RPGs is hard.

[Blackhawk]

I've been playing good old fashioned pen-and-paper RPGs since the 80s. I did nothing else through the late 80s and early 90s, and was almost always the GM. I ran D&D (original), AD&D, GURPS, MERP, RM, WHFRP, and a handful of other acronyms.

In the last couple of years I've been trying to get back into the game. After a couple of false starts (getting things lined up just before people moved away), I got into a small, but regular group a year or so ago (four people total, and we meet once a month.) We started out planning on Pathfinder, but ended up switching to Savage Worlds as soon as we got a good look at the rules. We're all adults, all with some combination of families/jobs/significant others to work around, so the faster rules (and much faster prep) has made Savage Worlds ideal.

I've run a couple of one-offs (one Star Wars, one generic fantasy), and we've had one short campaign that just wrapped up. I volunteered to run the next campaign. We started planning for Necessary Evil, and superhero (well, villain) campaign, but for whatever reason all four of us got nailed with the fantasy bug at once, and we all agreed to put off NE and run a short fantasy campaign first.

I've been working up the details over the last couple of weeks, and I'm amazed at how the hobby (and the expectations for the GM) have evolved over the last 20 years. When I was running stuff back in the early 90s, gaming was still in the early post-dungeon-crawl era. That meant that, most of the time, you just had a series of dungeons strung together with a thin story. Today, good lord, it seems like the expectation is a story with epic plots intertwined with character background hooks, all managed through a game that gives the PCs nearly complete freedom of choice in where they go and what they do. Suddenly, I feel like all my campaign running experience is useless. The last time I played, plot and railroading were the same thing. I have no idea how to tell a story with any coherence without some idea of what will happen where and when, and ensuring that 'where' and 'when' actually happen are seen as the worst form of GMing these days.

Grumble kids grumble lawn. Back in my day we didn't walk uphill to the dungeon in the snow; we just started at the front door!

[LordMortis]

When last I left RPG campaigns in the mid 90s, we treated the game a collaborative story telling. The GM would build a world and have a lot of major elements ready ahead of time but the characters would choose to do what the characters would choose to do, so the GM would prepare new stuff every session based on the characters choose to do.

Of course the GM is still going to guide them toward the predetermined path but it is was never mandatory. Filling in the world was framed before the campaign begun was best done only slightly ahead of time.

[LawBeefaroni]

Kill a few of their characters off, that'll teach them to try to get all free form on you.

[Smoove_B]

I have a huge amount of respect for anyone that can run an RPG session these days. The closest I've come in the last decade is doing the setup work for the Mansions of Madness boardgame, and eventually even that turned out to be too much. My window of prep-time is usually about 48-72 hours before gaming. If I try to do more, I end up just forgetting it. We just started a Descent 2nd edition campaign and the guy that was playing the Overloard got caught with his pants down when we didn't pick the scenario he was expecting. And all that involved was understanding the victory conditions and rules for reinforcements.

We were laughing because we both remembered playing through the original Temple of Elemental Evil during the summer just before we entered high school. I'm nearly certain we played three or four days a week the entire time we were off school and after everyone would leave my house to go home for dinner, I'd read up on what we'd be doing the next day. True, that was a dungeon crawl, but I'd throw in extra stuff to make it a bit more interesting.

The idea of running some type of campaign now with deep story plots, twists and epic resolutions? If it isn't being supplied to me to spoon-feed out to a player? It's not going to happen.

[IceBear]

Besides when I first started playing, I've always needed some sort of overall storyline/plot to the game, otherwise it was just a fancy boardgame. I had the players give me character backgrounds before it became a part of character creation and tried to fit their stories into my game world. I let them decide what to do and where to go, though we had an agreement they would tell me at the end of our weekly session so I had the rest of the week to prepare for what they wanted to do.

