As a GM, I tend to think about encounters in quite a different way. First, if I have a location which I require the players to go to, for an adventure to happen—typically at the start of a campaign—I’ll start at scene one, “Okay, you’re there!” then ask the players why and how their characters have decided to go there.

This is no different from making sure that adventurers ARE adventurers, or wannabe adventurers, not shopkeepers or farmers or blacksmiths. Sure, you can have a “fish out of water” scenario, but, in general, you want the premise of each character to be compatible with adventuring.

In the case of encounters, I tend to think about the landscape, the ecosystem, and the logic of the world.

If there are ogres about, what do they eat? Where do they get their supplies? What other ogres or other creatures do they interact with? Once you start tracking the activities of the monsters and the rest of the world, then the whole thing starts to feel a lot more logical.

Smart players will start to make logical conclusions, from the evidence of their presence, that encounters may happen. Even if they never actually encounter an ogre, they’ll see the overgrown roadway, and wonder why the road is not in use. They may find the deer guts, and wonder who gutted it before crrying it away. I let the particular flow of the story emerge from the logic of the world, and what the characters do in it, rather than focusing on “narrative beats”.

What this means, of course, is that you have to design the context carefully, so that it’s both coherent and challenging. And you have to operate the active parts of the world, even when the players don’t interact with them.

Hard sci-fi, you say? Excellent features could be battling cancer thanks to cosmic rays, and the disintegration of skeletal mass and deteriorating vision thanks to zero gravity. Punishing and crushingly repetitive schedules of medical therapy and physical exercise, plus batteries of psychological tests could add to the excitement of an expedition!

Or are the crew going to be far more fit for space travel than early humans?

Will their bodies be entirely synthetic, and their minds simply transmitted to the exploration craft after it arrives? Or will they be genetically engineered, proof against the rigours of interplanetary exploration? Will they be human at all?

Or could they be disposable human workers employed by an unaccountable interplanetary corporation, who are holding their nearest and dearest hostage to ensure their compliance?

Short version: if you want to go genuinely hard sci-fi, things may look very, very different to how they’re depicted in TV space operas.

Has anyone mentioned the card game Boss Monster? https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/131835/boss-monster-dungeon-building-card-game

I totally agree—but why don’t players like an adventure? It only maybe because the adventure is poorly designed. (In fact, back in the days of Judges Guild I and my friends ran a whole bunch of incredibly poorly designed adventures, but still had loads of fun!) It could be about poor group dynamics. It could be about a disconnect between expectations and actuality. It could be about poor GMing techniques. Perhaps it could be about something else.

If the aim of a game designer is the help GMs and players to have the best possible experiences, then it surprises me that game designers don’t attend more to the processes of preparing for and playing the game, of recruiting and selecting the right players, and giving them the right expectations.

Then again, maybe there are other factors that motivate game designers. Or perhaps people buy games for reasons other than to have a great play experience. (Both of these things are at least a little bit true!)

I’m not working on anything, I’m playing with a theory. The core of the idea is that people to their best, most free-flowing, most imaginative GMing when they don’t really know what they’re doing. When they’ve first taken up the hobby, when they are running a new game that they don’t really know well, or when the player characters go so far off the prepared plot that the GM has to improvise wildly.

This is outside a lot of people’s comfort zone—but I think there’s an element of truth to it. What if, the more you study how to GM, the more you work at it, the harder it gets?

Were this to be the case, it might explain why many GMs are in an endless quest to discover that cool new system/background/adventure that’ll REALLY create an immersive experience.

Again, were it to be the case, what would be the best rules system to get back to the improvisatory state of gaming naivety that makes the magic happen?

I’m toying with the idea of running a campaign with no game system at all—to force me, as the GM, to improvise on the spot!

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Late to this party and I have to agree to Ian M Banks, Ursula K Le Guin, Philip K Dick (very weird, discontinuous, but free-floating and fascinating) and many more. Just to add a couple of things that HAVEN’T been mentioned, that really may get your sci-fi juices flowing: Brian Aldiss’s expansive “Helliconia” trilogy is a cracker - and I think you may see echoes of it in the premise of “Game of Thrones”. I’d also like to plug John Brunner - his work “The Shockwave Rider” is dated now, but essential reading. It is the first book to ever feature the idea of a computer virus. Also DO follow up on “The Machine Stops” by EM Forster - full text available online for free. If it doesn’t BLOW YOUR MIND that it features social media overload, and was written in 1909, well, nothing will.

In new wave sci fi, you might also want to check out J.G. Ballard - too weird and hardcore for many, but the missing link between Moorcock-style sci-fi and mainstream fiction - think 1960s to 1990s Black Mirror. One last recommendation. If you have time and interest, check out the much neglected and ultra-weird work of C.L. Moore. Her “Northwest Smith” character is the prototype for Han Solo for sure, (Space Pirate and smuggler with a concealed heart of gold, flies a deceptively fast ship with just one crewman, who’s an alien. Carries a “heat blaster” which is also configurable as a energy sword. Too many coincidences!)