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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 6088963">I am not 100% sure I m clear on the question but will try to answer. Are you essentially asking how to we not be too heavy handed with things like hooks and how do we avoid railroading players while kerping things exciting and active?for me, the way i do it is concentrate on maximizing payer freedom and try not to fall too in love with my own vision. I also treat any adventure more like a setting more than a plot, connected encounters or scenes. I worry more about creating reactive and believable situations than having a beginning, middle and end (or worrying about having a big climax). So, if I have an investigative adventure planned, I begin with to assumptions that for me are quite liberating: the players have the right not to go on the adventure and the players have the right to "wreck" the adventure should they engage it. For example, if they figure out a way to solve the investigation in the first two minutes (either clever use of a spell or finding a path i hadnt thought of) then I let them. I wont throw up more challenges to keep the adventure going. My view is to reward them if they figure it out (because i as a player hate it when the GM does this). Usually i have enough interesting components in any adventure, because i build them like settings, that things just kind of stay interesting no matter what. If the players go off track or down some peculiar rabbit hole, i feed off what they are doing and there are plenty of reactions within the environment. So in one pf my latest Roman murder mysteries, the party ot sidetracked dealing with a crime lord in the subbura. They got entangled in a conflict with him and the focus of the action, rather than bing on solving the murder, was this mini-war in the city between them and the crime lord. I think one important feature of any game I run, which helps get around passive players, is I always coordinate a premise for the party being together before the game starts. So in my roman game, the players were part of a secret order working for the emperor (which was the premise of the game rules, not just my campaign). In the magic heavy fantasy game I am developing, my latest group was together as a bunch of merchants and scoundrels trying to find wealth opportunities in a region recently conquered by an orc empire. I the one beore that they belonged to a society of wizards engaged in political intrigue. Nt sure if this answers your question.</blockquote>

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