[coopasonic]

More important than flexibility is the illusion of flexibility. Let them make their choices and railroad them behind the scenes anyway. So they want to investigate the mysterious quest giver... I'll be damned, but his castle looks amazingly like the dungeon he wanted you to fetch the sparkly bit from. Of course now you are in trouble if they want to go to the dungeon next. Swap out some encounters and swap a couple rooms and they'll never know. Gamers are dumb.

Also, as LawBeef mentions, if they keep making things hard on you, kill them. Kill them all.

===

Edited to add: I am just making crap up because I have never played a PnP RPG of any kind. I've probably read 20 source books but never had the opportunity.

[Blackhawk]

Rocks fall.

You die.

[hentzau]

Our last foray into an ongoing game was a fairly successful D&D 4E campaign. Five players plus me as the DM, and we played for about 8 months, at least three-four times a month, until we lost two players (my daughter to homework, and our thief to moving out of town.) I never really attempted to replace them, and the game died just as the players were about to hit Paragon level (we played pretty slowly, plus our sessions were usually 2.5 hours long.)

I ran the game using nothing but pre-created adventures that I would read ahead of time at least once, and make minor tweaks to. Seemed to really work for us. This also helped to spell the downfall of the game, because every encounter in a pre-gen would always be created with a balanced party of 5 in mind, and it just seemed like too much work to rebalance the adventures.

I'm planning on starting up a Star Wars game that I'm going to run just a couple of times a month...nice thing about Star Wars is that you don't have to have an ultra balanced party to have a fighting chance. Plus, I really enjoyed the new Star Wars system when I played around with it last month.

[Blackhawk]

We're playing once a month right now (although we're trying to tweak that to bi-weekly.) I've decided to up the experience per session to 3-5 instead of 1-3, just to make the less frequent sessions less of a problem. With normal experience and monthly games, it would take a couple of years before the characters really peaked.

[Holman]

[Fantasizes about getting the old AD&D gang back together:]

"Adventurers, what's the plan?"
"Burn down Hommlet!"
"Again?"
"Absolutely!"
"<sniff> I love you guys. Don't ever change."

[Zarathud]

This is why I run Paranoia. The players will always self-destruct. A good background plot is nice, but not essential. When things get slow:

Zara: The lights just went out. What do you do?
Players: Hold onto my laser. ::scribbling teasonous acts furiously onto note paper.::

One of these days, I'll run a session at the Octocon.

[TiLT]

I'm a very experienced GM, having almost never been a player in RPGs (though I've tried it enough to know what it's like). I rarely get any feedback (exception: My D&D campaign is sort of collapsing recently, and while asking my players if they wanted to keep playing, all of them told me how much they loved the campaign. That was refreshing), so it becomes important to learn to "read" the players and their moods.

Being a GM is very, very challenging, and takes loads of practice. Not only do you have to spend at least as much time preparing a game as playing it, but you also need to fully understand the rules and the campaign setting. You must be able to see when a player isn't having fun, even if they don't say it. You must be able to divert attention away from the players who speak loudest and give the spotlight to the ones who don't speak out often (but you must also be careful, for not all of those players actually want the spotlight in the first place). You must recognize the needs of your players and make sure you feed them what they want, be it exciting combat, new loot, satisfying political scheming, a deep story, or a myriad of such things. It becomes an exercise in psychology, to an extent.

The freedom the players get is an illusion though. Unless you're running a fully fleshed out sandbox campaign, you'll need to prepare, and you can't prepare for everything. The trick becomes to have roadblocks to delay the players with so that they don't reach the parts you haven't prepared until you're ready. Do the players suddenly tell you that they're going to visit a town you aren't prepared to let them enter yet? Throw one of your reserve encounters at them to delay them, then after the session ends, prepare the town so that you're ready by the time the next session occurs.

You must always be prepared to ditch even entire scenarios or storylines if the actions of the players dictate it. Never force the players to run into your carefully prepared material. It's better to delay them before preparing something for wherever they were going. If you have to ditch something, take its basic elements and use them elsewhere. Did your players skip that awesome kobold dungeon you had prepared? Save it for later, letting the players run into some of your encounters when it becomes appropriate.

