You’ve read GM sections so you know preparation is the key to a successful session, you’ve probably heard this in regards to almost everything. For a newer GM it’s true. Preparation ahead of time means having the depth of knowledge to react to a party that wants to go anywhere but the nice little path that you have lain before them.
A huge problem with preparation is deciding what sort of preparation to actually do. While this is talked about a bit in a recent potelbat I thought I’d add in my own take on how to do preparation for a gaming session.
There are two time scales that you want to be prepared for and they have very different needs. Long term planning needs ideas and concepts but little can be concrete because these ideas need to change and be honed to fit the group you have and not the group you thought you’d have. Short term planning is more detailed orientated but can’t be exacting; the nature of a role playing game makes that unwise.
The Light House
Long term planning is a fairly bare structure. The structure consists of knowing where — in general — the adventure is supposed to go, what it’s supposed to involve, and what big twists are supposed to be there. This shouldn’t take that long to do, but it’s fairly crucial to think of these aspects. Having a direction to go and a few cool ideas for rising points that you want to reach is a good thing. Creating NPCs with descriptions of how they act is a great thing, but getting a character sheet done up for them is only useful if it helps you mold them, otherwise it’s doing a disservice to you and your players.
Like most details in a campaign, a major antagonist is an idea before they become anything concrete. The changing nature of any campaign makes it so that details that were appropriate at the start become nearly irrelevant at the end if the party veers off into an unexpected direction. A major antagonist isn’t a bundle of stats, the antagonist is a method of operating, a verbal tick that they always use, even a picture or drawing that’s been done up.. The reason that an antagonist doesn’t need a stat block is that it solidifies them too much. Without hard stats to be compared to, it allows them to be viable longer, if a player goes up two levels while you’ve been playing and then you forget to level up the antagonist before the players see that character, they walk over it as a little speed bump and not the epic fight you had envisioned. No campaign detail should be nailed down to a stat block before it needs to be.
Running Lights
Planning for the next session can be much more solidified, but not to the point of complete stats, or even complete characters. Planning too heavily for the session beyond is folly since you shouldn’t be sure of what your players are going to do with what you’ve put in front of them. You know the major scenes that you are putting before the players to have fun in, and you can come up with a few relatively obvious ways that the players can react.
If you have them narratively entering the door of a casino, barely making their way past the security guards with faked IDs, to talk to a local nefarious crime boss, you need to expect one of the things that could be done is that the players decide they don’t like the look of the situation and try to walk back out. The response to this idea can be as simple as having the guards blocking the door to letting the players leave knowing that they have to come back for some reason. For this situation, the only NPCs that need detail are the security guards, the crime boss needs a few social skills and/or difficulties to roll against, but not a full stat block. Having generic security, police, and ne’er do well stat blocks can usually cover the need for an impromptu fight that the players have talked themselves into.
Turning on the lamp
Small details can hang you up; it’s the broad strokes that everyone is showing up for. In some cases it’s wondering “can we survive this seemingly hopeless situation?” or thinking “this is so crazy it might just work!” and following through to the painful end. Creating a memorable experience that the players have and want to talk about is why you’re there. The things you have planned out have much better depth than things you don’t, but who is to say the cool thing you’ve planned has to take place in a certain locale? A show down with guards can happen anywhere, not, for instance, specifically on a parade route.
Keeping the ideas written with only a few specific statistics locked in allows for you to use the ideas you have when you need them and where the party is, instead of forcing the party to be where you ‘need’ them to be.
