Quote from: estar;943474However 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.

Duly noted. Few games have impacted me as the Civilization franchise. I agree entirely with you on 4x videogames. You find that they are almost never (I've never seenit until now) referenced as being influential on table-top. Civ is like a campaign unfolding on a massive scale. I'm a Civ IV guy. Civ V and Civ VI don't float my boat.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943449A 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.)

Likewise. Reading Matt Finch's Old School Primer was a revelation for me. It made something click in my head about how to referee classic D&D that nothing else had. However that revelation was not just about classic D&D it was about any RPG with lite mechanics. Nor did I think Matt Finch found the magic key that unlocked the secrets from "back in the day". And if you ask him, he will admit he wrote the primer in a over the top style that was overly sarcastic. Nonetheless it a work that many found useful. And it just one of many works on classic D&D that helped people figure an effective way to use these older games in a campaign.

Quote from: tenbones;943481Duly noted. Few games have impacted me as the Civilization franchise. I agree entirely with you on 4x videogames. You find that they are almost never (I've never seenit until now) referenced as being influential on table-top. Civ is like a campaign unfolding on a massive scale. I'm a Civ IV guy. Civ V and Civ VI don't float my boat.

It remains to be seen how much the idea of Sandbox campaigns has on the tabletop RPG hobby.

As for Civilization, I am a fan too, I haven't gotten Civ 6 yet, but had a good time Civ 5 although like you I found C IV to be pretty idea. My only annoyance with everything beyond Civ2 was I couldn't port the Wilderlands map in Civ 2 forward. Yes I had Wilderlands of High Fantasy drawn up in Civ 2. I had a couple of friends who played the hell out of it conquering the entire Wilderlands.

Quote from: Voros;943217(truth is, no one really knows what playstyle was the majority back then, ).

* snerk *

Of course, if you define "back then" as 2007, you're probably right.

For those of us who define AD&D as "new school" it's a different matter.

Quote from: estar;943485It remains to be seen how much the idea of Sandbox campaigns has on the tabletop RPG hobby.

As for Civilization, I am a fan too, I haven't gotten Civ 6 yet, but had a good time Civ 5 although like you I found C IV to be pretty idea. My only annoyance with everything beyond Civ2 was I couldn't port the Wilderlands map in Civ 2 forward. Yes I had Wilderlands of High Fantasy drawn up in Civ 2. I had a couple of friends who played the hell out of it conquering the entire Wilderlands.

I've thought about building my homebrewed worlds in the Civ map editor. I'm sure there's someone that's done it...

Quote from: estar;943485It remains to be seen how much the idea of Sandbox campaigns has on the tabletop RPG hobby.

As for Civilization, I am a fan too, I haven't gotten Civ 6 yet, but had a good time Civ 5 although like you I found C IV to be pretty idea. My only annoyance with everything beyond Civ2 was I couldn't port the Wilderlands map in Civ 2 forward. Yes I had Wilderlands of High Fantasy drawn up in Civ 2. I had a couple of friends who played the hell out of it conquering the entire Wilderlands.

VI is the best iteration of the game yet, as far as depth and complexity of city planning. However,   I find I just don't like VI as much as V for some reason. I'll never go back before V because getting a handle on unit stacking is one of the best things they ever did.

Quote from: tenbones;943493I've thought about building my homebrewed worlds in the Civ map editor. I'm sure there's someone that's done it...

Currently Crusader Kings II by Paradox is my dream computer sandbox. Imagine playing in the fantasy setting of your choice but with all the noble inhabitant living out their simulated lives over the centuries.
But modding CK 2 (or any other of the Paradox strategy titles) is a major hobby in of itself.

Quote from: estar;943536Currently Crusader Kings II by Paradox is my dream computer sandbox. Imagine playing in the fantasy setting of your choice but with all the noble inhabitant living out their simulated lives over the centuries.
But modding CK 2 (or any other of the Paradox strategy titles) is a major hobby in of itself.

