Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8127522">I don't know if this will answer your question or not, but I also had a dilemma with this around 2002-04 or so. Where I was running a lot of very typical type adventures at the time (mostly at the request of my players who wanted the mainstream 3E experience). This was a bit opposite your problem because those were high prep games, but the prep was all oriented around stuff assumed to happen (structuring adventures around encounters, using encounter levels as a guide, and having a kind of clear set of events or scenarios that were expected to occur). As a GM I found it incredibly unsatisfying, because I had been experimenting with looser structures focused on player agency in the past couple of years in other campaigns. What I realized was, for me, it was no fun to realize I might as well just hand my players my notes for that session. There just wasn't enough agency for me and there weren't enough surprises at the table holding my interest. I found a solution to my problems by going back to the older material that embraced the luck of the dice, exploration and not being so focused on things like is the session paced and building toward something, are the encounters all perfectly balanced and exciting, etc. I think you could call the issue I was experience "the tyranny of fun", where there was advice about how to run the perfect session that had become the default, but it just wasn't working for me: because for me the perfect session has a lot of imperfections in it and is centered around players having the ability to make meaningful choices that legitimately shape the direction of the campaign and the events that unfold. For me this led to focusing more on characters, more on creating a world to be explored, and embracing the randomness of the game component (I realized it was the not knowing how things would turn out that was driving my excitement at the table, and that sometimes that meant PCs and NPCs dying in anti-climactic ways, or the adventure wrapping up earlier than expected). I don't think in your case you need to prep a lot to provide player agency but you probably need some amount of concrete. If I were you I would focus on NPCs. Your style, if you want it to be more about player agency, would probably work with a character driven adventure (where you flesh out your NPCs, give them clear goals and motivations and deploy them in the world). That way while you may be deciding what happens on the fly and in response to player choices, you are responding through characters who have a logic to them. So you aren't just saying "Would it be cool for Lord Agitator to join forces against Lady Death with the players right now?" you are saying "Would Lord Agitator take the players up on their offer to join forces against Lady Death?".</blockquote>

Verification