*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.
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 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.*
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!
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 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.
Hooboy. I had a planned campaign turn into one of these when the players derailed the first Event in the first session, and it's the most fun I think I've ever had as a GM. They successfully rallied a bunch of commoners to beat over-equipped and over-statted soldiers and turned an intrigue plot into Exodus. Every adventure became a different town with a different problem, be it a mining village beset by barbarians or a hub city with cultists abducting citizens into the nearby crypt. Never did I have any concrete plans for an adventure, only premises and OCCASIONALLY a web of concepts and potential leads. We had a couple of recurring themes and characters, like a disgraced guard captain from the first session dogging their footsteps basically every other town. And finally, they made it past the far border to the wilderness, and to freedom.
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.
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.
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
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!
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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?
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!
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.
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 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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
sometimes the bits my players have the most fun at are the ones where i dont plan and have to quickly find a map to dump into roll20. i just need to remember this when i get anxious about prep, sometimes less is more! (just find a few more spare maps in advance xD )
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.
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
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.
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 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!
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
A few years ago now, I started running an urban fantasy game (an adaptation of Demon: The Fallen I made for the New World of Darkness ruleset). The players, playing fallen angels struggling to establish themselves in a small Texas town, found one of their allies had been killed the past night (the event). I'd prepared the stats for the killer and his allies, and fully expected this to become a fight that would end with the killer slain to set off a larger plot, but hadn't made any more preparations yet apart from some notes of how the killer's people were organised (since that was needed to inform their reactions). Instead, the players not only set a non-lethal trap for the killer but also figured out who (or what) he really was... and then proceeded to not only not harm him, but also did so in a way that scared away his backup, and then simply let him go when he begged for his life, opening the killer up to the possibility that even fallen angels weren't the absolute monsters he'd been led to believe. The campaign is still running. The players have since kicked off a civil war in the killer's people and allied with the faction they befriended that day, but there have been too many ups and downs in this process to recount (one of the worst being the players carelessly endangering the family of their new ally because they hadn't quite realised it truly was a family).
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
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 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.
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
I prefer this method, too. Some players don’t enjoy having full agency (casualty of video games) and wonder about making the wrong choice. Analysts paralysis is real for players these days.
Here’s one of my favorite hooks: party starts in a tavern, when the town’s wizard, often dismissed for his crackpot theories, bursts in, yelling about how an apocalyptic artifact long-thought a myth has suddenly resurfaced. He then falls to the floor, dead, shot by the dozens of arrows fired by the assassins now entering the bar to deal with the witnesses.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
I feel I failed at this when my players gave me the opportunity... I had planned an unrelated encounter on the road to find the party of baddies they’d been tracking... They fought the thing, damn Nat20 ruined the Gelatinous Cube trap in the middle of their road; But then traveled off the roads to try and find the source of the cube, where it came from, etc... I had NPCs around try to explain it away and that this was a matter is best left to the King’s soldiers, etc... since I was a new DM I asked my players to let me know if I’m overstepping and give me notes.. I love notes.. and yeah one of my friends just flat out said, “Erik you’re railroading the fuck outta us right now, if we want to spend the whole session investigating the crack this cube came out of that’s the game.” I appreciated his candor and have since, well.. “figured out“ isn’t right, but this happens less now haha.
My Champions Campaign is a Film Studio that provides everything for telling storys and not be limited by genre, time, or place...episodic or serial storys can told without limitation...a little Mission Briefing and the Characters are in The Story...
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.
Haha I love all the references to watching other videos. It was very much my first video. In session 8 of a campaign very similar to this. It's been a bit tough cause I am trying to get the players to create as much of the world as possible.
Huh, I've been doing this for a while. I have tried and tried to plan things out and have a structured and paced experience for my players but no matter what I anticipate they throw a solution at me that's viable I never considered and I wind up scrambling to accommodate. If I'm going to scramble I prefer to be prepared to scramble. I have some useful resources to use, hit the ayers with a situation and tell myself that I can deal with whatever they try. Remember, as Mythbusters taught us, failure is always an option! If I get the feeling my players are chasing clouds or trying to see how silly they can get just for the sake of it, they can always fail.
