Stop Over-Prepping!

These are stream-of-consciousness thoughts here, so bear with me.

You’re here because you’re an RPG referee, a GM. It’s up to you to present the players with something interesting and entertaining to while away an evening. If you’re stuck for ideas, you might Google “adventure design”.

The trouble is most of what you find is bullshit.

The whole first page of Google results consists of variations on “Create an Engaging Story”.  This is a bad idea for a multitude of reasons, the most important of which is it misunderstands the concept of RPG as emergent storytelling. (Or, worse, it’s ignorant of the concept, which means whoever’s saying that isn’t informed enough to be giving advice in the first place. Huge red flag.)

The very act of establishing a plot, a story, stops your players from having anything other than a negligible impact on the story. They can’t really make meaningful decisions without trashing the story. After all, you’ve already created the story. You know where the decision points are. You know the story’s arc. If you let player decisions change the story arc, every part of the story after that decision point is wasted unless you contrive a way to bring the players back into the railroad carriage. As a player, that drives me nuts. It’s too easy to spot.

So what to do? Easy. Stop imposing your story on the table.

Instead, present a situation. Prep some monsters, some NPCs, a location or two. Then get the hell out of the way. Let the other players take over from there. You make your decisions that impact the emergent story when you set the scene. You make no more story decisions unless the story demands it as it emerges, and that within the context of interpreting your game’s rules as referee.

Okay, Bob, I hear you cry. How do I go about that?

Guy Sclanders, in Complete Guide to Creating Epic Campaigns, recommends asking a question based on this template:

Someone wants to do something before a time, but they can’t do it using method because reasons.

Replace the words in italics. As an example, let’s recreate a classic trope:

The innkeeper wants to get the rats out of her cellar before they eat all the cheese, but she can’t do it herself because she’s frightened.

You’ve got your NPC quest giver (the innkeeper), the villain (pack of rats), a deadline (before they eat all the cheese), at least one “pass/fail” decision point (are all the rats gone? Have they eaten all the cheese?), and a variety of possible consequences for the PCs not accepting the quest (no cash reward, no reputation enhancement, another band gets the gig, etc.).

So there’s your scenario. That’s your main decision. Your other decisions are driven by these main choices.

You need to cover what Fifth Edition calls the “Three Pillars”: Social encounters, combat encounters, and opportunities to explore. So you need an NPC or two for the PCs to interact with, monsters for them to fight, and a location for them to poke around in. Sprinkle in some secrets to find or puzzles to solve (if your table is into that), add a twist — ONE — and you’re done.

The innkeeper is an NPC. Wanda has owned the Frog & Trumpet for 20 years. She’s a no-bullshit woman who’s her own bouncer, but she’s terrified of rodents, especially ones of such unusual size as the ones in her cellar.

The rats are the monsters. Duh. Giant rats, a shitload of them.

The location is the pub cellar. Find a map (Dyson Logos has plenty on his site) and go nuts.

Your twist is that the rats are led by a wererat (another NPC who as another monster becomes the real villain) who disguises himself as a pub employee. When the PCs find him in the cellar, he claims he’s trapped by the swarming fuzzies O PLZ HALP. He doesn’t want the PCs to find his secret lair in a huge beer barrel.

It’s wise to also provide future story threads for the players to pull, by providing links to new NPCs, new locations, and maybe new monsters. Threads like the big-ass hole in the cellar wall that connects the pub to the city’s sewer system, which everyone says the thieves’ guild uses as a subterranean highway, and didn’t we hear a rumor that a pack of wererats was trying to take over the thieves’ guild…? 

You don’t have to prep these beyond seeding some rumors. See what bait the players bite, then go prep another scenario for next week using the one-sentence template. Your players will tell you what to prep. Just listen to them.