Remember that the players want to feel as if they're taking part in a living world. Let events unfold without them if they don't get to them in time. Let them foil the plans of important NPCs if they do something clever, even if it disrupts the plot. Did your players just prematurely kill the main bad guy for this part of the campaign, the one you had planned to have escape intact so that they can encounter him again later? Let them kill him, then reveal that he's working for someone else (even if that wasn't the original plan), then let that "someone else" take over the role the original NPC would have played. Let the players run into other adventuring groups, who maybe talk about their recent exploits. Have the shopkeeper be too busy with a large order from the local militia, one he has to fill immediately.

Be patient! I've created plots that it took my players years to fully unravel, and I had to keep them secret until then. You don't have to go into detail, but lay a plan for where you imagine the campaign going and what kinds of challenges you expect the players to face. Place small clues that might not make sense right then, but which makes sense much later. You may be making it up as you go along, but the players shouldn't know that. Even if you paint yourself into a corner and start panicking because the players are about to do something you aren't at all prepared for, just make up something and pretend that it's the way you prepared it. You can always connect the dots later, and may be surprised at what interesting plot twists that might lead to.

Essentially, running an RPG campaign is like doing a very elaborate parlor trick. You direct the players' attention towards whatever you want them to pay attention to while you make sure they don't see the tricks for what they are. If you can do that, you can railroad them as much as you like while they never suspect a thing. When they ask if they can do something you don't want them to do, try to say yes instead of no. You can always subtly steer them back on course, or even move the course itself to fit their new path. They might think the events that happen were because of their choices, even if you know better.

The things I mentioned above are of no importance if the GM can't avoid the typical RPG pitfalls, such as GM-PCs, deus ex machinas, rigid plots, etc. These are just some basic experiences I've made in my own campaigns. I'm running two right now (D&D 4E and Rogue Trader), and it's a lot of work, but it's also very satisfying. The D&D campaign has an epic storyline that the players have been following since level 1 (they're level 11 now), and the campaign will end when that story is over. The Rogue Trader campaign is more of a sandbox thing, but I tend to throw out breadcrumbs to steer the players where I want them.

[YellowKing]

The most memorable sessions I ever had (either as a player or a DM) was when somebody did something completely contrary to the adventure and we incorporated the fallout into the story anyway.

The best example was when I was running an Undermountain adventure. My players decided to spare a single Orc they had defeated, tie him up, and use him as their personal cannon fodder to walk ahead of them and trigger traps.

I could think of no good reason why they shouldn't be able to do this, and after making the requisite strength checks to tie him up, we proceeded. What followed was an utterly hilarious night of me torturing this poor Orc. He triggered traps, was forced to drink poison, and finally, too close to death to drag along, the party kicked him down some stairs. Fortunate for them, because the stairs were trapped and the Orc met his demise by bursting into flame.

Over 20 years later, and that poor Orc still comes up in conversation from time to time when we get together.

[IceBear]

100% what Tilt said. One of the most important thing I have learned is always say Yes (think Chris Perkins wrote an article about it). Saying yes doesn't mean you are giving the players what they want, but it does increase the illusion they aren't being railroaded and helps you learn how to be flexible and improvise. Always keep old maps and encounters handy that you can reskin for your current needs; throwing delays at them like Tilt said if needed. I know the 4E rules aren't popular but the DMG and DMG2 were good books for GM tips

[hepcat]

Costumes, it 's all about the costumes.

[Zarathud]

That's a good point. Unlike hepcat, I'm not a very into the superhero theme but I stayed for almost a year in a Mutants & Masterminds campaign when the DM did an amazing job of rolling with the players and their crazy back stories.

