To answer the OP's question directly, neither is better.  And there's something a lot of folks around here (as in where I live, not this forum, you seem like cool peeps, but I don't know most of you) need to know is that Linear just means there's a starting point, and ending point.  How you get to those points is linear, but that doesn't remove choice, or twists or turns.

Linear does NOT equal a railroad.  Only when it's a bad adventure design, is it a 'railroad'.

Quote from: LordVreeg;830121Well, I don't claim to be 'right', but as you can see on this thread, there is some level of agreement that many people feel a sandbox is defined by the prioritization of player agency over plot.

I'm not trying to prove that I or anyone else is right or wrong. I'm not even sure what there is to be right or wrong about. I'm answering the question: What sort of game do you run and enjoy.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;830132To answer the OP's question directly, neither is better.  And there's something a lot of folks around here (as in where I live, not this forum, you seem like cool peeps, but I don't know most of you) need to know is that Linear just means there's a starting point, and ending point.  How you get to those points is linear, but that doesn't remove choice, or twists or turns.

Linear does NOT equal a railroad.  Only when it's a bad adventure design, is it a 'railroad'.

For example, my Alternities game. The PCs will be agents of an organization that explores parallel Earths. That's the premise, the basic plot. How they deal with the events that occur, what consequences developments that stem from and their reactions will make up the story and up to them. Its not a Sand box, but its not railroad.

Quote from: Nexus;830139For example, my Alternities game. The PCs will be agents of an organization that explores parallel Earths. That's the premise, the basic plot. How they deal with the events that occur, what consequences developments that stem from and their reactions will make up the story and up to them. Its not a Sand box, but its not railroad.

Ah, the mission-based campaign.

I'm interested enough to start a thread of its own.

But it doesn't have an ending point.

 CB needs some concrete examples.

Quote from: Nexus;830111Say "nope" to what precisely?

Quote from: Nexus;830100The Sandbox games I've been in and heard described in any details have been, not purposeless but had no focused purpose.

I don't mean you're wrong or you didn't experience that, obviously. I just mean that Sandbox games can include large scale events.

These events, ideally, are just a new set of monkey-bars in the Sandbox. Only these monkey-bars can affect other parts of the sandbox based on the interactions or lack of interactions with them as the GM indicates.

Is it more complex? Sure. And yeah it requires a bit of work for the GM to learn to do well. But imo that's where the best games come from. The tension and interaction of the PC's and the things that go on in the world, some of which might be due to the PC's actions - others might be corollaries of other events that occur downstream.

Quote from: LordVreeg;830121Well, I don't claim to be 'right', but as you can see on this thread, there is some level of agreement that many people feel a sandbox is defined by the prioritization of player agency over plot.
It is foolish and boring to create a setting without World in Motion, and huge large, DivSet situations, with motivated NPCs.
What makes a game a sandbox is the lack of railroad and the prioritization of player agency; but not a lack of consequence to that agency.

I have had PCs totally go off the rails and chase sidelines to historical stories; and it is my job in a sandbox not to 'get them back on the rails', but to honesty play the responses of the rest of the world to their actions, and let them deal with that.   What makes it a sandbox is the lack of rails and my willingness to move with the and just have the world respond to what they want to do.

I'm with you Vreeg. This sums up my games pretty well.

Quote from: Arminius;830143But it doesn't have an ending point.

 CB needs some concrete examples.

All right, fair enough.

For a linear game, let's go with the basic D&D adventure, "Explore the Dungeon!  Slay the Dragon at the end!  Save the Villagers!"  All three are tied into the adventure, there is a defined goal.  But how the players traverse through the dungeon itself, well no game will ever be the same.  Some will want to murder everything, others will want to beeline for the Dragon, but just rescue the villagers.  But there's a defined end to the adventure.  The beginning point is going to the dungeon.  The end point is slaying the Dragon.

Now a Sandbox, at least how I've been running them is more open world, where you have a bunch of 'things' happening at any one time.  The players are open to go where they want, but as a 'living world' there will be things that happen that will change what happens around them, but it's up to them to go where they want and just make a mess of things their way.  If village A has bandit problems, and Village B is having a festival and all the shops are vulnerable, and City C is looking for adventurers to help with a delicate issue of a 'rescue the Princess' which may not want to be rescued, all these and more, are happening, and it's up to the players to decide that they want to do.  But there's always something for players to latch on to.

And to be honest, a 'Sandbox Campaign' often ends up being a collection of sometimes loosely tied 'Linear adventures' in my experience.

Quote from: Nexus;830100Any action or adventures (or lack of) stemmed almost completely from their choices with them occasionally running into things by chance. There were no overarching things like an undead invasion. I think most of the people playing in those games would consider things like counter to the spirit of "Sandbox" as they liked to play them.

