Sandbox RPG: help me understand

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Not mine, no.

But I'm going to continue to push back against people redefining a term they didn't coin and have made no attempt to understand from the PoV of people playing in that style. I've seen that enough in this hobby, and the constant negative effect that's had.

Good thing the video gamers that first used the term didn’t have the same stance, eh?

Negative effect….ffs someone described how they used a term and then you were a dick to them. One is clearly negative.
 
I could be wrong, but I'm unconvinced that Rob and his friends coined the term. Used it? Definitely. Popularised it? Quite possibly. Repurposed it? Maybe.

Were the first to use the term in any kind of gaming context? I suspect not.
You will not find it used as a reference as a type of RPG campaign prior to 2006.
 
You not find it used as a reference as a type of RPG campaign prior to 2006.
Ironically considering later objections to the word, Glenn Blacow seems to have seen it as a "story telling world" in 1980.

In a story telling world, the non-player characters are alive offstage. History is a continuing and developing process, with the actions of both player and non-player characters affecting the course of events. Moreover, the GM has usually a very good idea of how the general trend of events is going. Also, of how the actions of the adventurers can affect things..

(...)

In more free-form versions of this game type, the flow of the story and the form of the script are decided by interactions between the GM's general outline of events and the actions of individuals within the campaign.

(They aren't perfect, but I generally like Blacow's definitions more than most people seem to).
 
I could be wrong, but I'm unconvinced that Rob and his friends coined the term. Used it? Definitely. Popularised it? Quite possibly. Repurposed it? Maybe.

Were the first to use the term in any kind of gaming context? I suspect not.

OK, well, I look forward to seeing the fruits of your investigations. Mine didn't turn up anything earlier
 
Are you going to push back against RPGers using it in general now? They didn't coin it.

Using it? lol, no.

It's the constant attempts to redefine it, which directly resulted in The Pub losing one of it's best posters, that I will continue to push against. Because, if not, pretty soon the term will be made meaningless
 
A Fiery Flying Roll Black Leaf If you search old Dragon magazines, Usenet posts, and the like. Sandbox was used but pretty always in one of two ways. The sandbox table that miniature wargamer used. Or as a synonym for setting. The use as a setting synonym was from a child's sandbox.

Videogames that features a lot of building like civilization were called sandbox games because of their flexibility like the sand table and the sandbox. But nearly all of them featured open ended play and so became strongly associated with that. And that open-end play is pretty much described how many of used the Wilderlands.

Then in the mid 2000s when folks were promoting the Wilderlands like myself, folks spoke about it like Melan's response from 2006.

Basically, this is it. Think of the Wilderlands as a huge sandbox your players can play around in and explore/conquer to your heart's content. The keyed maps give you, the Judge, enough creative sparks to sustain a campaign based almost solely on improvisation; or if you will, enough building blocks to turn into full adventures. The setting has a lot of small details but little macrostructure, making it very flexible indeed - judging by posts on the Necromancer Games messageboards, individual campaigns set therein are very divergent.
or this one from earlier in 2005.


So, essentially, you get a sandbox which is very accomodating of your own designs, and yet provides a network of ideas to get a party going. There is bound to be something nearby; something you can spin into a full adventure (the aforementioned Black Baron Pass has ten pages of handwritten notes associated with it in my game), keep as a side affair, modify or substract. The ultimate modularity of the environment makes it easy to delete and/or replace entire cities and cultures - something I have also done on multiple occasions. Thus, instead of a coherent millieu, the Wilderlands is more like a boxful of colourful mosaic tiles to be rearranged and modified. There is some degree of systematic detail in the Player’s Guide (which is essentially „baxtrapolation” - the original was quite random, and only coherent in hindsight... *), but ultimately, it is the boxed set, the maps and your own ideas which matter. My own Wilderlands is in many ways much more hardcore sword&sorcery than even the original, and there is more of the fallen spaceships stuff as well... and sure enough, no problem.

By 2007 folks (like Melan was one the driving forces behind the adoption of the term) started calling it sandbox-style or sandbox play.

Most modules that give you a sandbox to play in - an open environment with a lot of possibilities - is suitable for a party of anti-heroes or true villains. In that respect, you already have a lot of product to choose, from Keep on the Borderlands to Lost City of Barakus and City State of the Invincible Overlord (a Lawful Evil city full of adventuring potential).

