Prep Tools, Not Adventures

Update January 10, 2023: This post has won the Gold Bloggie for best Advice Post! Holy crap I am floored. Thank you everyone who voted for me, or who voted for one of the other posts, or who wrote one of the other posts, and thank you to Prismatic Wasteland for running this event. Being recognized feels nice 😀

I’ve run a lot of D&D over the years, and in that time I’ve cycled through various approaches for how I get ready for a session. Like most folk, I started out with unrealistic ideas about how much and how quickly I could produce good material. Because of this, my early campaigns were basically burnout generators. They quickly morphed into Zombie Campaigns: I continued running them out of a desire to spend time with my friends and to be a good referee, but I’d lost any creative energy for improving them. A lot of promising campaigns wound up ending before they should have because of that. Over many years and many campaigns I’ve developed better strategies for handling prep. The most important of these is to focus on making flexible tools, rather than specific adventure scenarios.

A few weeks ago I began a new ORWA campaign, so let’s take the first session of that as an example. Because it was the first session, and most of the players had no previous experiences in the world to drive their activity, I needed to prepare some specific adventure scenario to get the ball rolling. I put together a little 12 room dungeon which was being contested by two factions, each of which controlled one of the dungeon’s entrances. So my players go out to this location, get invested with one of the factions, and decide the best way to help their new pals out was to do some rabble rousing among the opposing faction’s neighbors. Then there was an impromptu street fair organized around a challenge fight, which the party skillfully manipulated into a riot when their opponents failed to honor the terms of the fight, culminating in the party using the cover of the mob to assault their enemy’s fortified position.

It was a good little adventure, and a great tone-setter for the campaign! It had everything I like to see: I was able to show off the Saturday Morning SciFi weirdness of my setting; the players did some creative problem solving; they punched above their weight class by leveraging a precarious social situation and deploying their skills and spells precisely when and where they would have the most impact. And never once did they set foot in my dungeon, or deal with any of the specific challenges I had prepared.

I’m glad I had that dungeon prepared. If they’d gone into it, I’d have needed those notes. But I’m also glad I didn’t put too much work into it. The whole scenario—setup, map, and key—was scribbled across 3 pages of my notebook. It was a sloppy little thing I threw together during loading screens in video games and boring scenes in movies. If I’d put much more effort into it I might have been annoyed that I never got to use it.

My more serious preparation time was spent making reusable tools to help me quickly generate gameplay no matter what the players decide to do. In the same session I described above, I used the setting map to quickly identify how long the party would need to travel and what sights they’d see along the way. I used encounter tables to give that travel time weight.¹ The encounters also presented the players with a series of smaller side-challenges to navigate, many of which provide hooks or foreshadowing for larger campaign events still to come.² When the party decided to start rabble rousing among the enemy faction’s neighbors I was able to use my NPC generator to quickly give those neighbors some personality and wants of their own. I was also able to reference the territory this was taking place in, and the social norms of that territory informed what challenges the party would face carrying out their plan.³ When the party organized a street fair I could have had a unique street vendor show up with my popup shop generator,⁴ but at that point we were running short on time so I decided not to.

¹ I detailed my general approach for structuring encounter tables in 2017, though I ought to post about its updated form at some point. (Update July 22, 2022) I have now posted about its updated form!
² One of those challenges, a minor trap the party fell into, resulted in a friendship with the creatures operating the trap. The party has become highly engaged with that friendship, and those creatures have appeared in every session since.
³ In this case, the local population was already prejudiced against the group the PCs wanted to turn them against, so it was easier than normal.
⁴ Similar to the Goblin Bazaar I described a couple years back.

All this stuff is what I spent time carefully crafting before the game, and almost all of it is reusable. The specific table entries will change a bit: some have been consumed and new entries need to be written. Others are temporarily exhausted and I moved them off the table for a bit. Still others remain on the table with a note that the next time they occur will be the party’s second encounter, with consequent developments. (“Ah, we meet again!” says the creepy sewer vampire.) But now that the tables have been written this restocking is fairly quick and easy to get done. For some tables I’ve even got pre-written replacements ready to go from days when I had too many ideas to fit on a given table.

Other tools I prepared that didn’t come up in that specific session include:

• A schedule of goals for each of the game’s major factions, so that each time they accomplish something I immediately know what they’re working on next.
• A table for determining what a random encounter is doing at the moment they’re encountered. I usually roll this outside the session while stocking the encounter tables.
• Generalized tables for the results of doing something that publicly affects the party’s reputation, good or bad.
• Specific consequences, good and bad, for some of the party’s more notable actions. I roll one of these at the start of each session. (This is a bastardized adaptation of Arnold’s Potential Drama idea).
• A table of major events that will occur in the world, irrespective of the player’s actions. Stuff like natural disasters, or the deaths of public figures. (A distant evolution of Brendan’s Haven Complications table).
• A series of tables and a little stack of blank maps to help me quickly throw together a small adventure site if the party finds one that I haven’t specifically prepared.

And of course, it bears mentioning that even my unused dungeon can now be repurposed as fuel for my tools. The parts the players learned about will need to be discarded: the nexus of varied mutagenic energies, and the Sherman tank in the basement that was being disassembled and smuggled out in pieces. The individual rooms however—none of which the players explored—could be shuffled among encounter tables, or into my adventure site generator.

The great thing about tools is that in addition to saving the referee’s time and energy, they’re able to react to the player’s actions in a way that specifically prepared scenarios just can’t. If the players are walking down the street towards a dungeon, then become randomly fascinated by a bit of graffiti and wander into an alley on a wild goose chase, then if all you’ve got prepared is that one dungeon you’re stuck. But if you’ve got a table of interesting locations that are designed to fit anywhere in your setting, you can keep the game rolling as if you’d planned for this all along. And when the players are able to find interesting adventure no matter where they go your campaign world will feel much more alive.

The reactive potential of tools is also why my most important prep occurs immediately after running a session. While I’m writing out my recap of events (something I’m indulgently excessive about), I have a set of questions to ask myself:

• Did the players encounter any interesting NPCs that it would be fun to add to my Recurring Characters table?
• Did the party wrong anyone who might hold a grudge against them? What form might revenge take? (Put this on the consequences table).
• Does anyone feel that they owe the party a favor? What might they do to settle the debt? (Put this on the consequences table).
• Review all the table entries used, and restock anything that needs it.
• What parts of the session were rough, and what tools or techniques would help them work better in future?

That last one is a biggie. For example, as the sessions have gone on, this party has taken out a lot of loans. That’s not something other groups I’ve played with have done. The first couple times it happened I set an arbitrary limit for how big a loan could be, and noted down the amounts without any real idea of how it would be collected. Now I’ve worked out a formalized little procedure for how loans are guaranteed and how debt repayment is enforced.

As of posting this, the renewed ORWA campaign has had 4 sessions. I made sure I had another specific adventure prepped before we started session 2, but once again I’m glad it’s a thing I scribbled casually into my notebook; because 3 sessions later the players still haven’t stopped moving long enough to need me to prompt them towards an adventure. My tools and their own desires have entered a feedback loop that hasn’t left room for me to say “Well, there’s X thing going on over here…”

I’ve also got heaps more creative energy left in me than I used to after the first few sessions of a new campaign.

Additional Reading About Session Prep

That Four Letter Word: Prep on Save vs. Total Party Kill
Planning a Campaign as a Series of Decisions on The Retired Adventurer
The Grand d666 on Being An Asshole To A Goblin