Our first scenario structure challenge is the Death Star sequence from the original Star Wars. More generally, this is an exemplar of a “space station infiltration” mission, but we’ll be using the Death Star as a useful parallel (while acknowledging the limitations of this).

What makes the Death Star scenario tick?

(I’m just going to assume here that everyone is familiar with Star Wars. If you’re not familiar with it, do yourself a favor and immediately track down a copy of the original, unaltered version and watch it ASAP.)

1. The PCs have to gain access to the Death Star. (In the case of the movie, they got captured by its tractor beam and hid in the smugglers’ compartments.)
2. There was a primary obstacle they had to overcome in order to get out. (The tractor beam needed to be disabled.)
3. There was an objective they wanted to accomplish. (Rescue the princess.)
4. There was a grab bag of situational obstacles that needed to be overcome, bypassed, or otherwise resolved in order for the PCs to overcome the obstacle and/or achieve the objective.

When it comes to the situational obstacles, note that there’s only a handful of them: Stormtroopers, Imperial officers, the security protecting the Death Star’s computer network, magnetically sealed doors, and Darth Vader. Rather than introducing entirely new elements, the lesser obstacles get mixed and remixed constantly: Stormtroopers scanning the ship. Stormtroopers guarding the ship. Stormtroopers attacking them in the brig. Stormtroopers chasing them through the corridors. Stormtroopers guarding the ship again.

RAID SCENARIOS

Let’s digress for a moment and talk about raid-type scenarios in general.

John Tynes’ Three Days to Kill module is my personal touchstone for this. It certainly wasn’t the first raid-type module ever published, but it was the one which, for me, made the concept really gel definitively (primarily because Tynes boils it down to an essential core and clearly spells out exactly why he designed the scenario the way that he did; in other words, he breaks down the scenario structure for the GM).

Basically, there are three parts to a basic raid scenario (which Tynes describes as a “Tom Clancy-style special ops mission”):

First, it largely functions using the same room-and-key design of a location-crawl.

Second, the target location is designed in such a way that the PCs can grok the entire floorplan and some (or all) of its defensive measures. (You’ll note that this is distinct from a typical dungeoncrawl, where it is virtually impossible and usually antithetical to the desired gameplay for the PCs to be able to predetermine the entire floorplan.)

Third, the target location should generally feature lots of potential entry points (allowing the PCs to select their approach and make meaningful tactical decisions about how to carry out the raid).

Fourth, the defensive forces should be designed to respond as an active opposition force.

Over the years I’ve refined this structure to include adversary rosters in order to make it easier to key patrol patterns and also to make the defensive forces more dynamic in actual play.

The intended form of play is that the PCs will (1) learn about the target location, (2) have time to plan their raid, and then (3) execute their raid against active opposition.

THE DEATH STAR RAID

Once you understand the basic raid structure, the potential trap for a Death Star-style raid is trying to map out the entire space station. That’s valuable for smaller raid scenarios (particularly if you prep it in a way that the blueprint can literally be presented to the PCs so that they can use it during planning), but a space station is just too big for that to be convenient. (Even a space station much, much, much smaller than the Death Star.)

So in planning out a raid on the Death Star, you’ll need to figure out how to design the raid on a slightly more abstract level. Let’s look back at our list of four elements which makes the Death Star sequence tick:

1. Generally speaking, do NOT determine how the PCs will gain access to the station. Instead, take a step back, think about all the ways people can enter the station, and then figure out how those entrances have been secured. Sketch those out briefly. As with any other raid scenario, it’s now up to the players to (a) learn about them and (b) figure out how to bypass them.

2 & 3. Figure out 1-3 objectives that the PCs want on the space station and/or primary obstacles they need to overcome to escape the station once they’re onboard it. (The players may have already determined at least some of this for you when they made the decision to raid the space station in the first place: Why are they there?)

