I hear ya…but I’d prefer that over continual made-up-on-the-spot-bullshit.
I see the disconnect here. My GM days were like a novel. It had a beginning/middle/end. After the end, it was time for something new in a completely different world or even game.
I see the attraction of a fixed world lasting years…but I/we liked variety.
I’ve never seen someone successfully pull off #2. Nearly all the games I’ve played in were pretty blatantly #1: even if you were allowed to sometimes deviate from the standard order in which the puzzle/plot needed to be solved, it was pretty clear there wasn’t any plot outside the preconcieved current adventure.
I’ve heard games that did #3, but I’m not that much into acting. I’d prefer a #3 that was less roleplaying-focused and more problem-solving and combat-focused (relative to other #3’s, of course: if all I wanted to do was kill stuff I’d be playing online “Role”-playing games.)
I, personally, do none of the three in my adult gaming career as a DM: when I was young no one wanted to play anything but hack-n-slash, even when I tried to introduce actual characters and plots in elementart/middle school adventures.
But in college, I had most of an entire world mapped out and the general things they would encounter in those places already mapped out. They really enjoyed just being able to wander whereever they wanted to without artificial barriers constraining their movement: it gave the world a real “lived-in” feel to it that I’ve never even heard about, much less played in.
But that all came crashing down when they decided to wander into one of the few places in that general region of their continent that I hadn’t planned out fully. And I’m not good enough of an ad-libber to make stuff up on the fly, and pre-planned encounters that seem customized but are not seem sort of cheating even if you can pull it off (although if I ever run the campaign again I will spice up the customized encounters with more generic ones provided I am comfortable with them being appropriate to many different settings.)
Hm. Maybe I just have a different idea of what “on the rails” means. Like I said, All Roads Lead to Rome…but how you get there is up to you.
As a player, I love to ignore the main action and focus on some interesting little throwaway detail, thus knocking all plotting completely off the rails and into (IMO) funland.
Alas, I don’t get to play that much.
When I run, I’d by far prefer if my players did that, too. So much easier when they’re the ones telling me what kind of things they’d be interested in doing, instead of me guessing blindly.
Alas, my players are somewhat lethargic and apathetic. (and they don’t even carb up on pizza much nowadays! we’re old.)
Somehow they’ve gotten it into their heads that they must Look For The Plot Hook. Unless said Plot Hook is forthcoming, they just mill around aimlessly, and tell pop culture jokes.
For me, it would be more fun pounding nails into my hand.
So my GMing style is: dangle Plot Hook, and then throw many bad things at them until they take the bait and do something, and more bad things every time they go back to milling around aimlessly.
So my Plot Hook is usually planned aforehand. And… the rest depends upon what game we’re playing.
If it’s rules-lite, or has a setting I’m well familiar with, I’ll jot down a few notes, and just wing the rest. Often, I can’t read my notes well enough to remember what they said, anyway, until it’s too late. Ars Magica, Pendragon, and a few other games I tend to run that way. Action and play tends to flow quick for us (particularly since they know I’ll just have random people keel over dead if things slow down… who? doesn’t matter; whoops, looks like the dog just died, what are you doing now?)
If it’s a rules system or setting I’m not familiar with (or is significantly complex), I’ll have to write up and plot out extensive notes. I’ve run a lot of Legend of the Five Rings, and absolutely have to have everything planned out in advance, in quite a bit of detail – because they’re usually playing magistrates, and I just can’t handle murder investigations or political schemes on the fly; I need to know who did what, when, and why, or I get too frustrated trying to keep track of it all. When we’re playing like that, the pace is a bit more sedate, interrupted by brief and fierce activity – but the campaign ends up much more detailed (since I have to remember to describe all the flower arrangements they see, so they don’t suddenly wonder why I’m describing the one flower arrangement that had roses in it).
So, um… there are Rails. That they can Switch between. And might be Freeformed. I guess?
As a player, I don’t really care, as long as it feels like my character has a say in his/her destiny. If I don’t feel like I’m being railroaded, I’m happy. If I do feel like it, I’m not happy, even if I’m not actually being railroaded.
