Café de Nuit

Velvet Glove for me too. As Javier and Jamesravenwind said, I make a detailed world, throw in some adventure ideas in the form of NPC suggestion and I let the players decide what they will do in this large world with the many adventure opportunities.
Once in a while, they choose to do what I want them to do. Most of the times, I have planned a short X adventure in the mountain and they decide to go in the woods hunting for a Y monster that they heard it exists there. I need a lot of creativity, but I learn as I grow old. As for the X adventure, later, they may decide to check it.
However, for the large adventures (likely to take 3-5 sessions) I talk with the players beforehand (or they ask me if they want). Like "We want a ghost adventure" or "How about a large dungeon crawl?" So work doesn't go wasted.

alhoon wrote:Once in a while, they choose to do what I want them to do. Most of the times, I have planned a short X adventure in the mountain and they decide to go in the woods hunting for a Y monster that they heard it exists there.

But sometimes this monster (in our case a hydra) was very challenging for us. It was a great battle and both of us had had great time!

alhoon wrote:I need a lot of creativity, but I learn as I grow old.

You are a great DM alhoon and trust me you have very much creativity!

alhoon wrote:However, for the large adventures (likely to take 3-5 sessions) I talk with the players beforehand (or they ask me if they want). Like "We want a ghost adventure" or "How about a large dungeon crawl?" So work doesn't go wasted.

...And this is the best choice, everyone is happy!

I have an odd mixture of the Iron Fist/Velvet Glove schools of GMing. I've always looked at RPGs like movies. I tend to think of it in three phases... Preperation (Pre-Production), Execution (Production), and Aftermath (Post-Production)

During Preperation I tend to be Iron Fisted. I tell me players this is what I am allowing and this is where I am setting the location of the chronicle. I detail the themes and moods that are going to be explored in the game and outline a very detailed explination of character creation and player expectation. I'm usually pretty specific, even strict, about it. As a reward though, I tend to offer an extra Feat or something similar to help make things easier.

By doing this and knowing exactly what my group is composed of and what their characters are like I'm able to take the Velvet approach when it comes time for Execution. This make the chronicle play out like a story, where we collectively tell a gothic tale and less like the typical D&D dungeon crawl, monster of the week, or GM vs. Player games. I like to think my approach works, at least for my group and tends to lead to the least headaches for both my players and myself.

I tend to mix and match. I will not kill pcs just b/c it is funny or appropriate at the time. If the pcs do something dumb that warrants death or refuse to run from battle when they should, then fine, they deserve what they get. The group does not have to follow my planning to a T, and can goof around a little, but I do like a certain degree of seriousness in my campaigns. One thing I like to do that works real well, is to have one big battle during the session and devote the rest of the time to role-playing. That way PCs get a mix of battle and role-playing. And the size of the battle depends on the part in the story.

As a GM I only have one golden rule:
The GM is always right.

The only exception to this is when I ask my players if they think something should be different, then we HR it.

What if the GM is left-handed?

Reginald de Curry wrote:What if the GM is left-handed?

Then you're screwed.
Trust me, I know from experience.