World of Warcraft taught me how to DM again.

[Obergnom]

Somehow you cured my upcomming DM burnout just by posting this, thanks for reminding me you do not have to go epic!

I created a rather epic "Temple of Elemental Evil"-like heroic tier campaign which is about to end after 30 sessions.
I allready figured out how to go from there to an epic climax against Graz'zt but to be honest, this long term planing was starting to suck all motivation out of me and the best part of the campaign was the beginning, when everything was still unknown and open to the players... the rather focused finale starts to get boring... thanks again for this reminder... know I just have to figure out how to make Return to the Tomb of Horrors a 10 sessions run

 

[Rel]

I ended up with the same problem from a different starting point. We had been long-time players of Rolemaster, a system that has some nice features but speedy, smooth combat isn't one of them. Our campaigns became highly political and social as a defense mechanism from long, slow, deadly combats.

3e got us back into the mindset of "let's just kill us a pile of monsters!" Very refreshing. Since the early days I've run some campaigns with epic plotlines and others that were more sandboxy. The method that seems to work best for the current group composition is to throw handfuls of plot hooks at them for the first dozen sessions of the campaign. Then see which ones interest them most and develop them and weave a few into a bigger idea. Oftentimes, when done right, it looks like they were always tied together and this ends up making the GM look like a genius (I call that a bonus). This "main" plotline carries us to the end of the campaign but has the advantage that it doesn't feel forced because it's made up of things that the players chose to pursue in the first place.

The WoW analogy holds here too because a lot of times you end up doing those "little" quests early on that end up being chains of quests that hold greater significance than you'd have ever guessed. Sometimes they send you back to these same questgivers in the late game to follow up on stuff that you did in the early days. I think that's pretty cool design.