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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9044843" data-attributes="member: 29398">Then all is probably good.Yet "tailored specifically to" is what keeps getting pushed here; to their goals, their beliefs, their agendae, etc.  I'm pushing back."Relevant in some way" covers a huge amount of ground.  Any adventure, for example, could be said to be relevant to a very wide swath of characters if only because the odds are good that those characters will be a) richer when they come out and b) potentially better at what they do.Then it'd be a different game, certainly.  I mean, I think I could run a half-decent politics/intrigue/diplomacy game where any violence was done off-screen by arm's-length hirelings and the focus of play was much more "talky", but I'd probably get bored of it after a while.That said, the general conceit of the settings I run is that in most places there's always trouble of some sort brewing, and while the PCs can (and very likely will) deal with some of it there's no way in hell they can deal with all of it.  Hence, there's other adventurers out there; and adventuring is in most cultures a known way of making a very risky living...or dying real fast.I can see how it would; and yet to me it fits in with the general underlying conceits of the setting.  There's either real or potential trouble everywhere, on scales local, global, and everything in between.It would be more contrived, for example, were the world's only hotbed of adventuring to always be right where the PCs happen to be at any given time.It does, at such times when the players don't generate goals of their own.  It's a give and take - they'll start with a small-scale GM-given goal usually along the lines of  "clear that place out" (I always pretty much dictate what the campaign's first adventure will be, just to get things started), and if they latch on to something during that adventure and follow it up then I'm in react mode.And then there's the solo campaign I ran for my SO during lockdown.  For that one we rolled up a new party (same setting and world as before,and that group will integrate with the main game someday) and then I counted how many published modules I have here.  Once this (frighteningly big!) number was determined she rolled a die of that size, with the result showing what module we'd start with.  And so I ran The Gauntlet, which I'd otherwise never have run as on previous read-through I'd been highly underwhelmed (and yes, it lived down to that impression in play).I don't think so.  If they come up with their own goals I'm happy to "craft stuff beyond what [I've] already prepared".  I mean, if out of the blue they decide one day they want to try and overthrow the Emperor then I'll suddenly have to pay a lot more attention than I otherwise would have to what makes said Emperor tick, who-what guards him, what he does each day-week-month, and all that.Contrivance here would be their suddenly deciding to take on the Emperor one day and having said Emperor show up without warning right in their path the next day.</blockquote>

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