My homebrew campaign is almost ready to begin. I've created a document with all the necessary lore for my players to know, as well as all the homebrew stat blocks and DM Lore. Still, I'm not quite sure how to run my campaign, and I want to decide this before I invite any players to my game. I've put a lot of time into trying to make it fun, but I don't want to ruin it by giving my players too much or too little freedom. Could you please answer the poll and post a message with your reasoning below?

It’s a very boring answer, but it’s the truth: it all depends on you and your players and what you all want.

Some groups will chafe at the idea that the DM has “plans” and want to entirely direct their narrative. Other groups are happy to show up for the story the DM wants to tell. Most of the time, a group’s preference will be somewhere in the middle, but if anyone tells you that there’s any approach that’s “best” for any arbitrary group of people, they are lying to someone, either to you or to themselves.

Saga is right -- it depends on the group. I offered my players a choice between a total sandbox where they set all the goals and helped build the world with me, vs. a well defined world with a "world story" going on that they could participate in, and they unanimously and without hesitation chose the 2nd one. Even when I have suggested things like letting them set goals and then giving them XP based on reaching goals they have set, they've shied away and said no, they want me to set the goals.

So... it's really up to what the table wants as a group.

My usual way of designing a campaign is that I have a setting, some seeds that are going to happen, and some NPCs with objectives, and I'll flesh it out and probably adjust its aims as the campaign progresses. However, it's not truly sandbox, because it's not a world the PCs are discovering, it's a rough outline that gets detailed as the PCs investigate, and the way it gets detailed will be structured for the needs of the campaign (You're going to X? Hm, let me think what adventures I can place in X). However, that's a personal preference, rather than clearly 'better' than other methods (and it's not a viable type of adventure to publish).

Quote from SagaTympana >>

It’s a very boring answer, but it’s the truth: it all depends on you and your players and what you all want.

Some groups will chafe at the idea that the DM has “plans” and want to entirely direct their narrative. Other groups are happy to show up for the story the DM wants to tell. Most of the time, a group’s preference will be somewhere in the middle, but if anyone tells you that there’s any approach that’s “best” for any arbitrary group of people, they are lying to someone, either to you or to themselves.

 Thanks! I will probably end up having a few plot points, then possibly fleshing it based on what my players decide during Session 0.

Quote from BioWizard >>

Saga is right -- it depends on the group. I offered my players a choice between a total sandbox where they set all the goals and helped build the world with me, vs. a well defined world with a "world story" going on that they could participate in, and they unanimously and without hesitation chose the 2nd one. Even when I have suggested things like letting them set goals and then giving them XP based on reaching goals they have set, they've shied away and said no, they want me to set the goals.

So... it's really up to what the table wants as a group.

 This is very helpful, thank you! The players who I am planning to ask are all pretty inventive, so they'll probably like to be able to explore whatever they want at the very least. 

Quote from Pantagruel666 >>

My usual way of designing a campaign is that I have a setting, some seeds that are going to happen, and some NPCs with objectives, and I'll flesh it out and probably adjust its aims as the campaign progresses. However, it's not truly sandbox, because it's not a world the PCs are discovering, it's a rough outline that gets detailed as the PCs investigate, and the way it gets detailed will be structured for the needs of the campaign (You're going to X? Hm, let me think what adventures I can place in X). However, that's a personal preference, rather than clearly 'better' than other methods (and it's not a viable type of adventure to publish).

 This is what I was planning to do so far. I have a few plot points, a BBEG (well, a group of BBEGs), and a few minor villains and heroes. The campaign's beginning will be based on the character's backstories, and they will be able to choose a side in the main event that's happening at the time, or ignore it and focus on a more minor happening. Either way, I feel like there a dozens of paths they could choose to follow even without me fleshing anything out. 

It's interesting but your survey doesn't have the answer I use. It seems to equate sandbox with no plot and railroading with more plot which makes no sense to me.

