What is your DM'ing style?

How do you approach your world?
Is your campaign more about the world itself? Do you like watching your players interact with the world, change it according to their personalities and find a place for themselves in it?
Or are you more about the characters themselves? Do you design your world around player characters, with personal conflicts and events based on the character's psyches?
Or do you have a unique mix of both?

I prepare a world that is both detailed, yet vague enough to make stuff up as I go, or to introduce something from a different source.
I like to just drop the players off in some location and see what trouble they manage to get themselves into.
Each region has a different sort of ordeal to get involved in.
Some places get raided by Orcs often, others are ruled by vampires. Some are at war, and some are filled to the brink with political intrigue.
It only depends on the players what direction their own decisions (and feet) will take them

I obsess over details and try to plan out every path that the players could possibly choose to go, because I have a crippling fear of trying and failing to improvise and the session dying in a fire.

I end up with stacks of notes that never get used, play for a couple of months and burn out from all the work.

Not that it matters, because none of my players ever want to DM.

...

I guess I specialize in "countryfolk hero" adventures best. Small worlds are my favorite; the biggest I've ever created is a medium-sized equatorial island. I'm not a big fan of a single group of powerful adventurers travelling the world, and prefer to make a patchwork out of many low-level campaigns that have references to each other instead.

I'd love for my campaigns to revolve around PC backstories and personal conflicts more, but I don't think I'm too good at it. However, I'm a sucker for character growth, and love to play around with their individual personalities by throwing encounters that might test them or allow them to shine. As I don't use big worlds often, I don't expect the players to leave a big impact on the world, but I love seeing them meet and interact with recurring or even meaningless NPCs. The biggest highlight of any campaign for me is having grateful villagers or NPCs throw a huge party for the heroes, or asking them to tell a story of their adventures, or generously supplying them in their time of need.

Over the top.
>You are fighting on the back of a dragon who is summoning flesh golems from its own body.
>Hunt down a troll who stole a heard of cows who is now throwing them at the party like a catapult.
>Towers that have rooms that turn by moving a RL rubric cube.
>Water elemental containing swordfish
>Goblin that keeps turning up coverd in wounds that the party have dealt (melted face, missing ear, gold eye, stone arm and missing middle finger)

By the end of the session we are tired, its like a work out. I end out losing my voice by the end because I really go for it.
The players really work together holding each other up.
Its so much fun.

I design patterns and systems, my players fits or not and shit happens
and maps, lots of maps

>none of my players ever want to DM
I know that pain

Thats COOL man. Total different from mine. I can even hear the gentle guitar in the background.
Its a warm sound, one that's slightly out of tune but is played with love and heart.
Its like ma's chicken soup, nothing like it in the world. It's comforting like a warm blanket on a winters day.

Keep it up bro!

Dude! its because they love your game! Why would they run when they have you as a gm!
Take your notes man and throw them away YOU DONT NEED 'em.

play as it goes along, but have a general plan for each session

also, turn random encounters into story elements

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>Dude! its because they love your game!
Lol. I appreciate you being nice, but really it's just because they're lazy.

This. I have a short leg of an adventure planned at a time, see how it turns out, get another one ready, and so on. If I feel optimistic about longevity, maybe eventually a longer-term "plot" unfolds, tentatively.

I have a decent mix of both, I started with a very established setting and the players actions have shaped the world as they played.
for example one character wanted to play as a knight in service to the main kingdom the game takes place in, she wanted to have fought in the great war (took place 10 years before the start) and it just so happened that I needed a knight to fill that role cementing her into the world a bit more it just worked out.

I start my campaigns in a small geographic area, and I know the motivations and goals of the major players in the area.

As the characters level up, I offer them hooks from more distant and exotic locales... this reflects that as they grow in power and capability, they attract the attention of powerful individuals from abroad (for better or worse).

I am bad at doing character development. However, I saw a great idea on Veeky Forums earlier where the players kill bandits, and the fighter realiaes they are former members of his military/mercenary organization. I need to give players the opportunity to grow their characters more.

I suppose In a way, the campaigns I create somewhat resemble the big published campaigns.

for me, it's "i'm the only one competent enough to DM and i don't want to play with incompetent dms"

>Set-up a semi-generic fantasy world to use for multiple adventures
>Purposefully leave a lot of open-ended elements
I'm a big fan of seeing the world grow and take shape along with the players kind of how describes it. It's even more fun when you're mixing and matching the people you play with. Really makes past PCs feel like the legendary heroes they were.

I let my players do pretty much whatever they want, but I also give them consequences for doing stupid shit

I never create a plot beforehand. This isn't about a story. If I wanted to make a story I would write a fucking book or something. This is about how the players' adventures and how they interact with my world

I keep descriptions of things simple and to the point. I think that it's much more immersive when you have to fill in the blanks with your imagination

I tend to be narrative, theater of the mind. Rather rules light, focus more on what seems like the most likely thing to happen/work.

Even when using miniatures I really don't treat the game like a 40k session, instead the miniatures are really just there to aid understanding of position.

For world building I usually say 'I am using X published setting' and then ignore the entire thing right away and make it up as I go.

For plot progression I try to have several 'plots' going on at any one time. The players decide what they want to do, I give them options. If they take option A instead of B, then B will progress. So there is an opportunity cost here - I try to make the world feel alive and like there is limited time.
I do use miniatures, but this is mostly because I have hundreds and hundreds of them. Combat tends to be theater of the mind, with maybe the last battle using miniatures (if I guess right on the capstone event of the session of course).

Character choice: I am very 'no fun' as you guys would say. I am heavily restrictive to race and class, whatever you choose it HAS to make sense for the immediate setting. So if we starting off in a Dwarf clan, then you are going to all be dwarves. Of course, that would also be because I am running a 'dwarf' campaign. As an example, human barbarian/viking campaign is up next. All human, take classes that would make sense for a Conan like tribe of barbarians.

I've only started running one Dark Heresy campaign, but the approach I'm taking is that I asked each player to provide me a little bit of backstory, then I dug into that for plot hooks and worked them into the overall investigation they're undertaking. The cult they're trying to wipe out has hidden masters high in the Adepta of the hive world they're on, and the cult is tenuously linked to the pasts of some of the characters before joining the Inquisition. There's also a rival Inquisitor about, which is going to present to the party an eventual conundrum about whether they will stay loyal to their Radical Inquisitor or defect to the Puritan rival. The effect the party has on the overall environment is going to be like sparks to the powder keg- not everything is because of them but events still react strongly to their actions.