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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hexmage-EN" data-source="post: 8065123" data-attributes="member: 79428">Personally I find exploration to be the most difficult pillar because I'm not terribly good at improv when the players go beyond what I've prepped. In the past when I have been forced to improv I've often come away disappointed with what I came up with and wished I had somehow been able to prep something better. Combat is much more clearly defined, structured, and simple to prep.The biggest example from my last campaign was that I had a combat encounter prepared, during which an illithid emerged from a portal to join the fight. One player, the party wizard, decided he'd rather go through the portal to the Underdark city where the illithid came from than contribute to the combat encounter everyone else was fighting in.The idea that someone would want to go through the portal somehow didn't occur to me. The party was in Geryon's Citadel Coldsteel in Stygia and had an immediate goal. The illithid (an ally of Geryon) and the portal were there just because they were present in the module "A Paladin in Hell" (I wasn't running the module as written, instead using it for inspiration for this part of my campaign).I could have said that the portal was temporary or that it didn't work for him, but I figured that would be disappointing. I could have said "you can go through the portal, but we'll have to pick back up with your character next session once I've prepared something", but there were still two hours left in the session and I didn't want this player having nothing to do for the rest of the time (in hindsight, saying that might have convinced him to stick with the party for the combat encounter and delayed his trip through the portal until near the end of the session).I let him go through the portal, putting his character in a "theater of the mind" space while everyone else was using maps and minis. I had nothing prepared for where this enemy mindflayer had come from, but the player knew a lot about mindflayers, what spells he could use to avoid detection, and that there was probably an elder brain somewhere. While the rest of the party was finishing the combat encounter the wizard (this was a high level PC, btw) used a combination of spells to get to the elder brain's chamber undetected and killed it. The player explained his (secretly evil) wizard's long term goal was to become a lich and come back to this mindflayer colony later to establish himself as their new leader.This player had a knack for doing unexpected things with magic that forced me into situations where I was unprepared, beyond the example I just gave. As such I've spent about two months so far trying to anticipate and pre-plan as much as possible for the next campaign I want to run. One of the first things I did, for example, was create a five page document detailing the last ditch defenses and countermeasures the planned BBEG would use if the party somehow teleported right to her inner sanctum.</blockquote>

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