this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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Set wide goals, expect mayhem, have fun. Anything more than this is wishful thinking.
DnD is no more just dungeons and dragons. The moment it becomes an open world, the players roam around and do mischief.
If you want to play out your dream campaingn, write a book. It will never play as you expect or want. Unless you have the play fully scripted, with fixed roles and outcomes, it will derail.
You're welcome to down vote to your content.
If everyone's on the same page and wanting to play out a story, seeing how your characters and world changes in response to things not playing out as expected is part of the fun. It should never truly derail unless someone is trying intentionally to, in which case you need to talk about it. Or you got complacent and dangled a campaign altering thing too close for them to resist...
That is scripting.
Are we playing a campaign or renacting the Lord of the Rings?
Live for the chaos and mayhem. Expect it. Thrive from it. And tell the players that if their precious avatar dies, it's on them, exclusively.
A campaign should be built around goals, capable of being moved around, delayed or put ahead of schedule as needed.
The players are walking in the campaign blind. It's not their concern if a random action - that may be completely in line with their character - ampers, deviates or collapses the entire campaign.
Of course nothing should be inflexible, but I'm just saying there's no reason for every campaign to be derailed completely. If your players are actively going against the scenario something's gone wrong. And yeah, if you give them the opportunity to do something, be prepared for it to happen and roll with the consequences.
Unless you play low level John Does every time, characters should know stuff about the world they've lived in their whole lives. And if none of that ties into the scenario are you playing a campaign or in a sandbox?
Congratulations. Having high level characters and well rounded players does make everything smoother. If you've had those, I envy you. But not much.
I've managed a couple of games but I always made my plots to willfully accomodate chaos. I like to reward stupidity and recklessness. After a couple of disastrous events, the table tends to settle down and the mood tends to loosen up.
I'm fairly comfortable saying we have different approaches to playing and play directing. Which is good.