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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mesh Hong" data-source="post: 5150792" data-attributes="member: 73463">The question I find myself asking is; is a sandbox what you really need? It seems to me that you might be better off with a slightly more linear campaign, I’m not talking railroad here, I’m talking more focused than fuzzy. To be honest the best advice I can give you is to just concentrate on the next session rather than worrying about the campaign. In my opinion most wasted prep time comes from a DM getting carried away with trying to manipulate the end of the campaign rather than preparing the next few encounters. Understand that you have no real control of how your campaign will end, but you do have a lot of control over what will happen in the next few encounters. In my own game we have gone from level 1 to 24 so far so I have some 4e experience. We also usually play twice a week for a total of about 11 hours combined, I can handle this by concentrating on designing the encounters needed for the adventure (which I design all the monsters for myself) then spending any random moments thinking about the immediate plot and the overarching plot. The mechanics come first – the encounters and monsters.The fluff comes second – the plot and adventure. Having said all this I have been running games for a long time, and the approach I have developed or at least become accustomed to is pretty close to “make it up as you go along”. I am very comfortable with the random whims of my players, but my players also understand that an adventure or side quest has a prepared encounter design that is as much for their benefit as my own. This means that my players know that they can do anything they want, but this freedom relies on a mutual respect not to screw each other over. They are happy to let me present a story that reacts from their actions. This is really easy to do when you aren’t focused on a fixed ending. I’ll leave it at that for the moment because I am running out of time, and I am probably starting to ramble anyway.  NOTE:Actually I have just reread your post and I am not sure I have really answered it, I'll have another look tomorrow. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":o" title="Eek!    :o"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":o" /></blockquote>

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