"Branching" and Over-prep

[Slethik]

First off, hello! I'm new.

Second, sorry for what has likely already been posted, I can't use the search feature without paying it seems(?).

Finally, I had a question about non-linear (by some interpretations simply non-railroaded) adventures. I'm a new DM so this may be obvious to some but I really like to write adventures with some very wildly different story paths. It can be a nightmare to make up this stuff (do this, or that; help him, or her; choose between the lesser of two evils) but when I finally have something I like to be able to use it. The structure of two branches from a decision fork (as discussed in DMG2) implies a TON of prep work, even if you love to improv. I'm really getting attached to my encounters and I hate seeing them missed. Sometimes I subconsciously make one decision fork seem better than another because I happen to like its encounters better, which seems wrong to me.

In this case I have a really neat encounter with some golems in a sorceress' vault that includes some cool 3d terrain, some exploding walls and lots of centipedes. The encounter on the other path is also neat but if I had to pick, I like the vault encounter better. What do I do if the players completely avoid this encounter that I spent an hour (or more!) working on? It seems impossible to have real decision branching and not spend days working on prep that will never, ever, get used.

Thanks in advance for your help, this has been driving me nuts!

EDIT: Not entirely sure, looks like this may be better placed in the other 4e forum. Apologies if that's so, please move at your nearest convenience.

 

[Markn]

Welcome to the boards!

I would do one of two things.

First, to save you a lot of work you could plan on designing only one encounter, but reskin it two different ways. Basically, if they choose the sorceress path, do it the way you envision it. If they choose the other path, if possible, include the same encounter but make some alterations to it - exploding mounds instead of walls, different reasons (but valid reasons) for the same creatures to be there, that sort of thing. Depending upon the story path, make one path have the PCs in a worse situation to start the encounter and in the other one, a more advantageous position. This greatly reduces your work as a DM.

If that is not to your fancy, you could always save the encounter, and when appropriate reinsert it later on, though you would have to respec that stats on the exploding walls and such.

Either method is fine, just pick one that suits your tastes.

 

[talarei07]

well first is the location (a vault) essential to the encounter or could it take place on the other path? second (and i have had to do this before) could you just file away the encounter for later? it may need a bit of power increase but you could do that relatively quickly if you have adventure tools, that way you dont lose all the work you put into it. those are a few things. and also if they are intentionally avoiding it (Npc a told them what was there) you could use anyway not every piece of information is completely accurate. i mean i know i have told someone to turn when i meant they need to turn left.

 

[LostSoul]

There are a number of things you can do to reduce prep time and allow the players a lot of freedom in their actions.

1. Story.

For each PC in your party, make three NPCs. For each NPC, answer these questions:

1. How does the NPC reflect central traits of the PC?
2. What does the NPC want from the PC?
3. How is the NPC going to get it?
4. How far is the NPC willing to go to get it?
5. Which other NPCs is this NPC bound to through ties of blood, sex, money, power, or religion?

You can do all of this in a couple of lines. [NPC's name] is a [descriptive statement reflecting a PC] who wants [something from a PC], and is willing to [how far they will go]. [NPC's name] will rely on [NPC's means] to achieve his goals. [Related NPC's name] is bound to [NPC's name] via [the nature of the relationship].

Grak is a savage barbarian clan-lord who wants the PC barbarian's honourable tribe to swear fealty to him, and is willing break all the laws of god and man in order to do this. Grak will rely on his necromancy to achieve his goals. Sosha, the PC's mother, is bound to Grak via ties of blood - they are brother and sister.

When you play the game, play the NPCs according to the motivations you've given them. They will want something from the PCs, they will be motivated to get it, and they will bring in other NPCs who also want things from the PCs. Start throwing the NPCs at them through whatever means they possess and see how the PCs react.

Make sure that you don't care if the NPCs achieve their goals. Make sure that you don't care how the PCs react. Make sure that you don't care what happens next. Just play the NPCs honestly according to the motivations that you've given them.

