*Thanks for watching!* Let us know in the comments below your experiences of running an adventure that you didn't plan, or having been a player in an unplanned RPG adventure.
I have been DMing for many years now and I must agree that the most enjoyable campaigns for both myself and the players that I have run have been the ones where I didn't plan anything out except for who the major NPCs were. It allowed me to have the freedom to explore interesting things from a character's backstory that I was able to tie into the campaign without making it feel like I was railroading them.
I literally take a laser pointer to my games. If the table talk gets too out of hand, the laser pointer comes out, does a circuit on the tabletop, and my players come back to focusing on the game and what we're doing. It was tongue-in-cheek to start with, but it's actually become pretty effective.
My players are about to fight Betty Crooker and her giant male goat demon Gorodon. With the help of Guy Fairy they hope to reclaim his rule of Flaverton.
I planned a grand murder mystery in an urban campaign. When the players wanted to gather rumors, I used a random rumor generator online and they latched onto the randomly generated side quests WAY more than the story I had written.
Honestly I’ve been having a crisis of over planning recently and this is exactly what I needed to see. My best sessions have been improv, but I was worried that my planned sessions weren’t working because I didn’t plan enough, not that I was underprepared. Thank you for another great lesson!
When I started d&d this year, I figured it was all sandbox. The DM ended up being the kind of guy who spends hours drawing multicolored premade maps and making bosses "just get away" which I found fairly infuriating but also helpless and guilty if we aren't "appreciative of all the hard work." It's like someone's fat mother baking cookies for a sports team of athletes who care more about their body composition than "her hospitality and love" (aka food). I feel like this is a social issue more that manifests in d&d more than it is a style of DMing. Apparently some people like railroad campaigns and are appreciative of not having to use their brain or be creative.
One suggestion I’d add is that, even in adventures where planning is appropriate or necessary, it’s important to think about what needs to be planned and what doesn’t. For an adventure with a significant mystery component-something where the players are meant to piece together what’s going on from disparate clues-I’m a strong believer in the idea that *the truth of what happened* ought to be planned in some detail, at least once they’ve chosen to pursue your hook. (Yes, you can always fall back on “whatever they guess is right”, but if they figure out that’s what you’ve done it cheapens any satisfaction they got out of it, and your clues are less likely to “click” together in a coherent way that gives a group that lovely AHA moment.) Once that much is planned, you can improvise much of the rest, because your knowledge of the “what happened” ensures that whatever specific clues they uncover will fit those facts. You don’t need to plan exactly what all the clues are or who the players get information from or what locations they visit-you can tailor the clues to their choices and lines of inquiry-because your improvisation about what they learn is anchored to your mental timeline of what occurred. And if they come up with a solution that fits all the clues and is better than what you planned, well, you can always decide to go with that instead-but at least it’s your option.
I am a very noob gm and have only hosted games for my children. The one who got most into it is a six year old. Basiclly every adventure with her is spontaneous because every event I planned she ran from or attacked when I thought she would talk to the dwarven miner. The list goes on but you can see how using everything you talked about in this video will be helpful and I have kinda had to do some of what you said just to get her on track to be part of an adventure. Also being the only player I can customize to her actions for triggers without it effecting anybody else's plans. Guy you've been a huge help with your videos. So here's one story about not planning which is now almost every time we play lol I had one time when she ran from every goblin so eventually I had them attack her horse in the stable at her house which forced her to stand up to them. Now she is very confined and is murder hobbing too often so I have to be changing things on the fly constantly.
I just realized something. The structure of this channel is completely based around teaching. From personal experience as one's knowledge the necessity to revisit has dropped. I guess I'd like to apologize for not participating in the release of your content as much as I did in the past. Yet at the same time thank you because what I've learned from you sharing has brought me to the point of extreme confidence running games
Same here. In the opening game of my current campaign, one of the players decided to stay behind and scout the area while the others went into the nearby village. I needed something for him to do, so on the fly I said, "You see two soldiers on horseback emerge from the woods and ride towards the village." He then decided to head into town and warn the others, while I (in the five minutes it took for him to catch up) improvised who the soldiers were, what castle they'd come from, why they were going to the village, and how that tied in with the developing storyline the players were following.
One time my players decided to approach a goal in a completely unexpected way and instead of trying to stop them I just went with it, frantically coming up with NPCs, quests and enemies on the go. Later, one of the players wrote me that it was the best session in a long while for him. :D
This has been my method since the late 90s, and I'm delighted to see it being given some discussion! Your videos on planning are the best I've seen, mind, but I'm quite glad to see someone finally talking about extemporaneous, event-and-response GMing. Bravo!
Some of the best game sessions are the games where our GM said I had nothing planned for the game tonight. One of my favorite games as a GM was I had the barbarian enter a drinking contest with a tavern full of dwarves. The rest of the party were trying to take out the dwarves secretly order to make sure their friend won. I had wanted to move the session along but they really wanted to stay in the tavern. The barbarian who was leaning toward being evil saved a female dwarf in the brawl at the end of the drinking game. He wanted a follower, so I made her a follower of him. She worshipped Bahamut, and because he saved her from certain death, Bahamut made the barbarian a champion of his.
I once ran a game whilst being a novice GM: The party had broken out of the prison of Duke Bofrost's Castle, a terrifying individual seeking to expand his territory by taking over their home town. After their resistance failed they where captured and shipped to the icy north regions where the Duke came from. So, after shattering their chains and kicking in the prison door (obviously) they had the "choice" between fighting a squadron of heavily armored guards or escape into the dungeon beneath the castle. Fast forward the dungeon crawl. I had to prepare something for the session, and this time my head was empty... I wanted them to find some prisoners who also escaped into the depths of the dungeon, I belief I watched a video where Guy talked about switching things up and adding the unconventional. The whole evening before I had no idea, the whole trainride to the friends house I had no idea. We sat at the table, had some laughs, still no idea. As we begun I moved on with the dungeon, they cleared some rooms, then it hit me. It was a whole tribe of Orcs that had been relocated from their warm regions into this cold mess! I mean just your ordinary plot, right? And they desperately wanted to be freed, all they needed was a clean way out. Because the Duke possessed strong magic weapons and some spellcasters, they needed some ruckus. I went on with describing some collapsed rooms, then a rubble filled corridor. On my dungeon map there was a secret door, one player aced his perception check, they unrubbled the entrance behind which the Orcs had their makeshift underground camp and I started to introduce them to the Orcs. They of course thought at first that the party members were spies, sent by the Duke to infiltrate their group. After some negotiation the party offered help. Here comes the improv.: The Orcs had an Druid that managed to dig an entrance into the castle that was hidden behind a picture. At that time the Duke was throwing a huge party for his henchmen. The Orcs posed as servants to deliver the food from the kitchen. My players skyrocket took off, they made all plans how to take over the kitchen, how to disguise as the taster, how to create ruckus and how to get the weapon. It was the Best Session of DnD I have ever run. Naturally things went south, and we ended with a epic battle where they managed to finally slay the terrible Duke Bofrost. It maybe seems naive in hindsight, but boy had we fun!
The first adventure I *ever* ran had literally *0* preparation, if memory serves. I can't even remember if we _used_ a system as, at the time, I did a lot of chat/server roleplay; this eventually ended up with me being "de facto GM" when I started actually manipulating the narrative..... The specific adventure that came to mind was when a merchant and his bodyguard boarded a ship headed for.... _somewhere._ We used real geography, as it was set in the Napoleonic Era of the real world. At some point, the captain's right hand went to talk with the both of them in their room and, at least I _think,_ asked for their help investigating a break-in below deck. While investigating, they discovered some smashed up crates(I think one had tea leaves or something, but tbh I was just bsing everything anyway) and they found a Mcguffin of some kind.... At some point they were ambushed by the bad guys and it ended with the bodyguard running off(luring away the two grunts) and the merchant defeating the boss with the "ye old scrote-kick," the merchant than ran up deck and was shot as he mistakenly charged at a guard who was armed with a musket. I gave him the accolade "Iron Gut" just for kicks.... I think I planned a sequel in which the party learns that it was a kidnapping plot of the captain's daughter, but it was long enough ago that a lot of the actual details are a blur for me. tl;dr: I became forever-GM before I became an actual GM, also BS *Everything.*
I've done my first few sessions as a DM now. Slowly adding stuff to 'plan'. Strangely enough i just prep: - list of names (for all races) - list of city names - a map (so you can say, forest here, mountain there) - a few random encounters (wolf attack, bears, some thugs) - the real "session" with just, x triggers, y is the end (reward) all stuff in the middle is either slighty prepared (a puzzle) or not planned.
This is great advice, thanks guy. Takes the pressure out of DMing a lot for me. I am playing for a year now, and I was DM for a Self-written railroaded one-shot - which was fun, but I overprepped a bit, and I could not get myself into preparing another game, because it seemed so much work, and I was afraid of preparing too much stuff my players would never explore. But I started a little game with my son, and I prepared a. It, but I started inventing more and more stuff on the fly, went with his ideas and the game world is growing by us telling stories - and it feels so good.
