By Popular Request: Rodney Thompson's Session Prep Examples

WotC's Rodney Thompson spoke the other day about creating a session cheat/prep sheet for a game of D&D. It sparked some lively discussion, and a number of people asked for examples of a prep sheet. Rodney, being that kind of guy, obliged and provided his session prep from a Greyhawk campaign. It's five pages long, and should give you a great idea of what he means.

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[Iosue]

I don't think Rodney is a pro DM, I mean he is a professional game designer and a good DM but I think your analogy is off. I have played under DM's that have done better and with much less game prep than some of the sessions of Rodney you can see via twitch and stuff.

While his notes and session prep are great for him, let's not try and make a superstar out of the guy or anything.

My point is not that he's a pro DM. I make no claims that any game he runs will be awesome. My point is that he's a pro RPG designer and writer. Which means that it should be no surprise when material that he just throws together looks more polished and labor-intensive than that of hobbyists.

 

[EricNoah]

The secret sauce is that the effort and the thinking that went into the writing means he probably now knows it well enough that he doesn't have to refer to it often during the game. Some of us need to get stuff out on a page for it to really gel; others can do it in their heads and that's something I envy.

 

[lkj]

Rodney tweeted some additional info with regard to the length of the notes he posted (I combined the tweets):

"Heh. Seeing some folks comment on the volume of material in my session prep notes. It's important to keep in mind that my session notes are an amalgamation of material I prepped for an entire adventure, stuff I prepped specifically for this session, and stuff that sits in a larger general file about my campaign as a whole. For example, the character traits of the NPCs, many of those are from a larger campaign notes file. For the session I ran with those notes, I probably only prepped about a page of it specifically for that session. And the more published adventure-like approach to my notes is something I do to burn the info into my memory. If I write it, I remember it. Plus, this was for a very intrigue-heavy adventure. For a dungeon, I'd probably write much less--room name, contents, & something memorable."


AD

 

[Grakarg]

Huzzah for his adventure being set in the World of Greyhawk!

 

[Celebrim]

That looks like an appropriate amount of prep, though I have some concerns about its focus. The truth is, it looks like good partial preparation for several sessions worth of play. What I'd expect to see is about 5 times as much prep which collectively represented about 5 sessions worth of play. In general, it looks like he knows which way the PC's will jump and is well prepared for that. Possibly in context of prior sessions preparation things would look more understandable, since there is a lot of potential context here that we aren't seeing.

Honestly, I don't know how any DM gets by with less preparation than that.

 

[Celebrim]

Agree, way to much prep work. Especially if trying to help new DM's.

On the contrary, the newer the DM the more preparation they should be encouraged to do. The more experienced DM can always draw upon his prior preparation and experience to improvise. A novice DM can't really ever prep enough (and an experienced DM knows he can't ever over prep), and a really new DM should have at least that many notes per session on top of using a published adventure as a basis.

If you are trying to teach a new DM, it's better to err on the side of teaching them to prepare more than err on the side of teaching them to wing it more.

 

[Celebrim]

But, if you step back and look at the basic format here, it could be condensed way, way down for personal game session notes. For example, instead of having canned speeches for NPC's, you could point form a couple of notes and move on.

If you look closely, he's varying between canned speeches and short notes. Canned speeches are appropriate when you have to get the wording of something exactly right, either to set a scene properly or to give a hint or to produce a particular deception.

Canned speeches are also very good tests. I don't know how many times I've made a note regarding what sort of things were going to be talked about that lacked specifics, and then in the middle of the session discovered that improvising the thing was far harder than it sounded. I might write a note like, "Bob insults Jim, provoking Jim to draw a sword on him.", only to discover that a truly appropriate venomous insult based on Bob's character knowledge of Jim wasn't easy to improvise. Starting a can speech is a good way of testing whether you are going to be able to improvise smoothly.

One thing I admire about Rodney's prep is I tested in my head his conversation notes versus his canned speeches, and I think he's right. Pretty much every where he just left a note regarding what would be said or talked about is fairly easy to improvise, which means his canned speeches - which are usually pretty intricate - are probably exactly the subset of ideas that needed elaboration.

 

[Krypter]

Wow. That is overkill. I have 1 page of notes per session, max.