A lot of this comes down to semantics but to me the video is more about "the death of railroading" which is to say "the death of moving the players to specific locations while not taking into account of their actions". The level of plot set up via a precipitating event. The desired outcome is still there and thus the plot is, though in this scenario we listen to the players as they figure out how to solve issues. Having done a lot of creative writing courses recently it's apparent that almost all writers "figure out" how the hero's react to incidents along with them - rather than try to push them through or even working backwards from the ending to plan the build up (which does happen but seems more for screenwriting than storytelling) I think what scares the new GM the most is "not having stuff prepared for where they might choose to go" - But really I find this to be a far simpler task than first appears.
I found planning adventures only three pages (plus stats for monsters Npcs) is optimal. So it is flexible enough to shift it around based on party choices and if it doesn't work, you aren't invested enough to chuck it if needed.
I’m completely new to being the dm and planing on doing a lot of this while still having some pushing towards the main events so we still progress or have random events that can gain info about the main quest or some item that can trigger a new event after figuring out what the item is or a message that’s hidden within the item or if they walk near a certain npc). Still only setting the event up, main goal and what they can gain and think about how to progress the event. (Have 5 events already before watching this video xD)
My table uses critical success cards and that's how I became an invisible acid spitting bear god for a day who decimated a kobold cave and rescued some farmers who have stayed in periphery of our larger game. I also baffled my DM by rolling two nat 20s to convince two chokers to run head first into an evil sentient berry bush that sucked the life out of them.
I have been doing this for years, I basically am doing the Dr. Strange time stone thing every single time my players do things, I plan out a few milestones and then after that I only ever plan out one session and lightly plan the next session.
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!
It seems to work when the players are very involved and immersive, playing their role and character well. If they are just waiting for something to be given to them and not come up with own ideas or interest then its rather dificult... (Im a hardcore pre-planer :/)
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.
This is almost exactly how I DM, I just have a page bookmarked that has all the monsters from AD&D I’ll need and I wing it, I have a stack of notes that are basically shit that I came up with on the fly or something interesting the players said.. I have an idea of everything going on in the area so whichever way they go I have at least something in my mind for them but I don’t plan it in depth
I literally have maybe a paragraph written for each thing they could possibly do. "They go this way, boom this happens. They go that way, they meet this person." I only write down a bare bones of what I need in an area if they go to it. As long as you have the imagination to fill in the small details in the moment, you only really need a few things. Who they can meet/fight, what they could find, Where it's at, what they can do after, why everything is happening the way it is. When is optional unless there's a time limit. After having this written down, I just wait for my party to decide where they want to go (90% of the time, it's somewhere I NEVER thought of) and then I look at my notes and wing it from there. Too much detail can kill things just as well as too little. After a point, it becomes either boring to hear all this description or your players decide to get vindictive and begin to look for those moments you forget these small details. Every DM has gone through this problem at some point in their career. Almost every game they tell me they don't know how I come up with this stuff. And I don't either. It's an in the moment thing, something that definitely takes a LOT of practice but can be a great tool to try and master. I read choose your own adventure books, writing prompts, DnD videos like this for Ideas, Matt Mercer (Nuff said), reading Terry Pratchett or especially Brandon Sanderson. Delve into the fantasy world and read other story tellers and see how they use detail and setting. You'll notice your mind fills in a lot more than the writer does. This can also give you a wealth of ideas to take and tweak to place in your world. I played a game where the party had a snow globe they used as a tiny little rest stop to travel into. It popped up every game and any traps they left behind were still there. I just asked the guy for some stats to it (Not the same one, no spoilers) and now my party is about to dive into it knowing NOTHING of what's about to come at them and I know they will love it. If planning a scratch campaign, you need very few things. A BBEG, a few of his Lieutenants for the MGB's and a setting. The setting, you only really need Names, Govt Type, People in that Gov't and a few shops/taverns/guilds/interesting people they can visit. After all this, everything else can be made up on the spot. Sometimes, when you get that really good idea of that thing you want them to find, you place it in the world where they haven't been yet or say "You just didn't see this shit last time, yo" and as long as it's interesting enough, your players will eat it up like the first meal off a deserted island. Practice. See what works. Keep at it.