This is exactly the way I GM whenever I don't run a premade adventure (Which is most of the time) For my last campaign we started, in the Scion 2e Urban Fantasy system, we made the characters, and each player made an important location to them and an important NPC or 2. We ended up having like 8 cool NPC's in place with relations to the players and about 6 interesting locations before the first session. Then before the first session the players made their Short-term deed (An exp trigger in the game about something they want to do/ their character wants to do) and one of the players made one 'Kick the gang out from the Community Center' which made me go 'Well then I need to make up a gang' so I made the 21st Street Legion who are a group of Gangers fighting to get London back under roman control, fighting under the banner of Juno (I later made up) Then slowly as the players explored I started to plan deeper and deeper over the next few sessions. So the plot right now seems to be 'A reborn Gaius Julius Augustus, is trying to gain power, to recreate the Roman empire, and concecrating London in the Roman faith' Then I could start finding out how this could be done, and how the players could interact with it. 1: She isn't sure which Caesar she is a reborn version of yet, so she is collecting ancient art and relics to see if they jog her memory. (Her name is Julia Octavia Kaiser) 2: What does the Goons of the Legion know? 3: What else do they need to prepare to make sure their plans can work?
this is exacly how i have ended up dming. one thing i do pre session is a sentence of what i want to have uncovered/ achieved during the session. I remember i had a campaign where the first 3 sessions where the goal was getting the party assembled cause i decided in all my wisdom to make them strangers spread out threw town.
I have an overarching story, I plan stuff out that can be moved around, but I end up doing as you described constantly. Thanks to creators like you I have been able to make it seem as though all is planned.
Yes! This is the missing link. While i don't over plan, this describes how the mindset of a GM works before, during and after session. I get so caught up in the moment when thinking on my toes and i think this will actually help me.
i've just been figuring this out as well, and I wrote the following sentence about events: "Events become problems when players try to solve them." When they do that I know they are invested, and we've got our selves an adventure. And since each event is about a specific person doing a specific thing in a specific place the GM already has tons of implied material to improv from, no need to be in free fall improv!!! (and if you are using an established setting even better!!)
This is excellent advise not only for all GMs, but especially for those with highly unpredictable players. My past experiences with my own play group has gone as follows: The party comes to a crossroads. They can go forward, left, right, or back the way they came. As the DM I have planned for all of those eventualities. What does my group do? Pulls out a shovel and digs down to the Ninth Layer of Hell. I didn't plan for that.
After watching hundreds of videos of how to gm, all methods seems a little odd to me or i dont like them at all. But this time you described exactly how i have gming for around 3 years in a way that no other person could. I feel trully blessed that i have found your vídeo finally describing exactly how i think, i thought it was impossible feeling related with other styles of prep but there is you, describing it perfectly, thank you so much!
I have run and played in both and I think they can lead to some of the most brilliant game sessions in a campaign as long as everyone playing is on the same page about improvising with each other and the GM to build something wholly unique based on the moment in time the session is occurring. I will be using the method more in the future as you have solidified the concept more for me. Keep up the amazing work!
Thank you! I have been a GM for... more years than I care to mention. I've played many different rule systems. I'm running my first 5E campaign and I got a little... ambitious. I have half a dozen groups of adventurers accross different parts of a continent. The effects of one group may have consequences for other groups. Once all of the pandemic limitations are over I'm hoping to amalgamate everyone into two groups. I realised very early on that given the scope of the campaign that I was running that things were going to be happening regardless of whether my players were getting involved or not. So a plot would move forward regardless. Group one might do something that affects a trade route that supplies goods for group 3. So each session my prep goes as far as deciding what NPCs are doing based on the current state of the world. Now this in itself sounds like an absolute ton of work, but as I'm rather heavily into playing NPCs it's very easy to work out their motivation as things in the world change. If my players get to like an NPC then they are more likely to go to them for information. Easy way to encourage specific courses of action. I have all of my major steps in place and whilst the outcomes are not decided, I have a nice vague shape that represents the current outcome. Thus far it is serving me exceptionally well.
This is a great video for new DMs or those wanting to improve their planning. I have used a system very similar to this for ages and although some may think it may make your campaign more messy it actually gives you a lot more flexibility. In my last session my group was travelling in the mountains and was looking for a place to camp. I rolled a 20 on my encounter die signifying something exceptional in nature. Off the cuff I created the ruins of a small mansion with a nearby pond and through expanding this simple area I have created an underwater lair magically concealed with a sealed basement in the original mansion that I can further expand as I wish. By just focusing on the "here and now I now have something that I can use either as a "one-page" or to link to other significant plot hooks. I find that the plots and adventures create themselves if I do not focus on the "hard stuff" and let my imagination run with these things. Thanks very much for sharing!
I had my PCs fight a witch. Since the witch would have been an easy kill if they all ganged up on her, I put a wicked bramble elemental thing. It waited for them outside of her hut. I described the hut in the forest with a circle of 6 tiki-like torches surrounding the battlefield. I just added that bit in there for flavor. The party comes, attacks the bramble but are having lousy rolls. The ranger, thinking that this was some witch magic decides to extinguish the torches. I thought I was a wonderful idea, so I lowered the HP and AC every time the took out a torch. When the elemental was destroyed, they found the witch inside and the real battle began. She would use a cantrip to light a torch, which gave her a bump to HP and an additional action to attack with. Kinda cheesy-zelda-ish, but the party enjoyed it and had a good time. Totally not how I planned that battle.
Excellent video. I haven't played or run a game for decades but one of the best I ever did was when I roughly sketched out a village my players walked into at the end of the last session and dropped in a mysterious new owner of the manor on the hill and his man servant (think Salem's Lot by Stephen King). Took me 20 minutes to plan and we played for around 6 hours and I just bounced off what the PCs were doing, throwing in clichés and tropes like pineapple on pizza. The adventure ran itself. At the end of it one of my PCs had lost an eye, just as he gained a pair of master crafted flintlock pistols (he was supremely irritated with me) and that led to us chasing down a replacement eyeball. One of the others ended up with incipient vampirism which led to lots of research and further missions to find a cure before he went full 'creature of the night' on everybody. I couldn't have planned that out in linear fashion or even sand box style. I definitely vouch for the minimal approach to planning, it beats spending half a day mapping and populating a castle and the players ride on by without even commenting on the architecture.
just starting a new campaign after a long break... and this video gave me so much confidence. I dont really need to over plan things, just basic structure of what might happen and Im good to go. thanks!
Very much how I have GMed for over 35 years now! A friend (and awesome GM) and I call this Power GMing! Listening to the players and letting them run with things and you are just faciliating them creating the story.
Good lord, this is the video I've been needing. I spend an ungodly amount of time prepping for my group's games and I would love nothing more than to ease that burden on myself. It all started because we collectively agreed as a group that we wanted a large campaign that would take everyone from lvl 1-20. We've been playing for over 22 years as a group and have never seen a campaign to completion before. COVID hit and we all decided we should have something worthwhile to focus on. It's been great...but yeah...the week before each game I am always up late every night outlining and whatever else. It's still fun for me as a GM, but very time consuming. I'm going to take the advice in this lovely video and only prep my barebones framework, like NPC's, Monsters, Maps, and maybe a few interesting non-combat encounters for our next session.
13:20 That's an interesting list. I say Stop, Find, Protect/Deliver, and Escape, which are comparable to your Thwarting, Discovery/Escape, Delivering & Collecting together
This was such a weird experience for me, because I started out DMing in this exact style, then discovered How to be a Great GM in my efforts to learn to better plan and structure my campaigns! Very fun to see it loop back to the exact things I've found, in trying to improvise _less_ over the years, and many thanks for yet another fantastic video, Guy.
Besides the two fists full of modules I've run, this is how I've GMed for over 30 years. It takes finesse and you have to prepare in other ways as stated here by Guy. I Like filling my head with interesting and inspiring situations, descriptions, locales, etc......as well as learning new ways of manipulating the narrative. ...And the most important...listening to your players and running with their ideas. Improv GMing takes time and can be taxing...but it is well worth it in the long run for both GM and players.
Me, I always start a potential campaign with 3 things #1: a place for the PC's to rest buy and sell, and become "known". #2: A location that the Players can delve into, gain experience and loot. #3: A few interesting interactions between #1 and #2. Thats it. Concentrate on NPC's. If the players take to the game... EXPAND.
GAH! Guy, do you realize how fundamentally counter this method is to my DMing style? Complex long-term plans are central to the way I prepare (and are also the most fun part!). It's not that I'm bad at improvising, but I love having a general sense of where things are going so I can foreshadow. It also helps me improvise to know a lot about the world and what all the characters are up to. And, like I said, it's fun for me. I suppose I could give this all-improve method a try. I do have a one-shot coming up. Wait... the one-shot is a mystery with a tight timeline, a situation where planning is essential to ensure the clues work and it all makes sense! GAH!!
