Radiating Gnome
Adventurer
Previous entries in this series: (part 1 | part 2|part 3)
It happens like this: You prepare a whole session of adventuring on the island of lost souls, and when you start playing, the first thing your PCs do is decide to get the hell out of that scary haunted island and go back to town. All those great Scooby Doo references are going to stay in your notes and never see the light of day.
What we're trying to focus on in this series is how to Get Play Started Again – how to keep the game moving without resorting to a variety of railroading techniques.
We'll ignore some of the more obvious tactics – as DM, you could certainly move your island of lost souls into the basement of the tavern the PCs wind up in, and get right back onto your prepared content, but lets assume you're stuck with nothing and need a story fast.
Improvisation needs a Spark
Assuming that you're comfortable whipping up a quick map and faking your way through a few monster stat blocks, what you need most is some sense of what the PCs might end up dealing with.
Creativity is tricky stuff – often it works best when it's given a seed, or a limit of some sort. It's often a lot easier to come up with a plotline on the spot when you're given a prompt than it is without. so lets look at a few tools for getting those prompts:
Web
Mobile
You get the idea – I'm leaving plenty out. This list is very heavy on the iOS options, but there are many for android devices, too. And there are too many of these to really go into any in detail.
Pick a few, give them a try, and practice coming up with idea. Remember, you're going to get something that isn't tailored to fit D&D, or at least your situation, so you're going to have to squint to make things fit.
For example, lets go back to the example above -- PCs have skipped out of the scary haunted island and returned to their home base. As DM, I am fresh out of good ideas, so I go to one of my handy random generators. In this case, I got to the Writing Prompts. I get the following prompts: A very hot place / An IT guy / A Flatscreen TV / The smell of cookies baking
Now, I'm going to have to transpose some of those for my fantasy game and the seaport setting. I'll make the IT guy a shipwright or carpenter of some sort, and the flatscreen TV is a stage, or a collection of books. A few seconds of chewing on it and I think the hot place and the cookies baking go together -- the setting for this scene will be a bakery that caters to the ships -- they specialize in baking ships biscuits. It's a warehouse-sized kitchen, baking and barreling the hard tack. The head chef is the "IT Guy". He uses some magic to preserve and flavor the biscuits, but the bulk required makes that expensive.
That, at least, gives me an interesting setting, something I would probably not have thought of before. The loose end that I still have is the stage or library. If I can come up with a quick idea for how that fits into a bit of plot, I'll be golden.
Other Ideas: Callbacks
Rather than (or in addition to) ideas prompted by a random source of some sort, you should make heavy use of the campaign history to fill in story gaps.
Other Ideas: Mystery
Another thing you can do (sparingly) is give your players a mystery to solve. You don't need to know what the mystery is, just start giving them clues.
Think of it like some of the weird details in the early seasons of Lost. Drop a polar bear onto their tropical island and don't tell them why. Let them try to figure out why it's there.
Obviously, you can't do this all the time. Your players need to believe that there is a story behind the appearance of the polar bear. And there will be. But you don't need to know what that reason is right away. Get to the end of the play session and you can spend the next week coming up with a reasonable explanation for the appearance of the polar bear.
Pick Something Fast and Run With It
In the end, there are a ton of different ways that you can try to come up with story ideas quickly to get things moving again. What's important is to pick something and roll with it.
Remember, you're just trying to get out of the session -- you don't need to have a whole story arc instantly, and you don't need to know where things are going to end.
What are your favorite tools for inspiring stories/plots/ideas for your game?
It happens like this: You prepare a whole session of adventuring on the island of lost souls, and when you start playing, the first thing your PCs do is decide to get the hell out of that scary haunted island and go back to town. All those great Scooby Doo references are going to stay in your notes and never see the light of day.
What we're trying to focus on in this series is how to Get Play Started Again – how to keep the game moving without resorting to a variety of railroading techniques.