Search any of the forums that span the early 2000s to now. You can see the shift and that the first folks to talk about sandbox-play sandbox-style were those involved with Necromancer Game projects or NG fans.

Like this post from 2006

I am more interested in sandbox style play over plot regimented style.
I will be using RA, Bards Gate and maybe Coils pf set to get the ball rolling. I may have orcus be in thrall to Set as a back story and to control the plot. The cult of Mitra will then be back in play to fight this rising evil.
 
A Fiery Flying Roll Black Leaf If you search old Dragon magazines, Usenet posts, and the like. Sandbox was used but pretty always in one of two ways. The sandbox table that miniature wargamer used. Or as a synonym for setting. The use as a setting synonym was from a child's sandbox.
I've also heard it used in wargame circles to describe a game with a lot of freedom to experiment with alt history, different strategies etc. That one almost certainly is a direct deviation from the literal wargame sandbox though. It's linked to the old argument about there actually only being a handful of strategic decisions if you're doing a simulation of WW2 European theater.

There also seems to be some very early use of it to mean something like a test server where you can mess around with coding to your heart's content. That's probably where the video game use stems from.
 
I've also heard it used in wargame circles to describe a game with a lot of freedom to experiment with alt history, different strategies etc. That one almost certainly is a direct deviation from the literal wargame sandbox though. It's linked to the old argument about there actually only being a handful of strategic decisions if you're doing a simulation of WW2 European theater.

There also seems to be some very early use of it to mean something like a test server where you can mess around with coding to your heart's content. That's probably where the video game use stems from.
I was definitely using Sanbox as a coding thing. I feel like beyond that I was exposed to it as a gaming term before 2006, but I'm willing to accept that it didn't become a commonly understood RPG term until 2006 as Robert is saying.

In any case, given the early large scale use of the term as Robert has described, I'm willing to defer to his definition, and to use terms like Qualified Sandbox for things that aren't quite the same thing as Robert describes due to some constraints.

I thought the previous Sandbox thread had pretty well settled the definition of Sandbox for the Pub... :-)
 
I've also heard it used in wargame circles to describe a game with a lot of freedom to experiment with alt history, different strategies etc. That one almost certainly is a direct deviation from the literal wargame sandbox though. It's linked to the old argument about there actually only being a handful of strategic decisions if you're doing a simulation of WW2 European theater.
I don't have a hard reference but I think you are right.

There also seems to be some very early use of it to mean something like a test server where you can mess around with coding to your heart's content. That's probably where the video game use stems from.
I experienced the use of that term when I was studying computer science in the mid 80s.
 
I feel like beyond that I was exposed to it as a gaming term before 2006,
You did just in a different context.

Over on Stack Exchange in 2010 I documented some of the early usage of the term in Dragon Magazine.
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The term originated in computer games and it's meant to describe a game where its playing field is wide open for the player to do what they want. Around 2005 with the release of Necromancer Game's Wilderlands of High Fantasy Boxed Set, its authors—I am one of them—used it to describe to people what made the Wilderlands different from other settings. It was designed to make it easy for the referee to adjudicate his players roaming freely across the map.

Later still, the term got attached to a specific playstyle as mentioned by mxyzplk. However this is beyond what myself and other Wilderland authors intended. The problem is that people take the hard-core simulation of wandering the map too literally. This often results in frustration as many PC groups feel rudderless and the game feels without direction. In fact, if you read through various forums posts, such as on ENWorld, you see these campaigns fail more than succeed.

The trick to overcome this is "World in Motion." You work with the characters to give them a background they like in the setting. This provides a framework in which the players can make their initial choices. This background can incorporate what some consider railroad elements, like being members of a noble household, a guild, a temple, etc. But the key difference is that the players are free to leave or ignore those elements, as long as they are willing to suffer the consequences.

Along with this you develop a timeline revolving around NPCs and events. This timeline is created with the idea that this is what happens if the players didn't exist in the campaign. This timeline becomes your plan. It gets altered as a result of the consequences of the players' actions. At some point the campaign will become self-driving as the consequences of the consequences start propelling the players forward.

