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Post by donosaur on May 25, 2016 4:37:45 GMT
So I feel like my inexperience is really going to show through in this question, but I've reached my limit and I need a sanity check. Basically, my notes eat up all my prep time and don't actually leave me prepared. I have switched from a fairly linear customized module, to a sandbox 4th-to-5th edition conversion campaign setting, and my prep process isn't cutting it. Here's my current process set up: - Write the "story" beats, as in what plots are in play, how big things will unfold around the players
- Figure out the nodes, or decision points, the various ways the players could tip balances, brainstorm a few possible outcomes
- Start planning encounters, dungeons, etc around the story nodes
- Plan session to session, what monsters, what treasure, what NPCs, what puzzles
- Spend hours upon hours referencing books, pdfs, other adventures, etc in order to get the details right
- Painstakingly transfer monster stats and treasure tables etc into my notes
Steps 4-6 have become unsustainable. Now that we're doing sandbox, I feel like I need 10 times as many situations ready in my notes than I used to, and I can't keep up. I can't predict my players, and I don't want to railroad them, so I feel like I have to prep for every possible thing.
I can improvise a conversation, but I don't know how to improvise monster stats, or a battle, or a dungeon. I need to have it all in my head and in my notes to run it. I use a google document and I transfer monster stats to it because I can't be flipping back and forth through books and searching through pdfs in the middle of a battle, and it's literally taking days to do it lately. We've got a game night tomorrow and it's taken me upwards of 3 days to half-fill a "basic" dungeon.
I've read "lazy dm" guides and they just do not make sense to me. The kind of game I like to run does not seem to mesh with that kind of prep, and the worst sessions we've played are the ones where I've had to improvise the most.
How on earth do you actually dm? Are you using random generators and combat builders on the fly and hoping for the best? Are you running a battle straight out of the monster manual??? It's starting to feel like magic to me that anyone can do this without making it a full time job.
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Post by donosaur on May 25, 2016 20:27:17 GMT
I made this thread last night when I was extremely tired and distraught over my lack of preparedness for tonight's game, and now I realize it's way whinier than I intended. If anyone wants to actually discuss the nitty gritty of what your prep looks like, I'd still love to hear about it.
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Post by friartook on May 25, 2016 20:41:16 GMT
I meant to respond earlier today, but its been a busy one!
I do very little actual prep for my games. I prep the world, and specifically the region the players are in. However, even that prep is mostly in my head. I don't come to the table with notes or documents. I look up stat blocks out of the MM as needed. If I have something custom, I prep it way ahead of time and keep it with me just in case.
I admit that I am on the extreme non-prep end of the prep spectrum. The thing is, I used to prep a bunch. I used to make a document with all the stat blocks I'd need. I'd prep up maps for locations and write up descriptions of NPCs and such. I spent hours and hours on prep. And, invariably, that time was wasted. I found that I inevitably prepped the wrong things. That my players' choices made most of my prep irrelevant. I found that I ended up improvising most sessions anyway, regardless of how carefully I prepped.
Here's the thing for me: I'm a busy person. I have three kids, two jobs, I run a face to face game group, I GM two play by post games and I'm a player in 4 other play by post games. I don't have time in my life for thorough prep that ends up not being used.
I have also found that once I embraced this, and just started leaning on my natural story telling abilities, our sessions got a lot better. In fact, some of our best sessions were the ones where I had literally nothing at all prepped for the night. No story, no hooks, no locations, nothing. I was put in this situation a couple time through totally left field decisions made by my players. One other time, we were missing two players. I came to the session expecting a board game night with the remaining players. I brought my dice and books "just in case", but did not expect to use them. My guys requested a "flashback" session for their characters. So, we made the whole thing up from whole cloth, on the spot. It was an amazing session! Memorable and we had a great time!
I know not everyone likes to run a game like this. I think you may need to take a step back and look at format. I think high prep GMs may have a harder time with a Sandbox style game, because you just can't think of every contingency. Dungeon crawls and the like may be more the format to go for. For myself, I love making the game up on the fly. I like the narrative freedom it gives me and my players. I can take little ideas they have, or comments about the setting and run with them as I see fit.
Anyway, that is how I do my prep: almost no prep at all. I'm open to any questions/comments/feedback you may have on my take here.
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Post by dmsam on May 26, 2016 15:07:55 GMT
Here are a few things I do to speed things up during preparation:
1. My NPC stat blocks do not actually have ability scores (why write 19 Str when all you needto know is the +4?). They have their modifiers, +x to hit and damage. They have a brief statement about their abilities, and that's IT.
2. During my free time, I craft a bunch of NPCs. A sentence to describe what they look like, what they act like, and what they are there for. I don't waste time to make a stat block for them until the players actually latch on or have a meaningful interaction.
3. When it comes to combat, I ignore the exp budget, and ROUGHLY follow the CR. Encounters are dynamic events that cannot always be planned. Just know who is involved and why they are involved in the fight. The rest is up to the players. If the fight is going too easy, add another element mid-fight (reinforcements, explosions, rocks fall, whatever), and remove elements if things get too difficult.
