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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5246689" data-attributes="member: 82106">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.</blockquote>

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