I began running Pbta games just over a year ago and what you've been talking about is similar to a principle they talk about. The talk about "playing to find out what happens". They take it a bit further than what you're talking about, but it's similar. Love your content as always!
Some years ago I had a busy week and hadn't prepped almost anything for a 3.5 D&D game where the players where a special ops team behind undead enemy lines. I grabbed Libris Mortis, picked out the bone velociraptors. I figured it would take them a little while of combat to deal with three of them and I could figure out my next step. 5 minutes, 2 castings of Control Undead, and some focus fire later, and the resident wizard had two new undead pets and I had no time to come up with anything solid. So I ad-libbed and told them that as they travelled, they came across a fort with 40 ft high timber walls and two visible guard towers that was supposed to be a target of opportunity and asked them to make a battle plan. That took up the next hour at least, them with the planning, and me with the planning. There were several moments on them making educated guesses as to what is inside, and I would surreptitiously make some notes thinking it was a good idea.
Lol this video is me. Before every session I say "What do I want my players to discover?" And then I improv my way to that point reacting to my players as needed, letting them have moments of RP and discovery that feel natural. Sometimes they solve puzzles in ways I didn't intend.
This sounds a lot like my core/original method, though I tend to throw out many events at the start, and allow the players to circle back to them in their own time. A missed "hook" becomes background information.
Thank you! This was exactly what the title suggested. Very helpful. I am currently waiting for our session 0, but I can't help trying to start thinking of interesting events, even though our PCs char sheets are not even ready yet. I do not want them to push to stuff, so I had anxiety and overthinking about sth that cannot be solved yet. You put my mind at ease
I always have a loose plan. Usually the first few sessions are pretty scripted out unless the players move in a different direction. Then once the players are comfortable in the world, and my style, i just start tossing out threads and whatever the players generate towards we start to move the campaign. Basically my dming style is the cabin in the woods method of picking the baddy
Ive been out of the Dm show for a long time due to covid. But I really focus on not railroading my players either. My triggers are typically placing npcs in the world and letting the party decide who they interact with. And then that triggers events. We will see how my first session of Icewind Dale goes on saturday. The most thing i honestly spend time prepping is my location descriptions as i try to get that level of immersion with it.
I love the video. It sucks for me because I'm playing online and my players demand a lot. If I don't put an actual workweek into each session they act almost offended. Yet, they put in the absolute bare minimum. Rough times.
I started with a published Module, and use the some of the events and options within the module to allow the players pick their own direction. Once they were done the NPC that hired them said she'd have a job in 1 week. To try to give the PCs a bit of time to explore the town and meet the shop keepers, etc. However any time I presented them with an "event/hook" they would try to fully reel it in to the exclusion of everything else. That said we didn't really have a "Goal" or "Sentence" that started the game other than "I'm going to run this published module and let the players go from there and if there's not been something we've 'hooked' onto there's another module I can use to get more mileage" This method still I think takes a lot of experience and It's probably a good thing you dont start with this. Do all the other methods, plan things out, and now that you're comfortable and understand what you and your players find fun and entertaining, let the reigns go and see where it takes you!
I really enjoyed this video. I've enjoyed your content for a long time. And I found past materials enlightening but yet lacking something. I think this video really brought it all together
Divination is easy: keep it simple keep it vague. Take 5e for example, RAW: "The GM offers a truthful reply. The reply might be a short phrase, a cryptic rhyme, or an omen." So a perfect reply is something like this: >> Where trees grow tall, >> And apples fall, >> From the shadow, >> Heed the call (Made up as I wrote) Now your players should actively look for shadows beneath apple trees. Which may become another trigger. I did something like this in game once and the player was very happy after the session, telling everyone that hadn't he used divination they would never have talked to a certain NPC and never got that piece of information.
@@Wolfsspinne Illusion 100 Speech 100! I've done similarly, but you definitely seem to have a really good grasp on how to pull it off, and I think I can learn something from what you've said. Thank you!
What some people here might not know is that there are whole game systems built around this concept. In the narrative RPG space this is called "playing to find out". Games that are built for it, such as many Forged in the Dark and Powered by the Apocalypse games, give you a toolset that helps you keep the game moving without having to place the whole burden on you as the GM.
It’s hard to replicate when your players favorite moment of a campaign was the moment you made up about the ghost of a gnome wizard. Just had a note saying “run down former study of some kind of wizard” for the room I did not think they would spend so much time trying to get into haha
Thanks for this. I haven't GMed a lot, but this is the general method I use. I don't plan too much and wing in response to players. Having a SENTENCE to start will really help. I'm now moving into running a whole campaign, I think, for a long time. Thanks for the help!
I'm a fairly new DM (and I've never played more than 1 session as a PC) so the concept of writing a story but also not carefully planning it is pretty overwhelming. These videos have been a huge help for me
This is exactly what I took from your book. I created 3 things the main villain is looking to do. I had 4 different big bads running at the beginning of my campaign and just waited to see what events would draw my players in. So leaving them at a simple template helped this. Great vid as always Guy.
This is how I ended up settling in to be my preferred method of running games. I've been doing it for about 12 years now and it resulted in much better games. The "player=cats" note is exactly why. It's like herding cats sometimes, so it's easier to learn to adapt to the players. If they ended with some hook, I plan a couple possible encounters, at most, and maybe a statement or so about a goal for the "episode."
I was planning things out to the nines for years now, and kept scrambling when it got derailed. These days though I've been assuming it would be derailed, minimally planning and winging the rest. This reinforces this and gives me some excellent ideas. Thanks!
None of my ideas were interesting. They were a barking dog, a man handing over a scroll... those are pretty mundane things. Don't put so much pressure on yourself. Choose an idea and then follow along asking answering the 5 W's and 1 H.
This video made me realise how D&D around table is like Poker game - iit's not only about game itself,. but also about player expressions. Also i paused the video and got very nice pic of @GM, it would be great for facebook profile picutre or soemthing haha - sadly i dont think i can put picture links in YT comments tho.
For my current campaign, which has gone from level 1 to 20 and is about two or three sessions from concluding, I've mostly written up descriptions of areas and let the players interact with them. I've planned out the larger structure, mostly with a major event mixing things up about once per tier but I've left the session to session details up to the players. By absolutely no coincidence, this campaign I've barely planned is probably the first time I've made it to the end of a campaign without any (okay, without much) burnout as a DM.
This is exactly how I run my campaign/sessions...I get a quick little half hour setup of a “mobile” plot (by “mobile” meaning I can insert whatever I need to whenever I want). My quests/plots are flexible and can also be deep and the long joke style. Example: my last party met on a slaver ship chained together near the back of a boat (the slavering maiden, of course)...traveling down a river. My plot is get them into the Giants Hill Steading (convert old TSR module). I want them to see it and want to go in, but they are levels away...not many, just need them at about 5th level for my conversion, they are level 2.. So that was my plot. Get them into the giants fortress module (hill Steading G1), from a slave ship. So we begin play. I know that hill giants have some kobold slaves, and I love gnolls...so while they are role playing, I have a large band of gnolls attack and hook the slave ship, large anchor hooks are flung from the rivers banks, pulling the slave ship ashore, the party MUST escape...no one on the ship is a friendly and no one on shore is a friendly...the thief picks the cuffs of his party while the slavers are busy defending their ship from gnolls arrows... The escape to shore eventually..where they everbtually run into the kobolds, gathering large kegs of water for the hill giants (unknown to the group)... At night further down the shore, they see the fire from the hill giant Steading...they investigate...they are hiding behind the walls of the fortress, after spotting a sleeping hill giant in the front doorway. This is where I will introduce the distracting NPC that explains they should get giant slaying weapons (and level a few more levels). I made a quick cave dungeon for next week, only five rooms and four halls that lead to (idk, I’ll make those up when we play). If I am stumped and can’t think of what to do with rooms not yet fleshed out, I have a couple modules with cavern maps - I’ll plagiarize a few of these with some tweaks. This is how I have run adventures/campaigns for the last 20 years. Improv by working off of what the players are doing and they expecting.. They will say things like: “I think there is something bad behind this door” Gm note: they are not comfortable in this dungeon. Perfect! “We may need to find a place to rest, I don’t think we are ready for a big fight” Gm note: good, I’ll throw a small encounter at them while they prepare to rest, to keep them on their toes and fearful. “I need to start rolling better, I can’t hit anything” Gm note: player frustrated at the luck of the roll, time to introduce an NPC distraction that won’t require rolls but will revolve around frustrated players skills and nonWeapons proficiencies... Basically, listen to the table, and improv off of their dialog, fears, mood, frustrations... by the end of a session, you will eventually strike gold and find that you are laughing and crying in equal amounts, in a good way. Practice, practice, practice
One fantastic side quest my players went on came out of me simply asking one of my players his last name. The player wanted to learn a UA spell and I had intended to create an NPC wizard with his last name as kind of an honor. He misunderstood, gave me his character's last name, the NPC the party was speaking with mentioned a wizard of that last name, his character commented that his estranged uncle was a wizard, and that's how we created Tarathiel NaKal. The PC's set out two weeks later to find crazy old Uncle NaKal to try to learn the spell from him, we had a fun little set of encounters to get into the uncle's wizard tower, and it turned into a great little session which was a ton of fun. It turns out that Uncle NaKal is a conspiracy theorist, he believes that a mind flayer collective is in charge of the nobility, and any noble who gets out of hand is replaced by a doppelganger. Halflings are actually underpants pixies who use undergarments to spy on people at the behest of the Faerie Queen. And birds are constructs used by the aristocracy to spy on the citizenry.
