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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9851405" data-attributes="member: 29398">Way late to the party here and I've only read the first few posts, but...For me, as DM I'll often have plotted out or "story-boarded" what the next few adventures are likely to be ay any given time (if for no other reason than doing so gives me time to write them, if necessary).  I'm not married to the storyboard, though; and what they players do with/to those adventures, or whether they even engage with them rather than left-turn to something else, is entirely up to them.  Anything finer-tuned than that is also up to them, as are their downtime activities and so on. (IME downtime activities, with the right players and-or characters, can produce more story than the actual adventuring!)The actual moment-to-moment and day-to-day in-game story of the party and its characters, such as said story may be, doesn't appear until after play is done.  Any capital-s Story structure that might arise is almost always due to pure random chance and mostly noticed only in hindsight: sometimes it'll be years later when reading over old game logs that I'll realize "Crap, that worked out better than I thought!".Recent example: Five years or so back, I ran a party through a couple of adventures in my setting, leading to a somewhat momentous event (namely, an in-game reason for a significant on-the-fly rule change).  A few real-world years later I ran another completely unrelated party through a homebrew five-adventure series, leading to a different momentous event (namely, finding-learning the key to fixing their broken world). It wasn't until reading back through the game logs last week - two years after that second series finished - that I realized that by sheer luck and without any planning on my part both those momentous events in fact occurred on the same in-game day.  Had I noticed that sooner I could have made some use of it, with people unsure which event led to which downstream consequences and effects; but in-game time has since moved on to the point where it's a bit late for that now.One of my more oft-repeated sayings as DM is "You can't script this [shizz]".I'm not sure this claim holds up; or if it does it implies each player is almost playing a different game than the others.Perception of the story might be different in each player's eyes, but - like with any media - the story itself is the same.Ass both DM and player I'm fine with the adventure being presented to the players as a hook or whatever as long as the players are then left free to approach and deal with that adventure in any way they see fit at the time.  Or not approach; if the players bail on it and-or left-turn into something else entirely then it's on the DM to react to that and run whatever they decide to get into.</blockquote>

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