Does anyone have any tips for when you don't know how to proceed with your adventure?

Does anyone have any tips for when you don't know how to proceed with your adventure? You had a really good adventure in mind, you manage to find players, you start to GM, and suddenly you don't know how to continue the adventure without some silly or strange and sudden event happening.

Largely this depends on the type of campaign you're running.

Let's take the normal BBEG type of adventure where your party are trying to stop the bad guy. The key for me tends to figure out the plan of action for the bad guy (or guys). A past campaign was driven by what the bad guy was up to. In planning the adventure I started by writing out the step-by-step plan that the bad guy would be following. Once I'd done this I worked out how the bad guy would conceal the things he was doing so that it was difficult for the party to find out who was behind it all. Keep in mind that in this setting magic is only usable by like 1% of people so is fairly rare. Feykind are also seen as evil empire builders by most inhabitants of the material plane. Also, teleportation and planar travel is non-functional. Finally trade in magic items is banned within this city so checks of goods happen at the city gates.

Bad Guy's Plans

• Weaken the walls between the planes of existence so that travel between the Feywild and Shadowfell is possible.
  • To do this he must locate 4 magic items
  • He then must siphon the power from these items to open rifts between just the 3 inner planes of existence
• Retrieve two artefacts, one from the shadowfell, one from the feywild
• Retrieve the heartstone of a dragon
• Combine the heartstone and two artefacts into a beacon
• Once crafted the beacon will be used to open a bridge to an outer plane (one of the hells of this setting)
• The bridge will be widened by the sacrifice of innocents
• The extra-planar being will be brought to the material realm along with their armies.

So at any given moment in this adventure I knew where the bad guy was and what he was doing. I also knew that he was a geeky, administrator in the city who worked as the assistant of the city's leader. This meant that if I gave the city's leader (or council) reason to acquire magical items through a black market that blind eyes had been turned to.

The Journey of the Party

1. Uncovering the black market trade of magic items which lead the party to their first potential suspect - Black Market's Leader
2. Discovering magical mishaps going on in and around the city which lead the party to meet with the Black Market's leader and try to broker a peace.
3. An uneasy truce with the leader of the black market who realises they made a mistake in selling two magic item that were dangerous if brought together. The leader of the black market knew that they had been sold to the city's leader. The party escort the city's leader out of the city and into the jail of the black market's leader.
4. With magical chaos going on in the city, the party realise that perhaps the city's leader was not, in fact, behind magical mishaps. The party look for another cause.
5. The party investigate looking for paper trails or evidence of these dangerous magic items and find the identity of the real bad guy - the administrator.
6. With the leader of the city out of the picture, the real bad guy manages to use their position to manipulate the city's council and have the party branded as criminals - wanted posters go up.
7. The party now aim to foil the bad guy's plans by ambushing him in the council chamber - it does not go well when one of them casts a spell that kills all but one council member.
8. Having fled the city to look for allies or other ways to stop the bad guy, the party take possession of one of the artefacts that the bad guy needs.
9. The bad guy and their forces come looking for the party - a showdown happens, the party kill the bad guy.

Hopefully from this example you can see how understanding the plan and motivations of the bad guy helped me build out a world and craft an adventure around that world. You may or may not have heard of a concept in writing called the story mountain. It's a rather childish framework, but can be helpful in developing an adventure.

In my case, the opening was the black market. The Build up was creating suspicion around the city's leader. The Dilemma was discovering that the real plan was summoning of an extra-planar being. The Resolution was unmasking the real bad guy. The closing was killing the real bad guy. Crude, but it helps to plan things out. 

You don't need to have just one bad guy for the whole campaign. The campaign also doesn't need to be continuous, you can give the players in-game a few months off to go do whatever they want other than adventuring. Downtime is totally fine, and even something many players enjoy. Then you can essentially start a second campaign just with the player characters at a higher level. 

Quote from Agilemind >>

You don't need to have just one bad guy for the whole campaign. 

 
And for real advanced campaigns you sometimes don't even need a bad guy at all. If a DM is needing help with their campaign though, stop the bad guy is kinda the default and simplest to explain. Similarly a 'find the macguffin' is a pretty simple adventure. 

Building more off Agilemind's point though, you could always just look up some one-shot adventures and run those while you plan the rest of the main adventure in the background. It's a good way to give yourself some breathing room while still having the fun of the game.

Unfortunately, this one's hard to answer without specifics. "Do a thing that logically follows from the situation" is easy to say, and hard in practice.

What it probably means when it happens is that your setup is too brittle -- you were expecting things to go a specific way, and they didn't. This can be avoided to an extent by prepping more robustly, but they're always going to throw you a curveball from time to time. And sometimes you need time to figure out what might come next. You can sometimes buy that time with the classic advice from Raymond Chandler: "When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand." -- a fight will not only give you time between sessions to figure out what's going on, but it gives you a new, dramatic, event to build off.

And yes, sometimes that doesn't fit. But there's no shame in saying to the players "I'm going to need some time to prep before things move forward. How about we call the session here? Do you all have any thoughts on what you're interested in doing next?"