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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ray_K" data-source="post: 6022846" data-attributes="member: 6698598">When you set the stage for your players, you have to keep it short and sweet. Imagine a pitch black room and a flashlight. You can only really see what's within the beam of the flashlight, right? Same thing with D&D. Players have a very limited "cone of vision" within your campaign world, so there's no point in beating them over the head with excessive information. There's also no point in designing things that your players cone of vision will probably never fall upon. Drop knowledge on them as they actively look for it, as it falls within their cone of vision, or if it's vital to the particular quest/story they're embarked on. If they don't care about the villains background, so be it. Save your ultra cool story telling skills for that NPC or villain that they do decide to take an interest in. Just get some of the important details in there. Kinda like writing a thesis statement. "This bad guy is doing X because of Y, and you should probably stop him". That's all players need to hear 95% of the time.As for main story lines.. I always have one, but it takes a back seat to side quests. There are people out there who can explain this much better than I can. My players are usually more interested in running short and sweet adventures that can be wrapped up quickly. Sometimes they even do two really short adventures in one session. A really cool way to do this is to feed off of what your players are interested in and make short adventures focused around that, but that's a different rant.In closing.. plan your campaign session by session, not longterm. Tailor each session to your players interests, and strategically drop the main story line on them. Let them burn themselves out on side quests.. then it's time for the big big baddie to do something that gets their attention.That's how I roll anyway.- edit for one more little point... Think about some video games you play like Skyrim, Fallout, Dragon Age, any of the popular RPG titles. What are you doing 95% of the time? Running silly ass side missions, kicking ass, and taking names. The main story is still there. You're still aware of it because you're being exposed to it in the background of what you're currently doing. Eventually you move on from raping and pillaging short dungeons and you start knocking out storyline quests. When you DM.. be a video game. Some people will want to beat me to death for saying that, but I've found that it's a format that works well for myself and my current group.</blockquote>

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