In homebrew games I run there are multiple "plots" or events/happenings occurring in the game world simultaneously. The players, through their actions and choices encounter aspects of potentially several plots and since it is a sand box the players decide what they want to follow up on.

There are usually several distinct plots that have been thought out and planned, some areas or stages of each roughly designed, related NPCs conceptualized and in some cases given game stats if the players are likely to encounter them. The world is usually designed so that if you have all the pieces then everything makes sense, events are related, different groups could be functioning as allies or they might be working at cross purposes. The players encounter bits and pieces of all of these, acquire knowledge and choose what to follow up. At times I might realize that some information was not conveyed properly or misunderstood so I may have to step in subtly or otherwise to help the players understand the information they have. On the other hand, if the misunderstanding is something the characters might actually misinterpret rather than something I conveyed incorrectly ... I'll let them run with it and see where it goes.

So ... my answer would be that the players/characters choose what they will do and I have several plotlines running simultaneously that could interact with whatever the players decdide to do.

Matt Colville has a great video on this very subject. Half way through I was like ‘huh, he’s talking about...

...watch it.  

For me the point is, I provide the framework for us all to have fun in. I’ve DMed campaigns where I’ve forced players to take a route for a carefully crafted plot point/monster/hook/encounter and they’ve always gone badly, or at best fallen flat. As I’ve got better at DMing I can guide more, but I know the signals now to not force or railroad for my benefit. My gut is my best friend in these situations.

I've only ever played the one style of game, so I couldn't give the first hand pros and cons of each, but for what its worth the advice I'd give is you want a mixture of both in your game. Unless you're a masterful improviser, and your players know how to find their own adventure, you're going to need to have a pretty good understanding on who the 'bad guys' are in your world, what they're trying to achieve, and how your players are going to be hooked (and become invested) into that.

In the game I run I tipped the scales in making my job easier by giving each player a lot of backstory to find their place in the world I invented. From the first game I told them all that they could do whatever they wanted in this world, and they weren't bound to do anything they didn't want to, but each of them had a strong incentive to pursue the content I had prepared. If they decided to ignore it, or solve their problems in ways I didn't anticipate I would have worked with it, but so far everything they've done has been of their own choice. Each time they've approached the edge of what I've had prepared I've asked them what they'd like to do next game, and I use that information to prepare for the next block of content, which I think is a good balance of 'railroad' and 'sandbox'.

When people talk about playing 'pure sandbox' games with no plot, all I can think of is loading up a 'new document' in Photoshop. You, as the DM,  might get to decide the dimensions of it, but it seems like a tall order to turn that blank slate into a whole world on the fly. I know that you're not really asking if this is the gold standard or not, but I think the 'sandbox without plot' game is a bit of a myth, and isn't worth consideration.

Matt Colville has a great video on this very subject. Half way through I was like ‘huh, he’s talking about...

The part where the players all agreed to play dwarves, and then the next week when they show up with their characters, one guy shows up with a halfling -- that was my pretty much game group. If we all agreed to do something, you could be sure one guy would do something different, after agreeing to do the first thing.

There's no "best", and no "worst" really.

I've run groups that were so indecisive that I had to railroad the ever-luvin shit out of them else they'd sit there and stare at me wild eyed.
That was actually a fun campaign for me to DM as I basically just ran a novel I had recently read and replaced the street gang with undead.

Most groups I run for prefer a semi-railroaded story where they can make decisions that affect outcomes, but the tory is basically the same.
These are usually the WOTC adventure books.

Sometimes I miss the old days of "modules" where you can grab a bunch and use them as a type of spoke-and-wheel campaign.

Personally I like running hexcrawl/sandbox games. Working on reading through "The Dark of Hot Springs Island" right now... was thinking of using 5e rules for it but I believe something else might be more suitable.

It's all fun and games (pardon the pun) and nothing is really better than the other - they are just all different.

Most groups I run for prefer a semi-railroaded story where they can make decisions that affect outcomes, but the story is basically the same.