As a GM, I run a variant on 2. The players can - and often do - derail the plot entirely, and I let them wander as they want, but there are outside forces that, either when I feel the need to move the plot along, or when they seem to be getting bored, will show up and give them little choice in things - who or what it is, and when and how it happens, is decided by a combination of what the characters have chosen to do, where they are, which of the Big Bads or allied NPCs* I want to use, and which source books I’ve been reading.
I lean towards #2 and #3.
I generally have the overarching plot planned - this is what the bad guy’s goals are, these are the events that are going to happen, barring intervention of the players, et cetera. I then try to make them aware of the situation through whatever means seem most plausible - a summons from an NPC ally, stumbling across the plan in motion, et cetera.
I’m lucky in that I have at least a couple of folks who are highly motivated - whether by their character’s moral convictions, or greed.
I also try to shift gears with different sessions. Our last session barely involved dice rolls, as the party interacted with a number of Elven nobles, trying to figure out which one might be the secret mastermind whose plans they have stumbled across over the past two dozen sessions. The session before that, they decided to try and find out how this mastermind guy knew certain facts, and so they made a trip into a deep forest loaded with random combats and such.
(One of my players is definitely of the hack and slash bent, I try to give him something to kill at least every other session. 
)
I do try to stay flexible, and sometimes my players have a plan or an idea that surprises me. Fortunately, once a world’s details are in place, improvisation becomes easier.
It was terribly amusing that the session after they discovered the existence of dark elves, they discovered that one of the Elven noble wizards had a secret dark elf apprentice. They were ready to string him up, I think, but had the good sense to go ask some other folks about it. It wasn’t me just throwing in a red herring, I just knew the guy had a dark elf apprentice … though once I was aware of the coincidence, I couldn’t resist giving them the chance to discover the secret.
As a DM, I try and do a mix of 2 & 3…object-oriented modular adventure.
I have a starting cast of NPCs, with backgrounds and motivations, and incidents to provide motivation and plot points for the players. However, I fully expect the players to derail the plotline at any time.
So I take a modular approach to major encounters, making them set pieces that can be plugged in at opportune times when the plot requires it, regardless of where or what the players are doing.
This ends up to many after-game discussions with players asking “How did you know we were going to attack that fort? Wow, you sure were lucky to have had that dungeon mapped out! What if we hadn’t decided to trade hostages?” They are often none the wiser that I was scrambling behind the scenes inserting dungeon tab A into encounter slot B with my prefab background notes after they went veering off the plotline.
In my experience, there is nothing that my players hate more than being artificially hemmed into a path. “Why can’t we go to the castle? But I want to slay the dragon, why can’t I go there?” We roleplay for the freedom and improv, otherwise we could just fire up the latest MMO if we wanted adventure on rails.
For the most part, I try to present plot arcs that have a beginning and an end. This makes for satisfactory story telling for the participants to feel that something is beginning and something is ending. In between, the players have a lot of options.
The best outcomes are those that seem to come from the players’ free will, even if they know damn well you’ve got a module in front of you. These days I find quite often that the players pick up on the plot hooks and run them down, though it worked fairly well back when I’d get players who would lead the party on wild tangents. If Mohamed will not come to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohamed. This is in fact precisely the GMing style we learn from The Bible. Obsreve:
God has a story he wants to tell, and it begins with Adam taking a bite of the forbidden fruit. So he tells Adam, “There’s the forbidden fruit, of which you may not eat.” Then God hides in the bushes and waits. Adam doesn’t take the bait. God can’t just say, “Adam, you eat of the forbidden fruit. Now come the consequences.” Adam would say, “My character would never do that!” Adam must choose of his own free will.
So, God brings in a new PC, Eve. There you go, kids, have fun, don’t touch the shiny, succulent forbidden fruit. Well, they don’t. Damn it!
So, God puts a serpent in the garden. Bingo! The plot starts getting traction.
I’m not saying that God is always a good GM. Moses keeps acing his Diplomacy and Intimidate checks, but God doesn’t want the Pharaoh to let his people go. He hasn’t mapped out the desert yet, or something. So he keeps “hardening the Pharaoh’s heart” against Moses. So, all these points Moses put in his social skills are just wasted, right? Because Moses can’t possibly affect the outcome, and Moses’ player is probably feeling more than a little screwed by bad GMing.