Again the Sandbox was meant to describe a type of setting, not a playstyle. But you can't control how these things go on the internet, so hence the confusion.

People often get confused due to the prior use of Sandbox in campaign. The term "Sandbox" was used for RPGs prior to the development of the Wilderlands Boxed but for other aspect of gaming than a type of campaign and setting. Some examples include:

Dragon #25, Tim Kask

He still clings to the shibboleth that wargamers are classic cases of arrested development, never having gotten out of the sandbox and toy soldiers syndrome of childhood.
Dragon #247, Page 123

Grubb has a phrase for working with existing games, settings, and characters: playing in other people's sandboxes.
Later in the issue

Having gone freelance three years ago, Grubb has explored new sandboxes. I worked on Mag Force 7's Wing Commander and Star Trek (original series) trading card games, ...
In this issue "sandbox" was used interchangeably with how most roleplaying gamers use campaign.
 
Starting to look a lot like arguing over how many orcs can dance on the head of a pin ...

In any event, I think arguing as to whether the etymology of an idiom or a turn of phrase "makes sense" is ridiculous. They don't have to make objective sense. In a lot of cases the coiners are deliberately trying NOT to make objective sense, to come up with a term that baffles outsiders, often times to deliberately piss off outsiders. We already have enough trouble in this hobby with badly overused terms ("levels") or companies throwing artsy-fartsy nomenclature at us (White Wolf, I'm looking at you) where it isn't so much that you need a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary to figure out what they could possibly mean, but that the OED wouldn't do you any good.
 
I'd just like to point out that language is a dynamic convention.
If you're trying to ascertain "legitimacy" by finding whoever used a term first, you'll be out of luck, because the most important defining factor is current usage, which is obviously ever changing.
 
I'd just like to point out that language is a dynamic convention.
If you're trying to ascertain "legitimacy" by finding whoever used a term first, you'll be out of luck, because the most important defining factor is current usage, which is obviously ever changing.

All the more reason to push back against anyone using the term wrong, before it becomes "common usage" (whatever that means regarding an obscure niche hobby term)
 
You will not find it used as a reference as a type of RPG campaign prior to 2006.

I was basically looking for ways to get away from a lot of the predominant adventure structures during the d20 boom, around 2005. I started by going back to things like hex crawls, back to my old AD&D books, and the AD&D DMG, and then drawing on the living adventure approach I had liked in Ravenloft. My focus was mainly on that. I think I first encountered the term sandbox from a writer I hired in like 2008/2009 or so (I had given guidelines on how the adventure was supposed to be structured---and he used the term sandbox). Which I remember felt jarring to me, and I think it is because I didn't play video games so I had no real context for the word. What I was doing at the time wasn't quite sandbox but was 'sandboxy', I suppose (I just tended to use living adventure to describe, but the focuses a lot more on NPC behavior than PC). From there I encountered more clear conversation about sandbox play from posters like you at theRPGsite, where I started to try out more directly sandbox ideas at the table and found they fit what I was trying to do.

I will say, I have known Rob for years and found his advice some of the best on this topic. It definitely shaped what I do now at the table
 
In a lot of cases the coiners are deliberately trying NOT to make objective sense, to come up with a term that baffles outsiders, often times to deliberately piss off outsiders. We already have enough trouble in this hobby with badly overused terms ("levels") or companies throwing artsy-fartsy nomenclature at us (White Wolf, I'm looking at you) where it isn't so much that you need a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary to figure out what they could possibly mean, but that the OED wouldn't do you any good.
In the case of sandbox, we still have the folks who coined and first spread the term still active and writing.
 
All the more reason to push back against anyone using the term wrong, before it becomes "common usage" (whatever that means regarding an obscure niche hobby term)

Which usage are you pushing back on (I think I missed this bit of the conversation)?
 
Which usage are you pushing back on (I think I missed this bit of the conversation)?

