Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ranes" data-source="post: 1866228" data-attributes="member: 4826">DM ideas are good. DM stories are bad. The best story, the one the players are going to love and the one they are going to massage your ego by reminding you about in years to come, is the story they write by playing your game. Instead of worrying about your story, help them write theirs. In journalism particularly, cynical sub editors sometimes make the observation that even the best writers have been known to spend the first paragraph waffling. Most stories, they find, benefit from a broad stroke of the red pen right through that first paragraph. On that basis, your structure might look like this: ConflictInteractionConflictResolution The first conflict is now your intro. A bit more dramatic and dynamic? That's it. When you're world building and adventure building it's natural to want to use storytelling techniques. The pitfall is in thinking that it's your job to write the story. That's what you've got players for. I spend a few hours a week trying to second-guess my players. Based on the outcome of the last session, I try to guess what they're going to try to do next session. I have a few alternative story outlines prepared. I have planted encounters and information in the players' path that I hope are going to encourage them to pursue one or two courses of action in particular. These are prepared in detail. I have some standby encounters prepared that are designed to be dropped behind enemy lines at a moment's notice, in case the players go off at a tangent. I spend a lot of time working on these, because my players frequently go off at a tangent. These encounters aren't designed to railroad the players back into my previously prepared adventure. They are designed to entertain the players and buy me time to prepare for what I now know they want to do. I don't consider any unused work wasted. If they didn't pursue a certain thread or have a certain encounter, that stuff can be used later (even if it needs tweaking in order for it to be transplanted to another place or another level of PC ability). And the really tricky part is making it seem like, whatever happens, the resolution makes sense in a way that the players feel they've been the protagonists in a coherent adventure. I don't always succeed but practice definitely helps.</blockquote>

Verification