I've just finished running my first campaign (Storm King's Thunder) and was thinking of doing pretty much this for my next campaign! I have the most fun when I'm just reacting to my players and what they want to do instead of constantly having to guide them along a path that I've set out beforehand. I love discovering where the story is going along with my players.
Ok… so a town where your not allowed to laugh… “Why are we not allowed to laugh?” Prison guard:”don’t know, you’d have to ask one of the higher ups, only the town governor knows, but no one knows who the town governor is besides the sheriff who is never seen.” Boom, that aughta work!
I plan a SHIT ton, it takes me hours to prepare because I enjoy it, it leaves me feeling confident and I want the session to be fleshed out. However, I do it a few sessions in advanced not several adventures in advanced. This gives me the confidence I need to run a session success fully whilst not being locked into any particular outcome, because it leaves plenty of room for modifications and leeway. I have a fully conceptualized plot as my basis, and my players are free to do what they want and not be railroaded.
TL;DW - Improve, get gud. Improve and being very reactive to players is how I've been running my games for a while now. I'm getting better at having some short and easy hook/quest ideas ready and will recycle any the players find uninteresting or miss out on for the moment.
I was having a discussion with my husband, about how players can get distracted. I was talking about how you want to keep gently reminding the players that were, oh say, in a cemetery about the mausoleum on the other side that they should get to. Otherwise they might start reading the tombstones. And I made up what one might say on the fly. My husband pauses, shocked. "She died when she was fifteen!?" Then he laughed at himself and agreed that you should keep the players on track...but then I found myself wondering why she died so young. Could it have been a murder? Was the murderer still out there? This was starting to sound like a pretty good story. And just like that, I changed my mind. Let those players get a little distracted. It could lead to some cool stuff! Just note that down for later.
Yay! This was my suggestion for a video. I am a serial over-planner, sadly 😢. Hopefully that'll now be rectified lol. Thanks for the great content as usual, Guy
I tend to have an overall idea of the campaign and where the players are likely to go based on the info they have, but most isn't set in stone until I'm sure they are going somewhere specific. What will happen is strongly based on general guides. They meet a hag who wants them to do this, if they do it she will do this, if they don't she will do this, if they attack she will do this, if they trick her this, but it is pretty loose and requires a good bit of on the spot improv on my part. Essentially the hag is a character and I play her like I would if she was a character with motivations.
I'm a first time GM and I'm enjoying making this kind of campaign. I'm using a VTT so I'm making maps for anything I have planned but I don't make anything until after the party makes a decision for the next step. This way they determine where we are going and I make the next bit based on that. I've found that kind of process has led to some cool ideas that I didn't have before. I'm hoping for a more organic unfolding of the over all plot line
Great video! This is how me and my friends played back in the day. It allowed us impromptu sessions that would last well into the night. We recently started playing again. As DM, I’m planning more to make it interesting, but also keeping it unstructured to allow them full freedom.
I've been running Lost Mines of Phandelver for the last couple of months and I have been adjusting and making a lot of changes as things progress. Right now it is more like a homebrew with only the core plot remaining. I'm halfway though and I will try this way of playing in next weeks session to see how it goes.
I've been running games like this for lots of time, and I've found the secret for this is to write a resume after the session to create a call back much later in the campaign (if it is a campaign) or at the end of the session.
This is all nice and dandy. Can you now tell me how to apply this method to online play, since the usual expectation of my average player is maps, creature art, maybe some specific ambience, etc. etc.
I once made an entire campaign like this: i made a 10x10 squares map and 100 little prompts for an adventure. It was a pirate capaign and in evert square there was a different island that was determined by a dice roll on the 100 promps table.
All kinds of wonderful adventures happen when you let the players guide you to what happens next. In my opening event I had a baron try and capture the player characters. They chose combat rather than trying to talk their way out. They defeated his guards and ended up capturing the baron and forcing him to reward them. This had the side benefit of pushing the players to leave town and pursue the main quest because they were no longer welcome.
I've always been so incredibly bad at planning that I've just gone with having big story beats and improving everything else. Helps keep the ole gray matter flexible and fluid
That was an awesome video. I love your content and the way that video take years of experience into one "system" that span many subsystems you made or referenced elsewhere on your channel. Makes people want to check out your other videos on those ;) I personnally took a lot of time to plan and create tools for myself to help me run open world games the most effortlessly and smoothly possible. After all that, I never ever needed to plan other than when creating rich and complex worlds (what I love to do). I just follow all those lists of objective types, triggers types, task types, reward/consequences types, players and PC profiles types based on their personnalities and backstories, etc. that links characters, locations, objects and events of my worlds personnally with the PCs and together between them in the world. With that, I can come up with personnalised stuff on the fly almost without even having to think, and everything blends so well so fast without anyone noticing how I do it. It helps me a lot to improvise and keep my focus on the ambiance and overall feeling, the immersion of the players in the game. I made myself an extensive system of lists and diagrams that I can simply loosely and passively follow and the same story can go fluidly many times with each time a different group, keeping it unique to every run and every PCs each run. Took me years of planning before running my first games. I never was good at adapting and improvising, my brain just won't work that way, so I gave myself a way to make it work for me and make it easy and enjoyable. An overplanned way to run unplanned games.
Thanks for the awesome video. I just started running Rime of the Frostmaiden. I guess this advice is more for homebrew stuff? Guess it could also apply even in an official published campaign though. I could have the scaffolding of the official adventure but just let the players take the ball where they want and me react to it. Might be cool to see where it goes lol.
I did all those techniques and I am running good with all of them. Nowadays I have a scene always prepared that makes the most sense and come up with stuff when players ignoring or not going to the scene whatever reason they may have. Currently for my Friday-Group I run 'Lost mines of Phandelver' with more logic that the adventure presents, my Wednesday-Group runs a classical epic campaign with an undead lich as the bbeg (relatively linear as it's also a introduction to dnd5e for a few people in the group) and my Sunday-Group gets an eragon-inspired campaign in which they decide if they're goodies or badies and that one is a mix in between linear and sandbox campaign (as well as potential pvp-elemets as single members of the group can decide to act as agents). Stay crunchy.
Adding a heavy dose of improvisation, a dash of random 3x5 cards with names or monster ideas on them, and this is how I run games. The players tend to drive the plot after I give them a few options. Rarely do the players do what they originally claimed that they wanted to do. Often, the run after a random plotline that seemed shinier.
Dude , i love this , i really tend to over-plan A LOT (planning for our 4th session), but i also wanted to reuse unused stuff and thought i have to create puzzle pieces to use them on the fly , this exactly what i needed
*Thanks for watching!* Let us know in the comments below your experiences of running an adventure that you didn't plan, or having been a player in an unplanned RPG adventure.
Can you a video on improv? It can be hard to think of things on a moments notice.
I have been DMing for many years now and I must agree that the most enjoyable campaigns for both myself and the players that I have run have been the ones where I didn't plan anything out except for who the major NPCs were. It allowed me to have the freedom to explore interesting things from a character's backstory that I was able to tie into the campaign without making it feel like I was railroading them.
In a video full of accurate information, the most accurate - "Players = Cats".
I literally take a laser pointer to my games. If the table talk gets too out of hand, the laser pointer comes out, does a circuit on the tabletop, and my players come back to focusing on the game and what we're doing. It was tongue-in-cheek to start with, but it's actually become pretty effective.
@@melissaclaassen9707 then, there's cans of cat food that is handed out instead of inspiration as well as catnip for the most attentive player
I like how the GM for Cathulhu is called a Herder.
then, there's cans of cat food that are not opened but thrown at players that are not paying attention. 😉
Good ideas, since "No plan survives contact with Players", to paraphrase.
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Yep. Been on both sides.
Just read a comment where this isn’t true for passive players, who only want a plan.
So true. My players were unpredictable and I would adjust on the fly
I made a one-shot sandwich dungeon, with bread elementals, peanutbutter oozes and grape jelly slimes:
Why? I was hungry:
I am stealing this, thanks.
@@samfowler2073 i'll "take inspiration" as well
lol
My players are about to fight Betty Crooker and her giant male goat demon Gorodon. With the help of Guy Fairy they hope to reclaim his rule of Flaverton.
I planned a grand murder mystery in an urban campaign. When the players wanted to gather rumors, I used a random rumor generator online and they latched onto the randomly generated side quests WAY more than the story I had written.
Honestly I’ve been having a crisis of over planning recently and this is exactly what I needed to see. My best sessions have been improv, but I was worried that my planned sessions weren’t working because I didn’t plan enough, not that I was underprepared.