4. I would rather be thematically consistent than leave things up to random tables. If the party is fighting a gang of bandits, I'll make a bunch of bandits of different flavors and difficulty and populate the dungeon with them in different combinations. I seldom take things straight out of the MM anymore. There are other resources on the dmsguild that can speed this step up, such as monster supplements, npc supplements, etc.
5.Don't be afraid to reuse encounters, especially the ones that the players missed from previous dungeons. You spent precious time creating those assets, and they deserve to be used. Just a few tweaks and they should fit right in.
6. Try to keep your encounters, dungeons, cities and everything modular. That way, you can take things apart and recombine them in interesting ways, even on the fly. You can also take elements from the premade adventures as well, if it pleases you to do so.
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Post by donosaur on May 26, 2016 23:00:50 GMT
My session last night went pretty well, mostly because my party happened to choose to follow the dungeon that I had spent the most time prepping. This was win number one. I followed the 5-room dungeon set up because I wanted it to be solvable in one night. The puzzles I introduced were challenging but not opaque, and provided a little resistance to the party without being total showstoppers. I let them avoid a trap-room bc we we short on time and they wound up talking to the boss (a confused and dopey spectator) instead of battling him. I did spend a lot of time customizing his stats only to not use them, but considering how lost I would have felt if they'd chosen to fight him and I had no stats, I don't consider this a loss.
However, I still feel like I was under-prepped. The dungeon was a vault of forbidden knowledge, but for story purposes, the party only needed one thing. At several moments the party tried looking in other rooms and looking at other books, but I didn't have anything ready for them to find there so I had to just say "you find nothing of value." I feel like I cheaped out on the set dressing of this place, and I regret it.
I worry that if I were to run a session with no prep, nothing would make sense. My party is very interested in the motivations of characters and ask a lot of questions about history and past events, and they've caught me in inconsistencies before. I worry that the gaps in my world building will pull them out of the story, you know?
Anyway, from now on I'm going to focus less on making my notes pristine and thorough. I'm going to go for breadth, not depth. Also I'm going to try and churn out some good NPCs and encounters that can be plugged in anywhere. They didn't find the mimic in the dungeon last night, so it's bound to show up somewhere else now. I also cheated a bit and at the end of last night's session I straight up asked the party what their next intentions were, so I knew what to focus on. Honestly, that last one feels like the smartest thing I've done this whole campaign.
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Post by friartook on May 27, 2016 14:03:29 GMT
I guess I need to clarify. I was using big declarative language about "doing no prep at all". That's not really true. What I really mean is that I focus on big picture prep, and improvise the details. I don't really do dungeon crawls often. When I do, I don't populate the dungeon per se. I have an idea about the inhabitants and layout, then let things evolve organically. When it feels right in narrative to have an encounter happen, I make it happen. A concrete example: My players are on a mission to find a certain book. It is a translation grammar. Without it, the Wizard and Bard will not be able to cast spells (magic is lost knowledge in my setting). A professor at a University hired them to go to the vacation home of an old professor who was killed in a religious purge (lotsa history there, not going in to it, but its there and prepped as backdrop to the story. None of it is written down; its in my head). The PCs traveled to the village where this house is. The villagers called it the Death House and seemed afraid of it. I used the actual map of the Death House from the Curse of Strahd adventure. But I disregarded the basement and all the "populated" bits of the text. Just used the map. The players get there, and find this ancient house where nobody lives and nobody goes, but it looks well maintained, as if there's a diligent cleaning staff keeping the place up. They enter, and begin searching. Bad things start happening; a chandelier falling on them, weird scuttling noises in the walls, kitchen knives getting thrown at them. My prep: I had the map. In my head, this house is populated with Kobolds. I took some inspiration from a more ancient origin of the myth of kobolds and made them like House Elves from Harry Potter, but without magic. Basically, these things had been living in and maintaining the house for centuries. Because of this, the villagers think its haunted. The stat block for Kobolds is in the MM. That's it, that comprises the entirety of my prep. Now, naturally, my players only sorta played along. All hell broke loose and, due to some unwise actions by the monk, an angry mob showed up to burn the house down just as the Kobolds came out of the walls in force to confront the PCs because one of the PCs had dropped a torch between the walls to "smoke them out". Very little pre-prep, most of it in my head. I made up the content of the rooms on the fly. Knew in my head that there was a secret entrance to the dub-basement library, and knew where the PCs could find it. Instead, they ended up going down a well at the back of the house, and I improvised a secret entrance back there. This combination of a broad mental picture and dynamic improvisation is how I GM and prep. I like to react to the PCs, let them affect the environment and alter it through their actions. In general, I like my prep to be open ended and fluid, rather than locked in to details of every room, scene and NPC. Hope that clarifies. Again, I recognize that my style is not for everyone. But you asked  This is my answer. |
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This is my answer.