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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8120130" data-attributes="member: 29398">You're making a faulty leap there, from a DM spending a long time in setting design before recruiting players to that the campaign will be acting out a personal novel.The alternative would be to recruit the players first and then spend a year designing the setting, by which time those players may well have found other things to do instead - or worse, have changed their minds on what they want from the game.When I design a setting my mindset is that what I'm doing has to be robust enough to last for a good long time, as my expectation is that the campaign will - ideally - last for a great many years.  And so I put a lot of work into it; I spent well over a year in setting and system design for my current campaign*, and I call it time well spent given that said campaign is now in its 12th year.But note that I'm designing the setting, not the story.  Sure I'll have a fisrt adventure in mind and some ideas after that, but if the players/PCs go in unexpected directions I know the setting is solid enough that I can sandbox it.  And if they're happy playing through what I have in mind then so be it.  Usually what happens over the long run is a blend of the two - sometimes they drive the bus and other times I do.* - about halfway through that process I ran a three-session one-off for two reasons: one, to run out a few new rules ideas and see if they'd fly and two, to test-drive a couple of new players (both of whom I worked with at the time, so I could easily give them constant updates on where things were at and on a projected start time).  All went well.Going in they knew it'd be a Greek-based setting.  Slavery was very much a thing in ancient Greece.Never mind that one of the starting PCs then randomly rolled "Slaver" as her past profession. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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