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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8464359" data-attributes="member: 6670763">That style of running games, especially when running D&D, always sounded way too good to be true. There's always been older GMs who say they just set up a situation and improvise from there, and it's much less work because they don't really have to do that much, with the players mostly entertaining themselves. That never sounded right, but when I started doing it, it was all that had been promised. Immediately my adventures became the best I've ever run.The key to running games like this is to get past the curse of Dragonlance and stop trying to write a story in advance and making it happen during play. That's not how RPG as a medium is made to work. People can do it, and have been doing it millions of times over several decades. But it significantly increased the preparation time and workload for the GM and results in less fun games for the players.A good adventure starts with a place that is inhabited by people who are in conflict about something, and someone is about to do something drastic, or has just done it. Know who the actors are, what they want, and what they are capable of, and then release the players on the field. There is of course a bit more to that, but not really that much. There need to be ways players can find loose threads to pull on and stakes they might care about, and it helps a lot to have basic maps for the places that are most likely to become the sites of fights or sneaking around. But an incredible amount of work in "conventional" modern adventures is about making sure that scenes are going to happen and to play out in a certain way that ensure the following scenes will also happen. Both in the preparation of the adventure, and in running the adventure in play.Without the need that certain things will play out in a certain way, the workload on the GM shrinks significantly. And when it's done reasonably well, the players are having a blast with it. The players are free to do and pursue anything that seems like it could get a result. Any result. They no longer have to figure out what they are supposed to do to progress to the next scene. This is a way to run games in which "default to saying yes" is easy and comes natural, and doesn't result in random anarchy. It's not about any NPCs anymore, it's about the PCs living through an interesting or chaotic situation and eventually coming out on the other side. Whether it's heroically riding of in the sunset, or fleeing into the night. And that's how you get players doing most of the talking in a game. Talking about what they want to do, why they want to do it, and how they want to accomplish it. Not trying to figure out what the next point on the script is that they are supposed to do but not being told about.</blockquote>

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