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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Harr" data-source="post: 4228931" data-attributes="member: 47190">I think you have very solid and good ideas for what you want your book to be.If you can make a system to offer up ideas that can be either 'strung-together' or 'scrambled'  equally well, you will hit the bullseye, definitely. I agree that the all-at-once bit could be something relatively unique to my group.I don't seek to use player opinions in the prep process... only in actual play. I don't really consider myself as using any 'indie' concepts in my game, either. Looking back, this is the supposed "system" I've ended up falling into: - Spend a lot of time in my head coming up with a suitably complex starting situation (just in my daydreaming-time throughout the day, at work, in the shower, etc. I don't count this as actual prep time). I don't actually write any of it down, just hold it in my head. - Spend 15-30 minutes coming up with 4-8 cool-feeling encounters or challenges following the TRAP factors, relating in general to the situation. I write these down, 1 encounter per page in a noteboook.That would be prep. Game would be more or less: - Start out by describing my complex starting situation. No roleplaying here, just me describing stuff as it is, everything that's happened to get things to the state they are in now. Players ask whatever they like or they think their characters have a right to know. In general it resembles more of a questions and answers session. This is just the intro, takes about 10 minutes. - Once we have the 'situation' laid out and understood, I just ask, 'so considering all this, what do you wanna do?' switch to roleplaying mode, and let them run loose. I improvise EVERYTHING, maps, locations, descriptions, NPCs, that isn't an actual XP-dispensing 'encounter'. - Then every once in a while, when I gague the timing to be right, I'll simply and invisibly 'toss in' one of my prepared encounters, adjusting the fluff to whatever the situation in the game happens to be at the moment. If one of my encounters is say a trap, and the players decided to walk off into the forest, my trap gets its fluff transformed into vines and poison thorns, while if they delved into a dungeon, maybe it becomes ropes and steel spikes. And so on. - I try to save the biggest encounter for last, when I know game time's running out.That's it.. and I do realize it may be very far from what a lot of people consider D&D to be like, still all my players and I consider ourselves to be 100% traditional, dice-rolling, power-tripping, kill-monsters-take-their-stuff-and-sell-it D&D gamers. What I do I do because it works, for us... for me it's either I prep it FAST or I might as well not prep anything at all.Without 'getting into it' as that would derail everything, I simply agree 100% with every word you wrote here <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Anyway, hope some of that helps a bit more, from someone who's been forced into the 15-minute prep-slot by necessity more than anything else.</blockquote>

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