The concept of an RPG sandbox campaign often gets mixed up with a lot of other things. Some of these are common structures used for sandboxes (like 
hexcrawls). Others are just misnomers (like sandboxes being the opposite of a railroad).
(Quick definition: A sandbox campaign is one in which the players are empowered to either choose or define what their next scenario is going to be. Hexcrawls are a common sandbox structure because geographical navigation becomes a default method for choosing scenarios, which are keyed to the hexes you’re navigating between.)
Other conflations are subtler. A particularly common one is to conflate simulationism with the sandbox structure. One major appeal of the sandbox can be that it allows players to feel as if they’re “living in the world” because they’re free to do “anything,” which has a fairly large overlap with what people enjoy about simulationism.
But simulationism is not required for sandbox play.
A good example of this is the chardalyn dragon from Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden.
SPOILER WARNING!
When the PCs approach a particular location on the map (Xardorok’s fortress), this triggers an event in which the dragon flies away to cause some havoc. In discussing this as part of a sandbox scenario, I was challenged: How could it be a sandbox if it was dramatically triggered by the PCs’ approach?
(Note: I’m just talking about triggering the dragon flight here. Shortly thereafter Rime of the Frostmaiden ALSO has an NPC show up to trigger a linear plot that ends the sandbox. I’m not talking about her. Just the dragon.)
The confusion here is due to the conflation of the sandbox structure and simulationism. A simulationist wouldn’t trigger the dragon based on the PCs’ approach. They’d probably do something like have Xardorok’s construction of the dragon be on a schedule with the dragon being released when Xardorok completes it, regardless of whether or not the PCs have found Xardorok’s fortress yet. (There are also other simulationist techniques that could be used here.)
But a sandbox isn’t dependent on simulationism. There’s nothing about dramatically triggering an event which is incompatible with the players remaining empowered to choose and define their scenario.
Wanted to push back on your characterization and the sandbox. I usually agree with your insights and am a big fan but I’m having trouble seeing how you could come to this conclusion.
This is a bit long. I hope you’ll indulge me.
“Choose or define what their next scenario is going to be” hinges on whether PCs have some chance to know what they are choosing.
Two black boxes, one containing goblins and the other orcs isn’t a true choice. A red box (with fire goblins) and a blue box (with frost orcs) is closer to a choice (given some basic puzzle skills on the part of the players, shared cultural expectations, etc).
“nothing about dramatically triggering an event which is incompatible with the players remaining empowered to choose and define their scenario”
IMHO a game isn’t “sandbox” or “linear” it’s usually a spectrum (or a tossed salad of different elements that blend into something session by session). Generally, even in a sandbox game, the more macro you are (hexcrawl, vector, etc) it’s more sandboxy, its less sandboxy as you go to the dungeon or encounter level (2-3 paths through the dungeon, 2-3 ways to approach the encounter) until it’s very determined/linear (e.g. the PCs don’t get to decide whether the BBG is a shaman or a sorcerer, etc)
The unpredictable (in the specific sense of not-being-predictable) dragon attack is a linear/rail-roady element that can be injected into a sandbox. If it’s the only “anyway this happens deal with it” thing the DM inserts in a session where the players otherwise have lots of viable options and choice then that game session is still sandboxy.
But it’s still a linear element that the PCs didn’t have choice. As you add more elements like that into the game you’re disempowering the Players choices. At some hypothetical extreme the players would have little choice and the game be a pure railroad.
But the random event never because sandboxy because it’s near a sandbox. It’s still a linear event imposed by the DM.
Graf wrote: “Choose or define what their next scenario is going to be” hinges on whether PCs have some chance to know what they are choosing.
I agree with this. But the important proviso is that the mere absence of that information doesn’t mean the choice isn’t meaningful; the PCs choosing not to gain that information is, in fact, a meaningful choice.
Graf wrote: IMHO a game isn’t “sandbox” or “linear” it’s usually a spectrum (or a tossed salad of different elements that blend into something session by session).
Sandbox campaigns and linear adventure design aren’t opposites of each other. Treating them as such is problematic at best.
Graf wrote: until it’s very determined/linear (e.g. the PCs don’t get to decide whether the BBG is a shaman or a sorcerer, etc)
I’m skeptical of any definition of a term which fails to actually define it; i.e., which results in a term so universally applicable that it doesn’t actually distinguish one thing from another. That’s what’s happening with the term “linear design” here. Saying that, for example, giving an NPC a specific name or a specific skill is “linear design” is to make the term meaningless.
The term “linear” refers to events being in a line.
What you seem interested in is the concept of narrative control. But that’s only tangentially related to linear vs. non-linear design or sandbox campaigns. For example, you can have a fully functional sandbox campaign in which the players’ narrative control is strictly limited to their characters’ actions. And you can have a linear scenario with a prescribed sequence of scenes in which the players have an otherwise limitless capacity for narrative control.
The Railroading Manifesto discusses some of these issues in more depth.
“Sandbox campaigns and linear adventure design aren’t opposites of each other.”
Justin, can you exemplify a Linear AND Sandboxy adventure? (is linear being used as a synonym of railroad here?) I’m having trouble figuring out these concepts.
So far my understanding is that sandbox vs. “Dm chooses the scenario” is more about how you prep and present the adventure. And railroad vs “yes to all” is about how you react to players’ choices during play.
If I understand things correctly a sandbox could be both Linear and a sandbox Easily enough as the sandbox is the campaign style and linear is typically an adventure style (assuming were not talking Pathfinder adventure paths). The sandbox can thus be littered with adventures for the players to discover and choose from. Some of these might be linear in nature while others might be more open ended.