That level of prep should give you enough to work with for a good number of sessions.

2. Encounters.

Improvise.

There are a lot of tools in 4E that make this easy, but first you need to decide on some principles about your game. I am going to approach it in my own style: set the level of the area and use that to determine what's there. The level sets everything about the area - DCs, attacks, damage, defences, you name it. 4E is easy for this.

Remember these formulas:
Attack vs AC: level + 5
Attack vs NAD: level + 3
NADs: level + 12
AC: level + 14
Damage: page 42
DCs: page 42

One big question: how do you set the level? You can go with the party's level and keep within a certain range - from two lower to four higher - or base it one setting considerations. If you want you can randomize the level one you figure out what base you're using:

Feature Level
 d20  Modifier
--------------
  1	-2     
 2-3	-1
 4-11	+0
12-15	+1
16-17	+2
18-19	+3
  20	+4

Monsters and Traps: I suggest that you write down a list of monsters that you're likely to use. You'll end up with a (bigger) list like this:

Barbarians
Goblins
Orcs
Undead
Wolves

Then write three encounters for each level for each monster.

Barbarians:
2 gray wolves, 2 human barbarians (600 xp)
3 human barbarians (525 xp)
2 human barbarians, 1 human mage (525 xp)

The good thing about this is that you can steal from any source and you can use these over and over and over again.

Encounter Settings: This is probably the trickiest bit. I don't think it should be so hard.

Write up a bunch of tables for different terrain - forest, plains, urban, mountains, whatever. Put something interesting in each entry. Use that entry as inspiration, and twist it in whatever way works best for you at the time.

For special features, like exploding walls and grab grass, just add another bunch of tables, and reference which one(s) should be rolled on in the entry above. All those features that you just wrote up for your two encounters? Put those on the list.

So you get something like:
Hills: "19. Stairs that descend into a bottomless crevasse into the underdark. E, H."
E - Dungeon Features (Stairs): "6. The stairs are weak and will collapse unless tread upon carefully. Atk: level + 3 v Ref; Hit: the target falls."
H - Hills Features: "17. A ruined tower adds a third dimension to this encounter."

When you put it all together you shouldn't have to prep anything at all. Just have a good idea of the setting in your head, consult the tables, and put your own spin on whatever you get.

3. Dungeons.

Here is a quick way to draw a dungeon:

1. Draw a pentagon.
2. Draw circles around each point.
3. Draw a dotted line from one point to a non-adjacent point.
4. Draw a perpendicular line through one of the sides of the pentagon.
5. Draw another circle around one point.
6. Decide where the entrance is.
7. Label the points with simple yet evocative descriptions - "Bridge of Death", "The Cistern of Blood", "The Gaunt Man", "The Pit of Despair".

Each point is an encounter area - a room or a group of rooms that adds up to one encounter.

The lines are passages between encounter areas - corridors, teleport circles, magic mirrors that lead into the feywild, etc. (A corridor can also be its own encounter area, such as a maze.)

The dotted line is a hidden passage between encounter areas. Secret doors, slides that trigger when you pull on the statue's hand, a teleport circle that only activates when you complete the riddle or bring the missing component to activate the magic, etc. It should be difficult to find.

The perpendicular line is a blocked passage - a locked door, a cave-in, a poisonous mist, etc. It shouldn't be impassable, just difficult.

The point with the second circle around it is the central encounter area - where the boss lives, the treasure vault, the goal of the quest, etc.

Now that your dungeon is "mapped out", rely on your improvisational tricks to build the encounters. Create a table of room descriptions to inspire you and pick one or roll on the table. Use the level of the dungeon to determine encounter levels - go with dungeon level, dungeon level +1, dungeon level +2, and dungeon level +3 (with one room empty). Use your encounter table to quickly populate the room.

