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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Darrin Drader" data-source="post: 4616044" data-attributes="member: 7394">I understand what you're saying. In some cases you break out a module, or turn to your adventure notes and start playing before fully fleshing out the characters and figuring out what motivates them. Other times, the DM and player spend time before the first session establishing their character to figure out what makes him or her tick. Then when the adventure starts up, there will be elements that will focus on the characters.I've done both, depending on what my goals are with the game. Obviously I'm not investing too much time in character building if it's a one-off, but if it's a real campaign, I want the PCs to play a central role rather than just having them jump in and face a series of static adventures. When I have a larger adventure arc that I have planned out, the overall structure will change very little, regardless of the characters. What I definitely do though is figure out a way to add elements to certain adventures that focus in on one of the characters. I might also add in an entire adventure that's intended to resolve an issue from a character's past.For example, in the third of four of my multi-year Galovinius campaigns, I had one adventure where the royal elvish wizard was caught up in political intrigue and ended up poisoned at the end of it (leading to a cliffhanger that lasted for two months, during which the campaign was on hiatus because a couple of the players were unavailable). In another case in that campaign, the party's rogue, who had been dealing in black lotus in between adventures, got caught up in his dealings, putting the whole party in danger. There were other examples, but despite these side treks, the focus of the campaign was always on stopping a fallen and dangerous god from regaining his godhood by conquering the world.As a side note, when they finally fought the god and killed his mortal body, there was an explosion so large that it could be seen a hundred miles away. The characters were killed instantly, but they didn't know it because the avatar of one of the gods, appreciative that the PCs had done their dirty work, recreated them and carted their unconscious new bodies back to town, at which time they started working on the elf problem. Their original bodies, which were blasted, remained in that location, and because of the dark taint of that location, reanimated as undead and had to be confronted in the campaign I ran immediately following that one.The one thing that was consistent with each campaign in that setting is that successive campaigns at least partially dealt with the consequences caused by the character's actions from the previous campaign. I structured them in this way to provide continuity, as though it were one book in a series leading to the next, and this served as an homage to the players who weren't around anymore from the previous campaign. So, in that respect, all but the first Galovinius campaign was largely character driven, they just didn't happen to be the characters that were being played at that time.</blockquote>

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