HOMEBREW DMs: How much of your campaign design is Reactive? Proactive?

[The Grackle]

What do you mean by reactive?
Reactive like the amount of stuff the DM fills in on the fly?
or Reactive like details about the world the players can make up for themselves?

 

[The_Universe]

I'm concerned that proactive and reactive are on different continua.

Good proactivism has to do with preparation and game design. Detail, texture, and plot are the fruits of this preparation.

Bad proactivism has to do with programing the responses of the players. This is called railroading. The cost of railroading is players' sense of control over their characters and therefore their sense of involvement with the world.

Good reactivism has to do with versimilitude. The world must react to the players' actions in order to seem real. The fruit of good reactivism is a sense of dynamism and excitement.

Bad reactivism has to do with overcompensation. The players cleverly solved one puzzle? Ok, I'll just throw another hoop in their way before they can get their reward. The cost of overcompensation is that players stop caring about being inventive, and will dully hop through hoop after hoop.

So, my world?

Hopefully 100% proactive, 100% reactive. I try to plan maps, npcs, dungeons, plot hooks, adventures, ideas, religions, themes, texture, you name it. I'm human, and probably fall short.

But what I don't plan proactively is the actions of the characters.

Reactively, I have monsters make contingency plans, villages use tactics, NPCs remember the parties, bards tell stories of their deeds or crimes, the world spreads and changes in response to the party's actions.

But what I don't do reactively is take away the rewards of cleverness from the party.

best,

Carpe

I think all campaigns have to be reactive in order to be fun - if it's all proactive, what do you need players for? My specific question related to the world in which the campaign takes place. How much of that is designed proactively? How much reactively?

 

[The_Universe]

What do you mean by reactive?
Reactive like the amount of stuff the DM fills in on the fly?
or Reactive like details about the world the players can make up for themselves?

Regardless of when it happens, I want to know what parts of a homebrew world a DM creates unprompted by his PCs, and what portions are created at the prompting and probing of the players in the game?

Being reactive in this sense doesn't necessarily indicate that you can fill stuff in on the fly for a game session, but rather that you can do so for the world in which the session takes place.

 

[Umbran]

Aristotle: No DM can literally plan everything beforehand. So, in a sense the game world is never fully designed, and additions and amendments to the world design are made during the campaign play. World-design and campaign design are thus intertwined.


As to the original question - I'm not going to try to put numbers on it. It isn't like I've ever taken a count or anything.

Large amounts of the general structure of my campaign worlds I design before the characters even exist. My players typically want a framework in which to do character creation. So the lands and social order are defined in broad strokes proactively.

Then comes character generation, and I look at the character backgrounds and find hooks to work in. Call that reactive if you like.

I don't think every single building must have a notable history in order to preserve verisimilitude. Unless the world is simply riotous with action, most buildings have mundane, uninteresting histories. I'll only expand when I find it useful to do so.

As the PCs adventure, they develop new interests and goals. New things are added to the design to help address these. Call that reactive if you like.

 

[Stormborn]

70/30 or 60/40

I have a pretty detailed world set up, but what the players do and where they go coause me to alter the metaplot as we go. In the most recent campaign player reactions to minor NPCs have eleveated them to the status of party member, which I wasn't planning, while they weren't nearlly as interested in the NPC that was going to be the driving force of a large chunk of the campaign. I have rearranged some things, altered some things, but we are really close to gettign back to the main plot and the remergence of the NPCs problems.

 

[Terwox]

40/60, currently. I set up a good deal of stuff -- but I focus most of my attention on things the players did that I didn't expect, and run with them -- that's the most fun, to me.
I love running with what a player wants to do, instead of what I want -- their solutions are far more elegant and interesting, I think, if I have no idea what they will be in the first place!
The end of my last campaign worked like that -- I set them up with a series of challenges that I had no idea how to defeat, and they neatly got through all of them and ascended. It was fantastic for me, and hopefully fun for them.

I've also played in a 100% reactive campaign... that was awesome. Playing Wraith, the DM basically cut a lot of the White Wolf backstory, and the ENTIRE game was ONLY dealing with the stuff we wrote. It was REALLY COOL, and I wish I still had a chance to play in that game. It's also something I think would be really hard to do in D&D... in Wraith... you must plot out your characters entire backstory -- but you also have to plot out their entire reason for being a ghost... you sort of plot out who they have been, but also, why they're still there.
In short... 100% reactive stuff is really cool.
I've tried running 10pro/90reactive, but in the wrong format, and it flopped. Hard.

 

[d20books]

You mean, Railroaded or Free-Will??

I have a unique group. They are all experienced gamers with jobs running game publishing companies, published D20 authors, or screenwriters.

As a DM, I have to be very creative and really be on my toes. The one thing I will not do, however, is push the players down any path. I create as close to 100% of the world and have a bunch of stuff going behind the scenes.

Because of the group, however, I find that I'm 100% reactive. They have to be the catalyst in their adventure, but just because they are not directly interacting with a certain part of the world does not mean that the world isn't grinding away.

I think the poll should actually be, "Control Freak Railroader" or "Benign World Master"

This is really what I think your poll is trying to get to. I believe in total free-will of the characters and it is my job as a DM to simply create a rich world for them to interact with and to provide reaction to their decisions and actions.

 

[Nellisir]

I voted 80/20. I run campaigns in my homebrew world, and help the players find a good fit in it. I cheerfully will and have created organizations and the like for a PC, but generally the establishments in the campaign are my creation.

Adventures, however, are a different story....


Nell.

 

[Creamsteak]

Between 60 and 100% reactive. Most often at how you describe 70% reactive.

 

[Umbra]

50-50. I usually have broad story arcs in my head and start with a few absolute details. The rest I fill in as I go incorporating the players feedback and fears as well as the characters fears. This also allows someone else to DM very occasionally with me giving a core objective (the party needs to find the Sign of Fire) and a general setting (an icy island) and leaving the rest up to them.