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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8227634" data-attributes="member: 70468">“what is the point of GM's notes?”The point of my prep is to give me things to say. They’re a tool to help me improvise. I can wing it for everything, but if I do, there’s a good chance things will turn out too silly or inconsistent or just kind of flat. I spend time outside of sessions fleshing things out a little bit to improve the experience during the session. The prep has an amplifying effect.For example, my players told me last session they wanted to recruit retainers. I generated several (7), and I included a few statements (with details) on appearance and behavior and a few bullets of key info*. I had no idea how the PCs would go about recruiting, but this gave me tools to make the scenes interesting when they did meet some of the candidates.After the session, I was talking to one of my players about it, and he commented: “It felt like we ran into characters, as opposed to hired help or NPC templates.” This is one of the NPCs from the retainer recruitment scene. I randomly picked three of the retainers from my list, framed the scene with the help of my notes, and established the stakes: how many (if any) of these people do the PCs hire?It turns out the answer was two. They hired the fighter and the acrobat but not the illusionist (probably because the barbarian is weird about magic). At the end of the scene, after the bard gave Marie some money to buy better gear, she climbed out the window to leave. Nothing in my notes said that would happen, but it did because Marie is paranoid. My notes helped make the scene interesting.The whole session went like that. I had notes on the town, a map, the list of candidates, and a timeline of goings on in the town (to provide color mostly). Nothing else was planned. The first thing the PCs did was have a planning meeting to decide how they’re going to stage an attack on some ghouls using lots of flaming oil. That was something they just started doing without any prompt.[HR][/HR]* My notes were already trending towards this style, but they’ve been heavily influenced lately by the style Necrotic Gnome uses to key dungeons. For NPCs, I combine that with some ideas from the <a href="https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/37916/roleplaying-games/universal-npc-roleplaying-template" target="_blank">Alexandrian’s Universal NPC Roleplaying</a> template to get a nice and dense block of tools to help me run my NPCs.</blockquote>

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