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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 2747558" data-attributes="member: 812">(barsoomcore fails his Will save against pointless arguments)I think the original poster received plenty of good advice in first half-page of this thread, at which point people kind of stopped making sense.schporto: the fact is that you'll always have SOME IDEA as to what your players are going to do next, so you never need to prep for every conceivable possibility. Of course, at times you'll be surprised and have to improvise, but that's true no matter what style you're TRYING to run.There's been a lot of discussion over what exactly an "open" campaign is, discussion that I have to say has ultimately been fruitless. I think it's more helpful to identify a pointer that is worth the consideration of any DM:Your players won't always do what you expect.The more you're able to manage what they do without resorting to measures that diminish the player's suspension of disbelief, the more fun your players will have.  This means not offering plot hooks that cause them to shake their heads in mockery of your ham-handed tactics. This means not saying, "Uh, you can't go through that door because I don't know what's on the other side." This means not imposing drastic consequences on their character's stats (like, say, killing them) without providing them with some plausible in-game explanation.Definitions of ham-handed, drastic and plausible will of course vary from one group to another.It seems like the OP was using the term "open" to identify a campaign style where the players are offered a variety of opportunities and take the ones they find interesting. This is in contrast to what we might call a "closed" style where the DM offers only one opportunity and expects the players to take it. These aren't absolute differences of course -- clearly a campaign where the DM offers TWO alternatives is less "open" than one where the DM offers FOUR. So it's a scale of "openness", we might say.And of course it's not always clear how many opportunities are being offered (I've been surprised when my players took "opportunities" I hadn't realised existed). And there's no reason why a campaign can't switch from one to another over its life: Barsoom certainly did. Some evenings I had only one possibility for my players and if they didn't go along with it I'd have to improvise wildly. Some evenings the whole point would be to bring up a half-dozen plot threads and see which ones (if any) they jumped at.But given that your players won't always do what you expect, it seems sensible to me for any DM to be ready to improvise, regardless of what style of campaign they wish to run.</blockquote>

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