I'm actually setting an entire month aside this summer to try and become proficient with Europa Universalis IV (I have all the expansions too)... sweet Galactus... it's a lot to digest.

Quote from: tenbones;943615I'm actually setting an entire month aside this summer to try and become proficient with Europa Universalis IV (I have all the expansions too)... sweet Galactus... it's a lot to digest.

EU4 is a good game. Just for me Crusaders King is more addicting because you are manipulating individuals and families over centuries instead of just countries.

Quote from: estar;943479Yeah 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?

It's also the way our brains work, associating similar things and sometimes making mistakes. I catch myself doing the same sort of thing without having had any damage.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943449I'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.

Contrast to my experience of having started inventing games and learning wargames when I was a kid, then seeing D&D and TFT about 1980 and choosing TFT because it seemed to make far more sense, and then ignoring most D&D and other RPGs after GURPS came out circa 1986. I'd recommend reading TFT's campaign book "In The Labyrinth", which explains how to run a TFT campaign. It just assumes you will run a logical game based on exploring established hex maps for regions, towns and locations. It has lots of good GM advice for logic-based play written circa 1980. It has rules for tunneling, for how far noise travels through hex maps, detailed realism-based rules for encumbrance, rules for travel and getting lost. It is written down and compared to whitebox D&D is quite "formal" while still leaving room for how to GM (though always explaining that things should make sense and have reasons). Of course it's just one game system and a campaign book only some players back then saw or read, but it is a written functional system for good "sandbox/hexcrawl" GMing. Starting from there, then layers of experience help to do it well and not have some issues, but that's just learning from experience.

It's interesting to me that now sandbox play is being taken as something re-invented or new and associated with a specific D&D product, or that people would get inspiration for that from computer games such as Civilization, as to me it seems like just a natural way to play tabletop RPGs.

Quote from: Shemek hiTankolel;941357Every encounter I present to my players will never have only one solution. There's more than one way to skin a cat. I don't enable them, but I do reward clever play. In fact, they rarely resort to head on confrontation anymore.

Shemek.

I hope nobody from PETA reads that.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;943487* snerk *

Of course, if you define "back then" as 2007, you're probably right.

For those of us who define AD&D as "new school" it's a different matter.

lol you may be one of the few with that actual experience. But even you weren't at all the tables in Chicago, San Francisco, LA, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver, etc. How did Lee Gold, Greg Stafford or Sandy Petersen run the game?  Plus all the kids and adults running the game through the 80s. Once the game was out there people immediately took to tinkering and twisting it into new shapes and for new purposes.

Quote from: tenbones;943437There 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.

Of course there was no OSR in the 70s or 80s. Who said there was?

As for the rest, I already agreed with what you say here,  that was the point of my comparison of the OSR and punk rock: revisiting the past to find what was best and rejigging it for today.  

QuoteYou're mixing your sub-genres indiscriminately. *NO* videogame is a sandbox (in the way we're using the term for tabletop games).

I know the different meanings of the term in reference to video games and tabletop. My question is where the term originated. I suspect the term, not the idea, has been borrowed from video games. Clearly many modern video games are built jankily on the attempt to replicate or imitate what can only be accomplished at this time by a good DM and their table.

Quote from: estar;943473Understand 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.

You've certainly always been the voice of reason among the OSR crowd estar. And of course as I already said as usual in any creative scene most of the creators are too busy doing their thing to argue how many angels dance on the top of a 20 sided die. Well except for some of the goofier statements of Raggi and Rients.

But the evangelical and dogmatic stream in the OSR is out there no matter how much you want to deny those hectoring voices. There's a reason it keeps popping up as a criticism outside of the Dragonfoot, etc circles and its not because everyone else is imagining it, or are evil 'storygamers.' I've seen at least as much pretension among OSR groupies as storygamers. People love to form their tribes and point and yell at the 'other' side.