Whenever I'm driving through an area of a town, and it gets really foggy, my brain immediately starts having anxiety because of 'Silent Hill.'

Time and time again, the players constantly surprise you and often not do at all what you expect and completely muck up your preparation, and that's kind of the beauty of the game. It wouldn't be as fun to the DM if everything worked out exactly how you thought it would.

I try desperately to try and figure out how they'd react to different scenarios. That's part of what the DM's job is: to try and know their players well enough to where they can build encounters, challenges, and be like, 'I think they would do this in this scenario, so I will go ahead and prepare a few options based on this.'

Matthew Mercer Quotes