One of the players was legendary for his min-max powers as a British time lord, and he kept making things interesting by shutting off all his other time powers to do one thing almost too well. When our Doctor got a little too cocky "accelerating the time to rust out the lock on the back door" of the villain's lair, the GM painted a wonderful picture as the minions turned around to find the dapper Brit revealed after he ended up rusting out the whole hidden pod bay door. Our Doctor was supposed to still have a Hero Point to burn to evade the incoming bullets, as his time powers were otherwise turned off which left him helpless. Unfortunately, his excessive success in the last stunt came from a bonus from burning out his last Hero Point because he thought he just failed -- and ended up with an excessive success. It all came down to one dodge roll, which of course was a critical miss. Whoops, our time lord needed to regenerate back to life...but had talked himself out of choosing that power yet. We were stunned, and the character who could most predictably get us back on the campaign trail was dead. The resulting complications proved to be quite interesting.

The party Science Ape had to spend several missions at base just working up gadgets to advance the plot, which turned out to be more fun than they ever should have been. Particularly in one mission when after just barely failing the rolls to build the bad guy capture device (leaving him convinced the device would work), he again rolled a critical failure when trying to send demonic biker chicks back to their own alternative reality. The DM announced we should save the Hero Point, and end the gaming session early.

Almost every gaming session, the GM would end up describing how an action unfolded and how it would have to be the cover page for the comic. True enough, the following episode was his explanation of our reactions when finding out that those biker chicks had just helped the Nazis win World War II and the Axis just arrived to arrest the party. What a classic, unexpected Golden Age moment for the campaign. And a blast to play.

[Zurai]

If you're finding it a chore to prepare for campaigns/game sessions as a DM, try moving to a game system that's more player-driven. For example, Burning Wheel. In BW it's even discouraged to have a setting put into place before character creation; everything about the system is player-driven. All the players at the table (GM included) are supposed to come up with the basic framework of the setting together, then make characters.

Possibly the most important aspect of each character are their Beliefs and Insticts. Beliefs are statements such as "My brother has gone mad. I must kill him before he causes any further harm" or "I am a predator. It is my right and duty according to the Way of the First Hunter to hunt prey", which provide goals and directions for the character. Working towards or fulfilling a Belief in game earns the players rewards. Instincts are always/never statements such as "Always eat when given a chance; you never know when your next meal will be" or "Always treat the dead politely and with respect". Instincts both provide a mechanical benefit (you can tell the DM "My instinct says I always have a weapon handy, so I have a knife in my boot") and provide the players with rewards when they get the player in trouble.

Beliefs and Instincts together with the way skills work (player says, "I'm doing such and such", DM replies, "That's an obstacle X <skill> test; success means you get what you want, failure means <insert devilish DM move here>") mean that the players are actively encouraged to make up their own plots and intrigues, and the DM just gets to follow along and make sure everyone's obeying the rules of the game and having fun. There's still world-building and session preparation, but it's pretty minimal.

[GreenGoo]

I found it difficult and time consuming as a kid. As I got older and thought even more of myself (heh), I *had* to do it right as described by various articles and handbooks, so all of my time was spent planning and outlining. Luckily, I had very few people who were interested in playing so I needed activities to do solo, and planning was good for that. Still, way, way too much time was spent on prep and not nearly enough on enjoying the game and playing it.

RPG's are a huge effort.

[Blackhawk]

All good points. I'm not too worried about pulling it off (well, other than the usual 'GM stage fright' aspect.) I was mostly just making observations about how much the genre and expectations had changed since the 'dungeon crawl' days two decades ago. Hell, when I first started you were lucky if there was a town outside the generic multi-level dungeon.

Much of what has been said matches up with my plan. I know what the Big Bad Evil Guy has planned. I know, in rough outline form, what's going to be going on in the world sans the players. I'm only planning one and a half sessions in advance in detail, though, so that I can tweak things as we go based on their actions. I had the players fill out questionnaires to give me plot hooks and motivators, and I have a decent idea of how I'm going to work those into the story.