Thank you for another great lesson!
When I started d&d this year, I figured it was all sandbox. The DM ended up being the kind of guy who spends hours drawing multicolored premade maps and making bosses "just get away" which I found fairly infuriating but also helpless and guilty if we aren't "appreciative of all the hard work."
It's like someone's fat mother baking cookies for a sports team of athletes who care more about their body composition than "her hospitality and love" (aka food).
I feel like this is a social issue more that manifests in d&d more than it is a style of DMing.
Apparently some people like railroad campaigns and are appreciative of not having to use their brain or be creative.
I still go back and watch your old videos. It's hard to believe I've been watching for... oh man, 3 or 4 years now. Feels like a few weeks.
As a player, I am a fish. I bite every hook, I can see. xD
its more fun that way
Same!!
One suggestion I’d add is that, even in adventures where planning is appropriate or necessary, it’s important to think about what needs to be planned and what doesn’t. For an adventure with a significant mystery component-something where the players are meant to piece together what’s going on from disparate clues-I’m a strong believer in the idea that *the truth of what happened* ought to be planned in some detail, at least once they’ve chosen to pursue your hook. (Yes, you can always fall back on “whatever they guess is right”, but if they figure out that’s what you’ve done it cheapens any satisfaction they got out of it, and your clues are less likely to “click” together in a coherent way that gives a group that lovely AHA moment.) Once that much is planned, you can improvise much of the rest, because your knowledge of the “what happened” ensures that whatever specific clues they uncover will fit those facts. You don’t need to plan exactly what all the clues are or who the players get information from or what locations they visit-you can tailor the clues to their choices and lines of inquiry-because your improvisation about what they learn is anchored to your mental timeline of what occurred. And if they come up with a solution that fits all the clues and is better than what you planned, well, you can always decide to go with that instead-but at least it’s your option.
I am a very noob gm and have only hosted games for my children. The one who got most into it is a six year old. Basiclly every adventure with her is spontaneous because every event I planned she ran from or attacked when I thought she would talk to the dwarven miner. The list goes on but you can see how using everything you talked about in this video will be helpful and I have kinda had to do some of what you said just to get her on track to be part of an adventure. Also being the only player I can customize to her actions for triggers without it effecting anybody else's plans. Guy you've been a huge help with your videos. So here's one story about not planning which is now almost every time we play lol
I had one time when she ran from every goblin so eventually I had them attack her horse in the stable at her house which forced her to stand up to them. Now she is very confined and is murder hobbing too often so I have to be changing things on the fly constantly.
I just realized something. The structure of this channel is completely based around teaching. From personal experience as one's knowledge the necessity to revisit has dropped.
I guess I'd like to apologize for not participating in the release of your content as much as I did in the past.
Yet at the same time thank you because what I've learned from you sharing has brought me to the point of extreme confidence running games
It's like you're describing how I've been running games for the last 20 years. :D
This is how I run my games with one caveat, I detail the local area before hand so I have an idea of what's available.
Same.
Me to. 3 decades -ish
I have binders of stats, for virtually any sitch, this point.
Same here. In the opening game of my current campaign, one of the players decided to stay behind and scout the area while the others went into the nearby village. I needed something for him to do, so on the fly I said, "You see two soldiers on horseback emerge from the woods and ride towards the village." He then decided to head into town and warn the others, while I (in the five minutes it took for him to catch up) improvised who the soldiers were, what castle they'd come from, why they were going to the village, and how that tied in with the developing storyline the players were following.
@@robpegler6545 If you managed to do that and it made sense then you're a great improviser
One time my players decided to approach a goal in a completely unexpected way and instead of trying to stop them I just went with it, frantically coming up with NPCs, quests and enemies on the go. Later, one of the players wrote me that it was the best session in a long while for him. :D
This has been my method since the late 90s, and I'm delighted to see it being given some discussion! Your videos on planning are the best I've seen, mind, but I'm quite glad to see someone finally talking about extemporaneous, event-and-response GMing. Bravo!
Some of the best game sessions are the games where our GM said I had nothing planned for the game tonight. One of my favorite games as a GM was I had the barbarian enter a drinking contest with a tavern full of dwarves. The rest of the party were trying to take out the dwarves secretly order to make sure their friend won. I had wanted to move the session along but they really wanted to stay in the tavern. The barbarian who was leaning toward being evil saved a female dwarf in the brawl at the end of the drinking game. He wanted a follower, so I made her a follower of him. She worshipped Bahamut, and because he saved her from certain death, Bahamut made the barbarian a champion of his.
I once ran a game whilst being a novice GM: The party had broken out of the prison of Duke Bofrost's Castle, a terrifying individual seeking to expand his territory by taking over their home town. After their resistance failed they where captured and shipped to the icy north regions where the Duke came from. So, after shattering their chains and kicking in the prison door (obviously) they had the "choice" between fighting a squadron of heavily armored guards or escape into the dungeon beneath the castle. Fast forward the dungeon crawl. I had to prepare something for the session, and this time my head was empty... I wanted them to find some prisoners who also escaped into the depths of the dungeon, I belief I watched a video where Guy talked about switching things up and adding the unconventional. The whole evening before I had no idea, the whole trainride to the friends house I had no idea. We sat at the table, had some laughs, still no idea. As we begun I moved on with the dungeon, they cleared some rooms, then it hit me. It was a whole tribe of Orcs that had been relocated from their warm regions into this cold mess! I mean just your ordinary plot, right? And they desperately wanted to be freed, all they needed was a clean way out. Because the Duke possessed strong magic weapons and some spellcasters, they needed some ruckus. I went on with describing some collapsed rooms, then a rubble filled corridor. On my dungeon map there was a secret door, one player aced his perception check, they unrubbled the entrance behind which the Orcs had their makeshift underground camp and I started to introduce them to the Orcs. They of course thought at first that the party members were spies, sent by the Duke to infiltrate their group. After some negotiation the party offered help. Here comes the improv.: The Orcs had an Druid that managed to dig an entrance into the castle that was hidden behind a picture. At that time the Duke was throwing a huge party for his henchmen. The Orcs posed as servants to deliver the food from the kitchen. My players skyrocket took off, they made all plans how to take over the kitchen, how to disguise as the taster, how to create ruckus and how to get the weapon. It was the Best Session of DnD I have ever run. Naturally things went south, and we ended with a epic battle where they managed to finally slay the terrible Duke Bofrost. It maybe seems naive in hindsight, but boy had we fun!
The first adventure I *ever* ran had literally *0* preparation, if memory serves. I can't even remember if we _used_ a system as, at the time, I did a lot of chat/server roleplay; this eventually ended up with me being "de facto GM" when I started actually manipulating the narrative..... The specific adventure that came to mind was when a merchant and his bodyguard boarded a ship headed for.... _somewhere._ We used real geography, as it was set in the Napoleonic Era of the real world. At some point, the captain's right hand went to talk with the both of them in their room and, at least I _think,_ asked for their help investigating a break-in below deck. While investigating, they discovered some smashed up crates(I think one had tea leaves or something, but tbh I was just bsing everything anyway) and they found a Mcguffin of some kind.... At some point they were ambushed by the bad guys and it ended with the bodyguard running off(luring away the two grunts) and the merchant defeating the boss with the "ye old scrote-kick," the merchant than ran up deck and was shot as he mistakenly charged at a guard who was armed with a musket. I gave him the accolade "Iron Gut" just for kicks.... I think I planned a sequel in which the party learns that it was a kidnapping plot of the captain's daughter, but it was long enough ago that a lot of the actual details are a blur for me.
tl;dr: I became forever-GM before I became an actual GM, also BS *Everything.*
I've done my first few sessions as a DM now. Slowly adding stuff to 'plan'.
Strangely enough i just prep:
- list of names (for all races)
- list of city names
- a map (so you can say, forest here, mountain there)
- a few random encounters (wolf attack, bears, some thugs)
- the real "session" with just, x triggers, y is the end (reward) all stuff in the middle is either slighty prepared (a puzzle) or not planned.
Yes, I *have* been binge watching, because I will soon be starting a new campaign and be a GM for the first time in almost ten years.
This is great advice, thanks guy. Takes the pressure out of DMing a lot for me. I am playing for a year now, and I was DM for a Self-written railroaded one-shot - which was fun, but I overprepped a bit, and I could not get myself into preparing another game, because it seemed so much work, and I was afraid of preparing too much stuff my players would never explore. But I started a little game with my son, and I prepared a. It, but I started inventing more and more stuff on the fly, went with his ideas and the game world is growing by us telling stories - and it feels so good.
This is exactly the way I GM whenever I don't run a premade adventure (Which is most of the time)
For my last campaign we started, in the Scion 2e Urban Fantasy system, we made the characters, and each player made an important location to them and an important NPC or 2.
We ended up having like 8 cool NPC's in place with relations to the players and about 6 interesting locations before the first session.