Alright, yeah... I get it... I've been over planning. My whole parties been saying it 😂 honestly may wipe a lot of my planning and just have over all general info for each city and then improv the rest other then my over all sentence
I just finished my first open concept with open events. My 5th level players just completed beating their NPC, who turned on them. My NPC wanted to escape through a portal, but my players dove in after him and they all landed in a forest. They battled and beat the evil NPC and recovered a evil glaive. So I started my players in my largest city. I made 4 events, and one of the player’s back story is a noble family (paladin). It was awesome. I had names, places, and let them develop the story. In the back ground, the kingdom of Prosday was at war with their northern neighbor the Norselicks. Prosday was losing the war. And they were in the capital of Prosday, Laskins. The interaction with Lords, nobles, inn keepers, ladies, bar tenders, inn keepers (NPC) all were afraid of the war coming to their city. I gave the players 4 events. And they decided what they wanted to do. We played for about 6 hours and the time flew bye. What a great experience. Thank you for the advice. I recommend gm’s to try this method. I will continue doing it. After our secession, I asked the players if they liked it. They LOVED IT...
Start of video: ok.. here we go.. Lets see what I'm doing wrong... 2:20, Hang on what? who does that? isn't that called railroading? Isn't that "Illegal"? 3:15, nope, first time at your channel, ahh is that why I haven't heard this before.. Rest of Video.. Yup.. Right, ahuh.. so.. I'll continue to do it exactly as I always have, for the last 30 yrs. cool. thanks for the validation.
Haha... I'm playing Ghosts of Saltmarsh ah-la me adding whatever I feel like because I'll be damned if I ever run any adventure as written, ever. I think there is something like nine different things they could just decide to go do right now; and I'm pretty sure they know about all of them. I have an island occupied by a fire giant for some reason, I just decided to up and dump the dungeon from Axe of the Dwarvish Lords off to the south(?) of saltmarsh at a location that is on the map but not used apparently, so that's there then. There's a kraken greater mummy at sunken city which I might decide is actually the BB, I decided that the one vendor is actually straight up an agent of an outside influence, I put a Helmite temple in the mountains which is actually a prison for something else, in the swamp that isn't used for the other adventures in the book there's a black dragon who's clearly up to something, Shar's influence affects Saltmarsh itself from a shadowlands version of the town, there's a coven of hags who are closely following what the PCs do which harass them whenever they uncover something "too powerful", they've assured the PCs that their motives are at least aligned with the PC's goals, for now... but who knows if that is really true? Speaking of hags, there's certainly a large number of odd amalgamations of animal and monsterous creatures running around which seem to be... optimized for offensive power? Strange indeed. Much of it is not strictly necessary to complete the main game; but the more they do, the more they can uncover weird and wonderful treasures, the weirder the main game can get. All of this was added willy nilly as people asked about this or that going about their way,
I am a fan of mild railroading. It gives me the appearance of effort of world building and want there to be some thought and superstructure to the world. The players can do what they want but if they don't stop the evil necromancer plans they will suffer the consequences. The event will happen if they don't stop it.
Every playstyle is valid, but personally, as a player, I really dislike it when DM's don't have a plot in mind from the beginning. I don't like being railroaded, but I need to believe that there are bigger events happening in the world than what is happening in my direct vicinity at any point in time. If I, as a player, believe things only happen when I seek them out, I can't get past the notion that the best thing my character could contribute to the world would be to just stay home. If there's a war going on, for instance, and the party catches wind that the king is going to be assassinated, there should be dire consequences of ignoring the call, both for the world and the party.