I'm actually looking forward to it, very much so. I always tried to add 'more' to my games, even back then, but the systems had only peripheral support for non-combat play (non-weapon proficiencies, blah), and most of the players I had got impatient for combat if the roleplaying was any more intense than negotiating the price for clearing out the nearest dungeon.

The way that modern RPGs support fully rounded, individualized characters without burying them in impossibly dense rules (Rolemaster, I'm looking at you) is fantastic.

I'm working with Reaper's world, as I also play their Warlord wargame (which is set there), so I have a bunch of the Adon specific miniatures (plus the Bones that'll be coming in a couple of weeks.) One part of the appeal is that it has never, to my knowledge, been fully fleshed out as a rpg world. That gives me the freedom to use the world as I see fit. I've got 25k words of background material written for it so far, which is plenty to get the ball rolling.

[Jaymann]

This brings up a question I've always wondered about PnP D&D. Suppose you have a character you have carefully crafted and built up for years. You have a session with a new GM. The party opens the first door to a dungeon and there is a level 99 dragon that wipes out the party with one blast. Do you say:

A. Oh well, I guess I need to re-roll my character, or

B. That guy was an asshole - that doesn't count.

The problem with B is: where do you draw the line between a legitimate death or asshole?

[TiLT]

This brings up a question I've always wondered about PnP D&D. Suppose you have a character you have carefully crafted and built up for years. You have a session with a new GM. The party opens the first door to a dungeon and there is a level 99 dragon that wipes out the party with one blast. Do you say:

A. Oh well, I guess I need to re-roll my character, or

B. That guy was an asshole - that doesn't count.

The problem with B is: where do you draw the line between a legitimate death or asshole?

That kind of thing would never happen in most groups. You don't typically bring along your existing character when playing with a new GM. New GM = new campaign = new characters.

[Blackhawk]

While TiLT has it right, even if he didn't, RPGs aren't hardcore mode. Dying doesn't delete the character sheet. It may kill that character in regards to that campaign, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with using him elsewhere. It isn't a real being. It can't 'die' and be gone forever.

[Zarathud]

I have offered to play my character in an "alternative universe" campaign. You need to know the GM and group well before you carry over a character permanently into any other setting, and usually only after knowing that the prior setting has finished.

One GM insisted that we choose from a long list of pre-generated PCs before he ran us through Castle Ravenloft. He insisted on playing a dark, difficult campaign world and knew that the emotional attachment even from losing clones of our characters would be too much. Three players each walked into the castle with 3 characters, and we each walked out with one apiece. One of my characters failed to escape under a descending rock wall secret door, and would have instantly died even if he wasn't bleeding out. Another was killed by the other players after turning on the party -- he was charmed by the vampire Strahd while on watch with his back to a secret passage. We had a great time, but agreed we would have been furious how he played hardcore after any decision, with the results of 1 die roll meaning the difference between life and death. We also passed on letting him run a party through the Tomb of Horrors.

[Blackhawk]

Gah. This is causing me more problems that I'd anticipated. I have years of GMing experience from the 80s and early 90s, and I keep falling back into the patterns I know. I write a session or plot, look at it, realize that the whole thing is on tracks, go back and try again with a completely different approach and get the same result.

I've realized that in all the years I've played RPGs, I've never run, or been in a game that didn't rely on railroading to move the story forward. I'm finding that I don't know any other way to write, and it is annoying the hell out of me. I mean, we had plots back in the day, but rarely was there much freedom. The guy who saw the obvious plot hook and didn't choose to follow it was generally looked at as being intentionally disruptive.

[Isgrimnur]

Brainstorm major elements you would like to include and draw up a flowchart so that you have multiple paths to a few destinations and build your story that way.

[TiLT]

Brainstorm major elements you would like to include and draw up a flowchart so that you have multiple paths to a few destinations and build your story that way.

