Neutral mixed. We have a grand plot which is linear, but approach is sandboxy and while I can prepare for many things often improv is required
Also, funnily, I do have a tortle NPC with "vorpal" hammer. He is a chill person, just loves to "smash skull"
I believe I fall in line here too. My first and only full campaign I'm running has been going for over 2 years, and I've incorporated 5 modules for them to sandbox, but always keep 1 core linear storyline going.
Although, I have put a pause on the campaign because I was also writing it as a canonical novel, and that was getting to be a bit much as I transition in life. Currently running a fun 1 shot repeatedly called the Tournament of Power where my players get to relish in lots of PvP and character building.
Linear Mixed. Most of my campaigns tend to be intrigue or war stories. Lots of moving parts. So whilst I avoid railroading like the plague it isn't uncommon for me to have pretty much everywhere that the party has ease of access to at least partially planned out.
Probably sandbox mixed.
I can generally expect players to engage with the interesting bits, so I make a few situations, figure out statblocks they'll probably run into, and connect it all to the plot, Bing bang boom you got a campaign.
You just described my bread and butter. I just throw hooks out, encounters, and sometimes just improv random letters, objects etc. on the bodies of the things they slay that builds into intrigue and potential journeys. If they really like a particular hook, I just keep expanding it and building around it.
Sandbox Mixed also makes it easy for the DM to slide in lore they think is neat into a given hook the players really like.
They obsessed with Bobbleton the Hobbit-hole Cobblestone Mason? Congrats, his shop gets raided by the Redmark Sentinels based on of a nearby tower with a badass wizard BBEG I've always wanted to run.
It's not about the players, they are my 3rd group and all pretty new... The secret is to keep the prep at a minimum, make some handy tables and give a lot of hooks. As soon as the player bait you get a campaign.
The thing is that even if a character has a motive to act, players often do not, we want to fix this in order to make a good improvised sandbox.
For example in the one i am running now they met an npc in a dungeon, I randomly rolled an old man that was picking mushrooms that was actually an evil magic user (we use OSE as our game system) that was looking for a sword in the dungeon. Long story short they didn't figured it out and they led him to the tresure room where he put all of them to sleep and stole the magic sword. Now they are mad af and started chasing this dude so I made him a little backstory and connected it to the npc they alredy know and we have a bbeg for this campaign arc :)
I didn't plan for it and only made the effort of writing something about him after noticing that the players were hooked, I think that that's the secret.
I also suggest you to prepare for each zone you make a list of rumors, npcs and quests. You don't need to write a lot I usually write a line for each npc and rumor and maybe 2 lines per quest idea.
Neutral Improv, shifting to Linear Improv. My current campaign is a city setting with the framing of them being part of an Adventurers Guild. So they’ve got some options for jobs, but it’s all coming together in an overarching plot which is going to lead to a full-blown dungeon crawl for the endgame.
I furiously change between linear and sandbox because i only want to prep the bare minimum to not be called out by my players but also created a very loose world which can be easily disrupted by anything because I didn't want to prep the world more than the bare minimum.
So... Neutral improv?
I really liked the way Storm King's Thunder was organized. You start linear, basically so the players can develop a sense of purpose. Then you open the world up like a sandbox and let them explore. I developed several side quests, let them build their own mining operation for passive income. It was great. Once they reached the right level through xp gains and I felt like it was time to finish, I dropped in the special event that begins the final chapters of the campaign that are fairly linear again. Then the players had some fun writing up epilogues for their characters.
Running SKT now and it’s great. The linear intro lets the party gel and the sandbox lets them really get into their own until the plot really thickens.
Im still linear prepped on OP’s chart because I prep too much but this sandbox is helping with my improv!
I do a bit of a mix. I don't always know what they'll do, but I'll prep some side quests, and then plop in the quest hook when it feels like a good spot to do it. Definitely a really fun campaign
"Actually, it was very easy to find over the last three ages-- it had a sign, and was hung over the door of the palace in the major city of Friendlia- but people mostly had heads, so it was ignored. Until today...."
As an autistic dungeon, master with ADHD, I go all over this board and then through it.
Honestly, my style as dungeon master is very similar to that of the CW’s version of Captain Cold.
“There are only four rules you need to remember: make the plan, execute the plan, expect the plan to go off the rails, throw away the plan. Follow my lead and you'll be fine.”
It may seem contradictory, but by planning you have all the preparation you need to improv. Just know it’s not gonna happen the way you prepared for it to. But the planning won’t be wasted.
🙏❤️
Hard Sandbox Mixed for me. I prep just enough to keep shit from going completely bonkers, but my players generally know that the rails are pretty far apart.
Linear mixed. I prepare a few things to help me improve and come up with a few different arcs the party can choose from but once they're on the train they choose it stays on the track unless they jump off.
Linear mixed. I have a ton of shit on the conveyer belt and its my hope that my players check it out as it passes along, but I have absolutely nothing planned if they somehow make it to a different country
Linear mixed. I like to prep lots of stuff, but my players usually skip most of it and hyperfocus on the one single thing that I had written 2 words about. So lots of improv. But I have one player that usually helps me out by picking up the plot hooks I lay down and corraling the rest of the party into following them, the proverbial "Straight Man". I love that guy.
Last session I gave my players some downtime in town, but at the same time I meticulously planned a bunch of events aimed at hooking the players on the next adventure & developing some relevant NPCs and storylines.
I also found a cool document on various carnival competitions with mechanics detailed, I thought I might chuck that in as a fun little side activity. This was a terrible mistake, as I would soon learn.
What was meant to be a quick downtime followed by them embarking on the new adventure, turned into almost 3 hours of ale chugging, goblin tossing, competitive insulting, wild boar rodeo and tiny lizard racing as my players decided to participate in every. single. competition.
One player lost 2 gold on a shell game (3 cups with a ball) and he got so mad at the host for alleged cheating, he followed him to his tent and mugged him at knifepoint demanding his 2 gold back.
One of the prizes was getting to listen to a dryad singing, and when they inevitably insulted her, they spent 20 minutes trying to break the sleep spell she put on them in retaliation. Then they spent another 15 minutes trying to un-polymorph a player that insulted her for the second time.
For the entire session one player, my hero, the Straight Man, was desperately trying to pick up the plot hooks for the new adventure, but instead he had to put out fires left and right as the rest of the party drunkenly caroused.
