NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6801331" data-attributes="member: 42582">This has already attracted responses from  [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] and  [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION]. Here's my go at it.In my 4e game, I typically have antagonist stat blocks written up. But when/how they appear, or even whether they appear, is something that I decide during the course of play. For non-combat challenges, an advance write-up is not normally necessary.About half the combat encounters involve maps drawn up in advance, based on knowledge that the PCs are heading to (or are in) a certain place; the others involve maps drawn up impromptu.Back when I was running RM and before that AD&D, similar principles applied. (In both games stat blocks tend to be simpler than 4e.)As far as selling me prep is concerned, I am happy to pay for statblocks, good maps and good encounters. I'll also pay for good "general" backstory (eg the stuff about Lolth and Torog in 4e's Underdark book; the campaign background in the original OA book; etc). But intricately pre-authored plot of the AP type is of no use to me. Likewise fetch quests, McGuffins and all the other "filler"-type stuff that makes up an AP.Who has stipulated that?What innerdude says here resonates strongly with me. There is no "side plot" because there is no "main plot" to which it forms an aside. The mace became relevant to play at all only because one of the players (i) decided that, some 14 years before the campaign started, at the point at which his PC had to abandon the tower that is now ruined due to an orc attack, his PC had forged but then left behind a nickel-silver mace, and (ii) decided that one of his PC's goals now was to recover that mace.And I certainly don't see why the PCs should run across things that have nothing to do with their current goals. I'm not a great believer in filler.If you don't know that it's a side plot til after the fact, then no GMing decisions can be made on the basis of the side plot/main plot distinction. Which is to say that the notion of side plot has no work to do from the point of view of GMing techniques.The same goes for BBEG, McGuffin etc.Like anything else - you make it up as is needed, and/or as seems appropriate, as the game unfolds.And apropos of this:If the check had succeeded, the PCs would have found the mace they were looking for.The backstory about the brother would still have been up for grabs: you can't establish an ingame fact about the brother via a successful Scavenging check. It would require a successful Balrog-wise or Great Masters-wise or Brothers-wise check, or something along those lines.EDIT: Another example of NPC backstory authoring from my BW game.As I set out in <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?473620-Keep-on-the-Borderlands-shenanigans" target="_blank">this post</a>, the PCs in my BW game think they have uncovered a death cult priest. And as far as my pre-prep is concerned, I am inclined to think that they have also. (I had written up the death cult priest one day catching the train to work.)But nothing definitive about the status of the priest has been established in play, and so the whole thing is still up for grabs. If the accused priest's champion wins the trial by combat, I might even decide that her story is true!These things don't need to be decided in advance.</blockquote>

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