Which are you, The plan everything out GM, or the Ad lib?

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

I haven't run a game in a very long time, but when I did, I'd have to classify myself as a fairly hard-core/attention to detail world designer and adventure prepper. But when the game went down, I was a mad ad libber and dealt with the consequences later.

I feel seen.

You learn as a DM that no plot outline survives contact with a group of players.

 

[Clint_L]

I’m a heavy planner but I also plan with a lot of breadth so the players have tons of options. And I love using random encounter tables. So there winds up being lots of ad libbing, too.

 

[Celebrim]

Look, I am not calling you a liar...I don't buy it. Sorry.

Sure seems like you are.

I went to check. My shortest full adventure of the current campaign was "Plague of Lies". Notes for it are 24000 words (as measured by Microsoft Word). But my longest was the opening adventure of the campaign "The Dogfish" which has notes at over 90000 words.

But I did say a typical adventure.

"Wings of Terror" the current adventure has 42672 currently, but I need to write a few thousand words this week because the hunters elected to stay around for the planet wide celebrations of the transfer of power after they finished the job, and that going to get them facing the dark sorcerer Hergen Gia and the remnants of the terrorist organization they dismantled. Which means I need narration of the ceremonies, notes for the VIPs, and I should probably study up on the force power rules. Also there is still a chance that they'll slip up and run into the bounty hunters that are trying to collect on the bounty Narmo the Beefcake put on their heads.

I also have 18000 words in the document "Short Adventures on Chulzund" that contains two mini-adventures "The Decker Job" and "Thou Shalt Not Escape Calumny", but those were intended really for a single session each (though they took two, my players are overly cautious sometimes). And there is 5000 more words for "Adventures on Breska" for the time the players went to a pirate world seeking black market weaponry. That was a single session though.

So yes, the current campaign is probably in the 350,000 to 400,000 words length at this point once you add up the adventures and all the notes for brainstorming and house rules. I really ought to turn this into a job at some point.

And if you don't buy it, then oh well. There are plenty of people on the board who have asked me for help with content that can attest to how much joy I take in being creative and writing things down.

 

[loverdrive]

Look, I am not calling you a liar, but as a freelance writer and a novelist, I look at that number and I literally don't believe you. No one writes that much for EVERY adventure they run. 75K is a BIG book for most RPGs.

I don't buy it. Sorry.

75k words written to be read by people other than the author is a serious task. 75k words worth of disparate notes not intended for anyone other than the writer, often describing spurious things that would be edited out from a published text, is pretty trivial to write, especially over several months worth of gaming.

 

[jdrakeh]

Look, I am not calling you a liar, but as a freelance writer and a novelist, I look at that number and I literally don't believe you. No one writes that much for EVERY adventure they run. 75K is a BIG book for most RPGs.

I don't buy it. Sorry.

Indeed, I've written/developed entire games that clock in at about at 50k-ish words, including system and setting. I've never personally known anybody to generate that many words merely in notes for a typical RPG adventure. A short campaign maybe. But a single adventure? There are literally hundreds of published adventures (not notes, but entirely fleshed out adventures) that clock in at fewer words than that. I find it implausible that anybody is regularly generating 75k words in notes for running an adventure, but I guess anything is possible.

 

[Celebrim]

How so?

You know how in Battletech moving first is a handicap? Those with the initiative move second, so they can perfectly respond to the opponent's plans? Running an adventure without having anything written down and decided before hand is like always having the initiative. Your plans are nebulous, and you get to see what the players do first. You'd have to be inhumanly unbiased to not consciously or subconsciously be totally in control of when the NPCs fail if you do it that way. There would be a strong temptation to give the NPCs whatever resources you felt like giving them at the time.

Most of the time, I've found anyway, mapped out locations aren't needed as the minutae of the location isn't the point, the events that happen in said location are.