This seems to be what most of my player groups like the best also. At least years ago, if I left it too open ended they would just not know what to do. 

I found players often wanted to know "what's the right thing to do?" when there really isn't. But saying "whatever you want to do is the right thing" just frustrated them.

I think some of this is video game "training" -- in video games, there *is* a right and wrong thing to do, because you can only do what the programmers put into the game ahead of time. There is no DM to dynamically change things on the fly or improv. They also know there is an "end" to each quest and they want to get the "badge" for completing it. I think this has trained people's brains to think of table top RPGs like this... in a way that those of us who started years ago did not have our brains trained.

Depends on the group, but I also happen to be a big believer in the idea that it’s the players’ job to stay on the rails, not the DM’s to put them there. If the players can’t find a reason to follow obvious adventure hooks or decide to do something random, that’s on them. It’s the social contract: the DM preps an adventure and you go on it. If you don’t, not only will it be less fun for the DM, but it’ll also make the session worse because the DM now has nothing prepared. Everyone knows it’s important for the DM to be an entertainer and focus on the players’ fun; it’s easy to forget that players have the same responsibility to the DM and each other. Everyone looks out for everyone at my table.

In the end, it has a lot to do with the players. I have at least one guy who could probably fill the session “runtime” all by himself, and one guy who would sit in the tavern for four hours if not presented with a plot hook. And others in between.

Quote from NaivaraArnuanna >>

Depends on the group, but I also happen to be a big believer in the idea that it’s the players’ job to stay on the rails, not the DM’s to put them there. If the players can’t find a reason to follow obvious adventure hooks or decide to do something random, that’s on them. It’s the social contract: the DM preps an adventure and you go on it. If you don’t, not only will it be less fun for the DM, but it’ll also make the session worse because the DM now has nothing prepared. Everyone knows it’s important for the DM to be an entertainer and focus on the players’ fun; it’s easy to forget that players have the same responsibility to the DM and each other. Everyone looks out for everyone at my table.

I agree with this 100%.

I have seen players make up characters who actively don't want to be adventurers (or in Champions, don't want to be heroes). And they will resist the call to adventure every time. They need an extra, personal, non-heroic reason to go on the adventure or fight the villains. I won't fight the atomic monster just because he's smashing up down town Chicago, but if he is bearing down on my own, personal Dependent NPC girlfriend, now I'll fight him. I won't go into that crypt just to search for long-buried treasure, but if you put a clue to where my long-lost sister is down in that crypt, and tell my character up-front that it's down there, then I'll go into the crypt.

I know that these players are just trying to individualize their characters and make them unique, but as you say, there is a social contract. You know that the DM, as a human being, and a person who almost always has many other real-life things to do besides just "prep an adventure", can realistically have built only one, maybe two, adventures at a time. You literally can't just "go off anywhere" and do whatever you want -- at least, not and have it be any good, anything other than just randomly rolled encounters and randomly generated dungeons in donjon or something. As a player, you know when you hear the plot hook that this is the adventure the DM prepared, and IMO, as a player, it is your job at that point to think up a reason why your character would want to go on this adventure. It is not the DM's job, week after week, to keep providing reasons why each and every character would want to individually go on this adventure, and if the DM doesn't do that, the adventure is "on rails."

I've been pretty up-front with my players. They can do whatever they want, but if they decide to do something I don't have prepared, I may have to cancel the next session to give my self 4 weeks to prep it instead of doing every other week -- because every other week assumes they are going on the adventure I prepped for them while we were doing the last adventure. The tower is ready because while they were in the crypts, I was working on the map and the encounters and the story of the tower. If they decide to ignore the tower and go visit the giant capital city (Rome in this case), which I don't have fully prepared, then they're going to have to wait until I *do* have it prepared. What I'm not going to do is have them walk into a city of half a million people to which I don't even have a map sketched out, NPCs named, or any storylines even thought of, and just "wing it."

