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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8144684">It isn't pure improv. There are principles guiding everything and a lot of it hinges on knowing the motivations of groups, NPCs, etc. I take a living world approach. And I don't really plan out adventures as much as situations and characters. One of my frustrations in gaming was the very thing you point to here (particularly at the height of the early 2000s d20 boom. I just felt like I might as well hand in my GM notes to the players, because the mainstream style of play at the time, and the style they wanted, was very much around prepped adventures, that felt pretty linear to me. That is why I went back to the old books, really read the 1st edition DMG, and started messing around with the older modules and material (as well as the older systems). What that did for me was remind me  of some of the things I came to the game for when I first started playing and it helped get me on a path where I was moving away from that frustration and enjoying gaming again. I think the keys for me were emphasizing characters, situations, the concept of the living adventure (this was talked about in the Ravenloft module Feast of Goblyns---which was building off the original Ravenloft adventure concept in that regard), open exploration, dungeon crawls, let the dice fall where they may, etc. Going back to some of those old hex crawls was helpful as well. And experimenting with different approaches to adventure and investigation. My goal was definitely to avoid the problem you are talking about here (because it bugged me probably as much as it bugs you).</blockquote>

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