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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8163548" data-attributes="member: 29398">I'm not quite sure if you're suggesting the things on this list are good things, or bad things, or just...things.For my own part, as a DM all of those are good things in that their existence means there's still some life in the campaign; as it'll die when there's nothing left to do.Also, IME occasionally something that starts out as a simple side quest takes on a life of its own (often because the players assign far greater importance to it than it really has, and-or end up becoming engaged in it for other reasons) and ends up becoming a major focus of the campaign for a while.=================Another (!) variable that I might as well chuck in here, just to add to the fun: desired types and amounts of player agency are going to vary, even within the same system, based on the type and length of campaign you're trying to design and-or run.Consider the difference between:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">designing a campaign and-or setting around a particular set of PCs and their goals/motives (and, by extension, a particular and unchanging set of players) with the intent of ending said campaign once those specific things have been dealt with</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">designing a campaign and-or setting without foreknowledge of what PCs will be played in it at any given time, or how long those PCs might individually survive, or how much player turnover the campaign will see as it goes along; all with the intent of the campaign - if things work out well - potentially never ending.*</li> </ul>One would think that in coming up with the former one would want to allow a far greater degree of [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER]-style player agency than in the latter.  Of the former: Benefit: way less or even near-zero up-front prep to do.  Drawback: an intentionally-closed-ended campaign.Of the latter: Drawback: way more up-front prep to do.  Benefit: it's work that in theory only has to be done once and it'll last for ages.I approach all of this from the latter perspective: characters come and go; sometimes players come and go; yet the campaign rolls on regardless.  What this means is that the underlying setting IMO needs to be robust enough to backdrop all this and to withstand what a (potentially wide) variety of people are going to try to do to it.* - there's also a third type - designing a campaign intended to be a single hard-rail adventure path and that's it - which can be ignored for these purposes.</blockquote>

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