[CanRay]

The first casualty of any battle is the plan.

That is true for both sides.

[Onion Man]

If your version of "Illusion of Free will", resembles herding or funneling, you're not maintaining the illusion.  The key is for your path to be mutable, not for circumstances to push the players towards a path.

[John Shull]

If your version of "Illusion of Free will", resembles herding or funneling, you're not maintaining the illusion.  The key is for your path to be mutable, not for circumstances to push the players towards a path.

Never been a fan of the funnel.  I equate the game as the players own tv show.  They make the decisions of what show they are on and I just run the silly universe around them.  They get half way through the run and decide they can't turn over the extracted target to get tortured its their picnic.  Being a Shadowrunner is the ultimate in self employment experience and I like being suprised by their next idea than riding heard over them.  Only time I go against this is when I walk in a room and one of them has the books cracked open and just figured a way to revamp their character for 2 more die bonus.  Growth in game is great, outside game chasing points
is just stupid.  Play your character out and it never let's you down.  Win, lose, or horrible cautionary tail it was your story.  Never seen a build a better dice pool guy who wasn't so busy being everything he wasn't anything. 

[baronspam]

The first casualty of any battle is the plan.

That is true for both sides.

I think it was Eisenhower that said plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable.  From the GM side of the table I think that would mean that you need to know as much about the situation as possible, but be aware that your players are going to do strange and unpredictable things.  When you expect them go sneak in the back, they will go in the front door shooting.  When you expect them to throw a grenade through the front door, they will try to sneak in the back.  The GMs job is to know what is inside the front door, what is inside the backdoor, where the muguffin is, and to be able to improvise if they decide to come through the window instead.

[Mystic]

The first casualty of any battle is the plan.

That is true for both sides.

That's exactly why I gave up trying to "plan" things out and why I always tell my players "go do this" and let them go and do it; however they want to go do it.
I think it was Eisenhower that said plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable.  From the GM side of the table I think that would mean that you need to know as much about the situation as possible, but be aware that your players are going to do strange and unpredictable things.  When you expect them go sneak in the back, they will go in the front door shooting.  When you expect them to throw a grenade through the front door, they will try to sneak in the back.  The GMs job is to know what is inside the front door, what is inside the backdoor, where the muguffin is, and to be able to improvise if they decide to come through the window instead.

[PH_dungeon]

Personally, I think how I plan for a session varies a bit depending on the type of run it's going to be. I like setting the characters up with an objective, giving them a starting point and letting them go from there.

However, if the run is going to involve breaking into a secure facility I want spend time prepping the security for that facility (probably putting in a weakness or two that the characters might be able to exploit if they wish). It will be up to the characters to decide how they do the job, so there is plenty of decision making opportunities for them.


If its a more investigative scenario I want to spend my time figuring out the motivations and potential actions of the NPCs and making sure the clues are where they will find them, and that there aren't any holes in the logic of the story. Then I can let them go about putting the puzzle together how they choose. If it runs off rails, knowing the goals of the major NPCs gives me what I need to decide how they might react.

Having stat blocks for NPCs I think they might mix it up with is also pretty handy, as well as maps of major locations. I can throw together a stat block on the fly, but I'd rather not waste time or brain power doing that at the table.

[revaddict]

I think it was Eisenhower that said plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable.  From the GM side of the table I think that would mean that you need to know as much about the situation as possible, but be aware that your players are going to do strange and unpredictable things.  When you expect them go sneak in the back, they will go in the front door shooting.  When you expect them to throw a grenade through the front door, they will try to sneak in the back.  The GMs job is to know what is inside the front door, what is inside the backdoor, where the muguffin is, and to be able to improvise if they decide to come through the window instead.

I love the way you said that!  I just might post it on my wall for inspiration while I'm preparing games.

[Shadowjack]

I think forcing players down a set path is a very bad idea and not a good way to gm under any circumstances. If you want the characters to do certain things you need to develop a storyline they have a personal stake or interest in. It's a great idea to give players incentives to do what you want and it will make things much easier for you as the gm. There are many ways to do this and in my experience in my group, our gm's(including me) can usually guage what will be of interest to the players and they usually go along with it out of free will.

However, we never give up our free will as players and will do whatever we want to do in the game even if it isn't part of the gm's plans. The gm will usually figure out a way to coax us into doing what he wants and if not, it's easy to recycle your material and put it somewhere else in a modified form. Aka in dnd an icy dungeon may become a castle in the plains somewhere else with the roughly the same content, it doesn't need to go to waste.

I like to have a large collection of npcs available for battles that I didn't plan or meetings etc. It's a great tool to have a wide variety of npcs which can influence the players into doing what you want if you are very set on it. An example of this is Mr. Johnson lays out a run for the group and you felt sure they would accept, but they didn't and now you're stuck in a tricky situation. That's when you can have other npcs intervene such as a fellow runner has a random encounter with the group and you can have him discuss runs and try to get the players to mention the run they just turned down. Then he could mention he heard there is a safe with some very mysterious contents at the site of the run the Johnson offered. Then the players have a personal interest and will probably contact  the Johnson.

That's just one example and not even a great one. But using npcs as a tool to get the players involved in what you had planned is a great tool.

[Operator]

I think it was Eisenhower that said plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable.  From the GM side of the table I think that would mean that you need to know as much about the situation as possible, but be aware that your players are going to do strange and unpredictable things.  When you expect them go sneak in the back, they will go in the front door shooting.  When you expect them to throw a grenade through the front door, they will try to sneak in the back.  The GMs job is to know what is inside the front door, what is inside the backdoor, where the muguffin is, and to be able to improvise if they decide to come through the window instead.

