How can I make my games better?

[Hywaywolf]

Thats why always learning one of those 1 page dungeons, or a short wilderness encounter adventure. Know iot and have it ready for when you are thrown for a loop. It will save your game night and then next week you can prepare something for the new direction they are going.

[Joe the Rat]

The modules have the random encounter population pre-created. You might want to do something similar - have a few premade random encounters for an area - so there's no rolling or fudging to see what they face.

So if they go in the opposite direction of what you'd put together, grab an "random" encounter and make that the thing for the session - maybe with a seeded hook to send them into something you've got more notes on.

You can save and reuse the stuff you prepared and didn't use. You could reuse stuff they did encounter, if there's a logical reason. (The goblin patrol ran away. Later, you run into another group led by the same captain. So long as the leader runs away from each fight, he can keep coming back. "Well, we're lost now lads. After that spell blasted us from the wizards keep, there's no telling where- Oh look, it's Bort. We must be near Ravenkeep. Hi Bort!")

Having an adventure like the Nameless Dungeon is handy, because it can literally be dropped anywhere. No special location, no backstory, just a secret lair in some random location.

[Solomoriah]

A GM doesn't write story, except for BACKstory.

You missed the meaning of my statement. Not every game session of every campaign can be an open-ended sandbox where the GM perfectly reacts to what the players try to do. Sometimes a GM must have something planned out, even if it is as simple as a dungeon map and a reason to be in said dungeon. I was simply remarking that all too often the players will look at all of the dangled threads and go "nope, we're gonna invent the East India Trade Company" and that being ready for any weird stuff like that to happen behooves a good GM.

Indeed.

Also note, there's nothing wrong with telling your players, "Hey, if that's what you want to do, fine, but I'm not prepared to do that tonight." It has rarely happened to me that way, but the times I've tried to go forward without either a plan or a drop-in module have been disasters.