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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ydars" data-source="post: 4573138" data-attributes="member: 62992">My favorite approach with 3.5E is to read the game's rule until they are completely clear in my head, read through all the monster manuals, pick out monsters I like or think would be fun and then....................do no more prep at all. Sometimes I have no idea what is going to happen in the session when I sit down to game. I sort of go into a kind of state where the ideas just come, without me thinking. They are coming from my sub-concious and I have to be relaxed and not try too hard. I will focus on something tiny and then it will blossum if the PCs pick up on it. I throw out about a dozen such things and see which the PCs run with. Then I wing it based on what they do. This is the type of game I guess I love best; when it works. It doesn;t always although as I get older it seems to work more consistently. For instance, one of recent game was a Ptolus based campaign where I had the PCs involved in a plot that was world-spanning. That session, I didn't want to push the main plot because I could see the players were tired and wouldn't be able to focus enough. So I invented a market scene as the PCs were passing back to St Gustav's church. In the market was a religious group trying to gain entrance to the graveyard and arguing with the guards. The PCs became involved and the religious group were told to come back in the morning. This was problematic as on a massive cart was a dire-bear caged and chained for the ceremony. This was left to one side of the square leading into the graveyard whilst the group tried to gain permission to venerate the burial ground of one of their founding members. The PCs chatted with the guards and found one who knew an NPC the players were friendly with. He mentioned that there was an order in effect that specifically forbade anyone from taking animals into the graveyard. Suspicious, the PCs rented a room above the tavern overlooking the square and that evening, someone was seen looking at the bear. Next morning as the PCs were at breakfast and the square was full of revellers. the bear escaped and the PCs had to fight the bear for a few rounds until one of them used charm monster to calm the beast. Eventually this lead the PCs to a cult who were releasing dangerous animals all over the city so that the city guard or others would to kill them and then they would steal the corpses and raise them to create undead animals to act as spies and battle-mounts.  It worked well and lead to some interesting challenges but was not hard to DM. I think it would not be possible at high level to do this but I tried never to run high level 3.5E games anyway.</blockquote>

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