Don't do that! That just leads to more railroad tracks. What you want to do is to create the major NPCs and their motivation, perhaps even a timeline of what would happen if they were left undisturbed. Create a simple plot hook to get the players involved in these motivations, and you've got an instant adventure. You shouldn't try to build a story. That stuff happens during play. Create the characters! That way the rest will fall into place organically. A bonus is that the setting will feel more alive like this too, giving the players the ability to completely miss important events.

[Blackhawk]

Brainstorm major elements you would like to include and draw up a flowchart so that you have multiple paths to a few destinations and build your story that way.

Don't do that! That just leads to more railroad tracks.

That's what I was doing, and that was the result. I wrote some really interesting stuff which, when I went back and read it, left almost nothing for the PCs to decide. It was the perfect adventure from 1989. That's how I've always written adventures/campaigns, and it is what I'm trying to figure out not to do now.

What you want to do is to create the major NPCs and their motivation, perhaps even a timeline of what would happen if they were left undisturbed. Create a simple plot hook to get the players involved in these motivations, and you've got an instant adventure. You shouldn't try to build a story. That stuff happens during play. Create the characters! That way the rest will fall into place organically. A bonus is that the setting will feel more alive like this too, giving the players the ability to completely miss important events.

I know on some level that this is excellent advice, but it goes against everything I ever learned about GMing for all of those years. I've got stacks of books and years of experience telling me to create detailed, exacting locations and events written out like detailed movie scripts, then get the players to those locations and events. It is how GMing was done when I used to play, but is seen as a horrible approach these days.

That is the exact opposite of what I want to have happen. I am just trying to catch up on twenty years of RPG evolution in the two weeks until the game starts.

[IceBear]

You still create those locations in detail, but that's it. You create the locations and characters, but you let the play create the story. It's a lot more work up front, but I am sure that over the years you have tons of maps and locations fleshed out that you can draw upon. Chris Perkins says he is constantly writing up encounters and locations and then using them as fits the story, rather than trying to fit the story to them.

[Blackhawk]

You create the locations and characters, but you let the play create the story.

I've read that phrase, or one like it, in about twenty different places now. Not trying to offend anyone, but if you haven't seen it done (or seen it written out in detail), "let the play create the story" is Yoda-speak. I've been going "what the hell does that mean?" for weeks now. Last night I finally stumbled on an article series that broke down in detail exactly how you do that, that successfully described this modern style of DMing for someone who has never seen it done.

I'm linking to the whole series, as it is a pain to find (no master index), but it was part 3 that explained the process of running a game this way.

Part 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

[IceBear]

All I mean by that is you have an idea of what the story will be but don't let it tie your hands. You've created your world, the interesting locations, the NPCs and their motivations. You then have your players create characters with their motivations. When they start playing, you will be presenting them with story hooks that they may or may not take, you let them do what they want and that becomes the story. That said, behind the scenes you can manipulate events so your planned story gets told too, but maybe not exactly liked you planned (but isn't that part of the fun of GMing, getting surprised by your players). Let's say there's an evil wizard that wants to take over the kingdom. He has had his minions capture the prince and they are holding him hostage. You have the wizard's tower all mapped out and the encounters all set up for the players who accept the mission to go rescue the prince, but the players pay no attention to the rumors of the prince being missing. Instead the wizard of the group is fixated on creating some new magic item and the group decides to head to the nearby swamp to look for troll's blood for the magic item. The group head out to the swamp and you use encounters and maps from your preparations (maybe you steal from Dungeon magazine or an online adventure you saw - I know, you're not playing D&D, just examples) to run that adventure. Maybe you add in a mysterious man who is talking to the troll when the party arrives at its lair. It's an agent of the wizard asking the troll to join with them. When the party defeats him, they find some note or map which puts them back on course of the story hook you had planned. Maybe they will take it, maybe they won't, but you let them do what they want and eventually a story that you are all happy with will be told.

