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Message: <blockquote data-quote="zakael19" data-source="post: 9361501" data-attributes="member: 7044099">Idk if this really is in response to your post, but just kinda sharing why what I think the play and GM style that aligns with whatever the heck neotrad is just works for me:So I have nowhere the gaming history most posters here do. Played a tiny bit of 3.5 as a teen ages ago, and then nothing until playing in a home-brew adventure in 2018. After that wrapped, I volunteered to try GMing and ran CoS; picking up a second game as the pandemic happened for friends stuck at home who wanted to try D&D. In that one, I threw together various short modules I found into an overarching plot. Wound up adding a couple OC players (didn't quite recognize that concept at the time), and we had fun! But it was pulling teeth sometimes to get people to get on board with the next plot point, people would always forget what was going on, and all the usual DM gripes.We end that campaign (and COS), and I start up a new one. Fall into COS again with my friend/acquaintance group and I find myself kinda mentally exhausted. One player really wants to do lots of spotlight hogging OC roleplay, and I want action declarations. Maintaining attention is hard, people check out - are distracted (especially when the OC player kicks off another self-spotlighted RP bit). I notice a poster here often reference different games on another forum (thanks [USER=70468]@kenada[/USER]) and start checking certain posts here out.Start up another online game at the start of this year for a lovely group from Reddit who were looking for a DM for their first game after coalescing out of a one shot. They're all CR fans who played BG3 and wanted to actually do The Thing. Because they like CR, they pick Call of the Netherdeep - and I'm still stuck in "running a premade is easier then doing it myself." But this time I do a session 0, and we knit some backstories in, and create connections between some of the players following all the "GM best practices" I've been reading/watching over the second half of last year. Things start connecting in my head when I realize that there's a huge difference in both effort and response when I try and nudge them towards the Plot vs when we're just doing something I fabricate and direct to a player's backstory/espoused goals as they arrive.We finally get to the first kinda "open sandboxy" area right about the same time as I've gotten super excited about narrativist games and done my first run of Stonetop (full narrativist/Story Now) - along with playing in an awesome Story Now 4e game run by [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] . My 5e players highlight that their favorite sessions are the ones where I'm (unknown to them) totally disregarding the adventure beyond  dropping a starting premise/goal for the session on them and letting them go wild. I stop prep beyond ensuring I have a roster of interesting opponents to deploy. We start up an entire side-adventure in the city because they all say they want to take some time to explore and make some $. I straight up read to them from the gazette, and one thing sounds interesting to everybody (something the module says "is beyond the scope of this adventure but would make a great story for you to tell in a different game!").We're now ... 4 sessions into interleaved drabs of the adventure quest with this secondary plot line the players picked entirely on their own. I asked each of them to build a different part of the premise for it, and we've just been following the twists and turns. Nothing is predetermined or prepped. I'm grabbing stuff from their backstories and hurling it at them and they're biting so hard we're all on the edge of our seats with tension all the way through - apart from occasional bits of OOC and memes and jokes. Not a single distracted moment, no "oh sorry I wasn't paying attention." They picked the villain (oh, the leader of this criminal group must be a doppleganger and that’s why the guards can’t find him!), the stuff they're dabbling in (assassinations, markets for illegal magic?), the areas of the city...etc. Each scene I'm asking their character why they recognize a thing, can tell something is off, how somebody from their backstory is involved, how their background lets them know..blah blah.All this because I stopped caring about an adventure and just asked the players and their characters what they cared about and the arcs they wanted to fulfill.</blockquote>

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