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

[Clint_L]

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.

How many words is a typical game's worth of planning? Factoring in the prep materials specifically for the game and then averaging out the preliminary materials for that part of the world (gazetteer info, basically), I probably average 3-4k words per session. My last campaign arc was ten games and about 40,000 words.

 

[Celebrim]

How many words is a typical game's worth of planning? Factoring in the prep materials specifically for the game and then averaging out the preliminary materials for that part of the world (gazetteer info, basically), I probably average 3-4k words per session. My last campaign arc was ten games and about 40,000 words.

Your average of 3000 to 4000 words a session sounds to me like a very realistic estimate for planning purposes.

I'm guessing that I'm writing 5000 to 6000 words per session over the course of the campaign, especially when counting the overhead for house rules and such things (for example, I had to do a write up on cybernetics because I wasn't happy with any D6 cybernetics rules I could find).

(Below here my mind wandered, so you can stop reading if you like.)

I honestly feel too often I've been under prepped. I was winging it too much in the late part of "The Dogfish", the middle section of "The Runaway", the early part of "Slaves of the Sith Lord". Notably these are all "town" sections and I get really tired of prepping towns. (The Runaway really required prepping three towns and I'd lavished all my attention on the first, for example.) Similarly, I was just way in over my head through the entirely of "A Corrupted Flesh" because a world city is just a terrible setting for an adventure because its just too freaking big. I'd also gotten in over my head on "Planets of the Smugglers" for a similar reason - prepping an adventure that can go over multiple worlds, even if those worlds are basically one small town each, still means prepping too many freaking towns. I never finished the prep because I found I was making a setting guide rather than an adventure. My latest adventure I've been suffering from burn out and under prepping. I've got 42000 words but I've needed 65000 and the shortage is critically felt on my part. Oh and the last section of "Plague of Lies" was just way under prepped because it was both another town section and that adventure had a unique "two adventures" in one structure because they had an official job for the Empire that was a cover for their job for the Rebellion and I didn't actually care that much about the Imperial job of catching the con artist.

All of those sections would have benefited from more density to them because if you are making things up you just never have the density of sign posts and motivated characters that you would if you prepped. Things always feel more empty because they are.

What I wouldn't give for some high quality Star Wars setting guides "So you want to run an Ecumenopolis?" with good stock locations and such. Like I would love to have a some stock Outer Rim settlements where the focus is on NPC service providers and you can change the drapes up to match local architecture and climate. Give me a whole book of pirate holds or a whole book of smuggler outposts. It's amazing how hard it is to find good quality content to bring into my game.

In general, Sci Fi is hard because the setting scale is too big.

Of course this is for 4 hour sessions with players that sometimes just take too much of their sweet time and don't get much done. If you are playing for 8 hour sessions with highly efficient and direct kill teams, you'd probably need more than that. Or you'd need to switch to a play style that didn't need as much heavy prep.

When I was running weekly open sessions at a local gaming store one summer I started out the first eight weeks or so writing out 8-12 room mini-dungeons like I might design for my own games. Trying to do that was killing me. The amount of prep time to play time was just absurd. I switched to a giant megadungeon with a lot more rooms and no coherent "plot", theme, or purpose just big old dungeon crawl through random nonsense. With less than half the prep per week I was creating more content than the players could explore in 4 hours, with the dungeon easily sprawling out past their ability to explore after just a few weeks of preparation. If you don't have to worry about content dense prep and you just have orcs and pie, then things get much easier.

 

[zarionofarabel]

[REDACTED]

I'm very curious to know...how often is the narrative driven by the actions of the PCs? How often do decisions players make actually effect events that happen in the game? Do players just play through all the stuff that's prepped? Can players in your games completely abandon a prepared plotline, like forever? How often do you manipulate events within the narrative to ensure that PCs engage with the scenes and encounters you have prepared? Do you regularly abandon thousands of words of prepared material if the players decide not to engage with what you have prepared? Can players choose to ignore plotlines you have prepared?

 

[Celebrim]

I'm very curious to know...how often is the narrative driven by the actions of the PCs? How often do decisions players make actually effect events that happen in the game?

The structure I'm providing is more "narrow-broad-narrow". The PC's are bounty hunters. Right now I am not giving them really the ability to choose their own jobs. The standard structure is the Guildmaster tells them there is a particular job he wants them to take and the job involves acquiring some bounty with some stipulations. So at that level, the PC's don't have a lot of choice about what to do. This isn't sandbox through the Star Wars universe where the players just decide what planet they want to hyperspace off too, access a list of thousands of bounties, and pick the ones they want to pursue. I can imagine such a game, but not running it at any point after becoming an adult. That full sandbox play takes more work than what I do.

However, within the context of "this is the job" the players can do pretty much whatever they like, and while I have ideas about what they are most likely going to want to do, they often surprise me and do things I hadn't anticipated or prepared for. How the story turns out is up to the players. For the most part, the group seems to not invest to much in which faction is winning as long as their crew is winning and they get paid. They have avoided sacrificing their interests to advance a particular faction's interests, and they generally work for whomever is offering the most pay. I think a different group might end up making different choices, and I have at least run the first adventure for two groups and they played things out entirely differently.