*

This is a lot of work but once you do it you're done, and all the work you do to it reduces all future prep. And other people have done some of this work; if you download the "hex crawl" attachment here, you can steal what I came up with.

I also have another thread about random terrain features; I will link to it in a second.

edit: Random Terrain Features of the Natural World

 

[jbear]

I have a similar dilema as you. I love for my players choices to be meaningful, which often means when they fork off in one direction a lot of cool stuff I have prepared is never used.

My campaign is not a sandbox like what LostSoul gives great advice how to construct. My story has a plot that is rumbling on behind the scenes and is linked to what the PCs are involved with in different ways.

But I want them to involve themselves with it in the way they choose to. So this is how I try and achieve that with the very limited time I have to prepare material:

I had a very loose idea of the main world event that is moving the world cogs.
I marked out some main secondary cogs that were influenced by the main action.
The PCs first adventure hook would eventually lead them to a key character involved with one of these secondary cogs.

I didn't have time to map out an entire world or the adventure or even the big picture from beginning to end. My players were all new, so the first part of the action was in a way fairly linear. The forks they could take caused ony a minmal deviation in the direction they headed (not that the players perceived it that way). I added some sidetreks along the way inspired by the little blurbs in the campaign guide I was using, to make their journey unique and flavoursome.
One of the sidetreks the players actually followed up I took from an encounter in Open Grave and then built more interesting stuff around it including story hooks that had nothing to do with the main story but could provide them very useful information about it. They didn't follow it up any further in the end, but if the had of, then I would have used the Tower Of Spellguard as a base for the adventure and shaped it to my liking.

Further on, they followed another side trek that continued to grow and grow the deeper they got into it. For this one I took a similar themed desert temple mini adventure from a Goodman Games module full of different little mini adventures and rebuilt it to my liking. Some of the fluff I had to discard totally. Some of the fluff started getting my creative juices flowing. Suddenly it seemed a waste that they had gotten so deeply into this story, for it then to bear no relevance with the big picture. So I decided to link them together. The big picture began to expand, deepen, complicate itself, take shape and grow. I began to build an alternative hook into the main action through this side adventure for them, if they followed it through to the end and the PCs were willing to side with a minor evil in order to battle the greater one. Surprisingly, at least for me, they made a pact with this minor evil, gained a powerful, selfish and manipulative dark ally which would bring them closer to the main story faster than previiously forseen. And of course who will turn all their deeds to his benefit much to the PCs surprise. This also allowed them to start putting bits and pieces of information that they had together (because now there began to be something to actually put together). But I didn't begin any of this until they had decided to go down that way. At the beginning it was a few encounters from a premade adventure module that I had reshaped and brought to life. If they had have passed by, little was lost.

When they finally arrived at their destination the narrow flow ended and their possibilities finally expanded pulling them in at least 7 or 8 different directions at once. A few of those choices lead to the same place. Some were not relevant to the main story, but most were linked to it in different ways eventually. Now obviously I wasn't about to prepare that many different adventure paths only to ever use 2 or 3 of them (if that).
This is how I handled it:

I told my players that they had reached a major crossroads in the story. That the ideas were there loosley but that I was not going to develop any of them any further until they made a decision which one they wanted to follow. Once they had made that decision, I began the building process. What I did have ready was a premade module that loosely fit the situation in one way or another for each possible path. Most of them were from Goodman Games, or some specifically chosen adventures from the Scales of War adventure path, even a couple of AD&D adventures including one of the original Ravenloft adventures. Once they chose which way they were going I took what I had and began making it fit, make sense and come to life.

So now the story behind their adventure has come together as I weaved all these different stories together. They have a fairly good sense of what is going on (at least as much as they should at this stage) and they are totally hooked into the story. The good thing is we got there without having to sacrifice the possibility of them making meaningful choices. I just made everything meaningful in its own way.