This is absolutely correct. I am currently GMing a weekly Shadowrun session  through IRC, and the current job involves a jailbreak. I planned on giving the players the choice of either storming Lone Star HQ to free those men or to intercept the transport that hauls them off to Wynaco; while you can guess which one I intend for the players to choose, I will still give them a choice.

Since my own scheduling is rather restrictive of how often I can play or GM, I use planning and improvisation in equal measure. You could say I'm cheating because the pace of my games is quite slow. 

If I were to run this same scenario at a live table, I would need a little extra planning. Explicit descriptions of the scene, and otherwise putting statistics within easy reach.

[DeciusRagnos]

I just did my first run last night and I would say it went very well.  This was a big moment for myself as last night was the only thing I have ever GM'd.  I will say that I had to pull quite a few things out of my hoop when the group started getting creative

Long story short I built the first run as an "Emergency" run for a fixer who need to bail out a different team who was surrounded by LoneStar up in a building in Kansas City.  I gave the PC's limited information about what to expect and I gave them a way to talk to the other team inside that were all NPC's.  After that the world was all sculpted in my head and everything they did and tried to do was like reading a novel. Not knowing which way it was gonna go next.  We all know where the story starts and we all know where we think it will go, but it was really thrilling for me to be a part of it all.  It was like they were playing a game of my design but at the same time I was also playing against them.  It was my world but they "lived" in it.  There was a very dynamic flow to things that isn't easy to describe, but I liked the fact that we all opperated inside what I would call realistic choices based on the way we thought the world worked.

After last night I can honestly say that I will always always always run a free will type.  Just remember to be creative as your team is.  It's totally ok to tell a team that this may not be a good idea but let them do it anyway.  Challenge them and let them challenge you. 

[Cass100199]

Interesting. All this talk of free will and sandbox play has got me thinking: whatever happened to telling a story? If you're the GM, you have the responsibility of crafting the storyline. That's  your job in this exercise. So while you should definitely be flexible and able to accomodAte your groups creativity, in the end you still have to provide a framework. Otherwise your just asking "what are we doing tonight Brain?".

[Charybdis]

Interesting. All this talk of free will and sandbox play has got me thinking: whatever happened to telling a story? If you're the GM, you have the responsibility of crafting the storyline. That's  your job in this exercise. So while you should definitely be flexible and able to accomodAte your groups creativity, in the end you still have to provide a framework. Otherwise your just asking "what are we doing tonight Brain?".

There is a balance here.

Some GM's let the PC's decide the story in it's entirety. The GM runs the world as a whole, and events may occur that the PC's hear about indirectly, however the PC's themselves can drive the storyline almost completely.
The absolute reverse is the strict storyline campaign, where the PC's are linearly led from scene to scene, with little room to pursue their own goals

and then there is the vast gray area in between, where a GM may have a set storyline in place, but allows varying levels of player-freedom in order to have character choose their own ways and means, but have certain set scenes with PC involvement.

All options are perfectly valid campaigns. It's not an exclusive job for the GM to provide the story-framework. It's the GM's job to adjudicate conflicts (PC/NPC/environment etc) and help everyone have fun.
If the PC's want to drive the storyline themselves that can work too

[Mystic]

I quote Voltaire (the singer not the other one)

"The Klingons and Romulons pose no threat to us! 'Cause if we find we're in a bind...WE'LL JUST MAKE SOME SHIT UP!!!"

Yeah, been forced to do that waaaaay to often.  But' its fun.

[Neurosis]

Okay, so over the last 20 years I've gone from only running mods out of books and from websites to writing my own to doing mostly improv, and I'm curious about other GM's and how they go about running their campaigns.

Over the years, I have gone through the exact opposite transition that you have. Same steps, opposite order.

[Gerafin]

Interesting. All this talk of free will and sandbox play has got me thinking: whatever happened to telling a story? If you're the GM, you have the responsibility of crafting the storyline. That's  your job in this exercise. So while you should definitely be flexible and able to accomodAte your groups creativity, in the end you still have to provide a framework. Otherwise your just asking "what are we doing tonight Brain?".

I'm getting into video game design, and this is probably one of the biggest problems that I hear people talk about in the industry - do we force them down a specific path? or do we let them do their own thing, evolve their own storyline? Trying to decide how much "player agency" you allow is basically a question of: if I allow the players to wander wherever, how entertaining / realistic will their surroundings be, if they are not prefabricated? Obviously, this is less of an issue in Shadowrun than videogames where you have to have each environment mapped out extensively, and you can come up with ideas on the fly. The other issue to take into account is: how naturally and unobtrusively can I lead them down a single-path type of story? Video games that deal with this problem well give an illusion of free choice, but then come up with such a compelling reason to go a specific direction that the player doesn't think twice about it.

Pretty often, I can get the players back on their pre-defined track by something as simple as someone leaving a note on their door to arrange a meet-up. Sometimes I have to go as far as kidnapping one of their favorite NPCs, or the bad guys threatening some other aspect of their life.

My Shadowrun group usually "behaves" if the storyline is interesting enough. My D&D group decides to burn down towns at the drop of a hat, try to topple thrones instead of retrieve the treasure from Dungeon B, etc. I chalk this up to Shadowrun being better at conveying a story than D&D, so the characters generally have something invested in the outcome.

I'm going to stop rambling now and go have breakfast