To put it simplest, the attempt to change from defining it by player freedom to "acceptable" imposed limitations
 
To put it simplest, the attempt to change from defining it by player freedom to "acceptable" imposed limitations

This is one of the reasons why I think qualifiers are useful. If I am running a pure sandbox, I would call it sandbox. But I have used the term "Contained Sandbox", simply because people know what sandbox means, so when I use that label it is pretty quick to get them on the page I am on. I also used the terminology drama and sandbox at one point to indicate campaigns that are sandbox structured but where the GM brings in dramatic elements that might not be thought of as part of a typical sandbox. I think it would have been misleading for me to describe a game with that many dramatic elements, as sandbox, especially if my book was the first time a GM encountered the term sandbox (because it would effectively be their initial definition of it).

I think where terms like this being changed can become a big issue is in playstyle debates where language gets co-opted so that it can be adopted by another style of play if they popularize the term enough. it would be like in the 80s, if you had death metal and thrash and thrash, and death started calling itself thrash, and then became the definition of thrash. You could say, well that is just where thrash evolved to. And sometimes that happens (the term heavy metal itself evolved a lot from its earlier uses with bands like Led Zeppelin) but in the latter case, it would have been a way of one sub-genre defeating another in the market, to co-op the language.
 
I think I first encountered the term sandbox from a writer I hired in like 2008/2009

Prior to 2008 I was mostly involved on mailing lists and small forums like Necromancer Games. Others, like Melan, were more responsible in the 2005 to 2007 period for using and spread the use of sandbox as a campaign style on the more popular forums like Enworld and RPG.net. The year 2008 was definitely the inflection year for the use of sandbox campaign where the larger hobby developed an awareness of the term, to a point. Even now it is still a smaller niche of interest in the larger hobby.

I will say, I have known Rob for years and found his advice some of the best on this topic. It definitely shaped what I do now at the table
Appreciate the compliment.
 
To put it simplest, the attempt to change from defining it by player freedom to "acceptable" imposed limitations
Do you include input limitations in that? "You are all members of a mercenary company" as a starting point, say. Or more extreme "no, while Kings exist in this setting you can't play a member of the royal family".
 
To put it simplest, the attempt to change from defining it by player freedom to "acceptable" imposed limitations
Imagine a campaign where the players are members of the military and are under orders and most of the action is about executing missions.

The problem that I ran into early on that the description of what happened in the above campaign is indistinguishable whether the referee is running it as a sandbox, or not.

In a sandbox campaign, the players choose as their characters to be under orders. Orders that are created by the referee roleplaying as their superior officer.

In other types of campaign, the players are also under orders. And the orders are still created by the referee.

More than a few then and more than a few now don't get the distinction. Hence all the talk of qualified sandboxes. But for the most part I am on the same page as you. A sandbox is about the referee being willing to let the players trash your setting. Whether the players take advantage of that as their character is immaterial. In a sandbox campaign, joining the military, living life being defined by the order given is as equal and as valid as living life of a free agent able to wander anywhere they want to.

In practice sandbox campaigns play out like like does. Choices have consequences, those consequences define most of the subsequent decisions however from time to time, folks opt to go in a completely different direction and damn the consequences.
 
Imagine a campaign where the players are members of the military and are under orders and most of the action is about executing missions.

The problem that I ran into early on that the description of what happened in the above campaign is indistinguishable whether the referee is running it as a sandbox, or not.

In a sandbox campaign, the players choose as their characters to be under orders. Orders that are created by the referee roleplaying as their superior officer.

In other types of campaign, the players are also under orders. And the orders are still created by the referee.

More than a few then and more than a few now don't get the distinction. Hence all the talk of qualified sandboxes. But for the most part I am on the same page as you. A sandbox is about the referee being willing to let the players trash your setting. Whether the players take advantage of that as their character is immaterial. In a sandbox campaign, joining the military, living life being defined by the order given is as equal and as valid as living life of a free agent able to wander anywhere they want to.

In practice sandbox campaigns play out like like does. Choices have consequences, those consequences define most of the subsequent decisions however from time to time, folks opt to go in a completely different direction and damn the consequences.

Absolutely.
 
Do you include input limitations in that? "You are all members of a mercenary company" as a starting point, say. Or more extreme "no, while Kings exist in this setting you can't play a member of the royal family".
Like any other campaign style "You are all members of a mercenary company" is a out of game consensus decision by the group.

