Quote from: estar;481419As for closed dungeon crawls vs open end campaigns.  I don't see them as the same things. The first is a type of locale, the latter is a type of campaign.  My view is that locales can be used with any campaign style. You can run an adventure path with a dungeon crawl, or a sandbox campaign with a dungeon crawl.

Yeah that was used as an example of sufficient clarity that the intention couldn't be mistaken, an approach I'm finding of value in certain parts of the internet. It's not to literally say that sandboxes can only be dungeons.

Am I right in saying that you're one of the first people to use "sandbox" to mean "an open ended gaming experience"?

Quote from: The Traveller;481475Am I right in saying that you're one of the first people to use "sandbox" to mean "an open ended gaming experience"?

Yes but not the person who coined it. I don't know who did but I do remember reading my email that day and going "That the way to describe what we, the members of the Wilderlands team, did with the Wilderlands." Since then I used the term, to describe how I run my games.

It has become more refined over the years as myself and other learned what needed clarification and expansion.  For example Lord Vreeg's World in Motion nicely describes what many of us do in the middle of a sandbox campaign to give it a sense that it is a living breathing place. Myself and the wilderlands team never really explained how to start a sandbox campaign and so started writing about the pre-game, the value of assumptions, so that players have some context in which to make their initial decisions.

So its like when someone tries to argue with me about the definition of Swine, or Lawncrappers?

RPGpundit

What do you guys think was the first sandbox module/campaign/setting in the industry ?

I would speculate RQ´Griffin Mountain (released in 1981), but Im not sure about it.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;481175(a) Your definition of sandbox is radically different from how everyone else in the world uses the term.

(b) Your definition of sandbox is functionally unplayable.

Ergo, it's a pretty worthless definition.



What I've seen is that anyone with any actual experience with a sandbox campaign has a pretty consistent and universal definition of the term.

It's people who don't know what the fuck they're talking about that tend to post nonsense definitions that don't make any sense.

Well no WoW is a sand box as are most MMOs.
I would agree that its an almost platonic state that you can't do without a computer simulated environment.
Now you can reduce the size of the sandbox to make those things increasingly easy to manage down to Traveller's example where the sandbox is a dungeon. Now in that dungeon  you may have a true sandbox that a human can run.

I think most people that run sandbox games would admit that they cheat and that they alter timelines and make ad hoc decisions to make the game more enjoyable for the players, after all that is the GMs job. However, every time you do that, everytime you delay the emergence of Cthulu by a day or let the Seige of Aniqua run for another day you are altering the veracity of the sandbox environment. I think this is inevitable which is why I think that Rail-road to sandbox is a continum and all games are played somewhere in between the two extremes and how it is pitched is unto the Players and the GMs prefered style.

Quote from: silva;481833What do you guys think was the first sandbox module/campaign/setting in the industry ?

I would speculate RQ´Griffin Mountain (released in 1981), but Im not sure about it.

Wilderlands in '77. Although one could probably make a case for City-State of the Invincible Overlord as a city-based sandbox in, IIRC, '76.

I think there's really no debate that Wilderlands was the first real sandbox setting.

RPGPundit