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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 5099531" data-attributes="member: 710">I am not big on improvisation and this is one of the things that I feel I could stumble upon, too. From what I gathered about others that are better at this than me, I notice that it's not "improvisation out of nowhere".Experience helps a lot. Experience with DMing in general. Experience with your players (ability to anticapte the directions the ymight go, even if not always concious). Experience with the setting you play in.Experience with the game system (to come up with encounters and resolution for anything that might come up fast.)Preparation of the "right" kind. It's not necessarily about preparing specific encounters. But it helps to know things like: - Which NPCs are around?- What are their goals and personalities?- What is their relationship with or attitude towards the PCs, if any?This is important to "drive" a session. Another aspect is just being able to come up with something new on the spot, and here "generic" NPC traits can help, for example in form of a random table.It also is useful to have an idea of locations the PCs might visit - areas of interest, how can you get there."Sandbox" DMs often seem to have tables for random encounters depending on locations. Even if you don't like random encounters (I don't), tables of this type can give you idea what the PCs might encounter or what you could prepare.Obviously, the more experience overall you have, the more of this you will happen in some way anyway. The right type of preperation is not having specific "plots" in mind. "A happens, PCs do either B or C which leads to D or E". It's more about having all the ingredients of a plot and let it unfold depending on whether the PCs touch on it it or not. For example: Your city has a mayor, a merchant guild, and a thief's guild. The mayor dislikes the current leader of the merchant guild. The thief's guild is probably robbing merchants all around the city. There are warehouses around town belonging to the merchant's guild. There is a city hall. There is the mayor's private residence. There are some thief hideouts. There is the city watch and its main building and the 3 city gates. You don't have any grand plot of the thieves trying to rob something important or anything at this point, which the PCs have to engage. But that's one plot that you could probably come up pretty fast. If the PCs decide for some reason to contact the mayor, you might improvise something about them investigating some warehouses to prove illegal smuggling operations. (Even if you never thought of it before - naturally the merchants might have going on something like that! And if you think this merchant guild leader is not the type for it, maybe the mayor is setting him up. Or someone in his organization does it without his knowledge.). With your table of NPC traits, you might quickly improvise some shady merchant doing this, maybe plus a corrupt city guard working for him. If the PCs contact the merchant guild leader, he might be worried about some recent break-ins and ask the PCs for aid in exchange for their help.</blockquote>

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