Right. Like a stage like I said. Change the drapes. And action. Though, you should try it with a map and minutiae sometime, just to see if it makes a real difference. You can't always have a map of course (though wouldn't that be a luxury, and it really makes me want to play in the real world), but a map and encounter locations do make a difference in the games feel - in its sense of space, solidity, and tangibility. You can't fake that.

Though nothing is so frustrating as making a map of a place and then having the PC's burn it down. So yeah, one of the dangers of high prep.

Can't I just decide something in a moment during play, and not tell the players immediately, is that somehow not a secret? As for being reliant on the players for content.and ideas, it depends. Sometimes I wholly riff off of, or outright steal, ideas from "overheard" conversations amongst the players. Alot of the time however, it's all just what I decide cause I'm the GM.

Right. We don't disagree on the facts. We just disagree about what they mean.

 

[dbm]

I prep outlines and then (like 90%+ of GMs) adapt to the players at the table.

I probably prep-to-play a ratio between 50% and 100%, so between 30 mins and an hour for each hour of gaming. Most of that is reading any adventure I am using, tailoring encounters to the group, writing down headline stats and page numbers to reference in combat, and some time identifying / building maps assets from my collection of map books and tiles.

My notes themselves are pretty sparse - I use a mind map to capture the main NPCs and events that I am anticipating coming up.

ETA: I don‘t have an extensive set of minis but one of my group does, so I will ‘put in an order’ for sets of minis to bring to the session. So needing to know we will be likely encountering lizard men or orcs is important to know, but I always ask for a range of minis rather than specifics. It does ‘spoil’ what is happening a little but we don’t play ‘menagerie’ games very often so the opposition often isn’t a massive secret.

 

[zarionofarabel]

You know how in Battletech moving first is a handicap? Those with the initiative move second, so they can perfectly respond to the opponent's plans? Running an adventure without having anything written down and decided before hand is like always having the initiative. Your plans are nebulous, and you get to see what the players do first. You'd have to be inhumanly unbiased to not consciously or subconsciously be totally in control of when the NPCs fail if you do it that way. There would be a strong temptation to give the NPCs whatever resources you felt like giving them at the time.

How would having it written down beforehand change anything though? Isn't it just as easy to change your preplanned stuff to "help" the NPC as it is to just make up an advantageous situation on the fly? I don't see how having stuff prepared ahead of time would have any effect on whether or not a NPC can fail as a GM can easily change whatever they want whenever they want. Prep or not, if the GM wants the NPC to win, they can, simple as that. That's really the reason I don't preplan stuff, because when I did long ago nine times out of ten it either got completely bypassed or needed to be changed anyway, so why take the time to prep, just wing it. Also, I'm pretty sure I'm biased towards my NPCs losing, cause that's mostly what happens.

Right. Like a stage like I said. Change the drapes. And action. Though, you should try it with a map and minutiae sometime, just to see if it makes a real difference. You can't always have a map of course (though wouldn't that be a luxury, and it really makes me want to play in the real world), but a map and encounter locations do make a difference in the games feel - in its sense of space, solidity, and tangibility. You can't fake that.

I'm pretty sure I do that through verbal description, by describing the space as the PCs would experience existing within it. Sometimes I will quickly sketch a very rough map of a place if the finer points of the space are an absolute need to know. Though doing so beforehand would be difficult as I rarely know where an important location might be, or when I will need said location.

Though nothing is so frustrating as making a map of a place and then having the PC's burn it down. So yeah, one of the dangers of high prep.

Yeah, PCs destroying cool stuff I've prepped was the cusp of the reason why I decided to go the "ad lib" route. That, and because I am a self taught GM (1988) from a little town where no one had any idea what a TTRPG was. I literally had no idea that having a prepared plotline for the players to follow was even a thing until I had been running improv campaigns for several years. The few times I tried prepping stuff always turned out to be a complete waste of time as I ended up having to improv everything anyway, hence why I do it that way now.

Right. We don't disagree on the facts. We just disagree about what they mean.