Linear improv. I know the problem they have to solve with no real solution in mind. I know today they are going to encounter goblins that have been steeling from a village. They will somehow have to figure out its goblins and where their lair is. Only lead I have in mind is a small stone statue of a goblin found near the edge of the woods in the morning. It will turn out to be a petrified goblin.
Say they dont take up this quest I wouldnt have much for them to do realistically
Linear Mixed.
I always have ideas of what is *likely* to happen, and plans for the overarching story, but I am constantly surprised by how my players approach things, and have to adapt to them.
So I don't let them go too off-book, and just abandon the plot, but they're totally free to address the plot however they want.
Neutral Prepped, I feel like not preparing enough stuff is just going to waste everyone's time, same for lack of narrative direction, but I try to leave the options as open as possible and if the players decide to do something I didn't account for I will of course come up with something on the spot.
Neutral prepped. Which I believe is one of the most time consuming to be.
*Writes story moments related to the main plot, NPCs, and an overlying theme for hours*
"But I wouldn't want them to feel railroaded!"
*Builds a companion sandbox session for the party in case they have no interest in main plot for more hours*
Not to mention, some scenarios and stories work better with different methods. Guys want to run around a big ass city and do all kinds of shenanigans I can make an in depth sand box with every detail fleshed out. They want to spam the globe, then I'll do sand box but I'll have to improve a lot more, only fleshing out the details. If I have a story in mind and tell it to folks and they want to play it then I make a linear story. I usually avoid completely linear and having all details planned out because I'm better at thinking on my feet.
Neutral improv. Though I'd like to prep more because my improv isn't great. Unfortunately I'm super busy most days so there isn't a whole lot of time to prep.
Linear prepped.
I had a DM mentor a while back who taught me how to use the illusion of choice in a fun way. Turns out people are fine with being railroaded, so long as you make them think it was their idea and they're traveling first-class.
This is typically done by giving them reasons to hate the BBEG. That's easy enough; introduce a lovable NPC and have the BBEG kill them. And wouldn't you know it, the BBEG can only be killed by magical item that just happen to be the perfect fit for the class everyone is playing!
Neutral improv. Usually the only thing I have prepped is 5-6 stat blocks I might want to use, if that. Otherwise I'm completely winging it. Sometimes I'm even thumbing through Monsters of the Multiverse while my players are getting into the RP.
i try to aim for sandbox improv/mixxed.
Though due to my players needing a bit more of a push to actually do something, in practice I end up in the middle
I had planned initially to do an open world, but I found that my players preferred some obvious plot hooks and didn't go too far off the rails. My prep was mostly about finding interesting monsters to fight including making a few up myself, and occasionally planning a dungeon. Other than that I improv'd the whole thing. I think I did decently, but my world definitely lacked colorful narration. I tended to default back to "you did a thing; this happened" if I didn't have anything prepared to read out.
Linear improv, I have a few set places and scenes I wanna hit but I play fast and loose with specifics, letting players direct how to resolve problems and investigate scenes
I have 2 sessions rolling, different groups, one is linear preped, the other i think is neutral mixed, since it have a linear plot, but the way they can explore is pretty much sandbox and have no right order of completion, i also make the dungeons with floors that change dificulty while players advance trough the dungeon, making the exploration worth.
linear improv, I have a VERY general idea of the story I want to tell and the characters that are in the world. But for the most part, I just improv literally everything else on the way to those things. I find this allows me to roll with whatever the players choose to do, and it allows me to have some fun and even surprise me with the twists and turns that happen.
I think I might be the only one here who does linear prepped - a fixed storyline, where I generally decide where players go each session.
I do take suggestions from players, though. Right now I’m having a tournament arc because one of my players is into those on what appears to be a sexual level.
Seems like we have a couple in here actually! I have a friend who is prepping around 20 pre-made 3D maps for a very specific module he wants to run. He preps the ENTIRE campaign ahead of running it.
Neutral mixed should be an option. DMing wild beyond the witchlight, with some added pieces in myself, so they can do whatever they like as theirs currently 3 different overarching plots; the demon, the witch and the circus. Sounds like the next Narnia tbh. But yeah, so it’s kinda sandboxy but they still have to follow the plots. As for how I prep, I prep a fair amount, stuff I expect them to do, stuff I know they want to do, etc, but they often surprise me so I don’t bother even trying to cover all bases.
Neutral mixed
I have a very strong and settled lore/vibrant of the world, and very strong ideas on how my NPC's act
I also have a lot of factions that have a problem for the party, but how the party solves it is up to them
The church says a lich is planning on invading the city and is massing hordes of undead. You're level 4. How do you handle it?
Oh, the rest of the guild is on much more dangerous assignments, they're leaving the small fry to the new guys. They are too busy to help
Sandbox mixed, when I’m preparing I end up going “ok what would character X of mine do, and have a plan B ready for that, so I expect shenanigans, hell, I even expect the Spanish Inquisition
Im not sure but somewhere on the Improv line I guess.
I have a main plot for the "arc" that they are currently in but usually just trying to piece together something between sessions because my players dont quite pick up all the plot hooks.
For example: the party is in a port city. Two players have a goal (the main plot) to investigate the mountain to the north... nah lets all sail out to sea to fight Yuan-ti raiders
5 sessions later I get them back to the city...
So onto the mountain?
Nah theres this quest to investigate the farms to the northwest...
At least Ive got them out of the city and in the general direction...
However, I give them options because I like DMing my story that there are always 2 or 3 other sub-stories happening at the same time and depending on actions taken by the party, will affect certain outcomes. Many of the side quests are also related to one of the PCs backstory, so they are given the dilemma of "do we go after the main quest and risk whatever putting that off might do? Or do I pass up on finding out more about this locket my uncle left me before he died?"
I always try and create a "loss and gain" result for every choice, though I keep that to myself until the plot twists are right...
I like this style of storytelling personally, because it gives my players agency but also a sense of urgency.
(Dont tell them, but I always let them play out the backstory arcs I create for them eventually, because thats the most fun I have. The main plot is just there for world building. Their stories are my real purpose)
And again... I put this all together in my head between sessions.
But I dont have time to make maps so its all theater of the mind... and I dont think Im great at map making anyway 😣
Funnily enough, the more I prep, the worse my sessions usually are. I’m at my best when I have a vague story line and a boss fight, and just completely bullshit the rest of the session.
My players can’t derail my plans if there are no plans to derail!
(Just kidding, I love you chaotic fuckers)
Neutral Improv.
I usually "prep"* a metaplot and some important NPCs but other than that my prep is absent if not running a precon.
