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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hautamaki" data-source="post: 5478144" data-attributes="member: 42219">Yes, agreed with this philosophy completely.  When I'm designing a typical adventure/campaign, generally I start with the overall setting/situation, insert one or more villains with specific goals and plans to achieve them which will be accomplished if the PCs do not act appropriately.  Then the PCs arrive, are presented with clues as to the identity or plans of the villain(s), and adventure hooks mainly take the form of ways for the PCs to discover/thwart the villains plans.  After a few of these sub-adventures, the PCs should be ready to tackle the main villain.  The key here is that the villain is an intelligent entity who will adjust their plans depending on what the PCs do.  And if the PCs don't do as I expect them to do, it's easier to adjust in this context because the next sub-adventure grows organically out of the goals and abilities of the villain.  It's also easier to avoid a sense of railroading your PCs in this kind of paradigm because different but equally valid options can be presented to the PCs which both lead towards the same overall goal of thwarting the villain.  For example, in my current campaign the PCs started out by rescuing a village's children from a small goblin tribe intent on using them in some sort of dark ritual.  The next stage of the adventure presented them with 3 options; they could try to discover what became of the province's missing army; they could head to the main city for the upcoming 2 week fair/festival (and uncover the villain's plots to insert a puppet in the leadership council) or they could directly investigate their main suspect by sneaking around the villain's keep looking for evidence of villainy.This gave them 3 different adventure-types; an overland adventure (I had inserted a short dungeon crawl aside into this adventure too though of course they wouldn't know that beforehand), a stealth/sneaking mission, and a city intrigue mission.The players wound up going with the overland adventure first, where they have discovered the army is walking into an ambush, and themselves are in the process of trying to break through the pickets and return to the main city to warn them of an incoming monstrous invasion.  If they had gone to the city first, the incoming monstrous invasion would have come as a surprise to the city, and in the confusion greater heroism and cleverness would have been necessary on the part of the PCs to thwart the invasion.  Or perhaps they would be unable to do so and would have to flee the entire province to get reinforcements from a neighbouring province.  If the PCs had investigated the villain's keep first, it could go any number of ways.  The PCs might not discover anything suspicious at all and nothing much would change. The PCs might be caught and imprisoned by the villain, in which case they would have to escape somehow.  The PCs might simply confront the villain in which case he would attempt to throw them off his trail and hire them to defeat his main rival who he would accuse of being the real villain, in an interesting role-play scenario.  The players could then take that in any number of directions, though they probably at this point would not last long against the main villain in a straight fight so they'd be best off pretending to accept his offer and then betraying him later.In any case, my point is that by far the best way to design an adventure campaign imo is to create a villain with a nefarious plot and cast the PCs as the Scooby Doo kids 'And I would have gotten away with it too if weren't for these meddling kids!!!!'  and let them decide for themselves from a number of equally valid options how they go about thwarting the villain.  From there, you'd simply design a series of encounters/sub-adventures of different types (dungeon crawl, stealth, city intrigue, overland, in my campaign) that most likely the players will make use of, but design them in such a way that the difficulty can be easily scaled for the PCs depending on what order they tackle these adventures.</blockquote>

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