I'm not sure I follow.

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

I haven't run a game in a very long time, but when I did, I'd have to classify myself as a fairly hard-core/attention to detail world designer and adventure prepper. But when the game went down, I was a mad ad libber and dealt with the consequences later.

I've recently subscribed to Lao Tzu's newsletter, but Helmuth von Moltke the Elder had his hand on my shoulder in those days.

I mean... I remember one 1E game. The party was pretty low level... maybe 2 or 3. There was a planned encounter with some equivalently levelled villains; a milestone on the path to the next phase of the plot. One of them was a gnome illusionist (because 1E). On the spot, I decided that he cast some illusion of a black dragon ominously popping up behind his crew, without thinking through the consequences. Mostly because I was 13 years old, but partially based on the way these guys and girls had previously blown through encounters, I was sure I had achieved DM nirvana: added tactical challenge that these murder hobos would ultimately solve and blow through, followed by high-fives, cuz BLACK DRAGON.

Well... they surprised me and responded as actual human beings would: WTFBBQ BLACK DRAGON!!! To their credit, it was a tactical retreat instead of a reenactment a horror movie trope ('hiding in the closet' or whatnot). But my railroad had suddenly gone completely off the rails.

This was my first experience with off-the-cuff DMing. The campaign had started as one party, navigating a section of the maps of my copy of the Greyhawk boxed set. I had carefully expanded and exhaustively detailed the immediate starting area (a couple of villages in the Grand Duchy of Geoff). In the previous session, my group had suddenly expanded to a dozen players for I can't remember what reason. I made a call to split this crew into two groups that I would DM in separate sessions. They both decided to roam... let's call this 'accidental West Marches'. It was pretty awesome... but my Grand Duchy of Geoff villagers never had their story arcs completed sadly.

This encounter with the gnome illusionist was the first one outside of my curated world. What a punch in the face.

My off-the-cuff response by the way was to have them run across a stray bandit on their escape route. After tucking their tail between their legs, their gander was up, so I used my newly minted DM improvisitonal skills to detect this and present them with an easy challenge: a lone bandit who was late to the ambush. Spilled the beans on the location of the bandit camp/next campaign objective. Crisis averted.

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

Sure seems like you are.

I went to check. My shortest full adventure of the current campaign was "Plague of Lies". Notes for it are 24000 words (as measured by Microsoft Word). But my longest was the opening adventure of the campaign "The Dogfish" which has notes at over 90000 words.

But I did say a typical adventure.

"Wings of Terror" the current adventure has 42672 currently, but I need to write a few thousand words this week because the hunters elected to stay around for the planet wide celebrations of the transfer of power after they finished the job, and that going to get them facing the dark sorcerer Hergen Gia and the remnants of the terrorist organization they dismantled. Which means I need narration of the ceremonies, notes for the VIPs, and I should probably study up on the force power rules. Also there is still a chance that they'll slip up and run into the bounty hunters that are trying to collect on the bounty Narmo the Beefcake put on their heads.

I also have 18000 words in the document "Short Adventures on Chulzund" that contains two mini-adventures "The Decker Job" and "Thou Shalt Not Escape Calumny", but those were intended really for a single session each (though they took two, my players are overly cautious sometimes). And there is 5000 more words for "Adventures on Breska" for the time the players went to a pirate world seeking black market weaponry. That was a single session though.

So yes, the current campaign is probably in the 350,000 to 400,000 words length at this point once you add up the adventures and all the notes for brainstorming and house rules. I really ought to turn this into a job at some point.

And if you don't buy it, then oh well. There are plenty of people on the board who have asked me for help with content that can attest to how much joy I take in being creative and writing things down.

Wow!!! That's pretty wild. 40K-75k words is 160-300 pages of notes according to standard words per page! Your entire campaign is ~1600 pages long! That is amazing bookkeeping. Do you publish this anywhere? I'd be interested to scroll through these campaign notes.