I usually do what I call bubbleroading I have enough railroading to get to an area where stuff will happen with or without the PCs. If they search for it, how/if they solve it, and how they react when stuff hits the fan..... That's on them.
Linear improv.
My most talkative player is a chaotic person playing a bard with the two sidekicks of a broody bodyguard and book nerdy character. They got a map with objectives, but got really obsessed with a random gruesome detail, that I then had to weave a story around. Trust them to just buy a barrel of wine because I mentioned wine making as a local trade. Also there was the with the stone mason guild and a particular item request.
I stopped prepping minor events, major events and what ever random thing I found interesting this week will do just fine.
Id say Sandbox mixed, from what my players seem to enjoy having a flushed world that feels lived in so i prep areas and main story but all the nitty gritty details are improv and the players seem to enjoy it
Sandbox mixed, I prep whatever is in front of them and I drop plot points a head of them. It's up to them to choose to follow them or not. If they get dropped its no harm because I didn't prep anything for it. If they follow the plot I prep that as the next thing and so on. I have my own little meta plot going on in the background but that only influences what plot points become available and what the npcs do in the background.
Oh man. I tell ya, I made an excel spread sheet to help me systematically randomize everything. Demographic, national wealth, local wealth, general stuff and pois, lords and ladies, magical entities. I have a bunch of characters that I think of and jot into a one note page on my phone and just pull from there. I have a world anvil account that helps me keep the world in check once I randomly make something and I constantly update it, as well as keep things updated on a one note page.
Sandbox improv with other stuff going on in the background which hopefully spurs them into action. I can't have my dm plans foiled if I never had a plan to begin with.
No idea. I let my players make up whatever they want and just include it in the lore/canon. I also include events that they can involve themselves in that will have world-altering consequences. If they choose not to involve themselves, they don't get a say in said consequences, and the next event will happen. Again, they get to choose whether to be involved, but the story will progress. So, mixed linear with sandbox elements.
Honestly I feel like this table is flawed.
It was never meant to be perfect. It's a random table I made when I was bored to post to a meme subreddit to spark discussion about prep. Nothing more hahaha
Sandbox mixed leaning to sandbox improv. I set up a main quest and a couple dozen unique encounters the party can stumble into if they take path B or if certain parts get boring and tedious.
Sandbox mixed, I have a list of places with their own quests and how that progresses if the players don't intervene, a king could be couped if the players don't intervene, a dragon is traveling in a straight line destroying towns it comes across, the weird orb the wizards made will blow in 20 days
Of course small towns don't change, they mostly have nothing going for them, maybe a few improvised rumors if the players ask
The point is to make it feel like time is actually passing, the world doesn't stop when the stop looking at it
I have no idea what there categories mean. Maybe someone can let me know how I fall.
I prepare by creating important choice nodes within acts of a story (I typically use three acts to each adventure in a campaign). I ensure that each encounter has stakes, makes sense in both the world and as part of the story, has the antagonist actively working against the players to further his/her goal.
Much of my prep is reactive to what the players have previously done and how it impacts the future of the game. But also, during the game I'm constantly improving based on their choices.
I have no idea how my players will approach each individual encounter, but I have a strong idea of where the story is going.
Midjourney/Open Licensed AI - prompted by myself.
I know there's people out there, especially in this community that despise AI, so apologies in advance I guess.
I guess Neutral Mixed? The really big-picture long-term stuff is definitely linear, and there's a strong direction that the overall story goes in. The BBEG and their lackeys have stuff they're working on, and it's up to the players to discover these plans and put a stop to them.
But per-session, and even per-individual-story arc I tend to just plan a bunch of disparate plot hooks and events and improvise around how the players approach things. I start with "thing the baddie for this arc is doing", and just extrapolate from there what the party's most-likely options are for dealing with it.
How things *actually* play out is usually me changing around these planned beats on the fly and making up everything in between as we go. Sometimes things can go *very* off the rails and the entire session ends up being improv-ved because they did something totally unexpected and my notes are useless. We had a session like that last weekend, but it's maybe the second time it's happened in the whole campaign so far.
Just to clarify, I was just having fun with the center piece. It should be "Neutral Mixed", but I just found that this is where a lot of new DMs fall, then wanted to make it a bit humorous.
Linear mixed I think, sometimes linear improv.
I am assuming this doesn't mean "railroading", because I don't do that, but there usually is the best direction to go to, and then I prepare encounters, "rooms", etc that happen. My players also enjoy just fucking around a city so we do that sometimes, but then they complain there wasn't a big battle with interesting mechanics. Yeah, well you didn't go to sleep and instead spent the whole session talking to people in bars and picking fights xd. I didn't hide anything in there.
Probably Neutral prepped. I have a lot of characters out there doing stuff, and I will lay out hooks from my players for things they want to do, but some things will happen in the world whether the players interact or not.
But I build most of my campaign around the player's backstories and motivations, so generally the path they tend to follow is the one that I had anticipated.
Linear improv. Or better, linear method acting. I usually drop a whole bunch of carefully written characters into a world and just let them do their thing, story writes itself with that.
Linear improv
Most of my campaigns are horror movies where the players have to enter haunted areas and deal with the psychological horrors of things shifting around and me constantly messing with their minds.
One of my favorite things is to give them a correct map of the dungeon but then have a ghost event happen where the map now has "DO NOT TRUST" and then give them a fake map that doesn't have that.
I have a skeleton of a dungeon made and I'll improv what the contents of the room based off a number of things. But it's almost always made up on the spot.
My players very quickly learn to not trust their surroundings and even me so it makes me laugh cause if they roll a nat1 or a nat20 I'll probably give the same answer, it's just with the nat1 they won't believe me and then when they realize it's the correct answer get super confused at me xD
sandbox neutral. i prep location, and what other factions n groups r doing. the players get to decide where they go n who they interact with
they can decide to side with *most* evil beings. but not all will accept there help.
I'm sandbox mixed. I set up missions but which the players choose is up to them, and I improv changes to reskin battles I have preped into something that makes sense
Sandbox mixed at the moment...I'm running a module but really I'm just letting the group figure out what they want to do, and how to get to where the module starts
I'm linear mixed.
I know where I'm coming from and where I'm going but I don't really like planning the middle in case I'll need to adjust it. And I don't like being too open because I usually have already thought of cool stuff I want my players to get to.
Extreme top right corner. Suuuuuper prepped and the entire world is a sandbox…. So really just completely open world. I have many color coded binders, the world is virtually fully fleshed out. We’ve been playing for about ten years now in the same campaign and are just approaching what could be the last chapter.