I think linear and railroad get conflated becuse in the narrative structure of films and books they have come to mean the much same thing, for right or wrong. Unlike TRPGs films, tv shows, and books have a director(s), showrunner(s), or author(s) who make a final decisions about direction. The collaborative aspects of these mediums vary quite a bit from RPGs. Thus a linear narrative happens in sequence A then B then C and to decoders (to riff off of Stuart Hall’s reception theory) or in other words, the audience, things can seem no different than a railroad where a set sequence of events must happen. But in RPGs the players and GM are simultaneously encoding and decoding as they are sharing in telling the story. People base their definitions and out looks on perceptions and beliefs, not realities, more often than not. In short, I agree terms need to be defined when applied to TRPGs because people may be used to applying these terms to other media that don’t fully parallel RPGs the way some might think.
Ruprecht more or less says what I was going to say. There can be plenty of gray area between where a “scenario” ends and a “campaign” begins (when dealing with, say, fractal nodes, for example), but generally speaking a linear scenario is not at the opposite end of a spectrum from a sandbox campaign because they’re classifying two different things. (And, as Ruprecht notes, one of those things can generally be thought of as a collection of the other type of thing.)
I see some confusion about the terms sandbox and linear, and that you’ve defined sandbox. Hopefully I won’t muddy things in my attempts to help clarify…
I like to think of a sandbox part of play as being filled with optional content, and a linear part of play as being filled with required content. This can be shown at many levels of scale: dungeon rooms, hexes, nodes, adventures, NPCs.
As pointed out above, these can intermingle. One can have a city filled with nodes that are all optional, and then each node contains a 5 room dungeon with a pass/fail state. Part of that is a sandbox, and the other part is linear.
A fully sandbox game is when all content is optional, while a fully linear game is when all content is required. Usually games are designed to include some of each.
I definitely agree with your sentiments, Justin.
If nothing else, at its base level, the dragon isn’t really any different than any other keyed location on the map, except it can move. At some point, the players enter the keyed hex and set off the event of the dragon flying off. The players then have the exact same basic options that they do when discovering a location:
1) They engage with it. For the dragon, this likely means chasing it down and assisting in the defense of whatever town it goes to first. For the location, it’s entering the dungeon, trading with the village, or whatever else is appropriate to the kind of location.
2) They ignore it. In both cases, they simply continue with whatever it was they were doing before. Granted, the obvious implied consequences of ignoring the dragon are far higher than the consequences of ignoring a trading village, but the option exists.
3) They split the difference and continue with their current course for now, with the intention of following up as soon as they can. This may be accompanied by some short action, like use of a Sending spell to let someone else know of what they’ve found and where it is.
And in the context of a hexcrawl, I’m also hesitant to call the dragon going off to cause havoc linear or railroady in and of itself. If the DM intends to tell you, “You lose, campaign over” if you don’t deal with it correctly, then sure, but presumably the actual result will be more along the lines of “There’s terrible devastation, making some things you want to do more difficult or impossible, but opening new opportunities to deal with the new world state”.
@ZZTRaider “Granted, the obvious implied consequences of ignoring the dragon are far higher than the consequences of ignoring a trading village, but the option exists.”
I think this is why many feel the dragon attack would be too railroady or linear for sandbox play. Sure the players can choose not to deal with the dragon, but the gm has created a scenario (I’m guessing they’ll describe the horrible devestation caused by this dragon) that 99% of players will feel they have no choice but to deal with since it’s so big and major.
I think that’s fine as one or two times in an otherwise sandbox campaign. But do it enough times and you’ll train your players to think “well this game seems to have some choice and then the gm throws these things we don’t have choice over, they must be the actual missions so let’s focus on those because the other stuff isn’t what will win us the scenario”
It might be worth pointing out, people often conflate “meaningful choice” with “fun choices” or even “fair and balanced choices”, and that’s not what meaningful means.
I haven’t read the campaign, but it seems a fairly easy fix would be for the dragon to be triggered by seeing the PCs, rather than by them entering an arbitrary space. Just as Smaug descended on Laketown because of his anger at the invisible thief, maybe this dragon is just looking for some excuse to attack Ten Towns and the PCs somehow provide it in their approach?
A DM could also foreshadow this somehow, adding in a meaningful choice earlier that could soften or increase the difficulty of preventing the attack. (Apologies if this is already contemplated in the scenario.)
@Xercies: You make an interesting point. However, according to Justin’s definition of railroad (which I think is an excellent one), railroading occurs when the GM negates player choice, either by preventing them from taking actions that they *should* be able to take, or by making all choices lead to the same outcome, which renders the choice irrelevant.
The dragon doesn’t qualify, because the players definitely have a choice about whether to chase it, and it definitely makes a difference if they don’t. (Unless the GM refuses to let them ignore the dragon, but that would be a problem with the GM, not the adventure as written.) The trouble is, you seem to conflate “linear” and “railroad”. Certainly, railroads are usually linear, but not all linear adventures are railroads.
I’m curious how you would feel if the dragon were replaced by a natural disaster such as an earthquake. Would that feel more railroady to you (because the players can’t do anything to stop it) or less (since the players can’t prevent it, they don’t feel like they’re “required” to do so)? And would it make a difference whether the trigger was “nine days into the campaign, Good Mead is devastated by an earthquake” or “three hours after the PCs arrive in Good Mead, the town is devastated by an earthquake”?
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