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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 7656952" data-attributes="member: 6787650">I'm not as eloquent as some in this thread, but I'll respond to your challenge here with some brief highlights of my style:* I enjoy playing more than DMing, so my joys while DMing are along the lines of "players had a good time" and "memorable things happened", as well as the "play to find out what happens" aspect. I try to be the kind of DM that I would want to play under.* My other joy while DMing is simulationism. This is to say, both constructing and tweaking rule subsystems to make them more accurately represent the desired fiction, and also building consistent stories/ecosystems/societies based on those rules. Why don't black puddings just take over the world? (Or do they?) What happens when you drop a primary witchlight marauder on a continent, and how quickly does it happen? What effect does Elminster's existence, or an analogous ubiquitous-powerful-crazy-prepared-benevolent wizard, have on a world, and on the adventures that you can have there? A lot of my adventure ideas and plotlines spring out of this kind of thinking.* Principles that I follow include "have a world which makes sense", but also "PCs are Weirdness Magnets." The latter principle implies that the Laws of Plot are allowed to apply to the PCs (a PC sitting in a public restroom will overhear a statistically-unlikely number of Interesting Conversations), and the reason for it is simple: Niven's Law for Writers #4 states, "It is a sin to waste the reader's time," and players are like readers in this sense. But the world also has to make sense--it has to be someplace that you could actually inhabit--so the weirdness that they stumble across will not exhibit obvious gameisms, it will be as self-consistent as I can make it. For example, one of my players recently asked me for rules on falling damage: that is, the damage an object inflicts when it falls on you. I'll come up with some rules, but I'll make sure that they are consistent with the existing rules for falling damage, traps, damage from dragon/giant natural weaponry, and the damage which huge rocks from trebuchets inflict when they fall on you. I'm not going to handwave away any issues with physical laws by invoking gamist tropes like "dragons do more damage than giants because they're supposed to be a higher-level challenge" or "trebuchets aren't intended for PCs." And bad guys will fight bad guys, and some people on the good guy's team will be evil, because that's how a realistic world would work. And sometimes you really will run across of whole clan of 40 Fire Giants, even though it's not a level-appropriate challenge for anybody under 30th level, because Fire Giants are not loners. Anyway, the point is that I am influenced by both simulationist principles and the desire to provide good experiences for my players, and I reconcile the two by bluntly admitting to my players that their PCs are not living typical lives. (Corollary: if a PC starts an industrial revolution with True Polymorph, he is not doomed to discover that some NPC already discovered/perfected/discarded the technique. PCs are allowed to change the world, it's part of why they are PCs.)* I'm not sure if you would call this a principle or a technique, but I sketch rather than plan. At both a macro scale (campaign design) and a micro scale (what's going to happen in the adventure today), I jot down a list of all the various things that are going on in the region and ways they could possibly intersect: "there's a vampire, and 3 carrion crawlers, and 18 skeletons, and a sign that says 'Treasure in THAT direction'", and then I will ad-lib most of the actual events, but I will pull from my prepped notes as I'm ad-libbing so that, for example, if the PC discovers a sewage line, I have a good idea that one or more of the Carrion Crawlers will be in the sewage (but not more than three of them, because that's all there are). Or I may know the hobgoblins are planning a resurgence in "revenge" for getting kicked out of the area by the original human settlers three hundred years ago, and they've told themselves stories about how the Keglar Clan (in reality only about fifty hobgoblins on the original five-hundred-acre territory, but much more than that in their hobgoblin descendants' minds) are the rightful owners of the Kingdom of Desdemoria--so the hobgoblins the PCs capture may be willing to go along peacefully as long as they don't find out that they are Desdemorians. (And if the wizard listens in on the captives' conversation using Comprehend Languages, I know what they are probably talking about amongst themselves.) And since I know there's a Rakshasa in the kingdom, masquerading as the king's advisor, why, he probably knows about the hobgoblins and is quietly fanning those flames. Or maybe he's opposing them. So anyway, the principle here is "sketch out the main outlines in advance, fill in the details when they become relevant."</blockquote>

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