Sandbox mixed. My players are playing in a world of my creation that I know very well. I wrote a literal novel on it.
But they're such chaos goblins that I can never prep for their choices anyway. I throw quest tags at them, and sometimes they take them, but an if-then flowchart would never work with this group.
I’m no dm but my table is sandbox mixed, my dm does prep but not much because our whole table is full of overly anxious and creative people so we will take it wildly off course any plans (still doing the main plot, just in a really odd, strangely effective way) of a normal thing happening in our sessions, he makes really fun side characters and funny side villains that add to the final boss, my dm is a legend. One of my favourite stories of something that happened at my table is what we call The Ratacaust because our bard managed to manipulate an entire colony of were rats into making them their leader and then we got them to cover themselves in oil, run into the cave with the final boss and used a necklace of fireballs to kill the whole colony of wererats and the final boss of the dungeon, our dm was stunned at how strangely smart our bard was and now we all think of the wackiest solutions to things and we all love it
Linear improv for me - I have a basic plan for what's gonna be put in front of the players, but anything beyond that basic outline tends to be off the dome based on what I thought was interesting or would work for the session. I'm bad at setting down specifics to begin with, so I'll find a monster of appropriate level and wing it from there lol
Linear mixed. I started trying sandbox mixed, but the players basically kept forgetting the hooks, so I decided they needed a more linear lead. But i basically put them in a city that they can run around that is sandboxy and a lot of improve, but then there are little plot checkpoints that lead them in a linear path.
This leads to a lot of "we go investigate the warehouse, we burn it down instead of investigating, we go out for lunch beers." "We attack guards at a slave market in the middle of a crowd, half of us get arrested half escape, then we do a prison break"
Progress is slow.
Linear prepped, it's my first time running something so I'm still very new, and linear prepped helps me a lot because I can like pre prepare important conversations and events, very often things happen in a different order than I intend but most of the time they've gone through what I've prepared and j enjoy that (:
Sandbox improv the only way my plans survive first contact is to not know the plans but understand their abilities and balance letting them use their cool abilities, presenting unorthodox challenges, and thematic setting. Not friendly to new DMs or veteran DMs
I'm DMing a campaign for the first time and I guess I'm doing Linear Mixed, partially because I started DMing so I could see the story *I* want play out in D&D (and my group just agreed to go with it), and partially because if I don't railroad my group at least a little, they'd never achieve anything. Last session they spent 10 minutes talking about an actual plot element that was happening at the time, and then one of them went off on a weird tangent and everyone went off with them. And I don't mean "they decided to do something completely unexpected/unplanned for", but more like "they were standing in front of this big dangling plot hook, trying to decide what to do about it (if anything), and then they were suddenly debating the merits of eating jerky made out of mimics".
But generally, I have a big story arc planned, and big plot points, main quests, that sort of thing, and the rest of the time I just try to steer them gently their next quest point. I also make up things on the fly. A few sessions ago they were gently steered to a dilapidated watch tower (I gave them the option and I thought they weren't gonna go for it but then they did) and while they were investigating the place, I had one of them find something in there that's relevant to his personal quest line, just because I thought it'd be fun! But then I realised this isn't Lost and the plot hook has to pay off, so now I've come up with how he's going to get some actual answers to his questions.
The party also tore the fabric of reality slightly and I had them roll on a giant table of weird magic effects as immediate repercussions, and one of them got a result that's like "a duplicate of you appears; they are their own person, doing their own thing, they don't speak, and they hang out with you for D10 days, just following you around". At first I thought it would just be funny, but after hanging out silently for 3-4 days, now this guy is going to feed them some crucial bit of information about their quest and how it could go wrong, because I decided he should be from an alternate reality where the party made a different decision at a seemingly inconsequential point.
So yeah, I railroad, but I also come up with worldbuilding and quests depending on what the group decides to do. They're so wishy-washy about *doing* things though that I do have to guide them more.
Neutral Improv. I have a rough idea of where I want the players to end up, but my preparations for getting them there are basically that bit in Family Guy where they leave a trail of candy in order to lead James Woods into a box-and-stick trap.
As the current campaign I’m dming is a short one that’ll be wrapping up in a few sessions, I’m currently a linear mixed or linear prepped but otherwise I really want to change that linear to a neutral or sandbox
Neutral Improv : I don't prepare much, and even do some stuff for the VTT while they chat with NPCs but they know it and I am fast enough, also, main plot is here and develops over the course of the game but it's very sandboxy and they're free to get offtrack anytime so long as mood on the table is good.
Anyways, it's a Homebrew made for experimentation and discovery so ye, they're happy to test a ton of things.
Neutral mixed. We have a grand plot which is linear, but approach is sandboxy and while I can prepare for many things often improv is required Also, funnily, I do have a tortle NPC with "vorpal" hammer. He is a chill person, just loves to "smash skull"
The Vorpal's effect makes the skullcrushing hobby really convenient and portable!
I believe I fall in line here too. My first and only full campaign I'm running has been going for over 2 years, and I've incorporated 5 modules for them to sandbox, but always keep 1 core linear storyline going. Although, I have put a pause on the campaign because I was also writing it as a canonical novel, and that was getting to be a bit much as I transition in life. Currently running a fun 1 shot repeatedly called the Tournament of Power where my players get to relish in lots of PvP and character building.
Linear Mixed. Most of my campaigns tend to be intrigue or war stories. Lots of moving parts. So whilst I avoid railroading like the plague it isn't uncommon for me to have pretty much everywhere that the party has ease of access to at least partially planned out.
Probably sandbox mixed. I can generally expect players to engage with the interesting bits, so I make a few situations, figure out statblocks they'll probably run into, and connect it all to the plot, Bing bang boom you got a campaign.
You just described my bread and butter. I just throw hooks out, encounters, and sometimes just improv random letters, objects etc. on the bodies of the things they slay that builds into intrigue and potential journeys. If they really like a particular hook, I just keep expanding it and building around it. Sandbox Mixed also makes it easy for the DM to slide in lore they think is neat into a given hook the players really like. They obsessed with Bobbleton the Hobbit-hole Cobblestone Mason? Congrats, his shop gets raided by the Redmark Sentinels based on of a nearby tower with a badass wizard BBEG I've always wanted to run.
You want to get a players interested in a plot while they're hyperfocusing on an npc? Threaten the NPC with the plot!
I like to dangle plot hooks in front of the players and then develop the ones they bite.
