Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 6800770" data-attributes="member: 85870">It's not that there's any preconceived notion about what session prep should like.....it's that D&D gives you very little leeway to prep any other way because it's so stinkin' hard to prep encounters. Either you've got to pre-plan those encounters, or someone else has to, but for the most part "winging it" all the time probably isn't going to cut it. When the bulk of your prep time is spent deciding what can my enemies do in combat (i.e., building their stat sheet), there's far less time to care about what the enemies are doing in the game world, and build natural/realistic/coherent/sensible intentions and interplays between the NPCs and the game world.Typical prep for my Savage Worlds games now is 20 minutes, 30 minutes tops. "What happened last time?" (Decide how the NPCs and world react and frame the scenes forward accordingly)"Is there anyone or any place they're likely to interact with? (Build a short, 2-3 paragraph sketch of what those things are). That's it. If I'm absolutely certain that they're going to have a combat with an NPC, I may take 5 minutes and sketch out their basic stats. But in Savage Worlds, that's literally all it takes---5 minutes.If there's an easier system to prep encounters for on the fly than Savage Worlds, I've yet to see it. The end result of all of this is that you can keep almost everything else fluid. There's no need to railroad, or plan out 15 sessions in advance. Set up the current scene, adjudicate what happens, do some quick calculating what the "spin off" effects are, and send the party forward to the next scene, and just see what happens. Your "grand plot" is little more than a vague set of basic ideas, tied to NPC motivations.This is the greatest thing in the world, because you can apply "just in time" pre-authoring to nearly any situation, and to the players it feels like a natural outreach of what they've already done. And in my experience, this keeps everyone at the table highly engaged.Pretty much this.To me this line of thinking is very much tied to the entire notion of "pre-authoring" to begin with. "Where's the plot? How are the PCs supposed to follow it? And if they get off of it, are they supposed to get back on it or not?"Scene framing approaches don't really follow this line of thinking at all. Scene framing approaches say, "You're this character, framed in the fiction this way, with these goals/responsibilities/obligations. Here's what you understand is going on around you. Where do you want to go, and what do you want to accomplish when you get there?" Lather, rinse, repeat. When I'm running a campaign, I literally have NO IDEA what's going to happen, or how it will end. NONE. For all I know the BBEG's might actually win . . . or maybe the PCs decide after killing the BBEG that they kind of liked the cut of his jib, and decide to finish what he started. Who knows? <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>

Verification