So once you've DMed for a long time, you tend to develop habits, or things you like to fall back to. Either because they are comfortable or they just work extremely well. So what are the go-tos you find yourself coming back to when designing your campaigns?
For me its the concept of "Pcs belong to an organization that are assigned missions"
As my group has gotten older, I find that they less and less want to roleplay out where or why they are going to X place, they just want to get there and get to the business at hand. I also find that when I run open ended more sandboxy campaigns, the game slows down a lot. Again, my players have real world jobs and familes and X responsbilities, they don't necessarily want to do a whole lot of thinking when it comes to gametime, they do too much of it in real life already.
So I have found the mission concept works exceptionally well for them. From the PC side, they get to jump right into things, the mission says we do X....so we all do X. No infighting, no squabbling, just get to it. From a DM side, mission concepts give me a lot of freedom, I can design all sorts of missions from steal X item, to kill X person, to blow up X. I can make the missions connected, or independent. I can give rationales, or I can choose not too (the boss says we need X....so we are going to go get it). And its easy for me to design a mission during prep time without worrying that the PCs will ignore my carrot and just not go to a dungeon, or talk to a person, etc. If a mission says you need to get this item from a dungeon, then I can design the dungeon with full confidence it will get used.
I've run 9 campaigns in 5e so far, and probably 7 of them have been mission focused (and definately all of my most successful campaigns have been that style). I just find for my older player group, it works amazingly well.
For me its the concept of "Pcs belong to an organization that are assigned missions"
As my group has gotten older, I find that they less and less want to roleplay out where or why they are going to X place, they just want to get there and get to the business at hand. I also find that when I run open ended more sandboxy campaigns, the game slows down a lot. Again, my players have real world jobs and familes and X responsbilities, they don't necessarily want to do a whole lot of thinking when it comes to gametime, they do too much of it in real life already.
So I have found the mission concept works exceptionally well for them. From the PC side, they get to jump right into things, the mission says we do X....so we all do X. No infighting, no squabbling, just get to it. From a DM side, mission concepts give me a lot of freedom, I can design all sorts of missions from steal X item, to kill X person, to blow up X. I can make the missions connected, or independent. I can give rationales, or I can choose not too (the boss says we need X....so we are going to go get it). And its easy for me to design a mission during prep time without worrying that the PCs will ignore my carrot and just not go to a dungeon, or talk to a person, etc. If a mission says you need to get this item from a dungeon, then I can design the dungeon with full confidence it will get used.
I've run 9 campaigns in 5e so far, and probably 7 of them have been mission focused (and definately all of my most successful campaigns have been that style). I just find for my older player group, it works amazingly well.