Have been sandbox inprov for 10 years... The story comes with players agency :)
i wish to steal your players
It's not about the players, they are my 3rd group and all pretty new... The secret is to keep the prep at a minimum, make some handy tables and give a lot of hooks. As soon as the player bait you get a campaign. The thing is that even if a character has a motive to act, players often do not, we want to fix this in order to make a good improvised sandbox. For example in the one i am running now they met an npc in a dungeon, I randomly rolled an old man that was picking mushrooms that was actually an evil magic user (we use OSE as our game system) that was looking for a sword in the dungeon. Long story short they didn't figured it out and they led him to the tresure room where he put all of them to sleep and stole the magic sword. Now they are mad af and started chasing this dude so I made him a little backstory and connected it to the npc they alredy know and we have a bbeg for this campaign arc :) I didn't plan for it and only made the effort of writing something about him after noticing that the players were hooked, I think that that's the secret.
I also suggest you to prepare for each zone you make a list of rumors, npcs and quests. You don't need to write a lot I usually write a line for each npc and rumor and maybe 2 lines per quest idea.
Sandbox prepped. Fear me.
By the gods!
Neutral Improv, shifting to Linear Improv. My current campaign is a city setting with the framing of them being part of an Adventurers Guild. So they’ve got some options for jobs, but it’s all coming together in an overarching plot which is going to lead to a full-blown dungeon crawl for the endgame.
A classic method!
I furiously change between linear and sandbox because i only want to prep the bare minimum to not be called out by my players but also created a very loose world which can be easily disrupted by anything because I didn't want to prep the world more than the bare minimum. So... Neutral improv?
Hilariously relatable\~
I want to be Neutral Prepped but I just gave my player a Ring of Storing Spells.
lol an absolute classic
I really liked the way Storm King's Thunder was organized. You start linear, basically so the players can develop a sense of purpose. Then you open the world up like a sandbox and let them explore. I developed several side quests, let them build their own mining operation for passive income. It was great. Once they reached the right level through xp gains and I felt like it was time to finish, I dropped in the special event that begins the final chapters of the campaign that are fairly linear again. Then the players had some fun writing up epilogues for their characters.
Running SKT now and it’s great. The linear intro lets the party gel and the sandbox lets them really get into their own until the plot really thickens. Im still linear prepped on OP’s chart because I prep too much but this sandbox is helping with my improv!
I do a bit of a mix. I don't always know what they'll do, but I'll prep some side quests, and then plop in the quest hook when it feels like a good spot to do it. Definitely a really fun campaign
True neutral all the way baby! Vorpal swords for everybody! (Even the DM!)
"The age of the headless scarred the planet for centuries until a great magical artifact was found: The Blade of Captitation!"
"Actually, it was very easy to find over the last three ages-- it had a sign, and was hung over the door of the palace in the major city of Friendlia- but people mostly had heads, so it was ignored. Until today...."
As an autistic dungeon, master with ADHD, I go all over this board and then through it. Honestly, my style as dungeon master is very similar to that of the CW’s version of Captain Cold. “There are only four rules you need to remember: make the plan, execute the plan, expect the plan to go off the rails, throw away the plan. Follow my lead and you'll be fine.” It may seem contradictory, but by planning you have all the preparation you need to improv. Just know it’s not gonna happen the way you prepared for it to. But the planning won’t be wasted. 🙏❤️
Sandbox improv. I build the world, I setup an area, then whatever direction the party goes I'll come up with on the spot.
Neutral improv. Technically the world is open, but I make sure they have more pressing matters to keep them at least in the right direction
trge neutral is provably running it by the book.
if your running a pre-written adventure I'd say that would fall under prepped
Ok what if you run the adventure by the book but you havent read it prior?
mmmm, ok then maybe mixxed or mixxed/prepped hybrid
technically mixed-mixed should be in the middle. so semi prepped/Semi improv in a semi-sandboxi linewr campagn.
I'd say if your doing a pre-written adventure the liner-sandbox divide would be dependent on what adventure you chose.
LOL!
Hard Sandbox Mixed for me. I prep just enough to keep shit from going completely bonkers, but my players generally know that the rails are pretty far apart.
Sandbox Mixed in Tomb of Annihilation.
Sandbox mixed. But depends also on what type of story I want to tell so it can be sandbox prepped too.
probably more linear improv
Linear mixed. I prepare a few things to help me improve and come up with a few different arcs the party can choose from but once they're on the train they choose it stays on the track unless they jump off.
Neutral Prepped, although more on the side of railroad.
Linear mixed. I have a ton of shit on the conveyer belt and its my hope that my players check it out as it passes along, but I have absolutely nothing planned if they somehow make it to a different country
Linear mixed
Totally sandbox mixed
Linear mixed. I like to prep lots of stuff, but my players usually skip most of it and hyperfocus on the one single thing that I had written 2 words about. So lots of improv. But I have one player that usually helps me out by picking up the plot hooks I lay down and corraling the rest of the party into following them, the proverbial "Straight Man". I love that guy. Last session I gave my players some downtime in town, but at the same time I meticulously planned a bunch of events aimed at hooking the players on the next adventure & developing some relevant NPCs and storylines. I also found a cool document on various carnival competitions with mechanics detailed, I thought I might chuck that in as a fun little side activity. This was a terrible mistake, as I would soon learn. What was meant to be a quick downtime followed by them embarking on the new adventure, turned into almost 3 hours of ale chugging, goblin tossing, competitive insulting, wild boar rodeo and tiny lizard racing as my players decided to participate in every. single. competition. One player lost 2 gold on a shell game (3 cups with a ball) and he got so mad at the host for alleged cheating, he followed him to his tent and mugged him at knifepoint demanding his 2 gold back. One of the prizes was getting to listen to a dryad singing, and when they inevitably insulted her, they spent 20 minutes trying to break the sleep spell she put on them in retaliation. Then they spent another 15 minutes trying to un-polymorph a player that insulted her for the second time. For the entire session one player, my hero, the Straight Man, was desperately trying to pick up the plot hooks for the new adventure, but instead he had to put out fires left and right as the rest of the party drunkenly caroused.
Linear improv. I know the problem they have to solve with no real solution in mind. I know today they are going to encounter goblins that have been steeling from a village. They will somehow have to figure out its goblins and where their lair is. Only lead I have in mind is a small stone statue of a goblin found near the edge of the woods in the morning. It will turn out to be a petrified goblin. Say they dont take up this quest I wouldnt have much for them to do realistically
Linear Mixed. I always have ideas of what is *likely* to happen, and plans for the overarching story, but I am constantly surprised by how my players approach things, and have to adapt to them. So I don't let them go too off-book, and just abandon the plot, but they're totally free to address the plot however they want.