We'll ignore some of the more obvious tactics – as DM, you could certainly move your island of lost souls into the basement of the tavern the PCs wind up in, and get right back onto your prepared content, but lets assume you're stuck with nothing and need a story fast.
Improvisation needs a Spark
Assuming that you're comfortable whipping up a quick map and faking your way through a few monster stat blocks, what you need most is some sense of what the PCs might end up dealing with.
Creativity is tricky stuff – often it works best when it's given a seed, or a limit of some sort. It's often a lot easier to come up with a plotline on the spot when you're given a prompt than it is without. so lets look at a few tools for getting those prompts:
Web
- Seventh Sanctum This site's collection of generators is pretty much exhaustive.
- Donjon Another library of random generators you'll bite on hard.
- Squid.org even more random adventure generator coolness.
Mobile
- Brainstormer
- Fantasy Muse
- Name Wizard
- Writing Prompts (and others from Writing.com)
- [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Tony-Rudzki-The-Daily-Flash/dp/B0052OSTI4/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top"]The Daily Flash [/ame] (Android/Kindle HD)
- Story Dice or the spooky version
- Writer's Dice
- Story Forge Cards
- Story Cubes
- [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-AG1250-Once-Upon-Time/dp/1887801006"]Once upon a Time[/ame] deck
You get the idea – I'm leaving plenty out. This list is very heavy on the iOS options, but there are many for android devices, too. And there are too many of these to really go into any in detail.
Pick a few, give them a try, and practice coming up with idea. Remember, you're going to get something that isn't tailored to fit D&D, or at least your situation, so you're going to have to squint to make things fit.
For example, lets go back to the example above -- PCs have skipped out of the scary haunted island and returned to their home base. As DM, I am fresh out of good ideas, so I go to one of my handy random generators. In this case, I got to the Writing Prompts. I get the following prompts: A very hot place / An IT guy / A Flatscreen TV / The smell of cookies baking
Now, I'm going to have to transpose some of those for my fantasy game and the seaport setting. I'll make the IT guy a shipwright or carpenter of some sort, and the flatscreen TV is a stage, or a collection of books. A few seconds of chewing on it and I think the hot place and the cookies baking go together -- the setting for this scene will be a bakery that caters to the ships -- they specialize in baking ships biscuits. It's a warehouse-sized kitchen, baking and barreling the hard tack. The head chef is the "IT Guy". He uses some magic to preserve and flavor the biscuits, but the bulk required makes that expensive.
That, at least, gives me an interesting setting, something I would probably not have thought of before. The loose end that I still have is the stage or library. If I can come up with a quick idea for how that fits into a bit of plot, I'll be golden.
Other Ideas: Callbacks
Rather than (or in addition to) ideas prompted by a random source of some sort, you should make heavy use of the campaign history to fill in story gaps.
- PC backgrounds -- this is a perfect time for a face from one of the PCs pasts to reappear.
- Past sessions -- is there an old enemy or ally who might turn back up? Some unfinished business?
Other Ideas: Mystery
Another thing you can do (sparingly) is give your players a mystery to solve. You don't need to know what the mystery is, just start giving them clues.
Think of it like some of the weird details in the early seasons of Lost. Drop a polar bear onto their tropical island and don't tell them why. Let them try to figure out why it's there.
Obviously, you can't do this all the time. Your players need to believe that there is a story behind the appearance of the polar bear. And there will be. But you don't need to know what that reason is right away. Get to the end of the play session and you can spend the next week coming up with a reasonable explanation for the appearance of the polar bear.
Pick Something Fast and Run With It
In the end, there are a ton of different ways that you can try to come up with story ideas quickly to get things moving again. What's important is to pick something and roll with it.
Remember, you're just trying to get out of the session -- you don't need to have a whole story arc instantly, and you don't need to know where things are going to end.
What are your favorite tools for inspiring stories/plots/ideas for your game?
