Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="SlyFlourish" data-source="post: 9679942" data-attributes="member: 54840">I have so many thoughts about this idea. I think it's dead on that there are actually several hobbies bound up in TTRPG prep and play. Miniature collection. Terrain construction and painting. Drawing. Mapping. And so on. All of it can be great.One of my favorite bits of prep-play is just thinking about my game. I put myself to sleep tonight almost every night thinking about what's happening in the next game I'm going to run. Where are the characters? What do they see? What are the villains up to? I have these little worlds reacting to the last actions of the characters. I play little scenes in my head of the villains doing things the players will never see, but that's fine! It lets the world live a bit more and some of it manifests at the table. The players say "wow, that was happening and we didn't even know it".I think its one of the biggest benefits of this hobby – we can just sit and think about worlds and what's going on in them and the results can be practical. We can use them. Not all the time, but sometimes.I think one area where things can clash, though, and I see this with a lot of new GMs I talk to, is when the GM is super into a world and its background and story and the players just aren't. Players don't owe us the same level of interest in our worlds that we do. They dig their characters. They want to have a good time at the table. They want to do awesome stuff. My friend Enrique, the NewbieDM, long ago said something along the lines of "they don't care about that temple on the hill, what gods it has, or how ten thousand years ago a great war was fought there. They care about what's happening in town right now". I'm paraphrasing but that stuck with me.So it can be awesome to dream up worlds but we can't always assome anyone cares but us.I do think there's some basic guidelines we can understand when we're dreaming up our worlds and their various movements and still make it practical for the table and that's in avoiding dreaming up plots and stories that require the characters to do something. Instead, we think about the world and its inhabitants and how they move around, sometimes reacting to the actions of the characters, but let the players drive the actual actions of their characters and then see where the world moves next.</blockquote>

Verification