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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruined" data-source="post: 306849" data-attributes="member: 113">I'm moving towards the same middle-ground that you are, Tom, but I'm moving from the opposite side. I tired of the linear adventures long ago, and gave a lot of freedom to my Planescape campaigns. Too much, I'll say in hindsight. We had great adventures, and many things were motivated by the little subplots and actions of the characters. But there were times where they just had no clue what to do or where to go. The only thing that saved us sometimes was that I had built such a detailed environment over the years that they had several places of interest to visit. Sooner or later, plot would surface and there they go.I'm gearing up for a Scarred Lands campaign, and it will have definitive timelines and events. Travel will be a big feature of the early games, as I plan to chase the characters from the midst of the Hegemony up towards Mithril and the more liberated lands. But I'll always bow to players wanting to make their own choices. The trick is to properly convey how good and bad certain options are without GM Metagaming. I want them to be able to decide that 'this really isn't the course of action we want to take' without having to go:  " Okay, your characters should realize that... ".   I've seen this in another campaign I play in, and I don't like it.Anyways, talking about changes to GM style, I've tried to take chances and do some non-conventional games every so often, just to mix things up. There was a great session where the characters had to go relive the actions of their employers (an aged adventuring company) through sensory stones. I handed them character sheets and backgrounds for the other characters, and we had a fast-paced narrative adventure with higher-powered characters. We made very few (if any) dice rolls, and all focused on telling an entertaining story. In the end it provided the group with enough information to go rescue one of the characters who didn't make it back from the Abyss. It was great.I think it's healthy to mix up the overall theme every so often. Maybe not to the degree of the typical humor episodes of the X-files, but hopefully you get my point.</blockquote>

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