Image (cc) Kridily on DeviantArt

Dungeons & Dragons is a bad game.*  Bad naughty.  It's irresponsible in that it doesn't show us how to be Dungeon Masters - my favourite term for which is Apocalypse World's "MC" as we are, after all, Master of Ceremonies above all else.

D&D teaches us to build encounters, but not how to build stories and worlds.  It teaches us to think in terms of probabilities and not stakes.  I learnt to DM on 4e and I've spent maybe a decade unlearning how it was presented to me then.  It took Stars Without Number and Dungeon World to open my eyes to how a game could be run.

Embracing the Chaos
The adage "No plan survives contact with the players" is particularly true at our table it seems, but it's usually expressed as a negative.  Dungeon World says Play To Find Out What Happens and I decided to embrace the chaos and go with that in my homebrew Stars Without Number campaign. Let the players drive the story and I'll try to steer, or just sit back and watch. I gave the players a goal and an environment and tried to build as much of the PCs backstories and connections in as I could.  It was the most fun I've had running a campaign - I spent less time building encounters and calculating challenges and more time on the story - and I'm now definitely putting together a process to help with this more dynamic approach as it's something I've been chasing for years.

Shaping the chaos
I need a process because I don't want any campaign to devolve into meandering around doing random directionless stuff.  I realised I was doing this early on, mainly because I thought I needed something to be going on at every location and kept adding rather than moving on. Lesson learnt. The plan is to take inspiration from Technoir, which I happened to stumble across, as a framework for building campaign seasons from a railroad or a sandbox or a load of player fiction.  I'll be putting my thoughts here, and would welcome feedback, but in the meantime I recommend you read:

• Stars Without Number for inspiring ways to only prep what you need, and great DM tables
• Dungeon World for its principles, especially Play To Find Out What Happens, Be A Fan Of The Characters, Embrace the Fantastic and Think Dangerous
• Technoir for how it sets out elements in its "Transmissions" and maps them into a plot

Agree? Disagree? Want to know more or have some suggestions? Comments welcome.

* OK, OK, it's not D&D's fault specifically.