How set-in-stone is your campain?

[Jürgen Hubert]

Sounds like we work pretty much exactly the same way, Jurgen. I'm a huge fan of the "don't define anything the PCs don't know about" school -- I leave everything as open as I possibly can.

Yup, yup. Sure, it is nice to have a developed setting that you can fall back in times of emergencies, and having a rough idea of your villain's motivations and resources is always good so that you can improvise evil schemes in a hurry...

But apart from that? The PCs will usually go into a completely different direction than you anticipated anyway, so all your work is likely go to waste if you plan too far ahead.

I'm just lazy. Why should I bother making decisions that will have no effect on the game? When the issue comes up, I'll make a decision. Till then, I have my list of stuff I think is cool. That's enough.

There's that, too. These days, I rarely spend more than one or two hours planning for individual sessions, and that is usually limited to scribbling down some monster and enemy stats and scratching some rough maps.