You can definitely do a 'zombie apocalypse sandbox' - I suspect that's really the only good way to play that whole genre. But I'd agree that a big undead invasion breaking out mid-game shifts the tone away from sandbox. That was my experience in my Southlands campaign - started sandbox the first 10 sessions or so, but with a building undead invasion the last 10 sessions were not linear - the PCs still had freedom of action - but not really very sandboxy either.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;830190And to be honest, a 'Sandbox Campaign' often ends up being a collection of sometimes loosely tied 'Linear adventures' in my experience.

'Adventure of the week' design is not sandbox design, of course. But if the GM seeds a map with a bunch of linear adventures you could get something a bit like that, with nested linearity within an overarching sandbox.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;830014It works for the most part, though a new player who is used to video games and board games is lost because he doesn't know how to handle the freedom.

That is the crux of why sandboxes don't suit everyone.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;830014So I was thinking of making a guild type game with a "choose your mission" style format.

Which could well work.

The trick is in judging what the players like and don't like. For an established, long-running game, this gets quite easy, but for a new game with new players, it can be tricky.

Try a few things out. Don't get all dogmatic "I am running a Sandbox", "I am running a linear campaign", "I am running a mission-based campaign", instead introduce things slowly and on a scenario by scenario basis. So, introduce the setting and game world, have a few start up, one-shot scenarios, one of which is very linear, another has places where the PCs can go off and do their own thing, another exploration, where the players spend some time in an area finding something. See what they like, see what they don't like and build on that.

Quote from: soltakss;830231That is the crux of why sandboxes don't suit everyone.

I don't blame that on sandbox; it's a weakness of the player who hasn't acclimated to playing RPGs yet. Instead of lobotomizing RPGs to fit the video game experience the player just has to learn how to play.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;830232I don't blame that on sandbox; it's a weakness of the player who hasn't acclimated to playing RPGs yet. Instead of lobotomizing RPGs to fit the video game experience the player just has to learn how to play.

It's logically lazy and needlessly pejorative to cast people who like something different than you want them to like as weak or lobotomized. It would be really nice if people didn't do that.

Some people like exploring a setting and creating proactive, ambitious characters who drive towards their own goal or goals. Some people don't. Oddly, that same difference in personality is visible all around us in the real world. Some people are very ambitious and driven, some prefer to go with the flow and enjoy life.

As a GM one can find players who like what you want them to like so you can run the game your want to run or one can adapt one's GM style to what the players one has on hand happen to like. Neither of those GM choices is ethically better than the other. I really, really wish people would stop talking as if one of those choices was a moral imperative and the other was not.

Quote from: LordVreeg;830034OK, well, that is interesting.  Sandboxing, as I call it, is more about the amount of player volition to me.  But the world is moving all around them, with many, many opportunities and options and influences.

Anyone want to weigh in with impressions?

It stems from the mid 2000s when the term "sandbox campaign" became a popular term to describe the type of campaign you and I run. It originated in the promotion of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy Boxed Set to answer the question "What it good for?"

We are started off by saying that the hexcrawl format of the boxed set allowed a referee to easily manage the campaign if the players wander where ever they want to in the landscape. We said this was analogous to computer games with wide open setting. Computer games of this types were and still are being called sandbox games. So we used the term sandbox campaign to describe this situation.

In hindsight that was a mistake. While technically true, the hexcrawl format was a great help when the player went off in an unexpected direction, it was not the focus of our campaigns. Instead it was about the freedom of the player to whatever in a wide variety of situation.

For me I didn't come to this realization until I started to see reports of sandbox campaign failing to ignite on enworld, here and other places. I dug into those reports and figure out why my campaigns worked more often than the actual play reports were.

It was because, I always had an Initial Context as a foundation from which the players could make their initial choices in the campaign. Without an Initial Context, the campaign becomes a crapshot dependent on the willingness of the players to be happy with literally throwing darts at a target in the dart. Which in my experience not that common for folk engaged in what is a leisure activity.

Quote from: Bren;830242It's logically lazy and needlessly pejorative to cast people who like something different than you want them to like as weak or lobotomized. It would be really nice if people didn't do that.

Some people like exploring a setting and creating proactive, ambitious characters who drive towards their own goal or goals. Some people don't. Oddly, that same difference in personality is visible all around us in the real world. Some people are very ambitious and driven, some prefer to go with the flow and enjoy life.

As a GM one can find players who like what you want them to like so you can run the game your want to run or one can adapt one's GM style to what the players one has on hand happen to like. Neither of those GM choices is ethically better than the other. I really, really wish people would stop talking as if one of those choices was a moral imperative and the other was not.

I'm talking about a new player though. For a new player you have to instruct them on the right way to play or you literally aren't teaching them the game. If you hedge every instruction about what an RPG is with "well you could do it like this, or like this, or like that, it doesn't really matter" then you're just going to confuse them. We have no idea if the player honestly prefers this style or is only doing it because they don't know anything else. You can't say that it's simply a matter of taste until they know what they're doing.

I also didn't say he was weak. Just that if you're going to try and make the game identical to Diablo or GTA, what's the point?