Then before the first session the players made their Short-term deed (An exp trigger in the game about something they want to do/ their character wants to do) and one of the players made one 'Kick the gang out from the Community Center' which made me go 'Well then I need to make up a gang' so I made the 21st Street Legion who are a group of Gangers fighting to get London back under roman control, fighting under the banner of Juno (I later made up)
Then slowly as the players explored I started to plan deeper and deeper over the next few sessions.
So the plot right now seems to be 'A reborn Gaius Julius Augustus, is trying to gain power, to recreate the Roman empire, and concecrating London in the Roman faith'
Then I could start finding out how this could be done, and how the players could interact with it.
1: She isn't sure which Caesar she is a reborn version of yet, so she is collecting ancient art and relics to see if they jog her memory. (Her name is Julia Octavia Kaiser)
2: What does the Goons of the Legion know?
3: What else do they need to prepare to make sure their plans can work?
this is exacly how i have ended up dming. one thing i do pre session is a sentence of what i want to have uncovered/ achieved during the session. I remember i had a campaign where the first 3 sessions where the goal was getting the party assembled cause i decided in all my wisdom to make them strangers spread out threw town.
Oh, that must have been a true cat-wrangling set of sessions, to try to herd players toward spontaneously wanting to do something together.
I have an overarching story, I plan stuff out that can be moved around, but I end up doing as you described constantly. Thanks to creators like you I have been able to make it seem as though all is planned.
He’s right, this is my 8th video in last 24 hours, I’ve been binge watching every chance I get 😂
I've been binge-watching these, as I'm going to try my first ever D&D game tomorrow, and I'm developing such a crush on you.
Goo luck with your D&D game!
Interesting new plan, I'm a constant overplanner
Soo close to 200k!
Long time fan!
I think could be summarized as "let players do what they want, but always bring it back to the narrative."
Yes! This is the missing link. While i don't over plan, this describes how the mindset of a GM works before, during and after session. I get so caught up in the moment when thinking on my toes and i think this will actually help me.
i've just been figuring this out as well, and I wrote the following sentence about events: "Events become problems when players try to solve them." When they do that I know they are invested, and we've got our selves an adventure. And since each event is about a specific person doing a specific thing in a specific place the GM already has tons of implied material to improv from, no need to be in free fall improv!!! (and if you are using an established setting even better!!)
This is excellent advise not only for all GMs, but especially for those with highly unpredictable players. My past experiences with my own play group has gone as follows: The party comes to a crossroads. They can go forward, left, right, or back the way they came. As the DM I have planned for all of those eventualities. What does my group do? Pulls out a shovel and digs down to the Ninth Layer of Hell.
I didn't plan for that.
After watching hundreds of videos of how to gm, all methods seems a little odd to me or i dont like them at all. But this time you described exactly how i have gming for around 3 years in a way that no other person could. I feel trully blessed that i have found your vídeo finally describing exactly how i think, i thought it was impossible feeling related with other styles of prep but there is you, describing it perfectly, thank you so much!
I have run and played in both and I think they can lead to some of the most brilliant game sessions in a campaign as long as everyone playing is on the same page about improvising with each other and the GM to build something wholly unique based on the moment in time the session is occurring. I will be using the method more in the future as you have solidified the concept more for me. Keep up the amazing work!
Thank you! I have been a GM for... more years than I care to mention. I've played many different rule systems. I'm running my first 5E campaign and I got a little... ambitious. I have half a dozen groups of adventurers accross different parts of a continent. The effects of one group may have consequences for other groups. Once all of the pandemic limitations are over I'm hoping to amalgamate everyone into two groups. I realised very early on that given the scope of the campaign that I was running that things were going to be happening regardless of whether my players were getting involved or not. So a plot would move forward regardless. Group one might do something that affects a trade route that supplies goods for group 3. So each session my prep goes as far as deciding what NPCs are doing based on the current state of the world.
Now this in itself sounds like an absolute ton of work, but as I'm rather heavily into playing NPCs it's very easy to work out their motivation as things in the world change. If my players get to like an NPC then they are more likely to go to them for information. Easy way to encourage specific courses of action. I have all of my major steps in place and whilst the outcomes are not decided, I have a nice vague shape that represents the current outcome. Thus far it is serving me exceptionally well.
This is a great video for new DMs or those wanting to improve their planning. I have used a system very similar to this for ages and although some may think it may make your campaign more messy it actually gives you a lot more flexibility. In my last session my group was travelling in the mountains and was looking for a place to camp. I rolled a 20 on my encounter die signifying something exceptional in nature. Off the cuff I created the ruins of a small mansion with a nearby pond and through expanding this simple area I have created an underwater lair magically concealed with a sealed basement in the original mansion that I can further expand as I wish. By just focusing on the "here and now I now have something that I can use either as a "one-page" or to link to other significant plot hooks. I find that the plots and adventures create themselves if I do not focus on the "hard stuff" and let my imagination run with these things. Thanks very much for sharing!
I had my PCs fight a witch. Since the witch would have been an easy kill if they all ganged up on her, I put a wicked bramble elemental thing. It waited for them outside of her hut. I described the hut in the forest with a circle of 6 tiki-like torches surrounding the battlefield. I just added that bit in there for flavor. The party comes, attacks the bramble but are having lousy rolls. The ranger, thinking that this was some witch magic decides to extinguish the torches. I thought I was a wonderful idea, so I lowered the HP and AC every time the took out a torch. When the elemental was destroyed, they found the witch inside and the real battle began. She would use a cantrip to light a torch, which gave her a bump to HP and an additional action to attack with. Kinda cheesy-zelda-ish, but the party enjoyed it and had a good time. Totally not how I planned that battle.
The events until players bite, I like to call fishing :). It's great to see another like minded in DMing. Great video bud.
Excellent video. I haven't played or run a game for decades but one of the best I ever did was when I roughly sketched out a village my players walked into at the end of the last session and dropped in a mysterious new owner of the manor on the hill and his man servant (think Salem's Lot by Stephen King). Took me 20 minutes to plan and we played for around 6 hours and I just bounced off what the PCs were doing, throwing in clichés and tropes like pineapple on pizza. The adventure ran itself.
At the end of it one of my PCs had lost an eye, just as he gained a pair of master crafted flintlock pistols (he was supremely irritated with me) and that led to us chasing down a replacement eyeball. One of the others ended up with incipient vampirism which led to lots of research and further missions to find a cure before he went full 'creature of the night' on everybody. I couldn't have planned that out in linear fashion or even sand box style. I definitely vouch for the minimal approach to planning, it beats spending half a day mapping and populating a castle and the players ride on by without even commenting on the architecture.
just starting a new campaign after a long break... and this video gave me so much confidence. I dont really need to over plan things, just basic structure of what might happen and Im good to go. thanks!
Very much how I have GMed for over 35 years now! A friend (and awesome GM) and I call this Power GMing! Listening to the players and letting them run with things and you are just faciliating them creating the story.
Good lord, this is the video I've been needing. I spend an ungodly amount of time prepping for my group's games and I would love nothing more than to ease that burden on myself. It all started because we collectively agreed as a group that we wanted a large campaign that would take everyone from lvl 1-20. We've been playing for over 22 years as a group and have never seen a campaign to completion before. COVID hit and we all decided we should have something worthwhile to focus on. It's been great...but yeah...the week before each game I am always up late every night outlining and whatever else. It's still fun for me as a GM, but very time consuming.
I'm going to take the advice in this lovely video and only prep my barebones framework, like NPC's, Monsters, Maps, and maybe a few interesting non-combat encounters for our next session.
Excellent information for how to begin a player-driven campaign! Thank you!
13:20 That's an interesting list. I say Stop, Find, Protect/Deliver, and Escape, which are comparable to your Thwarting, Discovery/Escape, Delivering & Collecting together
This was such a weird experience for me, because I started out DMing in this exact style, then discovered How to be a Great GM in my efforts to learn to better plan and structure my campaigns! Very fun to see it loop back to the exact things I've found, in trying to improvise _less_ over the years, and many thanks for yet another fantastic video, Guy.
Besides the two fists full of modules I've run, this is how I've GMed for over 30 years. It takes finesse and you have to prepare in other ways as stated here by Guy. I Like filling my head with interesting and inspiring situations, descriptions, locales, etc......as well as learning new ways of manipulating the narrative. ...And the most important...listening to your players and running with their ideas. Improv GMing takes time and can be taxing...but it is well worth it in the long run for both GM and players.
Me, I always start a potential campaign with 3 things #1: a place for the PC's to rest buy and sell, and become "known". #2: A location that the Players can delve into, gain experience and loot. #3: A few interesting interactions between #1 and #2. Thats it. Concentrate on NPC's. If the players take to the game... EXPAND.
GAH! Guy, do you realize how fundamentally counter this method is to my DMing style? Complex long-term plans are central to the way I prepare (and are also the most fun part!). It's not that I'm bad at improvising, but I love having a general sense of where things are going so I can foreshadow. It also helps me improvise to know a lot about the world and what all the characters are up to. And, like I said, it's fun for me.
