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Message: <blockquote data-quote="redrick" data-source="post: 7322512" data-attributes="member: 6777696">It's a pretty broad question that hits on a lot of different areas of design and prep, which is why I quibble about the definition.When I design adventure areas, my goals are:* Provide consistency, both story-wise (who are those altars to?) and geography-wise (how did we go down to flights of stairs and end up on the roof?). I can improv a small, tightly contained adventure area (say a bungalow), but I might get lost trying to build a more complex setting on the fly.* Originality and quality. Improv falls back a lot on tried and true tropes. By designing something ahead of time, I can get ideas through research on Wikipedia, roll on random tables, steal ideas and settings from published adventures in my collection, and, most importantly, discard the bad ideas that pop into my head in favor of the better ideas that come later.* Maintain a world that extends beyond the immediate POV of the PCs. I want PCs to feel like the main characters, but I don't want it to feel like the world is constantly being ordered around them. I want a world where there is something different behind Door #1, Door #2 and Door #3 and I know what that is without knowing what the players are going to do.There are other occasional concerns, like wanting to use a pretty map that is drawn ahead of time, which was a big driver when I played on Roll20 with line-of-sight and fog of war, but less so now when I mostly just draw stuff out for the players on sheets of blank letter paper.But design should also be flexible. Ideally, I want to be able to seamlessly mix my pre-determined elements with elements that arise at the table, because the players can take me in directions that I would never have gone with my graph paper, room keys and wikipedia entries, and I want to be prepared to go in those directions. So, for instance, I would never prep a town the way Gygax prepped Hommlet. I might have one or two houses laid out, and then I might have a list of a few other "note-worthy" NPCs with their role and possibly one or two other descriptions, and then I'd allow the rest to fill in as the adventure progressed. My understanding is that this is more or less the standard approach to RPG adventure prep these days.</blockquote>

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