End of an Era

I'm coming to the end of my longest-running campaign EVAAARRRR. It was my first D&D4e campaign, but I cheated: I didn't write most of the adventures. I went into the campaign with a single large story arc in mind - destroy the Nightmare Child. That took longer than I thought and the story arc encompassed the Scepter Tower adventure and about 3 months of real-life play. After that I floundered quite I showed the players a map and asked them "Where do you want to go?" Unfortunately they would discuss where they wanted to go at the end of one session than often change their mind at the start of the next session. I was far from innocent in this.

All in all it was an interesting experiment. If I do it again, I'll try to either
A: Have multiple adventure ideas, let the players pick one and then work on fleshing it out.
B: Demand that the players make a decision at the end of the session and NOT allow them to change the decision after that. I know my group would have been fine with this. Most have GMed at some time so they know what it's like.

Once the experiment was over I said "Forget this nonsense!" and started to run [b]Revenge of the Giants[/b]. I let the players know this was coming up before hand. Normally I would not say anything but I decided to let them let me steer them in that direction.

I actually miss creating my own worlds and writing my own adventures. All the people who keep asking me to GM again are the ones who played through my own creation. It's a nice ego boost and I really need to go back to doing that again.

All in all I get to be a player again. I both love and dread being a player. It's less pressure per week, but I get very creatively frustrated. Fortunately I have another project I'm working on and I can funnel that creative energy into that.