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

[Ralif Redhammer]

On paper, I probably split 60-40% in favor of planning to improvising. I always deliberately leave myself holes in my session outline that I will have to improvise through. One thing I read years ago that stuck with me is that when we plan a session in advance and when we improvise, we draw from different sources. What we come up with on the spot, when we have to think fast, is different from what we come up with when we have time to mull it over and plot. But when you rely solely on one of the other, you can find yourself going to the same well one too many times. So I try to make sure I have a mix of both when I'm running a session.

 

[KYRON45]

I plan until my players ruin the plan. Then i adlib until i forget what it was i libbed. Then i go back to see where we were in my plan. Then i eat what's left of the chips and then i take nap.

Then when next week comes around I ask someone for a recap....and i just go with what they say.

 

[payn]

I’m a planner and part of the plan is to be flexible with my adventures. The key is to be broad in approach but specific with the characters involved. The tighter the plan the less player agency is involved and that I want to avoid.

 

[Celebrim]

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.

No. I'm too arrogant for that. Nothing I have is publishable or currently formatted to publishable quality, but I like it and just like the wild dream were for no reason whatsoever, someone picks me without any prior experience to work on the Dungeon & Dragon's cartoon reboot (my character introduction for Sheila and Bobby is fire if I could get shoplifting through the censors) there is this part of me that looks at my bounty hunter campaign and is like, "This would be better than The Mandalorian". Of course, I would absolutely blow the budget for a TV show, so there is that. One thing ttRPGs definitely do is big scale at low cost.

The last time I tried to turn my notes into something someone else could use and I wouldn't be embarrassed to show them it took me far for too long revising and filling out half-filled entries. That was the notes for running I3 Pyramid in 3.0e D&D, which ended up being more than twice the page count of the original adventure. As someone else noted, there is a huge difference in labor in getting 1000 words usable for yourself and usable for someone else. I got a post published by EnWorld at one point, and I absolutely was mortified that my stream of consciousness was going to be held up as anything to publish.

Your page counts are bit higher than what I actually have. 40K is about 80 pages IIRC (single spaced, usually 10 pt font but 9 pt for stat blocks). And of course, stat blocks are often redundant - storm troopers show up in multiple adventures, and I prefer to have a stat block right there in the encounter (though sometimes I consolidate into a "forces" entry with a description and stat blocks for what a faction has available when I can't know ahead of time necessarily when or where encounters will happen). But yeah, I have a lot of pages.

I was a player in a campaign in college that did have over 1600 pages of notes (my own character sheet ran around 80 pages front and back, once it listed all henchmen, retainers, hirelings, maps of buildings owned, libraries of books owned, ships that I owned and the stat blocks for the officers of the ships, etc.) and among other things the DM had seven sentence NPC entries for like 1000 named NPCs, and my most recent D&D campaign probably hit that level or because the "Player's Handbook" for that campaign was 600 pages in MS Word and there was probably 2 or 3 times as many adventure notes as I have for this Star Wars campaign.

 

[Celebrim]

I plan until my players ruin the plan. Then i adlib until i forget what it was i libbed. Then i go back to see where we were in my plan. Then i eat what's left of the chips and then i take nap.

Then when next week comes around I ask someone for a recap....and i just go with what they say.

I can relate. The past year it's been hard to meet every other week as was our usual habit, and as such we had a lot of problems with everyone forgetting what had happened. But one of the players has without prompting taking it on themselves to write up a 3-4 paragraph recap so that we can all get back on page, because the players kept forgetting clues that they'd found. It's very helpful for everyone. It lets me pick up right where things left off, and it means the players all have their memories jogged without me having to prompt them - which in the past had had huge fails where I accidentally revealed something the players hadn't actually figured out yet.