Using "No you can't be a member of the royal family" as an example is problematic because the factors for allowing or not allowing a player to play such a character is nuanced.
  • It could be that the referee has already defined all the members of the royal family for the setting from a previous campaign.
  • It could be that it doesn't make sense in light of what the rest of the group wants to do.
Folks can go around and around the "What about this?" merry go around but it doesn't change the fact that a requirement of having a successful sandbox campaign is a pre-game two-way discussion between the referee and a player about the character they want to play. And between the referee and the group about how the players expect their characters to adventure together.

The first step in this is the referee pitching a setting, if the players agree to the setting then they are also agree to how the setting is defined. If the royal family is undefined then there is wiggle room for letting a player play a member of the royal family. If it wasn't and the group really want to have a player play a member of a royal family, then a new setting will have to be pitched.

But typically we are talking setting that are entire worlds. So there often flexibility and while the player who want to play a royal may not get exactly what they envision, the referee can often get something close.

A more common example is a referee not having a race like Dragonborn or Elves that in the core rulebook in their setting and a player or more rarely the group want to play members of that race.
 
Like any other campaign style "You are all members of a mercenary company" is a out of game consensus decision by the group.
If it's an out of game consensus decision I agree with you. That's a free decision by the group as a whole.

If it's a top down decision (in this campaign you'll all start as mercenaries) that's when I see it as a serious limitation.

And then you get the fringe case where the majority want to play mercenaries but there's no consensus because one player doesn't. For a truly free choice at that point, you need to have that player playing something else. (With the obvious qualifier that there may be consequences if they choose an incompatible concept).

A more common example is a referee not having a race like Dragonborn or Elves that in the core rulebook in their setting and a player or more rarely the group want to play members of that race.

I'd actually consider that less of a restriction; "there are no elves in this world" is a setting issue, like "you can't play a space marine".

"You can't play a royal" is an OOC restriction, although you can argue that it's not possible because it's an accident of birth which I think is stronger.
 
If it's an out of game consensus decision I agree with you. That's a free decision by the group as a whole.

If it's a top down decision (in this campaign you'll all start as mercenaries) that's when I see it as a serious limitation.
Yes I agree it is a serious limitation. Which setting has a "no adventures in town" rule but otherwise character can do as they please as long as it is within the wilderness?
And then you get the fringe case where the majority want to play mercenaries but there's no consensus because one player doesn't. For a truly free choice at that point, you need to have that player playing something else. (With the obvious qualifier that there may be consequences if they choose an incompatible concept).
That is a problem of tabletop roleplaying not whether a campaign is a sandbox or not. A single human being can only do so much even with a commitment to running a sandbox campaign. How I handle it that if a players feel that the logical choice is that character would be elsewhere, then I allow them to create a new character close to the experience of the departing character. For example in a recent campaign I had a player who played an elven wizard decide to return to their homeland when the party was around 8th level and he rolled up a 8th level human fighter and we roleplayed him joining the group.

I'd actually consider that less of a restriction; "there are no elves in this world" is a setting issue, like "you can't play a space marine".

"You can't play a royal" is an OOC restriction, although you can argue that it's not possible because it's an accident of birth which I think is stronger.
No not when the royal family is defined then it is as much of a setting issue as having no elves in the world or you can't play a space marine in a fantasy setting.
 
In a sandbox campaign, the players choose as their characters to be under orders. Orders that are created by the referee roleplaying as their superior officer.

I’m not saying this type of game is not a sandbox, because I think it very well may be, whether the decision is made by the players beforehand or during the game as their characters.

But isn’t it a bit problematic if one of the PCs opts to not join the military during game? What if one player says “sorry, I just can’t see my PC agreeing to join the military”?

If this happens, do you literally split time between the military PCs going on missions, and the solo adventures of the other PC? Or does that solo PC’s story come to an end for now and the game focuses on the military PCs? Does the player of the solo guy either join the military despite it being what the character would do? Or does he make a new character who’s a member of the military so they can all proceed together?

The game’s status as a sandbox would seem to potentially change based on the answers to these questions.

So is a game either a sandbox or not, or can it change from sandbox to not sandbox during the course of play? Or can it be a sandbox for some participants, but not others?

This is why I find some of the “requirements” to achieve sandbox status as odd.
 
