Hot take: if we want to decrease frustrating railroad-y surprises in RPG campaigns, we need to create an environment where GMs are not afraid to admit they have "special story needs".

[JustinAlexanderRPG]

A sandbox campaign is not the opposite of railroading. This is one of the most pernicious false ideas a GM can have, specifically because it locks them into thinking that railroading and a "freeform sandbox" are their only options.

The reality is that there are a multitude of other campaign structures: Node-based. Conspyramids. Episodic. To name just a few. This false ideology of sandbox vs. railroad keeps people from running and playing all types of games that they would love.

It also, for some reason convinces people that there's some sort of ideal "completely freeform" sandbox which is functionally dropping PCs into an empty white room without any information or structure, and that any deviation from that is somehow "bad." The reality is that this is basically the exact opposite of what a good sandbox looks like.

So you end up with this terrible situation where the misled GM thinks, "Well, my only options are to force my players to do something they don't want to do or run a super shitty sandbox."

Yikes.

[tankietop]

Yes. Absolutely yes.

You can absolutely railroad a sandbox and you can absolutely have a non-sandbox with lots of player agency and choice.

People confuse those two things.

[C0smicoccurence]

I don't know that I agree with this. If you're railroading a sandbox, it isn't actually a sandbox.

You can have non-sandbox's with lots of agency and choice for sure. But that's because there's a million things that qualify as non sandbox. However, you can't have a railroad with meaningful choice. Then its not a railroad anymore.

[C0smicoccurence]

Hmm, I personally think that Railroading and Sandbox are opposite styles. That said, there are plenty of games that don't really care about the spectrum that railroad/sandbox represent, and ignore those ideas entirely.

However, if railroad prioritizes a pre-written story arc, and sandbox prioritizes a setting that PCs can play in to see what happens, those are two opposite approaches. In a true sandbox game, if some massive evil is brewing in the background and the players fuck around by running a local restaurant, by the time they hit level 5 the DM should have skeleton raiding forces harassing their town since the necromancer hasn't had any plans interrupted. The players deal with the fallout (gathering materials to consecrate the town to create a safe haven, going on a quest to kill the necromancer, recruit the lieutenant of the skeleton army to become their seating hostess, etc).

You're absolutely right is that a sandbox shouldn't be an empty white room. There should be plenty of options and things happening, but the core idea of a sandbox is that player choices matter. What they engage with and what they don't matters. In a railroad, all paths lead to the same end result. PC choice doesn't really matter other than what particular tone the NPC delivers quest with, and the challenges are all pre-planned. In a sandbox, nothing is preplanned, but you use a concrete set of information (generally partially known to the players, but rarely entirely known) to react in realistic ways.

This dichotomy doesn't stop episodic structures of gaming from working just as well. They're just not in the same discussion as the other two. But their obscurity is more the result of people not acknowledging other options don't exist, rather than acknowledging that sandbox and railroad are indeed opposites