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="Rel" data-source="post: 5387848" data-attributes="member: 99">It's interesting that you say this.  Historically I tend to fall toward the center of the bell curve in terms of preparation I think.  But for my one shot games at GenCon or the NC Game Days I tended to do a lot more preparation.I think that was for a few reasons.  It was easier to do more prep because my one-shots tend to be a bit more "railroady" in terms of how the action would unfold (as I think most such games are and should be if you only have 4 hours to get it done).  And I also knew that I'd be running the same game more than once so it was worth investing extra effort into the preparation.Lately however I have decided to go in the opposite direction when running systems that are fairly simple (Basic D&D and Old School Hack) where I will simply make up an adventure on the fly based on the composition of characters at the table.  I've found this to be a fun challenge and the feedback I've gotten from the players is that they've enjoyed it a great deal (some have challenged the notion that I hadn't prepared the games in advance).One principle difference between these two styles of game preparation is that in the heavy prep style I was using pre-generated PC's (which of course matches the expectations you'd have for regular campaign play) whereas in the no-prep games the PC's were generated at the table thanks to the quick chargen for the associated systems.  Also Old School Hack has a slot on the character sheet for "Adventuring Goal", which is something that individual character hopes to accomplish outside any "primary goal" of the party.What I did at the DC Game Day in October was to have them all tell me their Adventuring Goals and then I rather quickly wove together an adventure that would provide opportunities for each of them to complete these goals.  The players seemed to appreciate that and the game as a whole was quite fun.I'm not trying to brag and say that I'm a super-creative GM who can make up fun stuff on the fly (ok, maybe a little) but mostly I just think that doing that sort of thing gets easier with more experience because you have a longer history of games to pull ideas from.  I mean it's not as though ALL of my ideas are fresh ones!  Just ones that this batch of players haven't seen from me yet. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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