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Message: <blockquote data-quote="devincutler" data-source="post: 6812081" data-attributes="member: 6684551">In playing D&D for over 40 years, I have yet to find a DM who can run extemporaneously and make it feel completely natural. Too many things go too well. Fights are all precisely the right toughness and the PCs always just pull it off in the end. Help always comes when you need it. Things never really threaten to spiral out of control because the guiding hand of the DM is always ready, at a whim, to cater to the players playing in the sandbox. I prefer playing and running in a game where there is a set world and I and the other players can react to it and try to make our way through it or change it to suit us.The sandbox approach ends up having the feel of:PLAYER: "Man if we just had some owlbear feathers, we could do X"DM: "Over the hill lopes an owlbear!"The above is obviously extraordinarily simplified, and even a half-assed DM wouldn't be that blatant, but it illustrates the general feel I get when playing with a full-on sandbox DM.That is also why I despise die fudging. I am never comfortable with a DM until we get a PC death. I am so tired of DMs asking players how many hp their PC has left and then miraculously the hit does just enough not to kill them (this is obviously more applicable to 3.5 than to 5e). As a DM, all of my combat die rolls and saves are out in the open.I prefer to present my players with a fully fleshed out situation (I tend to ask them the session before what they want to do next, so that it is still the players deciding their course) and then let them do with it what they will and the dice fall where it may.The key to a story-lead campaign is that you need to design your scenarios to account for most player curveballs, and you need to very carefully listen to and question what your players want to do next. Even if the players go off the rails, a good DM who has made a compelling storyline should be able to subtly guide their players back on line (if not, then you didn't choose a story that would interest your players).</blockquote>

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