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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Edward Kann@StoryART" data-source="post: 1798493" data-attributes="member: 23128">This is a great thread.  Thanks for bringing the topic up and all of the comments.I can only really speak from my own experience as a Dungeon Master / GM so here goes...Early on in my DMing hobby I ran into some of the same exact problems.  Really the goal back then was to sit down with my friends and allow them to adventure, more or less off the cuff, in the fantasy campaign we happened to be using at the time.   It was up to the players to get together, or not, and to decide on what town or dungeon to go explore and what trouble to get into.Some of those games were great.  I think that style just takes a bit longer to develop into a really good game.  Characters need some time to sort out their relationships with one another and some players just need two or three or four or five game sessions under their belt before they really have some clear personal goals.My advice is to just be patient.  Have a good selection of possible directions to go each game.  Maybe have one or two downloaded small adventures, maybe a larger dungeon you purchased and a city map or two plus some wilderness.  That way if the characters ignore your bumps in the cargo hold its no big deal..the voyage continues and when they land in the next town they can decide what they want to do.Maybe the players already have in the backs of their minds some style of game play that they really look forward to and they are just waiting for it to appear. Some players really like playing rogue adventures, getting entangled in the rogues guild, breaking into the barons mansion and finding out the baron is actually a necromancer..blah blah blah...some characters want to head out to a classic dungeon and ancient ruin.  It really depends.  Having these as options though lets your group mature and grow in a direction that is hopefully fun for YOU and fun for them.Later as a DM I found that these adventure styles weren't really as challenging or fun from my end.  That's when I started trying adventures that were designed to play out more like a film.  Basically these campaigns were not endless and open ended.  They had a specific theme and a definate beginning, middle and end with clear goals.  I those games the player characters were all designed around the story.  All the players were Dwarves from the same clan on a quest, or they were all members of the same Samurai family engaged in a war with two other rival families, that sort of thing.Dungeon Mastering is supposed to be fun right along with being a player so find out what most entertains you as a DM and try to go with that. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> Ed</blockquote>

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