praguepride:
Think of an adventure module. Rise of the Runelords. If the players say "nahh...we're leaving sandpoint" and never come back then the entire module is thrown away, basically.
Yeah, I get this. In an old AD&D campaign I used to run, there was enough detail that going down the Old Camptown Road would sooner or later take you through a forest which then modulated into a tropical jungle, and ultimately debouched on the site of a large and very ancient pyramid. Along the way, one could visit many other places in the world with significance to the setting.
If players decided to turn around at any point, all the data concerning that pyramid just sat there waiting, but I wouldn't say it was wasted. I would say I felt like the work I did creating that portion of the setting felt wasted for a very long while... so, like I said, I get it.
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I mean you could lift dungeon set pieces and plunk them down in front of the players with new context and while the players can take multiple avenues to get from A to B, if they are following the story then they will always end up at B.
"You are in a maze of dark twisting passages all alike"?
Personally, I always feel something like this is a cheap trick that robs players of their agency.
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In my opinion there are two kinds of sandboxes:
1) The cornucopia of choices. So instead of going from A to B, the players are also presented with C, D, E, F, and G. All of those are completely independent of one another. While B is fighting goblins, C is joining up with the goblins, D is pissing off to become pirates, E turns into a graveyard crawl and will lead them all across the land while F is about helping some nobleman woo the love of his life and G is the start of a path to god hood.
It doesn't really count if you are always taking them from A to B but just giving them a lot of different choices along the way. This is a big problem I have with the Telltale Games adventure games. They give you a thousand different choices but it's always taking you to the same spots. It's more like do you go from A to B via C, D, or E. You have those options but you will always veer back to B.
I think we're in agreement here. In the example I gave above about the pyramid, even though said pyramid is waiting at the ultimate end of the Old Camptown Road, nothing says the players have to ever go far enough down that road to visit it.
Now I
will admit to having certain NPCs go missing while hunting treasure down that road, and of circulating rumors in Camptown to the effect that some of the survivors of those expeditions came back very wealthy survivors... but I never twisted anyone's arms or plunked that part of the world in front of them and made them go explore a centuries old pyramid filled with traps, mummies, and other ancient horrors.
My players eventually
did go visit that pyramid (greed got the better of them, I think), and most of them managed to survive the trip because they did their best to think their way through that adventure. They came back insanely wealthy because they had waited until they were of high enough level and had the resources to survive.
Incidentally, the really well-buried hook in this setting was that the players were in a post-apocalyptic Earth many centuries removed from a global catastrophe. Camptown was located close to where Houston, Texas lies in our present day.
Elves, orcs, and the like were products of genetic mutations of humankind that managed to breed true. Magic was a force that developed partly because of these mutations, and partly because the mind of man fell back to a primitive sort of existence that permitted shamans, sorcerers, and the like to delve into its mysteries again.
The players had some idea after a while, but never got to that "Aha!" moment of realizing
exactly what I was doing.
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2) The open-ended (aka the GM has no plans). The players start at A. Either through random dice or waiting for players to do something they generate their own B, C, and D's but you might also end up with RED and 5 as options too. This happens a lot in "social" games where the NPCs aren't the main antagonists and where the players are being proactive and the GM is just being reactive.
"What're we gonna do tonight, Brain?"
"The same thing we do every night, Pinky: try to take over the world!"
I've played in games like this. Some were fun and some were not so fun. A lot depends on the genius behind the screen. Playing of this sort can help a beginning GM acquire their "sea legs", but if the players are expecting a long campaign this mode of play will sooner or later fail to deliver on one level or another.