Trust me, I do those! (but thanks, they're all good things to note.)
When on here I hate hate
hate long spiels of OOC text in IC threads, though, so...I genuinely wonder if letting NPCs give out the options sometimes muddied the water some for one of the previous instances whom I don't think saw
any characters as people. That
would explain some of the more insane decisions, if every NPC was looked at as the GM in a hat rather than in-world people who're going to have their own objectives as well as a plot function. Not sure how to get out of that, though.
Hunter:
Even in a sandbox style game, there need to be clearly defined objectives. That group of first level characters might not be strong enough to kill Smaug, but what about when they're fifteenth level? In my experience, players tend to be passive because they don't know what to do next.
In the example given I'd have an NPC casually ask what the party had been doing and go "Oh, you defeated the Dread CR17 Critter? Quite a feat! Our village would reward you handsomely if you went and killed the local dragon for us..." Thing is, aside from working with Investigators (or just plain random people sucked into Things Beyond Mortal Experience) rather than Adventurers, in between
fighting running away from feeple with shovels or tentacular critters trying to eat your face I rely on personal motivations for momentum/subplots in longer projects.
If Smaug gets defeated and Thorin just...stands there because I haven't reminded him it says on his sheet his main motivation was reclaiming the Throne Under The Mountain this post, and he gives the hoard to the first
orc elf* who wanders up and suggests the option of surrendering the gold whilst the rest of the party are busy counting,
that's my problem.
That all said, I do need to work on my pacing, loose-weave though my structure is (a necessity in anyone-can-die environments), and a better grip on that might help.
*These players can usually notice Team Bad hats if very obvious, but often forget the groups their character should be traditional enemies with.