Just going along with the DM

[Dancer]

Ahhh, after many, many years of GMing, I arrived at a compromise for me and my players. I created a campaign which required them to be together and gave them direction (they are trouble-shooters for the king of a particular kingdom). They pose as a warband to hide their true identity and missions. The Crown sometimes gives them missions and sometimes the pcs must take missions totally unrelated to the Crown to keep their cover stories. This allows the pcs the amount of freedom they want and allows me the control of events I need to fabricate a good plot and story. I make it known to the pcs from the beginning that they are part of a elite band of dedicated individuals who get special freedoms from the Crown. If the pcs are not part of this elite force, then they are not pcs in the campaign. That simple. I've defined the environment and the players can choose to play in it or not. My group has ranged from 5 players to 12 (currently at a healthy 6 with a 7th being on hiatus).

I don't railroad them, I assign them tasks because, it's their character's jobs. By making the campaign as I did, I provided focus from the start and even though the campaign is lousy with side plots, sub plots, and underhanded plots, there is still the focus of working for the king.

All this is to say, give the campaign a solid, interesting focus and you won't have to work too hard keeping up with the players.

 

[Pagan priest]

My last D&D campaign fell apart because I was not railroading the characters into an adventure. I had given one of them a task from his church (cleric, obviously) and the rest tagged along for fun and a few silver pieces. Once that finised, they were on their own for finding adventure. I gave them several hints as to where to go, either for more information or which road led out of the boring civilized lands. Rather than take up any of these hints, the players sat there like lumps of manure, waiting for me to shovel them into the next adventure.

And all they needed to do was start off on the road and a nice rescue mission/dungeon crawl/goblin hack was waiting right around the bend.

 

[Severion]

My players are usually pretty good at going on the adventure and completing objectives, but they tend to obliterate the in between stuff (they would have sunk the boat and fired arrows at the surfacing ogre). I don't mind as i tend to run pubished adventures (currently running the Shackled City AP from Dungeon).

 

[RFisher]

I created a campaign which required them to be together and gave them direction (they are trouble-shooters for the king of a particular kingdom).

Yeah. For some campaigns, I like to use the patron thing or an all-in-the-same-boat predicament to give the campaign some direction.