I also used to draw detailed maps and plan out every single encounter. It is hard to do all that work and then have the players ignore it so railroading them back was how I handled it (and the above example is still pretty blatant railroading - writing in a hurry). But once I let go of the reins and let the play just happen it surprised me. I still draw the maps and plan out encounters, but now I kind of do it in a vacuum - a cool encounter idea will spring to mind so I'll plan it out but then I just put it aside and try to add it into the game where it seems to fit rather than fit the game into the encounter, if that makes any sense.

[Blackhawk]

Heh, I have no problem stealing from whatever system wanders by. That's one of the reasons I like Savage Worlds - it makes it easy to steal from other systems.

[Smoove_B]

I haven't read through those links BH, but I'll be curious to do so. I can only offer my own practice as a guide now that I hear exactly what you were doing. Basically for me the hardest thing about being a DM wasn't planning the actual campaign story, it was making sure I anticipated the various possible paths AND had viable options on hand (mentally) to make sure I was ready to roll with changes. I found certain DM source books invaluable - books that essentially gave me skeletal framework for a random town or wilderness encounter that I could easily just throw into campaign if the characters wandered off the main trail. I would also keep a few short side adventures handy (usually from Dungeon magazine) that I could drop into play if the players were struggling and needed more loot / XP / a chance to work together on something small. It was having all those contingency plans in place that took up my time - making sure I could quickly jump to an encounter or side adventure if necessary.

But I more or less agree with the idea that freedom is an illusion. While the players are creating the story, I was always behind the scenes doing my best to direct things in a certain direction (for better or worse). Sometimes just having the basic framework was enough that I could create material on the fly, particularly if I was provided detailed information about the player characters backgrounds (as I liked to require) before we started the campaign, using those encounters to "tease" players into moving in a direction that I wanted.

I could dig through my books and pull some of the titles if you think that would be helpful.

[IceBear]

Yeah, that's what Chris Perkins says he does a lot...just steal from whatever caught his eye. Like Tilt said, as long as you know what the NPCs in your world is doing, and roughly when, the story you wanted to tell can progress with or without the players' involvement. Maybe my campaign was set up to be "PCs defeat the evil wizard before he takes over the kingdom". However, the PCs show no interest and do their own thing so eventually the evil wizard takes over the kingdom and outlaws ale Suddenly the PCs are pissed off and the campaign becomes a rebellion story rather than one of protecting the kingdom from evil in the first place.

Edit: Ideally, I would love for the game to just be reacting to what the players are doing, but I can't control the world or come up with great encounters off the cuff like I want so I am forced to have some plot devised that I am trying to expose to the players.

[Zarathud]

You cannot prepare for everything as GM but you should be flexible by letting players participate in the campaign story. For normal RPGs, I think it comes down to knowing your players/PCs and getting some meta feedback during/between sessions.

This is why I love Paranoia -- the Computer is the ultimate railroad: "Do X or die as a commie mutant traitor." But the FUN is letting players dig their own hole by trying to do X, trying to figure out how to do X to further their secret objectives, pretending to do X or coming up with some tangent to X. X matters as a plot device. When I know the players and PCs, I can often guess how at least a few will react. But it was a big challenge adjusting to unknown people when running a session at Origins last year.

[TiLT]

I'm linking to the whole series, as it is a pain to find (no master index), but it was part 3 that explained the process of running a game this way.

I'm not sure I quite agree with that article, at least not part 3, which was the one I read. It essentially says that directed story is bad, emergent story is good. End of discussion.

I'm currently running two campaigns, where one is pretty linear, while the other is freeform. Neither is truly emergent in the way that article describes it. The linear story has an end goal the group has been working towards the entire time, even if they weren't aware of the details at the beginning. On the way there they can essentially do what they want, but they know that they have to work towards their overall goal, even when they diverge. It works very well for the kind of game I'm running (D&D). The freeform story (using the Rogue Trader system) has me providing the players with a number of plot hooks that they can handle in any order they feel like, but once they start working on one, that particular hook is somewhat linear. They often do things, on their own initiative, focused on their characters and NPCs they've built relations with, which keeps the feeling of freedom that the game demands.

