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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 7167679" data-attributes="member: 6785785">As [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] said, one of the fundamental differences between D&D and a boardgame is the presence of a referee. If one does not like referees, then it seems odd to play a game that requires one. I can understand it....it seems more like a tactical combat game like Warhammer or something similar, with a story serving only to provide a bit of context to the battles, and perhaps a bit of decision-making on the part of the players in between the combats. Which is fine....I can understand the appeal of that just like I can understand the appeal of Warhammer or Malifaux or Dust or any other miniatures game. Perhaps it's that it seems like D&D would be an odd choice instead of a game that is designed to deliver exactly that experience. So I like referees in games....let's say I wanted to add one to Monopoly....I wouldn't be surprised when people questioned that decision. It's not always, that is true. Sometimes, it's hard to pull off and players know what's happening. Mine don't have a problem with that. I expect that this is just because we're going for different experiences from play. You have a kin of adversarial role to the players (in that you seem to focus on running their adversaries more than any other DM role) and you show them your work afterward. I almost never show my players anything from my notes.....but they would never ask. Other times, it may be obvious because the PCs have clearly gone off the rails, and I have to adapt and adjust on the fly. In instances like that, it's understood that's what the DM has to do. But other than those instances, there's no reason at all why anyone would ever be able to know when a DC was determined, or at what point I decided that the reinforcements from the other room show up to help the bad guys. I would even say that preparing too much ahead of time locks you in to certain paths, which then may interfere with acknowledging how the game world may be affected by the players. It's deciding things ahead of time before all the information is known. Thats not to say it's bad to have a plan.....I always have a plan in place....but you have to be ready to change the plan. It's like taking a long road trip....printing the directions ahead of time is definitely a good idea, but when you hit an accident that closes the highway, you have to be ready to adapt and change the plan. Okay, cool, thanks.What I did to prepare my game was to read through the book, and then I pre-selected the results of the fortune reading. I picked the areas I thought would be the most interesting and placed the quest items in those places. I think leaving it up to chance can be fun, but I preferred to decide ahead of time. This also allowed me to tailor things to the ongoing story from our campaign. There were a couple of areas that I decided not to focus on all that much (mostly the haunted keep of Arghynvostholdt, just didn't appeal all that much to me). I didn't worry about wandering monsters and the like...I tend to decide those kinds of things during the game. I did decide that no long rests would be possible in the wilds of Barovia; anytime the players camped, thw wolves and other creatures would harry them all night to the point that they could not benefit from a rest. So when we started play, things began as expected with the encounter in Barovia with Donovich and his vampire son locked in the cellar, and in meeting Ireena and her brother. I also had the PCs encounter one of the hags from the Old Bonegrinder selling dream cakes, setting that up for them. They were specifically seeking a witch due to the campaign story, and so they were very suspicious of that. So Barovia led them to a choice between seeking refuge at Vallaki or to go further to Kresk, far to the west. So the PCs went to Vallaki first. I find Vallaki to be a dynamic environment, so we wound up spending a lot of time there. The PCs were looking for Rictavio and other clues based on the card reading. They ran afoul of Izek Strazni and the Baron's other men. I set up the whole Bones of St. Andral subplot. I made it so that the bones actually protected the whole town from vampire infestation, but only the priest knew that. The bones being stolen, and the vampires in the coffin shop was something the PCs wound up having to deal with. Vallaki is a prime example of the kind of environment where the players can go a lot of different directions. Lady Wachter and her sons, loyal to Strahd, wanted to overthrow the Baron and take over in Strahd's name. So the PCs were kind of caught in the middle of this struggle, and had to decide how to handle that, while still trying to find Rictavio and follow up on other leads. I did not dictate how they went about this, or which side they would choose in the power struggle...that was all up to them. They wound up eventually killing Izek, which weakened the Baron enough that the Wachters easily overthrew him.The players could just as easily have decided to simply get the hell out of town and not get involved, or they could have decided that the Wachters needed to be taken out...any number of options. So when I say "improv" or "making things up on the fly" I usually don't mean making things up whole cloth right in the moment. Instead, I mean taking an existing environment, and deciding how the PCs' actions cause things to change, and how the inhabitants of that environment react, and how that causes more change. Using my judgement to decide how things play out. To me, that's one of the great strengths of D&D. And despite my understanding the approach you are taking and the experience you are going for, it does seem a bit of an odd choice.</blockquote>

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