I’ve resigned myself to the fun part of campaign design - the world; geography, cultures, languages, and overall self-consistency rather than on hack-and-slash dungeon after dungeon with little to no context. After nearly 25 years of intermittent map making, religeon design, and developing consistent systems of place naming, I consider myself well entrenched in my own OCD, James, so you’re at least in bad company.

It is a certainty that players are going to do unanticipated things, hell that in of itself is half the fun! But for me I really do need that level of organization in the sense that I have to be fairly clear on the mechanics of the world otherwise I’ll begin to loose track of the game itself.

After playing videogames for most of my life there is one thing that I abhor and that is either a game on rails or one that is so open as to have no purpose. It really is a challenge to design a game that balances goals with emergent behaviors, that unanticipated actions can be woven into the overall theme. Even sandboxes have constraints, I’m just hoping that my preparation can be as flexible.

C’mon James, get off the pine and get into the game!

Use a few post-it notes (if you must) as your pathetic “milestones”. Keep those in mind as you run the session. Gently guide the players with those notes in mind, and let the game happen. Maybe you need to provide stronger stimulus to get the players to go where you would like them to, but you shouldn’t have ‘fixed’ points in mind ’cause the gorram players are gonna do things you NEVER thought of.

Someone will always pick up an unknown whistle off a an obsidian altar and blow it, just for kicks, eh? Some other bozo will smash the blue musical globe that is the trigger to open the only entrance to the secret passage. Right? Sometimes you just gotta go with the flow and **make adjustments between sessions**

Let your hair down (figuratively speaking), dude, and go with the flow. (c:

My 28 coppers.