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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 6861366" data-attributes="member: 6777737">Yes, that's why I said, "And sure, you can say that the players "don't have to" follow the storyline quests in any of the published 5e modules, but that's disingenuous."Each chapter in, say, Hoard of Dragon Queen leads to the next.  Each bit has a crumb that leads you to the next bit, eventually to Rise of Tiamat and the ultimate confrontation.  It's an epic campaign where essentially each encounter involves enemies from the same Cult of the Dragon and they all tell the story of one huge battle against that Cult and the Dragon Queen.  PC in the campaign fight to prevent Tiamat from triumphing and conquering the Realms.  The players need to stop Tiamat.  If they don't, the campaign ends.  If they do, the campaign still ends.In a sandbox, the PCs fight bandits because they're killing people.  If the PCs don't, then the bandits keep being bandits.  The bandits don't destroy the world.  They're just bandits.  The same is true for nearly every adventure they go on.  You uncover a cult, and it has nothing to do with the bandits.  You find goblins pretending to be a green dragon.  They have nothing whatsoever to do with a cult or bandits.  You loot a tomb.  The undead inside have no interest in cults, banditry, green dragons, goblins, or anything going on in the living world.  You discover the cleric of the town has been charmed by a warlock.  Neither he, nor the warlock, have anything to do with bandits, cults, dragons, goblins, or tombs of undead.  They're just unconnected events that are going on that the PCs could investigate.  And if they don't?  Well, nothing particularly special happens.  The bandits keep robbing people.  More people join another cult.  The goblins keep terrifying people with a fake green dragon.  The cleric remains in the clutches of a warlock.  The undead guard their lonely tomb.  Sure, more bad things happen.  But it's just normal levels of bad things, and bad things happen all the time anyways.  The problems don't escalate to world-ending calamity.  There's no monolithic evil menace threatening the multiverse with a incurable case of terminal swamp ass.  When I DM a sandbox, I assume what the players find is the status quo.  If the players don't act to change it, it may worsen, but it's not likely to change all that much over the timespan that the PCs are in the area.</blockquote>

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