Minimizing Prep Time - Forked from "DMing: from fun to work "

[Noumenon]

It would be interesting to play in some of your one-hour-prepped games. I imagine I still wouldn't believe it was possible to create what you did in an hour -- I'd just be jealous, like when I see somebody write a 1000-word blog essay and say "oh by the way this took twenty minutes."

 

[Celebrim]

It would be interesting to play in some of your one-hour-prepped games.

I would too. I have very high respect for the level of DMing skill at EnWorld (evidenced by story hours and some of your published works), but I also have very low respect for the average 'improv' DM based on my experience with them. I would love to see how some of this plays out because my past experiences bias me heavily against all claims of DMing excellence based on 'winging it'. In my experience with DMs who think they can 'wing it':

1) Challenges tend to scale directly to character skil and player action. Any clever plot by the player tends to create an improvised counter-plot or counter-measure by the villains. Creativity is actually punished. Traps tend to exist when searched for, but not when they aren't so throughness and caution is actually punished. Defensive magic comes into existance when players try to solve problems with spells. High level gaurds tend appear in response to the presence of fighters and so forth. You are better off pretending to be stupid than upping the stakes by being clever.
2) DMs tend to create the plot twist based on the player speculation that they favor. Thus, the players tend to get what they expect to get. Twists are created as the players invent them. The DM does very little work, and as a result does very little to surprise the player.
3) Objects and clues have no significance or meaning at the time that they are found. Significance and meaning is added to them later as the DM improvises. As a result, the players are effectively on rails - even if the tracks are being laid only a few minutes before they get on them. There is no real puzzle solving, per se. Riddles, puzzles, investigative problems, and so forth have no real depth if they are even provided for which is doubtful, because there isn't really ever a situation where you are really putting 'two and two together' and solving something. Secret doors exist because you looked for them, not as means of altering the flow the plot. NPCs gather backstory as needed and the game has no history. The evidence of no past action exists in even a simple form, much less as a wide web of effects and threads that can be picked up on.
4) Tactical situations tend to be virtually non-existant. Most encounters occur on open flat terrain or in stock rectangular rooms.
5) Maps tend to be very simple and predictable, or even non-existant as its just easier to run combats in the street or wilderness or in large halls that are effectively outdoors. Exploration is pointless because you always find what the DM wants you to find (or at best a random encounter which is actually preferable), and nothing less and nothing more, and sometimes you don't even find that. Sometimes you are just finding what you imagined you'd find and the DM is just queueing off your imagination entirely (random tables would be far preferable).
6) The game has no meaningful cosmology or depth of setting because there was no world building. The game world has no history, no philosophy, no meaningful religion beyond 'light' and 'dark', no meaningful ethics beyond 'white hats' and 'black hats', and villains are simply 'things you kill'. And that's actually the best case scenario, since in many cases the improv DM thinks he's being really clever and mature by making everything the same drab shade of gray (or more 'mature' still, the same shade of black).

In short, I get frustated with the sorts of games for the very same reason I get frustrated with TV series that are improvised in the same way - Lost, X-Files, The 4400, new Battlestar Galactica, etc. - with no clear plan from the beginning but the soon self-evidently false promise that the 'Truth is Out There'.

Now, I'm not saying that 'winging' it isn't something that ought to be in the DM's tool bag. I very much agree with those that say that lists of names and random tables are some of a DMs best friends, because everyone has to be able to wing it some. And I've improved a few sessions in my time as well, but usually based of some past brainstorming that never got formally written down. Every once in a while a complex plot complete with events and locations storms into my brain in an instant fully formed like Athena, and I have more ideas that I can write down, but thats rare. I have the impression that some of you can do that all the time, and if its a skill, I sure want to learn it.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Celebrim, that's a very insightful critique of the 'winging it' style. The plus side of points 1-3, that the world varies dependent upon PC actions, is that the players have a lot of power over the game. Both the big-sandbox/high-prep GM and the seat-of-his-pants GM give the players a large amount of power, but the latter does it with a lot less work. It's the medium-prep GM who can't wing it whose games are most railroaded.

