Eloy Cintron “The purpose of having the Big Things going on in the background is to partially alter the nature of the sandbox.”

I’ll throw this out, then: how is this functionally different from a random-event generator? Meaning, you don’t need a Big Picture, right? You can just roll on a table and generate: “Town gets attacked by orcs and goes up in flames!” Since that’s all the players will see, the net effect is the same, isn’t it?