I LOVE this method! But... My Problem here is, if i dont give my players a common goal they split up and go all over the town. The Wizzard to a library, the healer to the temple, the socialdude and fighterdude to the market etc. And they plan on meeting again at evening in their tavernplace... Now have fun GM! If you give one player an event they like, this player gets an hour of soloplay. especially if the other players dont like their event but just keep doing what they were doing, like reading the one library book they found... Any ideas?? I cannot have every event happen at dinner :D
Hey! I'm really enjoying your content but would you mind dropping links to videos with the concepts you mention in your description? I am not watching in order and you have so many videos I'm not sure how to find what you're talking about.
I know nobody asked, but railroading is a tool I use for new players. I run an irl game for my brothers friends. They haven’t played a game before this, so I railroad them so they don’t just mess around the tavern for an hour and then complain. Of course I will adjust once they get a hand on the game.
my question is how do you get in that initial state of being anywhere in the first place, can't just start a game throwing the PCs in a place and wait for them to react, at least not my players they'd do nothing since "I" give no info
Would you say that a total DM Noob should run a few campaigns the “normal” way before attempting this? Or could it be beneficial to learn this way right from the start?
*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. 😉
As a player, I am a fish. I bite every hook, I can see. xD
its more fun that way
Same!!
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.
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 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.*
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!
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 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.
Hooboy. I had a planned campaign turn into one of these when the players derailed the first Event in the first session, and it's the most fun I think I've ever had as a GM.
They successfully rallied a bunch of commoners to beat over-equipped and over-statted soldiers and turned an intrigue plot into Exodus. Every adventure became a different town with a different problem, be it a mining village beset by barbarians or a hub city with cultists abducting citizens into the nearby crypt.
Never did I have any concrete plans for an adventure, only premises and OCCASIONALLY a web of concepts and potential leads.
We had a couple of recurring themes and characters, like a disgraced guard captain from the first session dogging their footsteps basically every other town. And finally, they made it past the far border to the wilderness, and to freedom.
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!
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.
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.
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
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!
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!
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.
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.
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
As a comparison. "ambushed by highwaymen. Searching and finding a note." would be distilled into a "Secret or Clue" by sly flourish method
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.
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 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?
Credit to this channel for making my first campaign a success so far. Thank you for making this excellent content
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!
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.
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 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!
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!
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.
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.
The Lazy Dungeon Master is the best thing I have read as far as what to plan and what not to plan goes...
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.
sometimes the bits my players have the most fun at are the ones where i dont plan and have to quickly find a map to dump into roll20. i just need to remember this when i get anxious about prep, sometimes less is more! (just find a few more spare maps in advance xD )
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.
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
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.
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 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!
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
A few years ago now, I started running an urban fantasy game (an adaptation of Demon: The Fallen I made for the New World of Darkness ruleset). The players, playing fallen angels struggling to establish themselves in a small Texas town, found one of their allies had been killed the past night (the event). I'd prepared the stats for the killer and his allies, and fully expected this to become a fight that would end with the killer slain to set off a larger plot, but hadn't made any more preparations yet apart from some notes of how the killer's people were organised (since that was needed to inform their reactions). Instead, the players not only set a non-lethal trap for the killer but also figured out who (or what) he really was... and then proceeded to not only not harm him, but also did so in a way that scared away his backup, and then simply let him go when he begged for his life, opening the killer up to the possibility that even fallen angels weren't the absolute monsters he'd been led to believe.
The campaign is still running. The players have since kicked off a civil war in the killer's people and allied with the faction they befriended that day, but there have been too many ups and downs in this process to recount (one of the worst being the players carelessly endangering the family of their new ally because they hadn't quite realised it truly was a family).
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
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 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.
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
Truly some of the best advice you’ve given so far, Guy!
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.
I prefer this method, too. Some players don’t enjoy having full agency (casualty of video games) and wonder about making the wrong choice. Analysts paralysis is real for players these days.
