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Message: <blockquote data-quote="twofalls" data-source="post: 2167209" data-attributes="member: 23718">This style of starting a game has been an evolutionary process. Please keep in mind that I've been gaming with these fellows for a long time, 25 years in two instances. The most recent player just was voted in last game session. The next most recent has been playing for 6 years. My style of GMing has become very organic, and I will try to explain that here.In my Dreams of Glory campaign (DoG), the one this whole thread has been discussing, I now have four fighters, two priests, and an elven mage. Only two characters are non-human (Dwarven Warmain from Monte Cook’s AU) and the Mage. There hasn’t ever been a rouge in the party. So this group is high on healing magic and can recover from battle quickly, has average magical artillery support, and awesome frontline firepower. I adjust the game to suit that mix. I can worry them by tossing in just a few traps, but avoid anything truly dangerous in that area because they just can’t deal with it. In most encounters I give the fighters plenty of tough opponents to vanquish, and there are many opportunities for the spell casters to support the front lines (or mix it up as they wish). I no longer plan grand campaigns. I used to sit down and write out ideas for plots, subplots, and concepts. I’d think about what theme’s I wanted to explore and take notes on what to research in order to get a clear idea about them, like slavery, or Nordic traditions, or once I did a college paper on the role of monotheism in Gaul and used that as the basis of a campaign idea. I don’t do that anymore, I’ve become lazy and my games have improved for it. For example the DoG game started off with the group assembling individually in Shadowdale with this idea that they wanted to look into the Harpers Organization, and the first session was role playing them meeting each other and getting to know one another. I always do that as it gives a solid start to the game and a foundation for the characters future relationships. They then discover that some girls are kidnapped and go after them. I didn’t have a plan as to where the game was going and just ran a small web module I’d downloaded. From there I played off the cue of my players and the game evolved from there. I grab a module when there is no clear direction the players are traveling and use it as an outline and then just ad hock off the players. This is a lazy way to run a game, but it’s led to the most intense role playing experiences of my career.The only background planning that is done comes from the players themselves. I require that they turn in backgrounds on their characters, and I use these backgrounds in the game. For example, my Elven wizard is from an old Eldath Family who fled the scourge of Myth Drannor and traveled to Evermeet. He is the talented youngest member of that family who left a promising career as a scholar to return to Faerun and shocked his family to shame by consorting with all types of lower base races. Now that the Drow are infiltrating Cormanthor and returning to the surface, his elder family members have expectations of him, and he has spent half the game dodging their messengers so he could continue to adventure with his friends. That’s just one sample of many in the game.\\\\Spoiler Alert for Players of ANY of My Games////It’s interesting the way things work out. I might put a puzzle, or conceive of a twisted plan in my head of what the bad guys are up to and drop clues. The players then speculate about what is going on and try to figure it out and sometimes one of them comes up with a brilliant idea that I hadn’t thought of and I decide to adopt it on the spot. They then feel so clever when they discover that they had figured it all out on their own, when in fact they had conceived it in the first place! ////End of Alert\\\\In this fashion the game grows and I keep after session notes on everything that transpires. I can then use that info later to make the game appear to have great depth and intricate twisted plots when in fact its all so easy and effortless that its laughable.So that’s what I meant by organic.   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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