Infinite free will, however, is not really the point either. There is always an obstacle, and sometimes that obstacle is a train that you must ride.
Here is an example of a perfect story, as related to me in a fiction workshop: A man is walking along and sees a blind man across the street. A dog is pissing on the blind man, and the blind man is trying to feed the dog a sandwhich. So, the man crosses the street and says, “You know, that dog is pissing on your leg.” And the blind man says, “I know, and as soon as I find his face with this sandwhich I’m going to kick his ass.”
The story is perfect because everything that happens happens because everybody in it wants something. The dog wants to relieve himself. The blind man wants to kick the dog’s ass. The guy walking along wants to know what the hell is going on. In a roleplaying game, the party’s desires generally start out pretty simple. They’re in a tavern because they want to find a party and go have adventures, possibly picking up gold in the process. Ideally, their motives eventually get more complicated.
The GM’s job is not simple wish fulfillment. There will be times of respite and reflection, and times of reward, but no one is going to enjoy playing a PC who has got everything he wants and has nothing left for which to strive. The GM must keep throwing problems between the PC and his goals. Usually these problems are going to be planned ahead of time, but often and especially if you’re determined to go freewheeling as much as possible they must be constructed on the fly. But the fact that the GM is doing the PC no good by simply giving him what he wants is very handy for generating things for the PC to do. The PC wants X and you say to yourself, “What will I make the PC suffer before I let him have X? Or X/2…?” When in doubt as to what to do next, problematize.
Damn, Johnny, that was art. I think I’m going to print that out and stick it in my GM toolbox (no, really, it’s a Craftsman tool box!) to read when I’m feeling run over by the players.
Wow.
Most of my recent GM experience has been with convention games. Those tend to have a relatively linear plot sequence that we can get through in 4 hours, but I prefer an approach between #2 and #3 – I give the players a world or setting and put some clues in it that lead to other places, but if they want to go the wrong way, they’re welcome to do so.
For my non-convention games, I still usually have an adventure in mind, but I don’t mind winging it if the players want to go somewhere else.
As a player, I passionately hate the full-on linear GMing style. “Ow, the ring in my nose hurts when you pull it so hard.”
One important thing about improvising as a GM is that you need to work with your players. One of my least-favorite experiences as a player was in a Warhammer FRP game years ago. My buddy John was GMing and we were exploring a dungeon, wherein we encountered a trap. The setting was a stone hallway, and the trap was a section of floor hinged to drop away into a pit filled with water. We spent hours trying to figure out a way past the damn trap after triggering it, with plan after plan being met with “nah, that won’t work.” We finally gave up in frustration and the campaign died.
In discussions later, I came to realize that John hadn’t had a way around the trap planned, he just figured we’d come up with something. Unfortunately, he wanted us to come up with something that he liked, instead of just “something” which would allow us to get on with the game.
The moral of the story: if you’re going to improvise, pay attention to your players. If they aren’t having fun, move on.
While I hate blatant railroading as much as the next player, I’ll gladly go along with the DM’s plot if I feel that I’m actively participating in the story. I make sure to let the DM know what my character’s motivations are, as well as some key plot points I’d like to see come to pass. For example:
Bryaxis is a drow mage, a recent runaway from the Underdark. He craves magical knowledge above all else, particularly anything from the Crown Wars era. He’ll jump at the chance to pillage an ancient ruin in hopes of finding lost magical lore. In accordance with Vhaeraun’s dogma, he tries to tolerate most surface elves, but he particularly hates sun elves. Though unabashedly evil, he views his adventuring companions as he would fellow house members, and is ready to viciously strike at anyone who threatens them*. As he learns more and more about ancient elven history, he discovers that he is of Miyeritari ancestry, not Illythiiri; this has a huge impact on his sense of identity, prompting a pilgrimage to the High Moor. His alignment will begin as a team-friendly neutral evil, and may or may not shift, depending on his experiences.
*This trait was deliberately chosen to help party cohesion (though still for the most part in line with drow instincts).
Hopefully, this should make it easy for the DM to hook my character, and make a trail of tasty tasty breadcrumbs for him to follow.