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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CharlesRyan" data-source="post: 5016556" data-attributes="member: 5265">Hi, all--This has been a terrific conversation--one of the most interesting I've been involved with in something like five years of visiting EN World on a daily basis. You all have given me a lot to think about, and I've learned quite a bit. (After 30 years of GMing, I still enjoy learning how to further polish my craft.) I've passed around a few XP in the process.More than one person has commented that most of the opinion points in this thread are not as far apart as they might seem. I'll wrap up my participation in this conversation with this example.My current campaign (very much plot-oriented) is set in Europe in 1199 (a Europe in which the magic and magical creatures believed in by medieval people are in fact real). In a recent adventure, the heroes faced a cult that formed around a relic brought back from the crusader kingdoms: a stone angel believed to have been carved by one of the Three Kings as a representation of the epiphany he experienced at the birth of Christ. I did a little research on those kings when preparing the adventure, and discovered that one--the best candidate for association with this relic, in fact--was believed to have been called Gastaphar; the francophone Europeans shoehorned that into the name Gaspard. Wow, stumbling across that factoid was an epiphany in its own right. One of my PCs is named Gaspard! This cast a whole new light on the adventure I was preparing; surely the cultists would see some sort of significance in this coincidence. As a result, both the preparation and the execution of the adventure went in some unexpected directions. I was, nevertheless, able to build in the plot points my campaign outline called for. In the end, my players said they really enjoyed the adventure, and so did I. An unpredictable mix of a well-developed world, a thought-out but not slavishly adhered-to plot outline, and the never fully predictable decisions of the players led to that result.I'm pretty sure RC would consider my campaign setting a sandbox--it consists of the whole of medieval Europe, after all, and I have a library of history books (and the entire internet) as my campaign manual. And in some ways I might be what RC considers a sandbox GM: That adventure was set in Verdun, but the players made an unexpected side-trek to Paris. I would never undermine such a decision; I see it as my job to make the story fit their actions, not vice versa. (And I would bore quickly of the campaign if they only did things I foresaw.)But I still see some of the tools that uniquely come from story planning as the most consequential to the experience I'm delivering, so I will forever think of myself as a "plot" GM.I think this is my last post in this thread--not because it's taken a bad turn, but because I think it's run its course. Thanks again to everyone for making it a good one!</blockquote>

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