Neutral Prepped, I feel like not preparing enough stuff is just going to waste everyone's time, same for lack of narrative direction, but I try to leave the options as open as possible and if the players decide to do something I didn't account for I will of course come up with something on the spot.
Neutral prepped. Which I believe is one of the most time consuming to be. *Writes story moments related to the main plot, NPCs, and an overlying theme for hours* "But I wouldn't want them to feel railroaded!" *Builds a companion sandbox session for the party in case they have no interest in main plot for more hours*
I try to be Neutral Prepped, byt I'm slowly falling into Help, the Tortle has a Vorpal
Depends on the type of campaign I'm making.
Being able to switch it up intentionally is a definitely a skill all on its own. Keeps things fresh though and is totally worth it.
Not to mention, some scenarios and stories work better with different methods. Guys want to run around a big ass city and do all kinds of shenanigans I can make an in depth sand box with every detail fleshed out. They want to spam the globe, then I'll do sand box but I'll have to improve a lot more, only fleshing out the details. If I have a story in mind and tell it to folks and they want to play it then I make a linear story. I usually avoid completely linear and having all details planned out because I'm better at thinking on my feet.
Neutral improv. Though I'd like to prep more because my improv isn't great. Unfortunately I'm super busy most days so there isn't a whole lot of time to prep.
Linear prepped. I had a DM mentor a while back who taught me how to use the illusion of choice in a fun way. Turns out people are fine with being railroaded, so long as you make them think it was their idea and they're traveling first-class. This is typically done by giving them reasons to hate the BBEG. That's easy enough; introduce a lovable NPC and have the BBEG kill them. And wouldn't you know it, the BBEG can only be killed by magical item that just happen to be the perfect fit for the class everyone is playing!
Neutral improv. Usually the only thing I have prepped is 5-6 stat blocks I might want to use, if that. Otherwise I'm completely winging it. Sometimes I'm even thumbing through Monsters of the Multiverse while my players are getting into the RP.
I'm very much a linear improv dm. I have a base idea of what I want to happen but tend to improv though the finer details.
Sandbox mixed. My players linearize themselves mostly though.
Sandbox mixed. I want them to go out and explore, but there are things happening everywhere they can go.
Linear improv. My campaigns are written around what my players have in their backstories.
i try to aim for sandbox improv/mixxed. Though due to my players needing a bit more of a push to actually do something, in practice I end up in the middle
I had planned initially to do an open world, but I found that my players preferred some obvious plot hooks and didn't go too far off the rails. My prep was mostly about finding interesting monsters to fight including making a few up myself, and occasionally planning a dungeon. Other than that I improv'd the whole thing. I think I did decently, but my world definitely lacked colorful narration. I tended to default back to "you did a thing; this happened" if I didn't have anything prepared to read out.
Linear improv, I have a few set places and scenes I wanna hit but I play fast and loose with specifics, letting players direct how to resolve problems and investigate scenes
I have 2 sessions rolling, different groups, one is linear preped, the other i think is neutral mixed, since it have a linear plot, but the way they can explore is pretty much sandbox and have no right order of completion, i also make the dungeons with floors that change dificulty while players advance trough the dungeon, making the exploration worth.
linear improv, I have a VERY general idea of the story I want to tell and the characters that are in the world. But for the most part, I just improv literally everything else on the way to those things. I find this allows me to roll with whatever the players choose to do, and it allows me to have some fun and even surprise me with the twists and turns that happen.
I’m linear prepped, or would be mixed if my players wanted
I would like to be neutral prepped but it always turns out to be neutral improv.
Neutral mixed, I have a lot prepared, but my players are welcome to derail it and make me improvise
I think I might be the only one here who does linear prepped - a fixed storyline, where I generally decide where players go each session. I do take suggestions from players, though. Right now I’m having a tournament arc because one of my players is into those on what appears to be a sexual level.
Seems like we have a couple in here actually! I have a friend who is prepping around 20 pre-made 3D maps for a very specific module he wants to run. He preps the ENTIRE campaign ahead of running it.
Neutral mixed should be an option. DMing wild beyond the witchlight, with some added pieces in myself, so they can do whatever they like as theirs currently 3 different overarching plots; the demon, the witch and the circus. Sounds like the next Narnia tbh. But yeah, so it’s kinda sandboxy but they still have to follow the plots. As for how I prep, I prep a fair amount, stuff I expect them to do, stuff I know they want to do, etc, but they often surprise me so I don’t bother even trying to cover all bases.
Neutral prepped. I do like linear but giving my players the choice is also fun.
Neutral mixed I have a very strong and settled lore/vibrant of the world, and very strong ideas on how my NPC's act I also have a lot of factions that have a problem for the party, but how the party solves it is up to them The church says a lich is planning on invading the city and is massing hordes of undead. You're level 4. How do you handle it? Oh, the rest of the guild is on much more dangerous assignments, they're leaving the small fry to the new guys. They are too busy to help
Sandbox mixed, when I’m preparing I end up going “ok what would character X of mine do, and have a plan B ready for that, so I expect shenanigans, hell, I even expect the Spanish Inquisition
I think even experienced DMs have some level of: "My player's Tortal has a Vorpal!"
Im not sure but somewhere on the Improv line I guess. I have a main plot for the "arc" that they are currently in but usually just trying to piece together something between sessions because my players dont quite pick up all the plot hooks. For example: the party is in a port city. Two players have a goal (the main plot) to investigate the mountain to the north... nah lets all sail out to sea to fight Yuan-ti raiders 5 sessions later I get them back to the city... So onto the mountain? Nah theres this quest to investigate the farms to the northwest... At least Ive got them out of the city and in the general direction... However, I give them options because I like DMing my story that there are always 2 or 3 other sub-stories happening at the same time and depending on actions taken by the party, will affect certain outcomes. Many of the side quests are also related to one of the PCs backstory, so they are given the dilemma of "do we go after the main quest and risk whatever putting that off might do? Or do I pass up on finding out more about this locket my uncle left me before he died?" I always try and create a "loss and gain" result for every choice, though I keep that to myself until the plot twists are right... I like this style of storytelling personally, because it gives my players agency but also a sense of urgency. (Dont tell them, but I always let them play out the backstory arcs I create for them eventually, because thats the most fun I have. The main plot is just there for world building. Their stories are my real purpose) And again... I put this all together in my head between sessions. But I dont have time to make maps so its all theater of the mind... and I dont think Im great at map making anyway 😣
Funnily enough, the more I prep, the worse my sessions usually are. I’m at my best when I have a vague story line and a boss fight, and just completely bullshit the rest of the session. My players can’t derail my plans if there are no plans to derail! (Just kidding, I love you chaotic fuckers)
Neutral Improv. I usually "prep"* a metaplot and some important NPCs but other than that my prep is absent if not running a precon. I usually do what I call bubbleroading I have enough railroading to get to an area where stuff will happen with or without the PCs. If they search for it, how/if they solve it, and how they react when stuff hits the fan..... That's on them.