I suppose I could give this all-improve method a try. I do have a one-shot coming up. Wait... the one-shot is a mystery with a tight timeline, a situation where planning is essential to ensure the clues work and it all makes sense! GAH!!
I began running Pbta games just over a year ago and what you've been talking about is similar to a principle they talk about. The talk about "playing to find out what happens". They take it a bit further than what you're talking about, but it's similar. Love your content as always!
Some years ago I had a busy week and hadn't prepped almost anything for a 3.5 D&D game where the players where a special ops team behind undead enemy lines. I grabbed Libris Mortis, picked out the bone velociraptors. I figured it would take them a little while of combat to deal with three of them and I could figure out my next step. 5 minutes, 2 castings of Control Undead, and some focus fire later, and the resident wizard had two new undead pets and I had no time to come up with anything solid.
So I ad-libbed and told them that as they travelled, they came across a fort with 40 ft high timber walls and two visible guard towers that was supposed to be a target of opportunity and asked them to make a battle plan.
That took up the next hour at least, them with the planning, and me with the planning. There were several moments on them making educated guesses as to what is inside, and I would surreptitiously make some notes thinking it was a good idea.
Lol this video is me. Before every session I say "What do I want my players to discover?" And then I improv my way to that point reacting to my players as needed, letting them have moments of RP and discovery that feel natural. Sometimes they solve puzzles in ways I didn't intend.
This sounds a lot like my core/original method, though I tend to throw out many events at the start, and allow the players to circle back to them in their own time. A missed "hook" becomes background information.
Or, a better term, is foreshadowing.
As a GM who is currently in this pitfall, This is a very useful guide to keep the game back to being interesting
Thank you! This was exactly what the title suggested. Very helpful. I am currently waiting for our session 0, but I can't help trying to start thinking of interesting events, even though our PCs char sheets are not even ready yet. I do not want them to push to stuff, so I had anxiety and overthinking about sth that cannot be solved yet. You put my mind at ease
I always have a loose plan. Usually the first few sessions are pretty scripted out unless the players move in a different direction. Then once the players are comfortable in the world, and my style, i just start tossing out threads and whatever the players generate towards we start to move the campaign.
Basically my dming style is the cabin in the woods method of picking the baddy
you are really crushing it lately with these videos! the last couple of months have been such interesting and novel ideas, its been great
19:00 agreeing on this so much. The things that take much of my time is: stat blocks, encounters and rewards. Everything else is up for the players.
Ive been out of the Dm show for a long time due to covid. But I really focus on not railroading my players either. My triggers are typically placing npcs in the world and letting the party decide who they interact with. And then that triggers events. We will see how my first session of Icewind Dale goes on saturday.
The most thing i honestly spend time prepping is my location descriptions as i try to get that level of immersion with it.
I love the video.
It sucks for me because I'm playing online and my players demand a lot. If I don't put an actual workweek into each session they act almost offended. Yet, they put in the absolute bare minimum. Rough times.
I started with a published Module, and use the some of the events and options within the module to allow the players pick their own direction. Once they were done the NPC that hired them said she'd have a job in 1 week. To try to give the PCs a bit of time to explore the town and meet the shop keepers, etc. However any time I presented them with an "event/hook" they would try to fully reel it in to the exclusion of everything else.
That said we didn't really have a "Goal" or "Sentence" that started the game other than "I'm going to run this published module and let the players go from there and if there's not been something we've 'hooked' onto there's another module I can use to get more mileage"
This method still I think takes a lot of experience and It's probably a good thing you dont start with this. Do all the other methods, plan things out, and now that you're comfortable and understand what you and your players find fun and entertaining, let the reigns go and see where it takes you!
I really enjoyed this video. I've enjoyed your content for a long time. And I found past materials enlightening but yet lacking something. I think this video really brought it all together
The bane for DM's like us is a little something called Divination. It does make for a great and fun challenge, though!
Divination is easy: keep it simple keep it vague.
Take 5e for example, RAW: "The GM offers a truthful reply. The reply might be a short phrase, a cryptic rhyme, or an omen."
So a perfect reply is something like this:
>> Where trees grow tall,
>> And apples fall,
>> From the shadow,
>> Heed the call
(Made up as I wrote)
Now your players should actively look for shadows beneath apple trees. Which may become another trigger.
I did something like this in game once and the player was very happy after the session, telling everyone that hadn't he used divination they would never have talked to a certain NPC and never got that piece of information.
@@Wolfsspinne Illusion 100 Speech 100!
I've done similarly, but you definitely seem to have a really good grasp on how to pull it off, and I think I can learn something from what you've said. Thank you!
What some people here might not know is that there are whole game systems built around this concept. In the narrative RPG space this is called "playing to find out".
Games that are built for it, such as many Forged in the Dark and Powered by the Apocalypse games, give you a toolset that helps you keep the game moving without having to place the whole burden on you as the GM.
It’s hard to replicate when your players favorite moment of a campaign was the moment you made up about the ghost of a gnome wizard. Just had a note saying “run down former study of some kind of wizard” for the room I did not think they would spend so much time trying to get into haha
Credit to this channel for making my first campaign a success so far. Thank you for making this excellent content
This is exactly how I run campaigns! I always thought it was something others game masters would probably look down upon
Thanks for this. I haven't GMed a lot, but this is the general method I use. I don't plan too much and wing in response to players. Having a SENTENCE to start will really help. I'm now moving into running a whole campaign, I think, for a long time. Thanks for the help!
I'm a fairly new DM (and I've never played more than 1 session as a PC) so the concept of writing a story but also not carefully planning it is pretty overwhelming. These videos have been a huge help for me
This is exactly what I took from your book. I created 3 things the main villain is looking to do.
I had 4 different big bads running at the beginning of my campaign and just waited to see what events would draw my players in. So leaving them at a simple template helped this.
Great vid as always Guy.
This is how I ended up settling in to be my preferred method of running games. I've been doing it for about 12 years now and it resulted in much better games.
The "player=cats" note is exactly why. It's like herding cats sometimes, so it's easier to learn to adapt to the players.
If they ended with some hook, I plan a couple possible encounters, at most, and maybe a statement or so about a goal for the "episode."
As a comparison. "ambushed by highwaymen. Searching and finding a note." would be distilled into a "Secret or Clue" by sly flourish method
I was planning things out to the nines for years now, and kept scrambling when it got derailed. These days though I've been assuming it would be derailed, minimally planning and winging the rest. This reinforces this and gives me some excellent ideas. Thanks!
So how do you develop the improvisational skills necessary to do this? I very rarely come up with actually interesting ideas on a short time horizon.
None of my ideas were interesting. They were a barking dog, a man handing over a scroll... those are pretty mundane things. Don't put so much pressure on yourself. Choose an idea and then follow along asking answering the 5 W's and 1 H.
This video made me realise how D&D around table is like Poker game - iit's not only about game itself,. but also about player expressions.
Also i paused the video and got very nice pic of @GM, it would be great for facebook profile picutre or soemthing haha - sadly i dont think i can put picture links in YT comments tho.
For my current campaign, which has gone from level 1 to 20 and is about two or three sessions from concluding, I've mostly written up descriptions of areas and let the players interact with them. I've planned out the larger structure, mostly with a major event mixing things up about once per tier but I've left the session to session details up to the players. By absolutely no coincidence, this campaign I've barely planned is probably the first time I've made it to the end of a campaign without any (okay, without much) burnout as a DM.
This is exactly how I run my campaign/sessions...I get a quick little half hour setup of a “mobile” plot (by “mobile” meaning I can insert whatever I need to whenever I want). My quests/plots are flexible and can also be deep and the long joke style.
Example: my last party met on a slaver ship chained together near the back of a boat (the slavering maiden, of course)...traveling down a river. My plot is get them into the Giants Hill Steading (convert old TSR module). I want them to see it and want to go in, but they are levels away...not many, just need them at about 5th level for my conversion, they are level 2..
So that was my plot. Get them into the giants fortress module (hill Steading G1), from a slave ship.
So we begin play. I know that hill giants have some kobold slaves, and I love gnolls...so while they are role playing, I have a large band of gnolls attack and hook the slave ship, large anchor hooks are flung from the rivers banks, pulling the slave ship ashore, the party MUST escape...no one on the ship is a friendly and no one on shore is a friendly...the thief picks the cuffs of his party while the slavers are busy defending their ship from gnolls arrows...
The escape to shore eventually..where they everbtually run into the kobolds, gathering large kegs of water for the hill giants (unknown to the group)...
At night further down the shore, they see the fire from the hill giant Steading...they investigate...they are hiding behind the walls of the fortress, after spotting a sleeping hill giant in the front doorway.
This is where I will introduce the distracting NPC that explains they should get giant slaying weapons (and level a few more levels).
I made a quick cave dungeon for next week, only five rooms and four halls that lead to (idk, I’ll make those up when we play). If I am stumped and can’t think of what to do with rooms not yet fleshed out, I have a couple modules with cavern maps - I’ll plagiarize a few of these with some tweaks.
