Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5299093" data-attributes="member: 42582">There is no way (that I know of) to guarantee against things going in an unexpected direction.But if you build your adventures around hooks that the players have provided to you by building them into their PCs (eg loyalites or other relationships) then you can normally be pretty confident that the players will engage with them.As for how I prep: I write up lots of backstory notes, explaining the history and motivations of various NPCs, gods, organisations etc. I make sure that these things are relevant to the hooks that the players have provided to me in their PC descriptions. These notes get added to and expanded as the campaign goes along. Over time, the complexity of the relationships and the way the PCs are caught up in them will increase.For any particular session, I write up notes about particular encounters - probable location and sequence, stats for fighting and/or skill challenge (if I'm expecting one sort of encounter and the players initiate another, than I improvise - 4e rules make this fairly easy), and indications of how this encounter is relevant to or expresses elements of the backstory. I will also incorporate some feature into the encounter so that this backstory element will become known to the players (eg written material the PCs might discover, things an NPC or monster might say, carvings, statues, strange phenomena that an Arcana check can interpret, etc).Sometimes I have to improvise, if the players make a choice that I didn't anticipate. But in practice this is not all that often, because of the integration of campaign backstory with PC backstories. (And to reiterate - preserving this integration makes it crucial that the relevant aspects of the campaign backstory are coming out in every encounter.)</blockquote>

Verification