Being a DM can take different forms, and a different DM/GM will often have very different styles from the next.
I've been running a campaign set in Ravnica (and, later, the overall MTG multiverse) and things have transitioned significantly in the past session.
Through the early levels, players have mostly been given short adventures that are fairly on-rails. The intention was to have self-contained content that we could get through in an evening so that the large cast of player character could rotate in and out without feeling lost if they missed a session.
The problem, as I saw it, was that there wasn't really a lot of time for players to just be themselves and develop personalities. Things were on a strict timetable, and we needed to get through our typical two combats per session.
The campaign is built around tiers - players level up very easily to a tier's cap (4, 10, 16, and 20) because they get a new level every session. However, to progress to the next tier, the players need to get to the next portion of the story.
The players recently got to tier 2 a few sessions ago, but after a brief, linear adventure introducing the big bads of the campaign and a character-specific adventure (I forced the Dimir member of the group to out himself or be taken down by a group of horrors sent to assassinate him) the players have now been sent off to a different district (that I've invented) with a broad goal - to break into a heavily-fortified Simic laboratory that is secretly developing Phyrexian technology - but with several major obstacles that will prevent them from successfully doing so unless they can find ways to subvert them before they launch their attack.
What's interesting is that I think some players are struggling to grasp that they won't be able to get in so easily - some party members seemed to think they might be able to get in on their first session, which was very unlikely.
That being said, the free-form nature of this new chapter of the campaign is making me very excited. I think that as things go, they'll be forced to come up with creative solutions. Just in case they can't, I have a few ways to solve issues that they might hear about from some of the "rumor NPCs" I've come up with, but as DM, I'm also going to be flexible and allow for solutions I haven't thought of if they come up with something clever.
At this point, the party is only aware of two major obstacles - monster packs guarding the place that are about twice the recommended challenge for a group of level 10 players as well as enormous, indestructible walls around the place. They'll need to do some more recon if they want to know about the other defenses, and then work further to discover ways to deal with those issues.
I expect this to take a few sessions, and with random encounters to have in the district's own various precincts (it's a blue-mana district with precincts each leaning toward one of the four blue guilds) I expect there will be plenty of issues for them to deal with in the build-up to this confrontation.
What's fun is that the party sometimes comes up with problems you hadn't even thought of. There are eight potential inns/hotels for them to stay in here, and they chose the second-sketchiest one (a former Simic biolab that was very cheaply converted into rentable rooms that all smell like chlorine.) The party, wary of being tracked by the bad guys, chose this over a far nicer hotel (also in the Simic-heavy Sharkbite Precinct.) The Boros fighter made a point to pay the stoner-dude desk clerk not to tell anyone they were staying there, which the Rakdos bard pointed out was far more suspicious than a bunch of people just staying in a hotel together.
This stoner high elf, Doug, was just a purely functional NPC to take money from them for their rooms, but now, I think that his addled mind is going to probably let slip their location after a certain number of days. So, thanks, players!
We're transitioning to an alternating Monday/Saturday schedule, which sadly means that it's over a week until our next session. But I'm really curious to see where this goes.
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