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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8168008">They make decisions in the game setting and that indicates where they want to go (or they ask me questions like "is there a school here that teaches sabres techniques). It ins't like a menu where they say "I want the high adventure with a dash of romance please". It is more handled through their characters and setting. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. The longer they play, the more familiar they become. When they first start out, they have a more narrow field of vision. This really depends. If they have goals, they can share those with me. It doesn't mean I am going to craft adventures around them. It is more about what their characters actively do in the setting. I try to make my settings comprehensive enough to handle all kinds of campaigns. That is why there are dungeons, there is wilderness, there are supernatural threats, but there are also sects, heroes, politics, etc. The players are pretty free to set an agenda and pursue it, they just have to do that through their characters. As an example one of the campaigns that we had, one of the players was focused on building alliances with different groups and forming a secret powerful sect made up of many key members of the martial world (but they all assumed disguises when serving the secret sects interest: this I believe I added to the War of Swarmign beggars material). However two other players in the group were less interested in that, so they decided to help him achieve his bigger goal, by seeking out manuals and artifacts that would increase the sect's prestige and power. So they basically went on a bunch of adventures that were more like heists and dungeon crawls (which is what those players felt like doing). I have no problem running a split party (as long as things don't get too disconnected). Once the other player had established this power base, they returned to help him manage things. Everything is pretty much through the characters. The players can definitely talk to me, but most of our conversations tend to be about what is possible for their characters to achieve. That said I do listen to what my players want. I'll give an example. In the Disposable Disciples campaign, the players came into conflict with the House of Paper Shadows, an organization that is intentionally mysteries in the setting (all they really knew about it was it had these supernatural shadow puppets that did its bidding, and it had a vast information network). One of the players told me at the end of a session that he was planning on attacking the house of paper shadows next week. Because this was a very important organization and I didn't have much material on it, and I knew it would take me at least two weeks to research what I needed and flesh it out, I said he can do that, but could he wait three weeks so I have time to prepare (because I had only a rough sense of what existed in their headquarters). This is something I don't mind doing at all. There is a location, the players want to go there, I genuinely don't have enough information and it seems too big to just ad lib (I could have ad libbed it if I had to but I just think it wouldn't have been underwhelming if I had). That way I was able to just think for a straight week about what it ought to be, then set to work on fleshing it out and mapping it out. It worked very well. I was quite happy with how it came out and the player seemed happy that I put the work in.</blockquote>

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