Do you plot stories or dungeon crawlers?
This is an extremely interesting question for me! I could go on for some time about this topic, but to answers briefly, I do neither.
I have grown weary of the location-based storytelling that is the classic way to to present RPG scenarios. I have purposefully tried to avoid that style in my recent games. Last Thursday's game was a cyberpunk adaptation of an obscure
cult movie that is basically a road trip based on random encounters. The game was a 'points of light' style affair in some key locations around Helsinki, although my original plan was to turn even the locations into random encounters, as the characters wandered around streets alien to them.
The game before that was planned to take place in just one apartment (although the game play did escalate also outside), so that instead of characters moving in space, they moved from bad situations into worse. (This was a hostage drama where the characters were the hostage takers.)
On the other hand, I do not want to plot stories either. I see story as what unfolds when the game is played, and I do not want to railroad the game to match my personal vision of a predefined story. (I quite like the idea of players being able to contribute to the reality of the game even outside the actions of their characters -
Whimsy Cards are an old but still valid example of this technique.)
I try to construct the scenario from
events - occurrences that have multiple potential outcomes. This is a bit like
The Garden of Forking Paths - I'm not sure what would be the best way to present branching structures like these, but so far I have used
mind mapping techniques. (Maybe Campaign Logger can at some point come up with something better?)