Eventually they will have to follow up some of the other roads when they return back to the junction point once this part of the adventure is concluded (but that is cool because I already have some solid bases to build on when the time comes) and those that aren't followed up... well no loss because I lost no time on them, despite them being semi-prepared in a way. Will they ever get there... well, I hope so because they are heading into a pretty epic adventure ... things looked pretty grim when we left off last. If they are not careful and at least a little lucky they are about to be whisked off on another side trek they stumbled into after some bad decision making that could land them in a depraved city of eladrin trapped in time endlessly playing out their massacre day after day by hordes of savage barbarians. I'm hoping they avoid that, but I have the module ready to build upon if it all goes wrong! And if they pull it off! great, back to the action. I hadn't prepared anything despite being ready for that eventuality, so nothing was lost!

 

[ArcaneSpringboard]

SlyFlourish had a good post on lessons learned from Dragon Age.

Three D&D Tips I Learned From Dragon Age | Sly Flourish

 

[vic20]

I can't use the search feature without paying it seems(?).

Just go to google.com, and enter your search terms there, specifying this site to be searched. For example, by entering this...

site:enworld.org bag of rats

...you'll get a bunch of links to the forums here that mention "bag of rats".

Welcome, btw...

 

[Slethik]

Wow!

This is uniformly fantastic stuff! Many thanks to everyone here this is all really helpful. This forum is clearly NOT the wizards forum, which is definitely a good thing.

I'll definitely try re-skinning them to work on both paths that sounds particularly easy. Since it seems like I spend the most time on everything BUT the monsters in the encounter its definitely feasible to just save it for later with pumped up or different monsters too.

LostSoul, that's a crazy system I'm not even sure I understand it all but I'm definitely going to go through it later and see what I can make. Looks awesome.

ArcaneSpringboard: I love SlyFlourish (and DA) but that related more to overall plot flow than actual encounter prep. Unless you mean the bit about reusing random encounter areas in which case, yeah that can definitely work as a form of "saving encounters for later". If I ever have free-time during one of my prep sessions -yeah, right- I'll make some random encounters for that exact purpose.

Again, thanks guys. This is exactly what I was looking for!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think there are a variety of ways to recycle encounters or just avoid making ones you won't use. One way is to know your players really well, lol. Honestly at this point I can pretty well predict which choices the players will make. I'm not always right, which is probably good, but I can do well enough that I'd guess less than 25% of the encounters I expect the players will hit get missed. Of course they also go off in random directions now and then and then some extemporizing is required.

Some good techniques have been presented already. Another thing to do is theme specific paths fairly heavily. Then you can either quickly add that theme to encounters you are going to reuse to make them seem cohesive with the story where they are really just stuff you had in your back pocket. These type encounters may end up being a map from one thing and monsters from another etc. Usually they're the less significant encounters, but running them can give you time to work up something more specific in a tight spot.

You can also have a few side quests lying around. When the players need to be slowed up a little bit to give you a chance to work out something you don't want to ad-lib you can drop a hook into a side quest, let them run around and do that for a bit, then by the time things get back to the main story you're all ready to go.

I think if it a lot like a magic trick. You want to keep the audience's attention OVER HERE while you're doing something OVER THERE, lol.

I guess it helps if you have a sandbox that has been played around in for many years. I have a lot of areas on my map that in the game timeline were explored or dealt with years or even centuries ago, so I know a lot about them, but they can be restocked or whatever pretty quickly.

 

[eamon]

<not-quite-serious>
Slowing player's down? Just have em meet with a level 34 moral dilemma.

Say, the overpowering BBEG's city-destroying evil machine can't be stopped, you just don't know how - need the plans! Previous parties that tried to interfere were tracked down and killed.

Cue orphan kid who overheard the BBEG's lieutenant saying the plans are in his house. Watch elaborate plans be made to break into house and extract plans, burning down the house afterward.

Except, the orphanage is right next door. Can they risk burning down the orphanage?

Sit back and watch discussion consume entire session.
</not quite serious>