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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest 7034872" data-source="post: 8543811">I completely agree. While this is my first-ever serious DM effort, it isn't anywhere near to my first rodeo (started in 1982, excepting a few jaunts I dropped it when I went to college, and then just picked it back up in 2018), and my experience as a player has been that adventures where the DM makes and populates the world and then just sets us loose in the place tend to fizzle out. That's why I'm leaning hard toward keeping this thing at least fairly linear.Where I've been on this for some months is that I'll do best to strike a balance between the completely open world approach and the highly linear, single-plot approach. This seems to be what most seasoned DMs do and it also seems to be what the better modules also do. payn's initial comments really helped me to get my head around what the elements at play in these approaches are, so at this point I like the idea of keeping it linear so long as I don't fall into that "illusion of agency" problem that I remember well from some of our youthful adventures back in the 80s.I mean, the sprawling epics and wandering Chaucerian tales still have a special place in my heart, but that's a note about literature, not about RPG adventures. I do intend to maintain, let us say, a "robust opportunity" for side quests in here, but I am going to keep the main adventure linear, which it was right from the beginning of my writing.It's funny--I was thinking about just this point last night and this morning: the really old classics much more strongly resemble campfire stories, which are highly episodic/modular. Sometimes they'll have recurring themes, sure, and they'll quite often feature recurring favorite characters, of course, but you and payn are right: they're episodic. The closest popular thing to them nowadays seems to be the television soap opera.I guess I'm just one of those nutters who still love short stories.Thanks to all on here--you've helped me a lot to work out how I want to approach this thing and what I should change before March.</blockquote>

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