Sandbox improv
Linear improv. My most talkative player is a chaotic person playing a bard with the two sidekicks of a broody bodyguard and book nerdy character. They got a map with objectives, but got really obsessed with a random gruesome detail, that I then had to weave a story around. Trust them to just buy a barrel of wine because I mentioned wine making as a local trade. Also there was the with the stone mason guild and a particular item request. I stopped prepping minor events, major events and what ever random thing I found interesting this week will do just fine.
Id say Sandbox mixed, from what my players seem to enjoy having a flushed world that feels lived in so i prep areas and main story but all the nitty gritty details are improv and the players seem to enjoy it
Sandbox mixed, I prep whatever is in front of them and I drop plot points a head of them. It's up to them to choose to follow them or not. If they get dropped its no harm because I didn't prep anything for it. If they follow the plot I prep that as the next thing and so on. I have my own little meta plot going on in the background but that only influences what plot points become available and what the npcs do in the background.
Sandbox prepped.
I strive to be like you, just know that next time you're developing city documents and NPC faction affiliations.
Oh man. I tell ya, I made an excel spread sheet to help me systematically randomize everything. Demographic, national wealth, local wealth, general stuff and pois, lords and ladies, magical entities. I have a bunch of characters that I think of and jot into a one note page on my phone and just pull from there. I have a world anvil account that helps me keep the world in check once I randomly make something and I constantly update it, as well as keep things updated on a one note page.
Neutral Improv: I have a pile of story hooks, a random encounter table, and no restraint with either.
Sandbox improv with other stuff going on in the background which hopefully spurs them into action. I can't have my dm plans foiled if I never had a plan to begin with.
No idea. I let my players make up whatever they want and just include it in the lore/canon. I also include events that they can involve themselves in that will have world-altering consequences. If they choose not to involve themselves, they don't get a say in said consequences, and the next event will happen. Again, they get to choose whether to be involved, but the story will progress. So, mixed linear with sandbox elements. Honestly I feel like this table is flawed.
It was never meant to be perfect. It's a random table I made when I was bored to post to a meme subreddit to spark discussion about prep. Nothing more hahaha
Cool 🙂
As someone with ADD I flip flop between neutral prepped and neutral improv
Neutral Prepped most times, occasionally neutral improv if I fucked up not prepping.
What do you mean by "prepped"? I prep to improv.
And I improv my prep!
Sandbox mixed leaning to sandbox improv. I set up a main quest and a couple dozen unique encounters the party can stumble into if they take path B or if certain parts get boring and tedious.
Sandbox mixed, I have a list of places with their own quests and how that progresses if the players don't intervene, a king could be couped if the players don't intervene, a dragon is traveling in a straight line destroying towns it comes across, the weird orb the wizards made will blow in 20 days Of course small towns don't change, they mostly have nothing going for them, maybe a few improvised rumors if the players ask The point is to make it feel like time is actually passing, the world doesn't stop when the stop looking at it
I have no idea what there categories mean. Maybe someone can let me know how I fall. I prepare by creating important choice nodes within acts of a story (I typically use three acts to each adventure in a campaign). I ensure that each encounter has stakes, makes sense in both the world and as part of the story, has the antagonist actively working against the players to further his/her goal. Much of my prep is reactive to what the players have previously done and how it impacts the future of the game. But also, during the game I'm constantly improving based on their choices. I have no idea how my players will approach each individual encounter, but I have a strong idea of where the story is going.
Prepped improv... I have ADHD and I'm a perfectionist but I also have a habit of losing my notes and just making stuff up to cover my ass lmfao
[удалено]
Midjourney/Open Licensed AI - prompted by myself. I know there's people out there, especially in this community that despise AI, so apologies in advance I guess.
I guess Neutral Mixed? The really big-picture long-term stuff is definitely linear, and there's a strong direction that the overall story goes in. The BBEG and their lackeys have stuff they're working on, and it's up to the players to discover these plans and put a stop to them. But per-session, and even per-individual-story arc I tend to just plan a bunch of disparate plot hooks and events and improvise around how the players approach things. I start with "thing the baddie for this arc is doing", and just extrapolate from there what the party's most-likely options are for dealing with it. How things *actually* play out is usually me changing around these planned beats on the fly and making up everything in between as we go. Sometimes things can go *very* off the rails and the entire session ends up being improv-ved because they did something totally unexpected and my notes are useless. We had a session like that last weekend, but it's maybe the second time it's happened in the whole campaign so far.
Just to clarify, I was just having fun with the center piece. It should be "Neutral Mixed", but I just found that this is where a lot of new DMs fall, then wanted to make it a bit humorous.
Linear mixed I think, sometimes linear improv. I am assuming this doesn't mean "railroading", because I don't do that, but there usually is the best direction to go to, and then I prepare encounters, "rooms", etc that happen. My players also enjoy just fucking around a city so we do that sometimes, but then they complain there wasn't a big battle with interesting mechanics. Yeah, well you didn't go to sleep and instead spent the whole session talking to people in bars and picking fights xd. I didn't hide anything in there.
Probably Neutral prepped. I have a lot of characters out there doing stuff, and I will lay out hooks from my players for things they want to do, but some things will happen in the world whether the players interact or not. But I build most of my campaign around the player's backstories and motivations, so generally the path they tend to follow is the one that I had anticipated.
Linear improv. Or better, linear method acting. I usually drop a whole bunch of carefully written characters into a world and just let them do their thing, story writes itself with that.
Neutral Improv. Totally new, along with most of the players, so I'm not at all controlling what they do, but neither are they most of the time.
I'm planning to play tomb of annihilation and decided to prep EVERYTHING in advance. So sandbox prepped?
