My approach to role-playing is to think of it as interactive story-telling. However, in reality it's incredibly difficult to construct a world that players traverse in the way you wish them to. As such, the telling of stories is difficult. Instead, I break down the story into its basic elements and wait to put them together until I'm in-session. The following is my description of those basic elements with some thought towards the minimum preparation required before the element is usable in-game.