I should note importantly that this game is what the players asked for. It started shortly after The Mandalorian came out and we were talking about next campaigns after winding down a CoC campaign that I don't think anyone was interested in continuing (I've decided CoC isn't really to the tastes of this group) and "Let's all be Star Wars bounty hunters!" was the players unanimous choice.

Do players just play through all the stuff that's prepped? Can players in your games completely abandon a prepared plotline, like forever?

Well, if they don't acquire the target they don't get paid, so they have incentive in game to not just abandon a job. The Guildmaster is generally on their side, but things might not be as pleasant if he wasn't because they abandoned time critical jobs with big payouts. They have a "boss".

The did abandon a plotline once after finishing the job where I had prepared a second job with in the same story. They instead chose to bugger off and fight it out in court.

How often do you manipulate events within the narrative to ensure that PCs engage with the scenes and encounters you have prepared?

Almost never. I can't think of a time I've done so in the Star Wars game. The only time I do this really is when the players are "stuck" and can't figure out what to do and aren't pushing forward and I can tell the players are getting dispirited, I will generally push something in front of the path of the players to help them get unstuck (like an ambush or stumbling on a crime in progress or the bad guys taking some plausible action that comes to their attention).

Do you regularly abandon thousands of words of prepared material if the players decide not to engage with what you have prepared?

Yes. I rarely use all the prepared material because the players rarely push every lead or go to every location that I think they might try. For example, in this current adventure they aren't going to end up investigating the Smashball Ultras, they never went to the Smuggler's bar to try to come at the problem from the black market weapons trade, they didn't find either of the two safehouses in time to have a shootout at those locations, and while they visited the racing teams custom swoop shop, they didn't really snoop around the way I expected they would.

Can players choose to ignore plotlines you have prepared?

Players could certainly go, "I'm not going to take this job." But in general, players don't do that. For one, I think I have a reasonable amount of trust with my players that I'm not going to write an adventure that is just going to screw them over more than not doing the job would. And secondly, because well most of the time in the 40 years of playing RPGs, players generally agree to play the adventure. Players know they need to "bite the hook" if they want to find the fun, and that if they turn down the adventure that it's not at all guaranteed there will be something equally fun to do. The idea that most players want to come up with their own fun is frankly bizarre. I know I don't as a player. The reality of trying to come up with your own fun is likely to be a grind. The real world just isn't filled with fun and any simulation of a setting just isn't going to have fun everywhere. At least my version of "Paychecks & Paperwork" involves exciting narratives, high stakes adventure, and big splashy payoffs in fame and fortune.

I'll be quite frank though. You wrote a whole paragraph of questions that were just variations on, "Are you really such a bad GM as I imagine?" Someone said he wasn't calling me a liar and then did. You just wrote in essence, "I'm not saying you run a railroad but also I am."

 

[zarionofarabel]

I'll be quite frank though. You wrote a whole paragraph of questions that were just variations on, "Are you really such a bad GM as I imagine?" Someone said he wasn't calling me a liar and then did. You just wrote in essence, "I'm not saying you run a railroad but also I am."

Never meant for it to come off that way, sorry. Just curious is all. I've played in games with a couple of prepper GMs and they had material planned, but I don't think it was to the degree that you do it, at least the amount of paper they had didn't seem like it would hold that many words. Side note; while I am a full on no-prep Emergent Play improvise everything GM, it's cause I'm lazy AF, really. As a player I'm totally not the kind of player I like to run games for! I rarely take the initiative to drive the narrative or "find adventure" on my own. Mostly I wait patiently for the next quest marker to show up so I can diligently follow it wherever it goes, cause as a player I'm lazy AF too! I don't know if it's cause I don't get to be a player all that often, so I still feel intimidated "taking the reins" as it were, or maybe it's just the laziness. I would probably have a lot of fun being a player in one of your games to be honest! Cheers!

PS (edit): Part of the reason for my curiosity is because of what you said about running a sandbox game as an adult being too time consuming. For me it's the opposite. The time aspect of writing that much material for a few sessions of gameplay seems overwhelming. It's just easier for me to daydream about the game between sessions, and have a "broad idea" of where the narrative might go, with only what happens in play being written down, in my session AAR. I couldn't imagine spending hours writing stuff, then have it sit unused because the players decided that they wanted to go a different way than I anticipated. Kudos for you for both having the time, and the ability to make the effort, to do that much prep. There's no possible way I could do it!

 

[GrimCo]

Depends on the game. My DM notes are usually couple of bullet points. I think the key is i know my players very well. We have been playing together close to 20 years together. So it's easy to wing it when you can have solid educated guess how will they act or react. What i do like to do is set stage. Give them setting info, mood and theme of the game, get some info on characters. Put them in the world and see what they do. Action-reaction.