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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kzach" data-source="post: 5300314" data-attributes="member: 56189">My game prep involves several stages.Firstly, I daydream a lot. Walking to the shops, or travelling on the trains or busses, or just lying down at home, I dream up scenarios and plots and NPC's and traps and tricks and whatever I can think of. These are generally pretty random ideas but sometimes I'll string them together into basic plot outlines.This stage is, by a long-shot, the most important because without fuel, you can't light a fire.Secondly, I think about the players and try to think about what they'll enjoy doing. This hardly ever works since most of the time I don't know my players very well but regardless, I think it's an important step. So using all the ideas I've come up with, I pull from the basket and connect dots to players and their characters.Thirdly, I'll break all of the above down into what I think is most likely to happen. For instance, I trust that if I say, "Orcs have raided this village and the village leader begs for your help saying he can only pay with his beautiful daughter's hand in marriage," that the PC's will go fight orcs. That, and I'll have to hand-wave a marriage night 'cause all RPG players are juvenile, no matter what age they are.Fourthly, I then pick and choose all the monsters and put them into likely groups that roughly equal an encounter's worth of trouble. Same with traps and whatnot. I try and think of likely encounters and scenarios where each group might be used but other than that, once I've got all their stats in a prepared format (I use index cards to help track initiative and deaths and conditions), I try to think of which treasure parcels might be most appropriate for each encounter and which there'll be none or several parcels.Lastly, I write up a cheat sheet. This is a point-form reminder note about the major things I think should be accomplished during the session or that I want to bring up during the session. These are generally pretty broad goals or themes or ideas I can adapt to the situation that plays out at the table. A for instance would be something like, "Frank's halfling pissed off the guards last session, make sure they get payback," or "Pete's dragonborn wants to track down his birth mother, drop a clue or two somewhere in the session," or "The BBEG is recruiting local humanoid tribes, put signs in amongst loot and captives, etc. that point towards this," etc.One theme you might notice in all of the above is that I'm not doing anything terribly specific. I plan ahead for what I think is most likely to happen given the clues and hooks I've put out and I try to steer the PC's in that direction, but ultimately I'm prepared for whatever they might come up with or attempt. Often what I'll find is that the ideas I had in the initial daydreaming sessions serve as a back-up when the PC's go off the rails and do something totally unanticipated.Again, if you don't have fuel for the fire of the imagination, then you're going to be left out in the cold <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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