6 minutes ago, Benjan Meruna said:A GM shouldn't be "trying to achieve a certain plot result." That's railroading, full stop. You plan ahead for the possibilities, of course, and you try to be prepared for what comes next, but a GM should never try to "steer" the story that comes out of play. This is not a book, not even a "choose your own adventure." It's a set of journals, and the players are the ones writing in them.
Well, you and I might agree on that, but by and large that's not how a lot of people do it and I'm reluctant to tell people how to run games at their table. I do feel, however, that only allowing the players to craft the story is not going to be as fruitful as the GM and players working together to craft a story.
One trap a new GM can fall into is over-prep - by trying to account for every possibility, the GM has spent time working on the choo-choo rather than preparing for any outcome by instead preparing locales and NPCs that can be reskinned at an instant to adapt to the the player's zig when the GM expected a zag. Let's say, for example, your PCs decide after a well-described bowl of soup that they'd rather spend the entire evening searching the city for the best soup. How on earth does a GM predict that? Short answer: usually a GM can't. But if a GM has a notebook full of generic settings and npcs, a couple helpful lists of npc names and species, then it's full steam ahead. It has taken many decades and countless hours of GMing and playing to arrive at this conclusion, but in the past 4 years running this system it has yet to fail me when things go completely whacky 5 minutes after I read the opening crawl.