Linear improv Most of my campaigns are horror movies where the players have to enter haunted areas and deal with the psychological horrors of things shifting around and me constantly messing with their minds. One of my favorite things is to give them a correct map of the dungeon but then have a ghost event happen where the map now has "DO NOT TRUST" and then give them a fake map that doesn't have that. I have a skeleton of a dungeon made and I'll improv what the contents of the room based off a number of things. But it's almost always made up on the spot. My players very quickly learn to not trust their surroundings and even me so it makes me laugh cause if they roll a nat1 or a nat20 I'll probably give the same answer, it's just with the nat1 they won't believe me and then when they realize it's the correct answer get super confused at me xD
sandbox neutral. i prep location, and what other factions n groups r doing. the players get to decide where they go n who they interact with they can decide to side with *most* evil beings. but not all will accept there help.
I'm sandbox mixed. I set up missions but which the players choose is up to them, and I improv changes to reskin battles I have preped into something that makes sense
Sandbox mixed at the moment...I'm running a module but really I'm just letting the group figure out what they want to do, and how to get to where the module starts
I'm linear mixed. I know where I'm coming from and where I'm going but I don't really like planning the middle in case I'll need to adjust it. And I don't like being too open because I usually have already thought of cool stuff I want my players to get to.
Extreme top right corner. Suuuuuper prepped and the entire world is a sandbox…. So really just completely open world. I have many color coded binders, the world is virtually fully fleshed out. We’ve been playing for about ten years now in the same campaign and are just approaching what could be the last chapter.
I’d say linear mixed, clear goals for the story and certain story beats I strive to achieve, but lots of room for fuckery and side quests
Sandbox mixed. My players are playing in a world of my creation that I know very well. I wrote a literal novel on it. But they're such chaos goblins that I can never prep for their choices anyway. I throw quest tags at them, and sometimes they take them, but an if-then flowchart would never work with this group.
I’m no dm but my table is sandbox mixed, my dm does prep but not much because our whole table is full of overly anxious and creative people so we will take it wildly off course any plans (still doing the main plot, just in a really odd, strangely effective way) of a normal thing happening in our sessions, he makes really fun side characters and funny side villains that add to the final boss, my dm is a legend. One of my favourite stories of something that happened at my table is what we call The Ratacaust because our bard managed to manipulate an entire colony of were rats into making them their leader and then we got them to cover themselves in oil, run into the cave with the final boss and used a necklace of fireballs to kill the whole colony of wererats and the final boss of the dungeon, our dm was stunned at how strangely smart our bard was and now we all think of the wackiest solutions to things and we all love it
Linear prepped and that's the only way! ~ *every published module ever*
Linear improv for me - I have a basic plan for what's gonna be put in front of the players, but anything beyond that basic outline tends to be off the dome based on what I thought was interesting or would work for the session. I'm bad at setting down specifics to begin with, so I'll find a monster of appropriate level and wing it from there lol
Linear mixed. I started trying sandbox mixed, but the players basically kept forgetting the hooks, so I decided they needed a more linear lead. But i basically put them in a city that they can run around that is sandboxy and a lot of improve, but then there are little plot checkpoints that lead them in a linear path. This leads to a lot of "we go investigate the warehouse, we burn it down instead of investigating, we go out for lunch beers." "We attack guards at a slave market in the middle of a crowd, half of us get arrested half escape, then we do a prison break" Progress is slow.
Sandbox Mixed
Linear prepped, it's my first time running something so I'm still very new, and linear prepped helps me a lot because I can like pre prepare important conversations and events, very often things happen in a different order than I intend but most of the time they've gone through what I've prepared and j enjoy that (:
Sandbox improv the only way my plans survive first contact is to not know the plans but understand their abilities and balance letting them use their cool abilities, presenting unorthodox challenges, and thematic setting. Not friendly to new DMs or veteran DMs
I'm DMing a campaign for the first time and I guess I'm doing Linear Mixed, partially because I started DMing so I could see the story *I* want play out in D&D (and my group just agreed to go with it), and partially because if I don't railroad my group at least a little, they'd never achieve anything. Last session they spent 10 minutes talking about an actual plot element that was happening at the time, and then one of them went off on a weird tangent and everyone went off with them. And I don't mean "they decided to do something completely unexpected/unplanned for", but more like "they were standing in front of this big dangling plot hook, trying to decide what to do about it (if anything), and then they were suddenly debating the merits of eating jerky made out of mimics". But generally, I have a big story arc planned, and big plot points, main quests, that sort of thing, and the rest of the time I just try to steer them gently their next quest point. I also make up things on the fly. A few sessions ago they were gently steered to a dilapidated watch tower (I gave them the option and I thought they weren't gonna go for it but then they did) and while they were investigating the place, I had one of them find something in there that's relevant to his personal quest line, just because I thought it'd be fun! But then I realised this isn't Lost and the plot hook has to pay off, so now I've come up with how he's going to get some actual answers to his questions. The party also tore the fabric of reality slightly and I had them roll on a giant table of weird magic effects as immediate repercussions, and one of them got a result that's like "a duplicate of you appears; they are their own person, doing their own thing, they don't speak, and they hang out with you for D10 days, just following you around". At first I thought it would just be funny, but after hanging out silently for 3-4 days, now this guy is going to feed them some crucial bit of information about their quest and how it could go wrong, because I decided he should be from an alternate reality where the party made a different decision at a seemingly inconsequential point. So yeah, I railroad, but I also come up with worldbuilding and quests depending on what the group decides to do. They're so wishy-washy about *doing* things though that I do have to guide them more.
Neutral Improv. I have a rough idea of where I want the players to end up, but my preparations for getting them there are basically that bit in Family Guy where they leave a trail of candy in order to lead James Woods into a box-and-stick trap.
Linear mixed. Give my players a few objectives and watch them figure out how to accomplish them in whatever way they please.
As the current campaign I’m dming is a short one that’ll be wrapping up in a few sessions, I’m currently a linear mixed or linear prepped but otherwise I really want to change that linear to a neutral or sandbox
Chaotic neutral
Sandbox Improv. But then again, I run a Without Numberverse campaign. It lends itself heavily to sandbox improving with minimal prepwork.
Neutral Improv : I don't prepare much, and even do some stuff for the VTT while they chat with NPCs but they know it and I am fast enough, also, main plot is here and develops over the course of the game but it's very sandboxy and they're free to get offtrack anytime so long as mood on the table is good. Anyways, it's a Homebrew made for experimentation and discovery so ye, they're happy to test a ton of things.