I would think the main problem with a "shitty sandbox" is that there would be a lack of true emulation; that is, there is no sense of a living world. Only the things the PCs directly do themselves create any change in the world.

Whereas a real sandbox always has all kinds of living NPCs/monsters/etc going around following their own agendas, not waiting around to see if the PCs will do anything at all.  So in fact, in a real sandbox even if the PCs do nothing at all, sooner or later things will start to happen to them and around them.  Whereas with the "shitty" version, if the PCs do nothing then nothing actually happens at all.

RPGPundit

First, "reverse raliroading is a lousy name for the thing depicted.
Blank canvas, litterbox, or why not crapbox and limbo ... would be far more descriptive words. ... Or why not "chaos"?

I tend to use something inbetween railroad and sandbox: One could call it roadmapping if one like, and i think several sandboxes works in similar ways.
It is that one makes up 2-5 plot stories, and consider them to be more or less ongoing during the whole time.
If the players would manage the improbable and go outside the areas for all those plots, then nothing happens.
However, that is the time when one either diverts parts of at least one of the plots to wherever they go ... or make something up on the spot.
....

For me the term "litterbox" evokes the metaphor of "throwing a bunch of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks" with no rhyme or reason, its own kind of degenerate sandbox. There the problem is that the players have no rational basis for decision making. So the campaign takes on the air of a surreal game show.
"In Dungeon Chamber Number One:"

"A stone golem shaped like Benjamin Cardozo! It steps forward and punches you in the groin!"
Compare this to e.g. a simple but informed choice between the long route through the Valley of Elysian Somnolence, and the shortcut across the  Axe-murder Mountains.

I suppose some gm's are so focused on pc actions to the point of not creating a living breathing world.

Ultimately it depends on what the players enjoy.

A world in suspended animation waiting for your player characters to react doesn't sound like a sandbox to me at all.

First, it sounds like juvenile bullshit, like a staring contest with a precursor  chargen formality. Waiting for one party to cry 'uncle' is just another form of metagame competition that doesn't make any 'rpg sense' for me.

Second, as Catelf notes, wouldn't that just be called Limbo? There's no real decision involved, outside of whether or not you flinch, because you must act to have the GM passively react (with consequences only in isolation) to everything you do. If consequences in the world are isolate, and only PC decisions set anything in (brief) motion, there's no setting ramifications to give context to any PC decisions.

It's like the opposite of a railroad as a sensory deprivation chamber is to a paint-by-numbers painting. It's like so much massive crazy and wrong, denuding the world of vitality and giving sole agency to players that any and all actions essentially mean nothing in the end, that I'm having trouble grasping it. Might as well stare at a blank wall until your mind starts to hallucinate images.

Seriously, if there's ever a case where you can say "you're doing it wrong," and something's "bad-wrong fun," this'd be it. I mean seriously, why play? It seriously is so solipsistic as to be an absurd example of play; I have trouble believing this ever happened.

How come all the outlier RPG weirdness ends up with representation, and supposed experience, upon RPG.net? It sounds... contrived.

Sounds to me like gamers trying to justify their own railroading playstyle by building up a strawman where "litterbox" equals "sandbox".

Yes. There are more effective ways to do a sandbox than other, shitty ways.

Yes, there are players who need to have choices and options thrown at them to be able to grab onto that and play the game. That's not the opposite of a good sandbox which would provide such opportunities for the PCs to get into something that interests them.

And really, if as a player you are REALLY that adverse to the notion of making a choice as your character while playing a role playing game, that you feel bullied by the GM when he actually expects you to take a decision and do something, anything in the game, you should just leave that emotionally unsafe environment that is the game table, just go home, grab a book, white-out the name of your favorite character therein, replace it with your own, and then read that book. That'll be your ultimate way of playing a "role playing game", I guess.

Quote from: Opaopajr;596302Seriously, if there's ever a case where you can say "you're doing it wrong," and something's "bad-wrong fun," this'd be it. I mean seriously, why play? It seriously is so solipsistic as to be an absurd example of play; I have trouble believing this ever happened.

How come all the outlier RPG weirdness ends up with representation, and supposed experience, upon RPG.net? It sounds... contrived.

Exactly.  If the players decide to just sit at the inn rather than interact with the campaign, that's on them.  I don't find it credible that the whole group sits around staring at each other waiting for someone to make a move, though.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;596051I think it is real. Every style of play has potential pitfalls. The way i run my modern mafia games, this is always a concern: trying to respect the free will of the pcs while supllying a living and reactive world. It would be easy to only react, and forget their are other forces out there that can act on the pcs as well.

It is one of the GMing mistakes I know I am prone to (due to the breakdown of multitasking, laziness, being forgetful, whatever), which is why I try to actively avoid committing it.

[edit]Also, I have found through personal experience that a GM's unwillingness to railroad and the players' unwillingness to show their own initiative makes for a poor combination. Some people are just not meant to be together.

So the big insight is that the sandbox format is not immune to bad GMing? :rolleyes:

Quote from: Melan;596312[edit]Also, I have found that a GM's unwillingness to railroad and the players' unwillingness to show their own initiative makes for a poor combination. Some people are just not meant to be together.

You are still batting .1000 with your keen observations, my good sir.

Quote from: The Butcher;596315So the big insight is that the sandbox format is not immune to bad GMing? :rolleyes:

Tautological insight is tautological.
(theirs, not yours.  )

Quote from: Melan;596312[edit]Also, I have found through personal experience that a GM's unwillingness to railroad and the players' unwillingness to show their own initiative makes for a poor combination. Some people are just not meant to be together.

Over the years, I've read plenty of complaints by GMs who didn't give their players a preset plot only to have the players do nothing or even ask them GM to give them a plot.  Some players want the GM to hand them a story and are quite happy willingly taking a ride on a railroad.  A lot of casual gamers seem to fall into this category.  If they are in a game with one or more active players who make adventures happen, then they don't need the GM to provide them a plot.  If they are all passive casual gamers, then adventure may not happen unless it's dropped into their lap.  

So I would argue that one should only run games that rely on proactive players if one has at least one proactive player in the group.

That's pretty much how my old player-group was. They didn't care about freedom of choice and a living, reactive world and yadda yadda, they just wanted a maximum of cool stuff to happen with minimal effort. Which led me to formulate the maxim that players only complain about railroading when they don't like where the tracks are taking them (when a railroad forces them to lose their stuff, or do some mission they don't want to, or befriend some NPC they don't like, or to listen to some NPC's boring expository monologue, etc.). But as long as they're in interesting locations having interesting encounters and getting interesting rewards, in my experience most players (especially casual ones) don't care if it was a railroad or their own choices that brought them there, and if anything prefer the former since it requires less work and is usually quicker.

Quote from: The Butcher;596315So the big insight is that the sandbox format is not immune to bad GMing? :rolleyes:

Yeah, file it under 'sun rises in east.'

Quote from: John Morrow;596342So I would argue that one should only run games that rely on proactive players if one has at least one proactive player in the group.

I don't mind running a more directed game if the group is looking for that. We can just agree on the "this is the week's adventure, now let's play" model. But there was one particular party of otherwise intelligent and creative people who just refused to budge unless they were hammered on the head with the plot stick. After a while, I got tired of hammering and handed over the reins to a railroadier guy, which was better for all of us since the new GM was ruthless in forcing an adventure to happen, and I assembled my Fomalhaut group, who took to making their own adventures in a fairly open world like a polar bear takes to a bucket of frozen fish.

Quote from: Benoist;596304Sounds to me like gamers trying to justify their own railroading playstyle by building up a strawman where "litterbox" equals "sandbox".

Correct answer.