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Message: <blockquote data-quote="argo" data-source="post: 1975663" data-attributes="member: 5752">I vote for keeping the campaign enjoyable at the level of each adventure.  Not all adventures need to have the same content (dungeon crawl vs city mystery), meanwhile focusing on making each and every encounter super-cool can bog the DM down while paying too much attention to the long-term story arc can be booring.  So I just focus on making sure that each evening spent gamming is more fun than an evening spent at the movies or playing Halo and call it good.That is the high-order philosophy.  As for what makes an individual session good, well as I said it doesn't have to be the same thing every time but my game style focuses on: challenging the player's minds (note that this doesn't have to be a puzzle/riddle, simply forcing them into a situation over their heads and watching them fight their way out works too), suprising the players (hard to do but big payoffs if I can manage it), over-the-top villians/NPC's, kicking in doors and showing off their uber-buff character by knocking down the bad guys.  I tell my players that verisimilitude and drama are important but really that is just a lie.  If I can make them think that then they tend to create their own verisimilitude and drama which takes a load off my shoulders but the second either one gets in the way of a cheap laugh it gets kicked to the curb  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /> The rest of that stuff; emotional involvement, non-linear gameplay and moral dilemma, can go hang.  I'm interested in running a game, not an amateur theater.Later.</blockquote>

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