Is your D&D campaign a game or a story?

[Agback]

Early on, I was a writer/gm and not a gm/writer. As a writer/gm, I would expend a lot of time and effort on the creation, and paid little attention to what the PCs would be doing during the course of the game. What was of utmost importance to me was that the story went on, and the players' interests were secondary (at best).

Now, as I have matured as a GM (and as a writer), I have found new and inventive ways to involve the players, and totally divorced the idea of an immobile story from my concept of running a game. Now, it is totally about the involvement of the characters - what is it that they do to affect the outcome of the adventure?

I have had perhaps a similar trajectory as a GM to that you describe. At the zenith (or nadir, depending on where you stand) of my manipulative period I devised a set of intellectual tools (such as 'leads', 'excuses', and 'grommets') that allowed me to draw PCs along a pre-determined path through a pre-ordained series of incidents, or at least to offer in effect only a very simple network among what seemed to the players limitless choices. I learned to railroad without letting it be apparent that that was what I was doing.

From that point it was actually my increasing understanding of the craft of fiction writing that enabled me to hand a share of control back to the players, and thus to rescue plot-based GMing from having been a rather dull and mechanical process to being once again a lively, engaging, and unpredictable form of play. Learning how to write, how in essence to tell stories, I became a less controlling GM.