Hit the beats without committing to details in your grand campaign!
The choices appear to be only two as a DM, run a game on rails and remove player choice, or run a sandbox game where anything can happen but finding meaning in the story takes some digging. Well taking inspiration again from John Trubys book The Anatomy of Story, we can drop in some simple structure to campaign or even adventure planning.
Need as sense of direction in your campaign without feeling like you're removing autonomy from players? Campaign prep can be one of the most fun creative endeavors, until it turn into a waking nightmare of recipe cards and a myriad of NPC names. Players destroy your plan and you are left only with throwing out the days of prep you have done to adopt a new path. Well no more! We have slogged through so much campaign planning and arrived here, with these story beats which gives us confidence and direction and allows focus on the fun stuff.
They go like this:
Weakness and Need
Desire
Opponent
Plan
Battle
Self Revelation
New Equilibrium
Let us walk you through them and form better more dramatic stories ahead without having to force them down a path. In this episode we also touch on another brilliant campaign planning tool for players. Story Cards! We don't start a new campaign without these things now. They are also fantastic for building better NPC's.
They can be found here if you're interested. http://brooklynindiegames.com/games/backstory-cards/