I know this is a roleplaying game but it's also a game. Players know they are playing a game; they know how this works. If you've decided as a group to play Curse of Strahd, then it's your job as a player to follow the hooks about Strahd and Barovia that the DM places before you. Not doing that is, for lack of a better term, poor sportsmanship.

The biggest question in my mind is: How well can you improvise on the fly?

If you can pull an engaging story out of thin air on no notice and everyone is having a fun time, giving the players total control and seeing where things go from there works fine.

However, if you need some time to plan out what's happening, and need to make sure you have all the necessary pieces ready to hand, then the you need to have some idea where things are going before you get there.

Social contract is a good way of looking at it.  It's the job of the DM/GM to present an interesting story.  It's the job of the players to be interested in being in the story.  There's also an element of trust.  The players have to trust you (as DM) have a story in mind that they will find fun and engaging.  You have to be able to trust that the players will engage with the story.

Random thought I forgot earlier: when I do run sandbox games, they take MORE prep than linear ones, not less. It’s about developing six different plot hooks, along with location maps, NPCs, and encounters you can mix and match as appropriate. Sandbox does not mean “full improv.” I was an improv kid in high school, I think I’m pretty good at it, but a fully improved game will never be as fun as it could be. And all that extra prep is why I don’t usually run sandboxes!

If you can pull an engaging story out of thin air on no notice and everyone is having a fun time, giving the players total control and seeing where things go from there works fine.

Despite folks' claims to the contrary I would bet not one DM in ten can successfully pull an engaging story out of thin air week in and week out, and make it good enough that everyone will have fun, while giving the players total control of where they go and what they experience. I am sure there are some exceptional people who can do this, maybe some on this thread... but I firmly believe these are edge cases, and the vast, and I mean overwhelming, majority of DMs would not be able to do this week in and week out in a way that is successful. Heck most people would not be able to successfully run a pre-written adventure without tons of prep ahead of time.

If you can do it, great. I suspect almost nobody can do the improv as well as they would do if they could prep something ahead of time and have it actually ready.

I would have to agree. If the players are just making up their own choices, where are the hooks? What would be the goal? 

It's not even that... it's how do you spring something like a whole city full of NPCs, factions, political intrigue, etc. out of thin air if the party decides to go to a town you haven't previously prepped?

Anyone with that sort of skill should have a stack of bestselling novels they've written that's taller than they are.

I sort of talked about this in another post just prior to this one. I tend to give my players quite a bit of freedom in my games. I may have a general idea as to the campaign ending but that can easily change over the course of the game based on what the players are doing. I personally pay close attention to it my players are doing within my game world because they will generally offer a good amount of information to me allowing me to weave in my own ideas or even spark up some new ones. Truth is you never know what you players are going to do. Sure, they may be predictable to some extent especially if you've been playing with the same people for some time. But in the end you just don't know.

Usually I will have a major event happening in the background of the world and even in some cases have several different events going on. This of course is to attempt to entice the players interests. I usually keep some sort of timeline for these events. Some of them could even potentially cause drastic changes within the world if they had not been dealt with. As just one way of handling it. This basically tells your players that there is something really wrong going on and should probably be dealt with. Though this does not necessarily mean that they have to deal with it. Especially if there are several different things going on in your world. It could be that a group of NPC's dealt with the situation while the players were off doing something else. Another thing that is fun to do with any campaign world is if you have two separate gaming groups going you can easily incorporate everything into your world. In some cases it could even affect one group negatively or positively depending on what the other group had done in the campaign world. There can be issues with this however. I have had one group claim favoritism on my part for another group. Other than that it can be quite fun.

I guess lastly. I like to have extra stuff prepared for the session just in case the players take a hard right turn forcing me to ditch most of my prepared notes. Extra stuff I like to have on hand are various encounters, and not all of them are necessarily combat encounters. This helps immensely when you are put into one of those situations where you are totally winging it. It can provide an illusion of fulfillment for the players until you recuperate… Or reevaluate the decisions that the players have made in order to get yourself synced backup with what they are doing.