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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Woas" data-source="post: 4742187" data-attributes="member: 16317">Here's my little story.When I first starting playing D&D (D&D 3.0, Thomas the human cleric of St. Cuthbert!<img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/glasses.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt="B-)" title="Glasses    B-)" data-shortname="B-)" />) I had a DM that was totally into the build-as-you-play/no prep mentality. It was horrible. And frustrating. We would be attacked by random monsters at night for no reason other than because it was in the book. Towns would just spring up out of nowhere. When asked, all the towns were named, "Uhhhhhhh.... [insert name of real life local suburb]". It was bad no prep/improv to it's finest but at the time, being so new to all this I couldn't see it as that.Then I became the DM for the group and I vowed to not run games like that. So what did I do? Jumped on the pendulum and rode it hard the complete opposite way. Oh I went all out. Hand drawn poster maps of the continent... detailed histories of imaginary fairy people... custom deities... dress codes... heraldic symbols for known families...All that work.. and it was a LOT of work (especially the lovely hand drawn maps which I kept) would be thrown at a bunch of late teen/early 20 something dudes and it would just completely get wasted on all of them. I don't know... four, six, ten campaigns I tried out this way? Nope, didn't like that last slew of information? Want more wizardry this time around? Riiiippp start again, see ya in a month with my new creation. This one too hard to follow? Riiiippp start again...So I did this for like 4-5 years then like some sort of movie scene I read one sentence of GM Advice and it was like the skies opened and I saw the way. The piece of advice was from Ray Winninger's "Dungeoncraft" Essays. It was Rule 1 of Dungeoncraft: Never create more than you must or need.So that's how I started the next campaign after the previous prep-zilla failed yet again and it instantly became the most successful games I'm ran.And that's it. That's my answer. I would tell any novice GM 10 out of 10 times, "Never create more than you must or need."</blockquote>

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