A character can be subject to orders from a superior in a 'sandbox' game; that is just life (at least for people who are in a hierarchy but not at the top!). The question is how the DM responds if the player refuses that order, goes AWOL, misinterprets a command, or in some other way behaves in an unexpected fashion. A good 'sandboxy' DM will just roll with it and come up with NPC responses and setting events that allow play to proceed naturally; a DM who is a control freak or just bad at this sort of play will try to manipulate or simply force the players to go back on their own decision and follow the command/railroad instruction.
 
I’m not saying this type of game is not a sandbox, because I think it very well may be, whether the decision is made by the players beforehand or during the game as their characters.

But isn’t it a bit problematic if one of the PCs opts to not join the military during game? What if one player says “sorry, I just can’t see my PC agreeing to join the military”?

If this happens, do you literally split time between the military PCs going on missions, and the solo adventures of the other PC? Or does that solo PC’s story come to an end for now and the game focuses on the military PCs? Does the player of the solo guy either join the military despite it being what the character would do? Or does he make a new character who’s a member of the military so they can all proceed together?

The game’s status as a sandbox would seem to potentially change based on the answers to these questions.

So is a game either a sandbox or not, or can it change from sandbox to not sandbox during the course of play? Or can it be a sandbox for some participants, but not others?

This is why I find some of the “requirements” to achieve sandbox status as odd.
That issue is no different than 5 players saying "Let's play D&D" and one player saying "No I only want to play Traveller".

This is why I no longer have any expectation that players continue to my next campaign after one ends. I offer existing players first crack at the seats, but otherwise I recruit anew.

RPG campaigns require buy in from the players and GM.

That said, I think there's a key difference between mercenary company as sandbox and one that isn't. If the players pitch the mercenary company, and the GM says, "sure, you can do that in my setting" and the GM is running a sandbox, he will be OK if the PCs get orders that they decide to not follow for whatever reason. In a sandbox, at any point the players can decide the campaign is no longer about a mercenary company. Of course there can be in game implications and consequences of that choice. In a not sandbox, if the players suddenly decided not to be a mercenary company, the GM can pitch a fit and blow up the campaign. Somewhere between those two end points are qualified sandboxes where the GM is open to the PCs no longer being mercenaries but the choices of how they change or what they change to will be constrained, and the implications and consequences might not follow logically.
 
That issue is no different than 5 players saying "Let's play D&D" and one player saying "No I only want to play Traveller".

This is why I no longer have any expectation that players continue to my next campaign after one ends. I offer existing players first crack at the seats, but otherwise I recruit anew.

RPG campaigns require buy in from the players and GM.

That said, I think there's a key difference between mercenary company as sandbox and one that isn't. If the players pitch the mercenary company, and the GM says, "sure, you can do that in my setting" and the GM is running a sandbox, he will be OK if the PCs get orders that they decide to not follow for whatever reason. In a sandbox, at any point the players can decide the campaign is no longer about a mercenary company. Of course there can be in game implications and consequences of that choice. In a not sandbox, if the players suddenly decided not to be a mercenary company, the GM can pitch a fit and blow up the campaign. Somewhere between those two end points are qualified sandboxes where the GM is open to the PCs no longer being mercenaries but the choices of how they change or what they change to will be constrained, and the implications and consequences might not follow logically.

Yep, it's all common sense and communication, basically.
 
That issue is no different than 5 players saying "Let's play D&D" and one player saying "No I only want to play Traveller".

This is why I no longer have any expectation that players continue to my next campaign after one ends. I offer existing players first crack at the seats, but otherwise I recruit anew.

RPG campaigns require buy in from the players and GM.

That said, I think there's a key difference between mercenary company as sandbox and one that isn't. If the players pitch the mercenary company, and the GM says, "sure, you can do that in my setting" and the GM is running a sandbox, he will be OK if the PCs get orders that they decide to not follow for whatever reason. In a sandbox, at any point the players can decide the campaign is no longer about a mercenary company. Of course there can be in game implications and consequences of that choice. In a not sandbox, if the players suddenly decided not to be a mercenary company, the GM can pitch a fit and blow up the campaign. Somewhere between those two end points are qualified sandboxes where the GM is open to the PCs no longer being mercenaries but the choices of how they change or what they change to will be constrained, and the implications and consequences might not follow logically.

