Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 7894465" data-attributes="member: 97077">To add to #2, consider just editing most of the background info NPCs out of the adventure. There's often too many and too much session time in my opinion is spent prying exposition out of an endless chain of quirky, cagey NPCs. Hardly anybody is going to remember them or the information they give out, so it's really just a big waste of time in my view. Trim the fat to get to the adventure faster.3. Similar to above, don't bother with quest-giver scenes. Or at the very least, don't spend too much time on things where the PCs don't actually get to make a decision. If you're running a module, for example, and the players have agreed to play that module, they don't actually get a choice to not take the quest, do they? So don't act as if they do. Acceptance of the quest is assured to play the game. (Of course, this doesn't apply to quests that actually are optional.)4. Consider the best means by which to award XP prior to the game and tell the players what they need to do to earn it. If the module is event-based (a plot needs following), then the best sort of advancement method is either milestone XP (if you can specifically tell the PCs the quests or goals that will earn them XP) or story-based advancement without XP (DM says when they level based on how much of the content has been covered). This keeps the PCs on the path by not rewarding them for going off said path. If, however, the module is a location-based adventure, standard XP is best in my view, and I wouldn't even worry about characters being of disparate levels or falling behind the module's recommended level at various stages. The game is honestly not hard enough for most people to worry about these things.5. Rename all the NPCs you do end up keeping so that their names are memorable, even if it means they're a little silly. Players remember silly names that describe the NPC in some fashion. They rarely remember the typical fantasy names the modules give us.</blockquote>

Verification