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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5405842" data-attributes="member: 42582">Not an adventure path, as there is no predetermined set of adventures to be gone through. These are worked out by me (as GM) from session to session in response to the actions of the PCs and revealed (or sometimes imputed) preferences of the players.Not a sandbox, as the PCs are not really free to explore the world. I agree with Pawsplay that sandbox implies exploration as a focus of play, and that is not the case in my game.Well, that seems to me to rule out an adventure path as "good GMing", becaus in an adventure path the players are not free to choose who shall be their PCs' enemies and allies (except in some marginal cases). If the PCs decide to join rather than try to overthrow the evil cult, the adventure path grinds to a halt.I know, from experience, that this is not so in my game,  because in my game there is no predetermined "final enemy/BBEG".I don't at all dispute that it's real. I just deny that it is exhaustive.Neither of those things describes my prep. I've posted on how I prep upthread, in chaochou's sandbox thread, and in the "GM by the nose" thread.  In this thread I've also posted a quote from Paul Czege that describes how I like to prep for my game (although as I said, I'm a bit more relaxed than Czege in how I push resolution of situations/encounters).I like to GM a game where the large events of the story revolve around tensions between PCs, and between PCs and NPCs, that emerge and are resolved in the course of play. This precludes linearity, because there is no predetermined destination. A brief actual play example: when the PCs encountered the duergar slavers, I had assumed that they would fight them as a prelude to raiding the duergar stronghold to free the prisoners. Instead they negotiated a deal with the slavers to ransom the prisoners for a share of the loot taken from the hobgoblins from whom the duergar had bought the prisoners. (Mechanically, this was resolved as a skill challenge.) So instead of a fight plus a fortress raid, the game is headed towards a settlement of the ransom transaction at a designated time and place.This is not linear. No one knew that the game would head in that direction until after the encounter had actually been played out. But it is not a sandbox. The players are not exploring the world that I have written up for that purpose - I am shaping the world and the NPCs within it in order to push the various buttons that are built into the PCs (via backstory and previous play) in something like the way Paul Czege describes.</blockquote>

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