Quote from: The Traveller;662378Apparently not, I think in fact that one of the forum regulars, estar, had a hand in the original coining of the phrase. The misinterpretation of it being a children's play area came later.

Huh. I think I'll put this in the "misheard lyrics that I like better than the real lyrics" file, since playing in a sandbox makes more sense to me as an analogy for RPGs.

Quote from: jibbajibba;662417So you conceed the geography?

I think you can do exactly the same thing with cultural groups extrapolating from the geogrpahy and climate you could generate human cultures from a random algorithm likewise you could add monsters from random monster generators, not such an original idea after all.
Sure the outcime would be limited by the imagination you put into those tables but since ones you make up are limited by your imagination anyway .....

that you run the who world through a historical events generation package with some algorithm to mirror response to events and interation between cultures let the thing run through a 10000 years of history and I think that would be pretty good. Ruins, lost civilisations, old roads overgrown by forest, cultures that lived underground but perished to unknown forces, ancient technology lost to the past.

Remember your moster tables can be far more complex and larger than 20 monsters in a single matrix by vegetaton type. Shit you could tie a random monster generator into the package and have it populate the randomised world (the word in compter games is Procedurally generated apparently) with randomised monsters, classic monsters and every variant in between....

Would be awesome.

A setting isn't a sandbox. Any setting can be used to run a sandbox game, or a railroad, or a story, or a competition, or a beer and pretzels one off (though some settings are easier to run in some styles than others).

A sandbox game is a verb, not a noun. It's what happens when the players' imaginations, the setting, and the GM's imagination interact. It's fundamentally about creativity, imagination, and improvisation IMO; sandbox play for me is "how the heck do I respond in a manner that makes sense given the setting to what the players just decided to do".

Flipping through Dungeon World here, I think it missed something thats really cool about Apocalypse World: the way each item, name, lookout, and puntuation in the character sheet serve the purpose of communicating the setting in a effective and evocative way.

If all possible Paladin names are just 4, and all are bland / generic ones, whats the point ?