one really knows what playstyle was the majority back then, and besides, who cares?).

Understand what James Mal did or did not advocate at Grognardia, those who "drank" his kool-aid, what I wrote, what James Raggi, Jeff Rients, Dan Proctor, Kevin Crawford, doesn't define the OSR. What the OSR is can only be answer at a specific moment in time by what people were doing in regards to publishing, playing, and promoting classic D&D along with whatever else interested folks.

The reason for this situation that the foundation of the OSR always rested on leveraging the Open Game License and the technology of the Internet especially Print on Demand and PDFs. Anybody with a contrary view always had a low barrier to reach an audience.  

This is not a typical situation for a roleplaying game. So people keep looking for gatekeepers and trend setters even when there is none. There would be a point if the situation was like what happened with Fudge and Fate. Fate and Fudge are open content and enjoy same low barriers of entry but it quite obvious that Evil Hat dominates that portion of the hobby.

James Mal in contrast was perhaps the most popular blog among many others. He only published a handful of projects and did little to act as some type of publishing house. When he crashed and burned with Dwimmermount, the OSR didn't suffer even a hiccup and kept on going. Imagine what would happen to the Fate community if Evil Hat folded up tomorrow.

If the OSR has a bias, it is towards those who do. Those who publish often and publish quality works. Those who play, those who talk about what they do and why and so on. It is a community defined by participation.

Quote from: Voros;943217Many resist the groupthink but to claim that there is no groupthink going on is pretty hard to maintain to any lurker on rpg forums or OSR blogs where you can see the same truisms being repeated ad nauseam. Just bring up DL and watch people repeat JMal talking points as if they thought of them. Of course as usual the actual creators tend to be more open minded than their rabid disciples.

There going to be some amount of commonality. It just how human nature works. The real question does it stop you from getting your work out there into hands of people who are interested? It takes work, work that some that not prepared to do for a hobby which is OK. Except when a person complains about the stuff not being produced that they are interested in. The OSR answer since the beginning is and continues to be "Write it if you want to see it."

Quote from: Voros;943217Now I like a sand-box approach myself but when some push a single style of play as the only legit style based on some imaginary golden age it is bound to annoy.

Why should it annoy? What the alternative? Silence people? I think the OSR as a chaotic stew of multiple voices all doing their thing is as close to the ideal we are ever going to get. Have you ever tried the OD&D discussion forum? Knights and Knives, Piazza, Acaeum, Dragonsfoot, Ruins of Murk Hill? They are not clones of each other and each offers their own view of classic D&D.

Quote from: Voros;943217Matt Finch's Primer is full of nonsense about how people 'use to play the game' before 2000 that strikes me as full of faulty claims. I know some gamers who played in the style of the Primer, but a lot didn't. You'd think from his Primer that the game wasn't rife with rules lawyers, OCD DMs and munchkins. It is false nostalgia.

Philotomy's Musings is so much better as Cone simply presents a style of play he enjoys and explains his rationale for it, no attempt to claim authority by referencing some gold-lit past.

Right there two moderately well-known authors with different views on similar topics. Neither is representative of the OSR but both are part of the OSR. Multiply that by a 100 and that would be an accurate view of how the OSR actually is.

Quote from: Voros;943217As Pundit has said, I'm glad to see the OSR leaving the endless retroclones behind, the imitative retro art and trade dressing and instead focus on fresh settings and twists to the original system like in Patrick Stuart's work, Zzarchov Kowolwski, Hydra Collective, Michael Prescott's mini-dungeons, Beyond the Wall, Swordfishislands, etc.

While OSRIC and Basic Fantasy represents the genesis of the OSR it wasn't like there was nothing going before then. Nor it was it all about the retro-clones. The retro-clones got attention because of how novel they were in the sense they set out to replicate a out of print editions as closely as it was legally possible.

But they were only one part of the puzzle, it was the retro-clones, print on demand, and PDF distributions (RPGNow, etc) that propelled the OSR forward.

Anyway you don't have to take my word. You can take a look at Hoard and Horde and see many of the products that were released that focused on classic D&D prior to 2012. The author quit trying after 2012 because there was just too many for one person to keep track off.

How many you heard of on that list? Do you know what style they represent? What kind of focus they had? Early on I stated that what the OSR is depends on the narrow slice you see at that moment. I don't have a complete picture, neither does the author of Hoard and Horde, nobody does. All because of the OGL, and digital technology has enabled a crazy quilt of diversity that expands every year.

Quote from: tenbones;943437You're mixing your sub-genres indiscriminately. *NO* videogame is a sandbox (in the way we're using the term for tabletop games). Simply because no videogame can produce the same level of interactivity with the campaign as a good GM.

However there are video games that don't have a end goal. How the games plays out depends on what the players makes of it. You are of course correct on the interactivity part in regards to tabletop RPGs having a human referee. But the reason the Wilderlands group picked sandbox was because of the existence of open ended computer games like Civilization and the fact as a category these game were labeled as sandbox games.

And since we started talking about sandbox campaigns as something distinct, the ideas have matured as more and more people, like you and others, shared their experiences. Among the benefits, in my opinion, is highlighting the flexibility of human referee over other forms of roleplaying games.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943221For what its worth, I have found it to be very useful.

I appreciate that. The trick of course is to translate that concept into a set of useful techniques so referees of different skill levels or experience can take advantage of it.

Quote from: Skarg;943277Thanks Estar.

(I assume "comprehensive but combat list" is a Freudian slip for "comprehensive but complete list". )

Yeah that my learning disability at work. I have a 50% hearing loss as a result of nerve damage from scarlet fever and it nailed a bit of my brain's language center as well. One side effect I have a nasty tendency to swap words around or substitute similar sounding or similar spelling words. Oh well what life without its challenges, right?