Here’s one of my favorite hooks: party starts in a tavern, when the town’s wizard, often dismissed for his crackpot theories, bursts in, yelling about how an apocalyptic artifact long-thought a myth has suddenly resurfaced. He then falls to the floor, dead, shot by the dozens of arrows fired by the assassins now entering the bar to deal with the witnesses.
great content again, Guy! Also, thanks for all you and your team's hard work on the map stuff on Kickstarter. Can't wait to get them ^^
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.
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 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
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.
I love the emerald and other things on the shelf behind, so dope...oh right the content, i was swept away and stared at the shelf as i listened. :)
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.
really love these tips and as a new DM, I will try my best!
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.
I feel I failed at this when my players gave me the opportunity... I had planned an unrelated encounter on the road to find the party of baddies they’d been tracking... They fought the thing, damn Nat20 ruined the Gelatinous Cube trap in the middle of their road; But then traveled off the roads to try and find the source of the cube, where it came from, etc... I had NPCs around try to explain it away and that this was a matter is best left to the King’s soldiers, etc... since I was a new DM I asked my players to let me know if I’m overstepping and give me notes.. I love notes.. and yeah one of my friends just flat out said, “Erik you’re railroading the fuck outta us right now, if we want to spend the whole session investigating the crack this cube came out of that’s the game.”
I appreciated his candor and have since, well.. “figured out“ isn’t right, but this happens less now haha.
My Champions Campaign is a Film Studio that provides everything for telling storys and not be limited by genre, time, or place...episodic or serial storys can told without limitation...a little Mission Briefing and the Characters are in The Story...
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.
Haha I love all the references to watching other videos. It was very much my first video. In session 8 of a campaign very similar to this. It's been a bit tough cause I am trying to get the players to create as much of the world as possible.
Huh, I've been doing this for a while. I have tried and tried to plan things out and have a structured and paced experience for my players but no matter what I anticipate they throw a solution at me that's viable I never considered and I wind up scrambling to accommodate. If I'm going to scramble I prefer to be prepared to scramble. I have some useful resources to use, hit the ayers with a situation and tell myself that I can deal with whatever they try.
Remember, as Mythbusters taught us, failure is always an option! If I get the feeling my players are chasing clouds or trying to see how silly they can get just for the sake of it, they can always fail.
A lot of this comes down to semantics but to me the video is more about "the death of railroading" which is to say "the death of moving the players to specific locations while not taking into account of their actions".
The level of plot set up via a precipitating event. The desired outcome is still there and thus the plot is, though in this scenario we listen to the players as they figure out how to solve issues. Having done a lot of creative writing courses recently it's apparent that almost all writers "figure out" how the hero's react to incidents along with them - rather than try to push them through or even working backwards from the ending to plan the build up (which does happen but seems more for screenwriting than storytelling)
I think what scares the new GM the most is "not having stuff prepared for where they might choose to go" - But really I find this to be a far simpler task than first appears.
I found planning adventures only three pages (plus stats for monsters Npcs) is optimal. So it is flexible enough to shift it around based on party choices and if it doesn't work, you aren't invested enough to chuck it if needed.
interesting; sounds like a improv skill I would like to develop. would certainly make it exciting for the DM too
I’m completely new to being the dm and planing on doing a lot of this while still having some pushing towards the main events so we still progress or have random events that can gain info about the main quest or some item that can trigger a new event after figuring out what the item is or a message that’s hidden within the item or if they walk near a certain npc). Still only setting the event up, main goal and what they can gain and think about how to progress the event.
(Have 5 events already before watching this video xD)
My table uses critical success cards and that's how I became an invisible acid spitting bear god for a day who decimated a kobold cave and rescued some farmers who have stayed in periphery of our larger game.
I also baffled my DM by rolling two nat 20s to convince two chokers to run head first into an evil sentient berry bush that sucked the life out of them.
Been doing this since AD&D days as a kid. It’s what i did because I don’t have elaborate writing skills.
I have been doing this for years, I basically am doing the Dr. Strange time stone thing every single time my players do things, I plan out a few milestones and then after that I only ever plan out one session and lightly plan the next session.
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!
