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Message: <blockquote data-quote="shilsen" data-source="post: 1866211" data-attributes="member: 198">Why would the things they are interested in be irrelevant? If they enjoy doing or pursuing whatever they do, that's a good thing, IMO, since the aim of the game is to have fun. As for throwing the GM's story off, the way I figure it, the GM's story is supposed to be about the PCs, so whatever they are doing is not irrelevant, nor a tangent.At the start of my current Eberron session, I explained to my players that they should not waste time trying to stick to my story or follow the plot - since there won't be any predetermined one. They get to choose what they will pursue and what aims they will have, and that's what the game will focus on. There will be lots of options and various paths that they can follow (and I'm sure they will create more than a few paths of their own), and any and all of them will be interesting, because I will make it so. They decide to go off to Xen'drik? Cool. They decide to form a mercenary company? Cool. They decide to hang out in the tavern all day? Also cool (bar-fight!). Obviously, since I want them to have the sense of a living, breathing world around them, others will interact with them, and the party can choose to follow up on some of these interactions, but the choice will ultimately be theirs, not mine. I will admit that DMing this way is harder than if I had a specific plot all set up beforehand for them to follow. But in its own way it's incredibly fun and satisfying for me as well, and allows me to have a piece of the "sensawunda" (technical term <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />) that players get, since even I don't know exactly where the game is going. For example, tomorrow I'll be going to the game with a dozen different mission options (the PCs were talking to a contact about job options at the end of last session), and I have no clue which one the PCs will choose, or if they'll even ignore all of them and go do something else. Whichever it is, I'll handle it and we'll have fun. Bingo!</blockquote>

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