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

[The_Universe]

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.

That would in fact be the case if the poll was about campaign design (deciding how adventures are going to go, etc). However the poll was about the WORLD, not necessarily about the campaigns that take place in or on it. It's not railroading players to decide that, in you campaign world, Elves are called Alder, and that gnomes don't exist. That's just proactive world design. However, if one of your players says, "don't elves have a name for themselves, other than 'elves'?" and THEN you decide that elves are called Alder among themselves, that's reactive world design - it wouldn't have existed without the players' action.

Does that make sense?

 

[Gorilla726]

About 70% reactive. My world is designed a little more each session. I'll write up vague details of what's around them, and it's up to them to find out what they want. Then when it's time to move on, I do the same for the next couple of miles. I base stories around what the characters are wanting to do (i.e. find a lost relative, get revenge on so and so, recover a lost artifact, journey to the center of the earth...)

Gorilla

 

[DragonLancer]

70:30.

Its my world, first and foremost, but the players have free will to do what they want and go where they want.

 

[the Jester]

Well... I do a lot of planning, but a lot of that is in reaction to pc actions...

I voted 60/40; I have thousands of pages of notes on my campaign, but so much of that arose from "following the pcs around with a camera," if you know what I mean.

 

[Altalazar]

It is hard to boil this down to percentages. I'm half and half, if you want a number. I plan out the adventure in great detail, but anytime anything happens that isn't strictly defined, I can fill in all new details for whatever tangent the player's take. Most often, it happens in town - if they travel to a new village, I may only have the name or, if it is remote enough, not even that, on my map. Depending on where they go and what they want to do, I'll flesh out NPCs and locales within the town and I have sometimes ended up with very detailed locations that lead to further adventures and narrative based simply on a desire by a few PCs to get some assorted things in town.

I really think it is necessary to have a balance like that, because no matter how detailed you make your setting, the PCs are always free to go in a direction you didn't anticipate, and then you will end up having to make it up as you go. So I plan out certain things in great detail, and then just leave little threads at the edges that I will only flesh out as needed. Thus has my homebrew world grown rather organically even as my epic backstory was vat-grown.