Here I was thinking I didn't plan enough but turns out I just was doing this already😁
Deck of Stories helps a lot.
It seems to work when the players are very involved and immersive, playing their role and character well. If they are just waiting for something to be given to them and not come up with own ideas or interest then its rather dificult...
(Im a hardcore pre-planer :/)
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.
love your work man, keep it up
This is almost exactly how I DM, I just have a page bookmarked that has all the monsters from AD&D I’ll need and I wing it, I have a stack of notes that are basically shit that I came up with on the fly or something interesting the players said.. I have an idea of everything going on in the area so whichever way they go I have at least something in my mind for them but I don’t plan it in depth
I literally have maybe a paragraph written for each thing they could possibly do. "They go this way, boom this happens. They go that way, they meet this person." I only write down a bare bones of what I need in an area if they go to it. As long as you have the imagination to fill in the small details in the moment, you only really need a few things. Who they can meet/fight, what they could find, Where it's at, what they can do after, why everything is happening the way it is. When is optional unless there's a time limit. After having this written down, I just wait for my party to decide where they want to go (90% of the time, it's somewhere I NEVER thought of) and then I look at my notes and wing it from there. Too much detail can kill things just as well as too little. After a point, it becomes either boring to hear all this description or your players decide to get vindictive and begin to look for those moments you forget these small details. Every DM has gone through this problem at some point in their career.
Almost every game they tell me they don't know how I come up with this stuff. And I don't either. It's an in the moment thing, something that definitely takes a LOT of practice but can be a great tool to try and master. I read choose your own adventure books, writing prompts, DnD videos like this for Ideas, Matt Mercer (Nuff said), reading Terry Pratchett or especially Brandon Sanderson. Delve into the fantasy world and read other story tellers and see how they use detail and setting. You'll notice your mind fills in a lot more than the writer does. This can also give you a wealth of ideas to take and tweak to place in your world. I played a game where the party had a snow globe they used as a tiny little rest stop to travel into. It popped up every game and any traps they left behind were still there. I just asked the guy for some stats to it (Not the same one, no spoilers) and now my party is about to dive into it knowing NOTHING of what's about to come at them and I know they will love it.
If planning a scratch campaign, you need very few things. A BBEG, a few of his Lieutenants for the MGB's and a setting. The setting, you only really need Names, Govt Type, People in that Gov't and a few shops/taverns/guilds/interesting people they can visit. After all this, everything else can be made up on the spot. Sometimes, when you get that really good idea of that thing you want them to find, you place it in the world where they haven't been yet or say "You just didn't see this shit last time, yo" and as long as it's interesting enough, your players will eat it up like the first meal off a deserted island. Practice. See what works. Keep at it.
And bare in mind everything takes practice! So it make take several tries to settle into a format that works for you.
Nice, want to see it in action
Alright, yeah... I get it... I've been over planning. My whole parties been saying it 😂 honestly may wipe a lot of my planning and just have over all general info for each city and then improv the rest other then my over all sentence
I found this inspiring. Thank you for sharing it.
I just finished my first open concept with open events. My 5th level players just completed beating their NPC, who turned on them. My NPC wanted to escape through a portal, but my players dove in after him and they all landed in a forest. They battled and beat the evil NPC and recovered a evil glaive.
So I started my players in my largest city. I made 4 events, and one of the player’s back story is a noble family (paladin). It was awesome. I had names, places, and let them develop the story. In the back ground, the kingdom of Prosday was at war with their northern neighbor the Norselicks. Prosday was losing the war. And they were in the capital of Prosday, Laskins.
The interaction with Lords, nobles, inn keepers, ladies, bar tenders, inn keepers (NPC) all were afraid of the war coming to their city. I gave the players 4 events. And they decided what they wanted to do.
We played for about 6 hours and the time flew bye. What a great experience. Thank you for the advice. I recommend gm’s to try this method. I will continue doing it. After our secession, I asked the players if they liked it. They LOVED IT...
Start of video: ok.. here we go.. Lets see what I'm doing wrong...
