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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 6375870" data-attributes="member: 3586">It's basically impossible to do a sandbox for any adventure where there's a strong story involved. However, that doesn't mean that individual episodes of the adventures can't allow the players a variety of approaches (and the DM a variety of approaches in how to handle them). It doesn't change the fact that certain things have to happen to lead the characters onto the next episode, but it does mean that the adventure isn't 100% forced. The first episode of Hoard of the Dragon is a good example of this style of design. Let's look at its structure:Introduction: The players come to Greenest for a variety of reasons and discover it's under attack by a dragon, kobolds and humans.Opportunities for Adventure: The DM presents the players with a number of adventure opportunities: The players see the cultists burning the mill. They encounter villagers needing escort to the keep. The dragon attacks the keep. The cultists attack the church which has villagers inside. A warrior of the cult challenges the defenders to send out a champion.The players can react to any of these events. They can ignore them entirely. They can wander around the village attacking random cultist encounters. There's a general expectation that the group will meet the Protector of the village and offer to help (because, in the end, this is an adventure about heroes), but there's a lot of freedom for the players in DM in which encounters to use and how to approach each encounter.Conclusion and Continuation: After six hours or thereabouts, the cultists finally cease their attack. The player characters, assuming they survived, gratefully go to rest and, the next morning, the Protector asks for their help investigating the cultist camp.The link between episodes is going to be a railroad. It's extremely hard for it not to be. The problem really comes when the link doesn't make sense at all to the players. I haven't read the later episodes in much detail, so I'm not going to comment on how the links work, but that's the theory behind it. However, in the first episode, there's a wide variety of options available to the players.The biggest trouble Episode 1 has may not be a problem. Quite simply, the opposition is overwhelming. Most groups simply cannot fight for as long as the adventure allows. Part of this is due to the monster stats being in flux during the writing of the adventure (they got tougher towards the end), so the suggested groups could well be too tough for the players. But another large part of it is that it is meant to be overwhelming. The players are meant to come out of it thinking the Cult of the Dragon is a threat. That they were lucky to survive. (Perhaps they didn't all survive - that's quite possible). My own feeling is that the monsters are indeed too tough, so that the party is depleted too soon. The party "losing" is not a problem for me, it's how fast they lose that is the problem. As a result, I've upped the healing available to the party in my running of the adventure, but by the end of the first episode, they're still going to be in trouble.That's my view of it, anyway! I do know I'm very much enjoying running the opening stages of the adventure, and I hope the later stages are as enjoyable!Cheers!</blockquote>

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