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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="airwalkrr" data-source="post: 6615057" data-attributes="member: 12460">I don't need prep aside from describing the setting for the campaign, which is usually a published campaign setting or variant thereof (over the last 10 years it's been My Eberron or My Greyhawk). I get to know the setting well enough that I can improvise stories and NPCs to my players' delight. One of the first things I get to know intimately in recent editions of the game is that table in the DMG that shows approximate AC, hp, to hit, damage, etc. for each CR so that I can recall this table off the top of my head to create reasonable challenges for my players off-the-cuff. Although I usually don't do it out of a sense of laziness as the OP describes. Rather, I see the players interested in pursuing an aspect of a story that I hadn't anticipated. This happened to me often enough that the details I wrote up for dungeons and adventures ahead of time became more and more vague as time went on. I focus now on a cast of characters, an NPC villain or two, and some sort of climactic event (which is mutable depending on what direction I feel will be most exciting for the story).In my current campaign I've been dropping hints about various incarnations of triad cults that have something to do with a doomsday scenario, something that fits into the draconic Prophecy. And it seems many factions are working to try and manipulate this event to their own ends. So far all the PCs know for a fact is that they witnessed an earthquake which caused a scar to open up in Xen'drik and that some terrible claw momentarily lashed out of that fissure before it closed back up. Something has awakened in Khyber, but they don't know what and are trying to figure it out. The truth is, I don't know either. It could be an Overlord, a Rakshasa Rajah, Tiamat, maybe the Tarrasque. But as we get closer to Doomsday, certain things will get ruled out until I have a pretty good idea of what I want it to be. And along the way, I run a lot of the campaign from the seat of my pants. But my players don't actually know that. I pretend like I've got every contingency planned out and ad lib as necessary.So yea, I fake it all the time.</blockquote>

Verification