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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AaronOfBarbaria" data-source="post: 6749544" data-attributes="member: 6701872">That's a matter of preference. I prefer a campaign pace at which characters can go from starting level dealing with minor issues up to and through major events that have potential for lasting impact on the setting at large in about 6-9 months.A concrete example: I ran a campaign that started with The Temple of Elemental Evil module, proceeded through Scourge of the Slavelords, and then Queen of Spiders concluding the campaign with the party confronting Lolth (so T1-4, A1-4, GDQ1-7), and all that happened in 60 sessions of 3-4 hours each - a handful of which felt a bit unexciting because the players were spinning their wheels deciding what to do, not actually doing things.I hear of people playing the same campaign for numerous years - I just can't imagine what that is like, because it really can't be what it seems like it would from my current point of view.It's not at all shallow, not even to begin with, if you don't want it to be shallow. I'm not adversarial at all - never have been. Even when I was 12 and reading the DMG for the first time, I identified a few things as bad advice and chose to ignore them; those being the various ways in which the book encouraged adversarial practices (and fudging dice rolls, but that's a different topic entirely).Winning the arguments that arise is nowhere near my priority - my priority when an argument arises is to get past it and back to playing the game with the argument having as little influence on the overall mood at the table as is possible. So yes, arguments do happen, but I don't care about winning them. In fact, I usually settle them by having the whole group vote what they think should be done and going with whatever is most acceptable to everyone present, my own opinion on the matter being no more weighty than any of the players'.I don't know what you are unsure about. That you (and I, to be honest) are decades into DMing and still have room to improve doesn't have anything to do with the fact that a 12-year-old can learn to DM without being some kind of DMing prodigy.Yeah, it's just a difference of approach. You do all that stuff in advance and it's done whether you actually need it or not in the course of play, and I do that stuff the instance that it is actually needed at not a moment sooner (and someone jots it down for consistency in case it needs referenced later).Yes, full sandbox and players driving - at most I toss a few ideas into the mix by way of rumors or events the characters hear about or witness. Even when I do pre-plan for a campaign it is a bare-bones outline that only consists of events outside the party's control because I don't feel like wasting any of my own effort by spending time on something that ends up not actually coming up.Why would I? I can see their list whenever I want to - making a copy of it to track myself would just waste time and paper.Ah... I see. At my table if the characters aren't identifying an item as soon as they find it, they write it down as something along the lines of "unidentified magic oil" with a reference number so that when they do identify it later I can open the book and tell them what they need to know without me having to keep another set of notes.Of course, I also run with full transparency because I think that there is nothing of worth lost and numerous gains in the simplicity of it, so I'm not concerned that the players could use the reference to find out what the item does for themselves.That's another group difference. We don't divide loot, and I tell the players the value of items their characters find, so the player tracking the party's wealth can handle questions like "can we afford to buy spare armor before we head into those caves that are probably full of black pudding?" without my assistance.I find the key to on the fly dungeon design lies not in being able to keep track of measurements and distances and such, but in simply choosing smaller locations for use as dungeons (a single tomb with a half dozen rooms arranged around a cross-shaped hall, rather than a sprawling complex), or in going to the other end of the scale by having the dungeon consist of small, simple areas of a few rooms each and the passages between them being "to A, 200 feet" rather than fully drawn in.I've helped my players learn how to take notes efficiently - you don't write out the whole of events and all their details, just a brief point that will help you recall the rest when you read it later. And as for the timing of writing these notes, it is exclusively during times where the note-taker's character is at lesser participation (such as jotting down a bit about that happened in the last hour of the session while the players of the rogue and wizard are working out how to deal with a magical trap in the party's way).Another point where I avoid the adversarial approach - I don't consider the player forgetting a detail of what happened last week fair cause to treat their character as having forgotten what likely just happened in their life, so I am proactive about reminding players of anything they seem to have forgotten that their character probably wouldn't have.</blockquote>

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