2:20, Hang on what? who does that? isn't that called railroading? Isn't that "Illegal"?
3:15, nope, first time at your channel, ahh is that why I haven't heard this before..
Rest of Video.. Yup.. Right, ahuh.. so.. I'll continue to do it exactly as I always have, for the last 30 yrs. cool. thanks for the validation.
Haha... I'm playing Ghosts of Saltmarsh ah-la me adding whatever I feel like because I'll be damned if I ever run any adventure as written, ever.
I think there is something like nine different things they could just decide to go do right now; and I'm pretty sure they know about all of them.
I have an island occupied by a fire giant for some reason, I just decided to up and dump the dungeon from Axe of the Dwarvish Lords off to the south(?) of saltmarsh at a location that is on the map but not used apparently, so that's there then. There's a kraken greater mummy at sunken city which I might decide is actually the BB, I decided that the one vendor is actually straight up an agent of an outside influence, I put a Helmite temple in the mountains which is actually a prison for something else, in the swamp that isn't used for the other adventures in the book there's a black dragon who's clearly up to something, Shar's influence affects Saltmarsh itself from a shadowlands version of the town, there's a coven of hags who are closely following what the PCs do which harass them whenever they uncover something "too powerful", they've assured the PCs that their motives are at least aligned with the PC's goals, for now... but who knows if that is really true? Speaking of hags, there's certainly a large number of odd amalgamations of animal and monsterous creatures running around which seem to be... optimized for offensive power? Strange indeed.
Much of it is not strictly necessary to complete the main game; but the more they do, the more they can uncover weird and wonderful treasures, the weirder the main game can get.
All of this was added willy nilly as people asked about this or that going about their way,
What about having the players own something, like a castle or a tavern, and having it threatened or have them do things for its upkeep?
This is very much how I run my game. And I thought I was lazy.
I am a fan of mild railroading. It gives me the appearance of effort of world building and want there to be some thought and superstructure to the world. The players can do what they want but if they don't stop the evil necromancer plans they will suffer the consequences. The event will happen if they don't stop it.
Every playstyle is valid, but personally, as a player, I really dislike it when DM's don't have a plot in mind from the beginning.
I don't like being railroaded, but I need to believe that there are bigger events happening in the world than what is happening in my direct vicinity at any point in time. If I, as a player, believe things only happen when I seek them out, I can't get past the notion that the best thing my character could contribute to the world would be to just stay home.
If there's a war going on, for instance, and the party catches wind that the king is going to be assassinated, there should be dire consequences of ignoring the call, both for the world and the party.
I LOVE this method! But... My Problem here is, if i dont give my players a common goal they split up and go all over the town. The Wizzard to a library, the healer to the temple, the socialdude and fighterdude to the market etc. And they plan on meeting again at evening in their tavernplace... Now have fun GM! If you give one player an event they like, this player gets an hour of soloplay. especially if the other players dont like their event but just keep doing what they were doing, like reading the one library book they found...
Any ideas??
I cannot have every event happen at dinner :D
Hey! I'm really enjoying your content but would you mind dropping links to videos with the concepts you mention in your description? I am not watching in order and you have so many videos I'm not sure how to find what you're talking about.
I know nobody asked, but railroading is a tool I use for new players. I run an irl game for my brothers friends. They haven’t played a game before this, so I railroad them so they don’t just mess around the tavern for an hour and then complain. Of course I will adjust once they get a hand on the game.
5:00
Plot Events
my question is how do you get in that initial state of being anywhere in the first place, can't just start a game throwing the PCs in a place and wait for them to react, at least not my players they'd do nothing since "I" give no info
Would you say that a total DM Noob should run a few campaigns the “normal” way before attempting this? Or could it be beneficial to learn this way right from the start?
I both have been watching for years AND binge. #overachiever
Brilliant!
"Perhaps" search the bodies... never met a player who would not loot every corpse in range... me included ;-)
I usually try to do a beat chart like Cyberpunk RED recommends, what are your thoughts on that?