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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 1794676" data-attributes="member: 172">Big preamble statement:There are different shades of "winging it."Example that serves not to show how to wing it, but an example of how "off track" players could take a campaign:Once I created a campaign surrounding a faegold staff. Faegold is based on the idea of the Rhinegold, a cursed but desirous treasure. The faegold staff was created when a powerful wizard gathered all the faegold the could find and bound it into a staff, and artifact that promised to doom the world. To stop this, the players would have to find the one artifact that could destroy the faegold staff, and the one person who could wield it, and convince her she needs to do this.Well, my players found the faegold staff, and dealt with it in another way. I had given them a deck of cards that made gates to other planes or places. They hurled the staff into another plane. Now this promised loads of repercussions, but in the meantime, my whole campaign idea was scrapped. (And I am not the sort of GM who likes to compensate on-the-spot for player cleverness. I prefer to reward them for clever thinking.)Philosophical statement to take away from this thread:The title of an old dungeon article gave this sage advice:If you are going to wing it make a flight planFinally, a real example:In one campaign I had, I had layed out, in very general terms, a number of paths the party eventually needed to take. IIRC, they boiled down to:1) Find the Prince who psions from Drakar (the resident Evil Empire) had kidnapped.2) Pursue the Drakarians to a post apocalyptic world to prevent them from getting some fantasy WMDs3) Find out what happened to the legendary Queen Ariel so she could deal with the issue that the Drakarian emperor now held the artifact that could only be wielded by the destined leader of the land.They had completed #2, and the way things were staged, #3 looked like the most likely next step, so that's what I planned my session around.But guess what happened? Yup, they decided it was time to go save their Prince.But this did not prove to be a total disaster. Though I hadn't planned that for the session, I did have a general idea of where I was going with that particular adventure. I knew he had been sequestered (per the spell/psionic power) and was being displayed "Han Solo in Jabba the Hut's parlor" style in a keep in an isle of an opposing nation. I knew that one of the character's long lost fathers was long lost because he was part of an underground movement to overthrow the said nobles. So, I threw in some creatures from a new toy (at the time, the MMII) and pulled up a castle floorplan from Darkfuries Castles & Keeps, threw in a whimsical encounter on their way into the castle (they caught the lord's daughter messing around with a guard, which made for a great combined roleplaying/infiltration scene as they started to mess with them.)Not only did the winged session worked, I feel it came off better than many of my planned sessions.Yet usually if I wing something without the benefit of knowing what I WANT to do, I find myself struggling to find something to do, and spend the first hour of so of the game looking for direction. So the moral here is when you know you have to wing it, at least pick out some goals/objectives/plot points/activities you want to cover, i.e., if you are going to wing it, make a flight plan. It makes all the difference.</blockquote>

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