There may well be no dip in quality when the players effectively create the what's-going-on rather than the GM. More than once I've seen 'wingers' say that the quality improves as a result. However you're right to say a downside is that the players can't be surprised.

The ideal is probably a mix of prep and winging it.

 

[Crothian]

I think you are not seeing one of the most important item in the improvising DM's arsenal: experience and knowledge. No improvising DM is just making everything up at the moment. They rely on past experiences and past games to aid them.

 

[Meatboy]

I can see where Celebrim is coming from on the whole winging it thing. I winged a one off last weekend and pretty much most of what was posted went down. On the plus side the players had fun but I wouldn't want to have to do that every week. It would were out pretty quick.

As for something that makes my games go faster. Places the PCs into some kind of organization a mercenary unit/ special investigation team or something similar. I find that this will minimize the whole "how did you meet" and gives disparate characters a reason to work together if not exactly trust each other.

 

[pawsplay]

I think you are not seeing one of the most important item in the improvising DM's arsenal: experience and knowledge. No improvising DM is just making everything up at the moment. They rely on past experiences and past games to aid them.

Agreed. My advice on winging it is: Don't wing it. When it is time to wing, it will wing itself.

Even now, I prefer to spent at least an hour and a half prepping between each session, when I can manage that.

 

[Janx]

I think what Celebrim is describing as bad improv-DMing is really "Oh-yeah-ism"

The trap doesn't exist until a PC looks for it.
If the PCs look for assassins, there's one there to be found.

Part of the improv behavior of creating complications to player actions is standard "writing" and DMing technique.

If the player said he wanted to run for Sheriff in the next election, a bad GM would say time passes and announce the election results (possibly randomly determined).

A good GM creates some complications to the goals so as to make it a challenge (and memorable).

Where that goes wrong in improv, is the PC sees a pretty simple and obvious goal, announces it, and suddenly the way is fraught with obstacles and ninjas. All because the player chose to go that way, the DM applies this principle in over-drive and makes the simple become hard.

this is "thwartism", where the GM can't let a single thing be simple, because that's how he generates his game content. It's over-doing it that's bad.

I use this technique. but I generally don't improv. I figure out the PCs goals (usually by asking the session before), and then I write content to present the opportunity that I expect the players to pursue, and that opportunity has challenges and such on the way.

The adventure then becomes how the PCs learn about these obstacles and overcome them. I don't generally make up new obstacles on the fly, so if the players have a really good idea, the task becomes simple. I may shuffle or re-use an obstacle if I feel it makes sense when they have simply chosen a different direction.

Thus, I may have a guard patrol in the main halls, so regardless of if the PCs go left or rigjht, they may run into the guards. Technically, I'm thwarting a left or right decision, but I maintain that wasn't a real choice anyway.

What I don't do, is bring in the guards when the PCs specifically take an action that would prevent alerting the guards.

So if the PCs go Left and tromp loudly, they'll run into guards. Even if they went Right instead. But if the PCs go quietly Left, they'll sneak past the guards. I might roll all this, or just determine it, it depends on the actual situation.

While I'm talking about Celebrim's point, this also touches on how I reduce prep-work. I try to deploy challenges that I have some leeway to redeploy differently in the session. This means less writing of "IF" blocks and planning, and fewer overall encounters I need to prep up.

Ideally, I figure out the players goals, and figure out how an Opportunity to pursue the goal is revealed (usually the first encounter or so in the game).

I then figure out all the people/monsters that I think will be encountered to pursue this goal, and the places I'll need.

I use random NPC, Monster, Treasure, Dungeon, Town generators as much as possible for this. So it's copy/paste or hyperlink (many of these tools use a Seed value, so you can hyperlink back to that exact roll-up).

With all this in place, I usually have enough notes to run a session off of Word on my laptop.

For my group of friends, we have the general meta-game rule that the party will bite the plothook. We also have a corollary, that the plothook must make sense for the party to bite, and must respect that the players have shortcut the process to reduce complexity for the GM. In short, I can't screw them over because I know they HAVE to bit the hook, whereas in a more sandboxy game, they'd have a large menu of choices.

