Search Results
6/16/2025, 2:13:55 AM
>>95863765
> How do you prep your sessions and campaigns?
Don’t try to anticipate every possible PC decision, that would be impossible. Instead try this:
1) find a system you’re comfortable ad libbing on the fly with.
2) when you are world building, lay it out like a travel guide and not a history, timeline, or explicit narrative. That way no matter where the players go you are already prepared with interesting places for them to visit and explore.
3) have a GM folder, keep in it generic NPC stats for: random pedestrian, merchant/innkeeper, security, elite security, local leader. Sooner or later PCs will at some point interact with everyone of these archetypes in a way that will warrant rolling dice so having them on hand is easier than having to completely build them from scratch. This also means that you have a baseline stat to adjust for VINPCs (Very Important Non Player Character)
4) also either keep a monster manual on hand, or transcribe into your GM folder the stats for any monsters that you like using/have minis for (to save time thumbing through the monster manual)
5) (optional) if you want to have an antagonist, make one that is proactive and has some kind of personal vendetta against the PCs specifically, (thus inclining them to go out of their way to harass the party instead of just waiting quietly in some lair for the PCs to show up)
6) abandon any ideas about a specific narrative playing out, so instead of trying to force the players onto a railroad, embrace Player agency and have them lead the story wherever it goes.
I find that if you let them off the Leash, players are more than capable of making their own narrative, they only need to know what they can do to know what they want to do.
The key to this prep work is explicitly so YOU, as the GM, know what the players can do, and to cut down on “loading time” (I.E. the time the GM needs to set up any particular scene or encounter) as much as possible to keep the momentum going.
> How do you prep your sessions and campaigns?
Don’t try to anticipate every possible PC decision, that would be impossible. Instead try this:
1) find a system you’re comfortable ad libbing on the fly with.
2) when you are world building, lay it out like a travel guide and not a history, timeline, or explicit narrative. That way no matter where the players go you are already prepared with interesting places for them to visit and explore.
3) have a GM folder, keep in it generic NPC stats for: random pedestrian, merchant/innkeeper, security, elite security, local leader. Sooner or later PCs will at some point interact with everyone of these archetypes in a way that will warrant rolling dice so having them on hand is easier than having to completely build them from scratch. This also means that you have a baseline stat to adjust for VINPCs (Very Important Non Player Character)
4) also either keep a monster manual on hand, or transcribe into your GM folder the stats for any monsters that you like using/have minis for (to save time thumbing through the monster manual)
5) (optional) if you want to have an antagonist, make one that is proactive and has some kind of personal vendetta against the PCs specifically, (thus inclining them to go out of their way to harass the party instead of just waiting quietly in some lair for the PCs to show up)
6) abandon any ideas about a specific narrative playing out, so instead of trying to force the players onto a railroad, embrace Player agency and have them lead the story wherever it goes.
I find that if you let them off the Leash, players are more than capable of making their own narrative, they only need to know what they can do to know what they want to do.
The key to this prep work is explicitly so YOU, as the GM, know what the players can do, and to cut down on “loading time” (I.E. the time the GM needs to set up any particular scene or encounter) as much as possible to keep the momentum going.
Page 1