The thing is, directed doesn't have to mean railroad, and it most certainly doesn't have to mean ruining the players' experience, even if they know exactly what you're doing. The way Rogue Trader's premade scenarios handles this is by being divided into chapters that have to be done in a certain order, but where each chapter tends to be constructed from a bunch of "scenes" that the GM can toss at the players in any order he feels like or even abandon altogether if he wants to. At some points the scenario may tell the GM that a certain scene is mandatory and should happen at such and such a point in time, at which points another chapter or more scenes are available for use. Scenes tend to change depending on what the players have done and how NPCs like (or dislike) them.

On the other hand, I'm currently programming an advanced star system generator for Rogue Trader which will allow me to instantly create interesting star systems for the players to jump into if they just want to go exploring in a random direction. There's no need for a story. It builds itself based on what the players find. If they run across a planet infested with Orks and valuable Xenotech, they'll start thinking up ways to part those two things from each other (or they may just ignore the planet and head for a different one). There's no reason why you, as a GM, should prepare any scenes or storylines for this purpose. The players tell you what's happening, and you tell them the results.

[Blackhawk]

I don't take any single opinion as gospel. I'm still planning on have a storyline taking place which the players can follow or ignore. I'm planning on having a few relatively linear experiences as options, as well, but I'm planning on placing them as options in a freeform world.

What the article did was finally help me make sense of the idea of 'let the players determine the story', something that my experience from the 80s did not include.

[GreenGoo]

Brainstorm major elements you would like to include and draw up a flowchart so that you have multiple paths to a few destinations and build your story that way.

I've always thought the old common approach of writing a murder mystery backwards, starting with the murder and then moving backwards through the plot would be a great way to design adventures, although I don't actually have any experience with it.

[Blackhawk]

I'm having great success by simply pretending the PCs aren't there, and then plotting out the plans and actions of the NPCs. A history of a time to come. I will then toss the PCs into the middle of it by starting the first session out in media res with them having stumble into one of the early phases of the plan. The rest I'll plan out as we go.

Instead of putting hours into planning the story, I'm putting the effort into planning (and understanding) the NPCs in such a way that I can figure out how they will respond to the various wrenches being thrown (with a d6 in Throwing) by the PCs, and how their opposites will respond in turn.

[TiLT]

Instead of putting hours into planning the story, I'm putting the effort into planning (and understanding) the NPCs in such a way that I can figure out how they will respond to the various wrenches being thrown (with a d6 in Throwing) by the PCs, and how their opposites will respond in turn.

And there you have it! You figured out the important thing. It should be relatively smooth sailing from here.

[GreenGoo]

I remember one campaign I created, the whole thing started off with level 1 characters passing through a village that was suffering from kobold raids. Some of the children had been kidnapped as security for the kobolds to keep the village complacent. Then a sort of keep on the borderlands cavern complex where the PC invade and rescue some of the children. Some had been eaten and one was missing entirely.

The campaign was set to rotate around that one missing child, and as the PC's went about there way, they would come into contact with information about the kid, and other times there wouldn't be any mention of the kid and what happened to him as the PC's pursued some subplot. The plan was to have the kid being sculpted into the "ultimate bad guy" through various actions happening behind the scenes, including bitterness at his parents failure to save him from the "horrors" etc.

It was all planned out, and, I thought, pretty clever. I was just a kid, so you have to forgive the cliched stuff.

In any case, that first night where they entered the kobold caverns and rescued the few remaining children, discovered the remains of others, and found out from evidence and kids' accounts of the missing kid (I think he was the Mayor/town elder's son), one of the PC's said, yeah, and of course he's going to be our antagonist for the rest of the campaign or something to that effect.

I was heartbroken, my whole elaborate plot undone in the first night.

Sad Panda was I.