My general preference is all (living, not static, since that's come up in the thread) sandbox. all the time, but I have occasionally had players request that we switch to mission-based play for a while and I sometimes run one-shots, which tend to have to be mission-based as well.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;827692Which kind do you run? Which kind is better?

Short-term or one-off, linear. At least in the sense that there are a bunch of things happening and the players have a reason to care what happens, if they don't get involved then not much will be happening at all.

Long-term game, more sandbox style.

Sandbox, it can take a few sessions for the players to settle down as a group and decide on their own direction. Which feels like a waste if you only have a few sessions, so in that case we streamline things a wee bit.

Quote from: Ravenswing;827753I'll be contrary: I don't think linear plotlines and sandboxes are necessarily mutually exclusive.

I run a sandbox.  I pay attention to my players' choices, and they have complete freedom to buy into or ignore any plot I put forward.  But I also do linear plots, where Z follows Y follows X.  The distinction is I don't do railroading, where I compel the group to do Y rather than W.  If they decide that what they want to do is help guard the new queen rather than chase down threats, then that's where the plot goes from there.  My timeline is still valid, and events will happen in the sequence events happen (absent, of course, PC intervention), but the players' freedom of action is maintained.

People forget that players can choose to place their characters in situations where their choices are constrained or only have one logical path. For example in a campaign the party choose to join the city guard under the command of the city's marshal.

From that point on the campaign is going to be more mission oriented because that how the life in the city guards is.

Running a sandbox campaign doesn't negate the fact that choices have consequences and sometime those consequences restricts the character's freedom of action for a time.  

The key difference between a sandbox with city-guard and a linear railroad with city guards is that sandbox referee won't get bent out of shape if the player decide to desert. Instead the campaign will not be the one where the characters are deserters from the city guard. The railroad referee gets bent out of shape as now all his plots, plans, and preparations are thrown out the window.

I run the occasional linear story within an overall sandbox, by inserting 5% or so of stuff in such a way that they can't obviously tell it is intentionally linear.

I don't force them to interact with the linear story though, no railroading.

Quote from: robiswrong;827827Then what do you define as a linear plot?

What Justin said.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;827832A sandbox campaign......But not all linear adventures are railroads.

Also what S'mon and Soylent Green said.

I run dynamic sandboxes. There isn't an overarching plot but stuff is happening regardless of whether the players interact with it. It's not always big things either,  sometimes it's a simple minor territory squabble between nobles, or a petty gang causing trouble. Though there tends to be bigger stuff happening too, but the players don't have to get involved though the consequences may effect them.

I tend to keep a sheet of factions with a connection web  and have a table of random outcomes for events if the players don't intervene.

I wanna feel like I just had sex on the beach, I want it THAT sandy.

"it's been three days I STILL feel the sandbox in all the wrong places..."

JA's Node-Based adventure is a nice template for what I normally like to do.

I use a table rule that the party must work together on the same team and not split up for extended periods of time.  That comes with the side effect of curtailing a lot of individual actions as the players must negotiate what they want to do.

Setting up the game, I will have a map with some site-based locations detailed beforehand and a handful of important organizations/NPCs.

The game's start will be determined by the PC's backgrounds to integrate into whatever main event is going on in the region (my two current campaigns are the Slavers and Dragon Cultists).  95% of the time, players have focused on the main event, usually as good guys stopping the injustice.  In the Slavers game, they have happily gone from Slaver base to Slaver base.  Functionally, I am not sure if there is a difference between it being a sandbox, linear, a railroad, or whatever.  They are working their way through the adventure module either way.

Last session, they through me a loop though.  While I had expected and prepared for a wild seaborn session sailing Woolly Bay battling orc pirates, they instead decided they needd more experience before taking the fight to the Pomarj.  So they took a delve into the Greyhawk Ruins (using the adventure module).

And significant periods of time are spent adlibbing in Greyhawk City with their background connections and a long adlibbed section where they were captured and sold into slavery with later escape.

Pretty sure at any given moment I bounce back and forth from sandboxy to linearish to railroady.

I do have lots of event chains and many levels of plot, huge and ancient down to minute.

I also have many what I call 'set pieces', which get triggered by PC intervention.

That being said, the games are complete sandboxes as the players run ito them and intereact with them as they will.  The players can affect them and change the course of what is to come, or not, my job is to run the rest of the world while the players do as they will in it.

I think sandbox vs. linear campaign is a continuum, rather than a binary thing where you have to choose one or the other.

That is, a hexcrawl is pretty close to a pure sandbox - the players choose where to go, perhaps without much direction from the referee, and have adventures depending on random tables and preplanned hex contents. Most adventure paths tend towards the linear end, with an assumption that a series of major plot events will unfold regardless of what the PCs do.

In between are things like Savage Worlds "plot point" campaigns, where there is a linear plot but PCs can choose how much they want to engage with it; mission-driven settings where the PCs can do what they want, but may have unwanted consequences from straying too far from the main quest(s); and "episodic" campaigns where the PCs don't necessarily choose where to go, but face a series of sandboxy scenarios where they can do whatever they want.

I prefer more sandboxy games, but I've had lots of players who would prefer to be given a goal and a plot to follow.

I run linear games.  Each episode consists of a series of beats or goals acting as scenes which my player generally encounters in sequence.  There's a lot of leeway in each scene, including the ability to sequence break or go off on some other tangent that may make it an entirely different episode altogether.  Those player actions taken while engaging my beat/goal/scene outline for the episode become the inspiration, motivation, and drivers for later episode outlines.

When I do long term plans or arcs, I usually sketch out about 6 episodes in advance tops.   These are like big, episode sized beats.  Inevitably, things will happen during an episode which will invalidate later episode plans, either causing a modification to the later arc outline or possibly an abandonment of it entirely for a better long term arc.

On my longest, most successful campaign, it was linear all the way.  I find it easier, just because of how I think (I am a trial attorney, and being organized and linear in one's approach is, IMO, the best way of presenting your client's case), to design a linear campaign.  Also, the PC's told me when we got started they wanted to have a clearly defined destiny, an overarching goal they had to achieve.  Linear seemed like the best way to achieve that. Half the party was hard core role players, and half were hard core "roll" players.  The Rollers didn't really care much about what the plot was about. And the role players were the ones suggesting the "destiny".  So it worked really well for all concerned, for the most part.  I confess I did some railroading in the earliest games, but evolved out of that, slowly but surely.  I have never done a true sandbox style adventure, and would approach such a thing with a measure of trepidation, to be honest.  

All that having been said, I think linear campaigns are definitely the way to go with superhero games.  Based on comics as they are, if you have a pulp/golden/silver/bronze age orientation to your adventures, stopping the bad guys is the order of the day.  You just don't see superhero stories that feel sandbox-y in comic books, with heroes just wandering around and checking stuff out.  Sandbox-type adventures would seem, to me at least, to lend themselves more to fantasy and sci fi settings.  Horror could probably go either way, but I think it has more of a linear leaning as well; eldritch horror rising, PC's defeat it, uncover piece of larger mystery.

I tend to start out with a linear adventure, introduce lots of adventure seed and hooks, work out to a sandbox, and then focus back down to a more linear format as the group decides which hook to follow up on.
And then repeat the process.