Sure, I don't disagree with any of that. But my issue is that you're assuming the players and/or characters are always acting in unison.

So if a sandbox game comes to a point where they can join the military or not, and 4 out of 5 say sure, and 1 says no....what happens? Unless the answer is that we split time and essentially run two different games, then it would seem the game is no longer a sandbox for at least 1 person.
 
Using it? lol, no.

It's the constant attempts to redefine it, which directly resulted in The Pub losing one of it's best posters, that I will continue to push against. Because, if not, pretty soon the term will be made meaningless
What was the story with that loss for newbies? It seems to be an issue that gets posters riled.
 
But isn’t it a bit problematic if one of the PCs opts to not join the military during game? What if one player says “sorry, I just can’t see my PC agreeing to join the military”?

If this happens, do you literally split time between the military PCs going on missions, and the solo adventures of the other PC? Or does that solo PC’s story come to an end for now and the game focuses on the military PCs? Does the player of the solo guy either join the military despite it being what the character would do? Or does he make a new character who’s a member of the military so they can all proceed together?

The game’s status as a sandbox would seem to potentially change based on the answers to these questions.

So is a game either a sandbox or not, or can it change from sandbox to not sandbox during the course of play? Or can it be a sandbox for some participants, but not others?

This is why I find some of the “requirements” to achieve sandbox status as odd.

I think this is kind of an edge case. But that possibility of 1 player not going along with the rest, is always a possibility in any play structure or style. Whether that edge case makes it not a sandbox...I don't know. I don't think we need to redefine the term though. I think it is just something that, each group is going to handle differently. At its core, with sandbox, I think you are trying to honor the player's ability to make choices and set goals for themselves in the game world. How far apart those goals can be, how much tension can exist between a group of 4 players who want to join the military, and 1 player who doesn't, that is pretty individual. However, I have had things like this crop up in a sandbox. I had one group for example who started out just wandering around making a name for themselves, then they joined a sect together, which they eventually took over. Two of the players wanted to go on adventures, the others wanted to manage their sect and grow its reputation. Because the exploits of the players who wanted to adventure would give some glory to the sect, they decided to split for bit. Each session I would spend going back and forth between the players at sect headquarters, and the players going off on adventures. Occasionally they would return and do things together, but for a large chunk of time, they were apart. I made it clear to them, I could manage this, but they also understood there would be a point where splitting of the party into more and more groups would probably not be workable.

Whether that kind of split is tenable, I don't think is a question of 'is this a sandbox', but 'can the group handle this kind of split'. In a sandbox, in the military example, the group has a choice: do we split the group up so this one player can go do something else, do we make the character join with us, or do we have that player make a new character. How they reach a consensus on the matter is up to them, or up to the vote. This can happen at any point in a sandbox. You can have four players who want to go deal with the haunted manor down the road, and 1 player who wants to go on a quest to get the Horn of Julian. In some groups that might result in a temporary split, in others the player who wants the horn may get outvoted and have to go with them to the manor. In sandbox you are trying to honor the player freedom to explore, but I mean, you have to let them sort out what that is (and maybe step in and help if they can't come to a consensus).
 
That said, I think there's a key difference between mercenary company as sandbox and one that isn't. If the players pitch the mercenary company, and the GM says, "sure, you can do that in my setting" and the GM is running a sandbox, he will be OK if the PCs get orders that they decide to not follow for whatever reason. In a sandbox, at any point the players can decide the campaign is no longer about a mercenary company. Of course there can be in game implications and consequences of that choice. In a not sandbox, if the players suddenly decided not to be a mercenary company, the GM can pitch a fit and blow up the campaign. Somewhere between those two end points are qualified sandboxes where the GM is open to the PCs no longer being mercenaries but the choices of how they change or what they change to will be constrained, and the implications and consequences might not follow logically.

I think this is a crucial distinction. I had a campaign where the players were all constables. And I was trying to take a sandbox approach within that framework. At a certain point the players decided to become corrupt constables, and build up and underworld empire around prohibited goods (they basically became drug lords). So they steered it into more breaking bad territory. Which was fine. I think what a sandbox GM does is not thwart those kinds of changes of direction.
 
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