This is how I have run adventures/campaigns for the last 20 years. Improv by working off of what the players are doing and they expecting..
They will say things like:
“I think there is something bad behind this door”
Gm note: they are not comfortable in this dungeon. Perfect!
“We may need to find a place to rest, I don’t think we are ready for a big fight”
Gm note: good, I’ll throw a small encounter at them while they prepare to rest, to keep them on their toes and fearful.
“I need to start rolling better, I can’t hit anything”
Gm note: player frustrated at the luck of the roll, time to introduce an NPC distraction that won’t require rolls but will revolve around frustrated players skills and nonWeapons proficiencies...
Basically, listen to the table, and improv off of their dialog, fears, mood, frustrations... by the end of a session, you will eventually strike gold and find that you are laughing and crying in equal amounts, in a good way.
Practice, practice, practice
One fantastic side quest my players went on came out of me simply asking one of my players his last name. The player wanted to learn a UA spell and I had intended to create an NPC wizard with his last name as kind of an honor. He misunderstood, gave me his character's last name, the NPC the party was speaking with mentioned a wizard of that last name, his character commented that his estranged uncle was a wizard, and that's how we created Tarathiel NaKal. The PC's set out two weeks later to find crazy old Uncle NaKal to try to learn the spell from him, we had a fun little set of encounters to get into the uncle's wizard tower, and it turned into a great little session which was a ton of fun. It turns out that Uncle NaKal is a conspiracy theorist, he believes that a mind flayer collective is in charge of the nobility, and any noble who gets out of hand is replaced by a doppelganger. Halflings are actually underpants pixies who use undergarments to spy on people at the behest of the Faerie Queen. And birds are constructs used by the aristocracy to spy on the citizenry.
I've just finished running my first campaign (Storm King's Thunder) and was thinking of doing pretty much this for my next campaign! I have the most fun when I'm just reacting to my players and what they want to do instead of constantly having to guide them along a path that I've set out beforehand. I love discovering where the story is going along with my players.
Ok… so a town where your not allowed to laugh…
“Why are we not allowed to laugh?”
Prison guard:”don’t know, you’d have to ask one of the higher ups, only the town governor knows, but no one knows who the town governor is besides the sheriff who is never seen.”
Boom, that aughta work!
I plan a SHIT ton, it takes me hours to prepare because I enjoy it, it leaves me feeling confident and I want the session to be fleshed out. However, I do it a few sessions in advanced not several adventures in advanced. This gives me the confidence I need to run a session success fully whilst not being locked into any particular outcome, because it leaves plenty of room for modifications and leeway. I have a fully conceptualized plot as my basis, and my players are free to do what they want and not be railroaded.
TL;DW - Improve, get gud.
Improve and being very reactive to players is how I've been running my games for a while now. I'm getting better at having some short and easy hook/quest ideas ready and will recycle any the players find uninteresting or miss out on for the moment.
I was having a discussion with my husband, about how players can get distracted. I was talking about how you want to keep gently reminding the players that were, oh say, in a cemetery about the mausoleum on the other side that they should get to. Otherwise they might start reading the tombstones. And I made up what one might say on the fly. My husband pauses, shocked. "She died when she was fifteen!?" Then he laughed at himself and agreed that you should keep the players on track...but then I found myself wondering why she died so young. Could it have been a murder? Was the murderer still out there? This was starting to sound like a pretty good story. And just like that, I changed my mind. Let those players get a little distracted. It could lead to some cool stuff! Just note that down for later.
Was wondering if we could get a video on designing dungeons? Couldn't find one from you lol
That's the appeal of this channel in my opinion. Most of his videos are system agnostic.
@@genvoorhees I mean, "dungeons" can exist in a lot of different systems. We just call them different things, I guess.
@blarghonk8 Thanks, I've been looking for help on this as well.
Yay! This was my suggestion for a video. I am a serial over-planner, sadly 😢. Hopefully that'll now be rectified lol. Thanks for the great content as usual, Guy
You are so welcome!
I tend to have an overall idea of the campaign and where the players are likely to go based on the info they have, but most isn't set in stone until I'm sure they are going somewhere specific.
What will happen is strongly based on general guides.
They meet a hag who wants them to do this, if they do it she will do this, if they don't she will do this, if they attack she will do this, if they trick her this, but it is pretty loose and requires a good bit of on the spot improv on my part. Essentially the hag is a character and I play her like I would if she was a character with motivations.
Some crazy NPCs are some of the best because I can have some very interesting reactions to things the party does.
I'm a first time GM and I'm enjoying making this kind of campaign. I'm using a VTT so I'm making maps for anything I have planned but I don't make anything until after the party makes a decision for the next step. This way they determine where we are going and I make the next bit based on that. I've found that kind of process has led to some cool ideas that I didn't have before. I'm hoping for a more organic unfolding of the over all plot line
Great video! This is how me and my friends played back in the day. It allowed us impromptu sessions that would last well into the night. We recently started playing again. As DM, I’m planning more to make it interesting, but also keeping it unstructured to allow them full freedom.
the town where you can't laugh reminds me of the oxventure Quiet Riot, and The Order of Keeping it Down.
The Lazy Dungeon Master is the best thing I have read as far as what to plan and what not to plan goes...
I've been running Lost Mines of Phandelver for the last couple of months and I have been adjusting and making a lot of changes as things progress. Right now it is more like a homebrew with only the core plot remaining. I'm halfway though and I will try this way of playing in next weeks session to see how it goes.
I've been running games like this for lots of time, and I've found the secret for this is to write a resume after the session to create a call back much later in the campaign (if it is a campaign) or at the end of the session.
This is all nice and dandy.
Can you now tell me how to apply this method to online play, since the usual expectation of my average player is maps, creature art, maybe some specific ambience, etc. etc.
I once made an entire campaign like this: i made a 10x10 squares map and 100 little prompts for an adventure. It was a pirate capaign and in evert square there was a different island that was determined by a dice roll on the 100 promps table.
All kinds of wonderful adventures happen when you let the players guide you to what happens next. In my opening event I had a baron try and capture the player characters. They chose combat rather than trying to talk their way out. They defeated his guards and ended up capturing the baron and forcing him to reward them. This had the side benefit of pushing the players to leave town and pursue the main quest because they were no longer welcome.
I've always been so incredibly bad at planning that I've just gone with having big story beats and improving everything else. Helps keep the ole gray matter flexible and fluid
I would sure like to hear an example of these concepts at the table.
That was an awesome video.
I love your content and the way that video take years of experience into one "system" that span many subsystems you made or referenced elsewhere on your channel. Makes people want to check out your other videos on those ;)
I personnally took a lot of time to plan and create tools for myself to help me run open world games the most effortlessly and smoothly possible. After all that, I never ever needed to plan other than when creating rich and complex worlds (what I love to do). I just follow all those lists of objective types, triggers types, task types, reward/consequences types, players and PC profiles types based on their personnalities and backstories, etc. that links characters, locations, objects and events of my worlds personnally with the PCs and together between them in the world. With that, I can come up with personnalised stuff on the fly almost without even having to think, and everything blends so well so fast without anyone noticing how I do it. It helps me a lot to improvise and keep my focus on the ambiance and overall feeling, the immersion of the players in the game. I made myself an extensive system of lists and diagrams that I can simply loosely and passively follow and the same story can go fluidly many times with each time a different group, keeping it unique to every run and every PCs each run. Took me years of planning before running my first games. I never was good at adapting and improvising, my brain just won't work that way, so I gave myself a way to make it work for me and make it easy and enjoyable. An overplanned way to run unplanned games.
Thanks for the awesome video. I just started running Rime of the Frostmaiden. I guess this advice is more for homebrew stuff? Guess it could also apply even in an official published campaign though. I could have the scaffolding of the official adventure but just let the players take the ball where they want and me react to it. Might be cool to see where it goes lol.
I did all those techniques and I am running good with all of them. Nowadays I have a scene always prepared that makes the most sense and come up with stuff when players ignoring or not going to the scene whatever reason they may have.
Currently for my Friday-Group I run 'Lost mines of Phandelver' with more logic that the adventure presents, my Wednesday-Group runs a classical epic campaign with an undead lich as the bbeg (relatively linear as it's also a introduction to dnd5e for a few people in the group) and my Sunday-Group gets an eragon-inspired campaign in which they decide if they're goodies or badies and that one is a mix in between linear and sandbox campaign (as well as potential pvp-elemets as single members of the group can decide to act as agents).
Stay crunchy.
Adding a heavy dose of improvisation, a dash of random 3x5 cards with names or monster ideas on them, and this is how I run games. The players tend to drive the plot after I give them a few options. Rarely do the players do what they originally claimed that they wanted to do. Often, the run after a random plotline that seemed shinier.
This is exciting! I have a session this weekend and I am gonna use those forms!
Dude , i love this , i really tend to over-plan A LOT (planning for our 4th session), but i also wanted to reuse unused stuff and thought i have to create puzzle pieces to use them on the fly , this exactly what i needed