The plus side is, I only need to prepare 1 solid plothook/opportunity (though sometimes I'll present multiple smaller hooks, and the bigger hook, because I think some multi-tasking make sense). I try to make each hook directly applicable to what the PCs goals are, so it is very natural for the PCs to choose to pursue it.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Here's my method for avoiding those common pitfalls:

1. Because of my "let the players lead" maxim, I never worry about players undoing some plot that I had thought of maybe 5 minutes ago. My usual mode of thought is "then what?" Okay, the players totally thwarted the necromancer's ritual without any of the drama I had planned. Then what?. Part of throwing out hooks like candy means that there's always a few dangling threads waiting in the wings to become relevant again. Players can have their victory, and the game goes on (though not with the big necromancer battle I had planned, but that's OK, the players get that victory).
2. I do take inspiration from my players, but when I do, I always add an additional twist. If the PC's suspect the viceroy might be behind the assassinations, sure, the viceroy might be behind the assassinations (if it's a good idea). But what's behind the viceroy? Why might he be doing that? What can I do to keep the players on their toes? Maybe the viceroy is seduced by a succubus. Maybe he's a werewolf. Maybe he's a doppelganger. Maybe he's actually got connections to the plane of shadow and was feeding a death cult of orcus. What else can this line of thought give me?
3. I don't have a plot in mind that the PC's can gradually uncover, generally, no. That doesn't mean that the details aren't significant. Generally the spontaneous ideas I have for big climaxes have to be worked toward gradually, and foreshadowed in advance. I don't know from puzzles (I dislike them myself, so I don't use them), but there's always more stories than there are adventures to explore them in. If I decide it's awesome to have a plague of deformed births, then that might foreshadow something, even if I'm not sure exactly what, or if the PC's ignore it. Or I might loose interest and it won't.
4. I struggle with maps, because I don't like grid combat. But in 3e, there were always cliffs and winds and tossing waves and rain and fire and frozen seas and a million and one exotic things happening that constantly affected the terrain of the battle, even if abstractly.
5. Again, always having more story ideas than what is currently being explored allows a lot of that. If the PC's go to some mountain pass somewhere that I've decided has nothing to do with one story, they'll find another one. I react to what they do (and, yes, random tables are my friend).
6. I love setting-hopping, so my settings tend to be tightly focused. I deal with questions of cosmology and history as matters of in-play material, rather than pre-prep. What do the characters actually know and experience? That's what I've got to know.

In general, the things that come to my mind are scenes. I work toward those scenes gradually, and I always have more scenes than I need to use in this chain of encounters. I let the players' choices decide which scenes get shown.

 

[GrimGent]

I could never run this but it sounds amazing and fun.

Out of the three playstyles suggested in the book, the first and most elementary one consists of just winging it all in a flurry of anime tropes "when you unexpectedly have some free time", perhaps for no longer than a few minutes, perhaps for an hour. (The second mode tends to follow a prepared schedule for a day as everyone goes about their business, often with more sedate random events based on the mood rather than the genre, while the third involves setting up traditional scenarios like in any other RPG and possibly no random events at all.) Familiarity with the source material helps, obviously.

Getting the game started in a hurry is made easier by the fixed "three Ms": play always revolves around the Master (the authority figure that the characters work for), the Mansion (the part of the setting where the bulk of the action takes place) and the Maids (the PCs themselves), although the details of what exactly those are can vary wildly. For example, for a less chaotic set-up the characters might be a cleaning squad of stormtroopers on the Death Star or apprentices of Merlin who pay for their magic lessons by performing chores around Camelot. Even then, using the random event charts can instantly overturn everything by, say, triggering World War III so that a modern-day world turns into a postapocalyptic wasteland. Improvisation on the fly is a necessity.

Of course, not every group would find the mad randomness or the idea of playing, well, anime maids entertaining, so there's a bit of player buy-in required. Personally, I tend to think of it as a cross between Teenagers From Outer Space and Paranoia.