4. Prep your grab bag of 4-6 situational obstacles that can complicate the PCs’ efforts to reach and achieve the objectives/primary obstacle. Include 1-2 big, notable bad guys (Darth Vader, Tarkin). Include some interchangeable mooks (stormtroopers, officers). Include some passive security features (computer network, magnetically sealed doors).

Finally, briefly sketch the general layout of the station. As noted, this shouldn’t be a hyper-detailed map: You want to know the major features of the space station (docks, brig, bridge, engineering cores, Stormtrooper barracks, etc.) and you probably want to have a general sense of where they are in relation to each other (brig is on the upper levels, docks on the lower levels, etc.).

A flowchart structure can work well for this, giving enough structure for the PCs to make meaningful choices without getting bogged down in an unnecessary superfluity of detail.

SITUATIONAL OBSTACLES

As you’re developing this flowchart, try to include at least 1-2 locations between the entrances and the various objectives/primary obstacles. These are the locations where the PCs can encounter some of the situational obstacles. For example, in order to get from the docks (where the PCs enter the Death Star) to the brig (where the princess is being held) you need to pass through the central elevator shafts (giving Imperial officers or other personnel a chance to spot you).

You can sketch out what situational obstacles are found in each location, if you like:

DOCKS

• 2 stormtroopers in the docking bay itself
• 2 imperial officers overseeing the docking bay from the control room
• Magnetically sealed door on the control room

THE DEATH STAR RAID IN PLAY

And that’s basically it. At this point, you’ve got enough material that your players should be able to engage with it and you can respond dynamically whenever they do.

Don’t feel trapped by your prep. Remember, that what you’ve been designing are tools: If they’re in the brig and they blow their Bluff check, send in some stormtrooper squads. If they feel trapped, don’t think they can fight their way out, and they say, “There must be another way out of here! Can we get out through the vents?” think for a moment and then say, “Sure. That works. You can blast a hole in the wall over there and drop down onto the garbage disposal level.” You didn’t prep a garbage disposal level, but it makes sense that a space station would have one, right?

The garbage disposal room they drop into feels like a significant location, though, so let’s add a situational obstacle. Stormtrooper guards? Hmm… No. They just got away from stormtroopers up above, and who would bother guarding garbage? Let’s throw a magnetically sealed door here and… compacting walls? Yeah, that sounds good.

BEYOND THE DEATH STAR

Obviously this basic structure can be used for more than just space stations: Any raid targeting a sufficiently large facility can be set up this way.

As an exercise, you can break down the raid on CIA headquarters in Mission: Impossible and design it as a scenario. The objective is obvious (the NOC list kept in the vault). What are the potential entrances to the facility? What is the primary obstacle(s) that prevent them from leaving once they’re in? What are the situational obstacles that the GM can use to complicate their mission (if they choose to accept it)?

Go to Challenge #2

This is the first entry in a new series I’m trialing here at the Alexandrian. Back in 2012, I wrote a series of essays about Game Structures in RPGs. A major component of this discussion concerned scenario structures – the macro-game structures which allow the GM to prep different aspects of their campaign world and different experiences for their players.

One of the specific things I discussed was the fact that when you try to prep a scenario using the wrong scenario structure, the result can be painful for everybody involved. You can see this with clearly wrong-headed ideas like running dungeon exploration as a linear timeline of events; running conversations using combat initiative; or trying to have players navigate a city as if it were a dungeoncrawl (by prepping every street with a keyed encounter and having the players make intersection-by-intersection navigation decisions).

This makes it truly unfortunate that most GMs don’t have a robust library of scenario structures that they can use to build their campaigns. In my experience, the vast majority of GMs are limited to just three structures:

1. Railroads
2. Dungeoncrawls
3. Mysteries

In actual practice it’s usually worse than this because many GMs don’t really understand how to structure mysteries, so they end up defaulting back towards railroads for their mystery scenarios. And even running a dungeoncrawl is no longer a reliable skill for many DMs because the gateway game, D&D, is no longer teaching it as a skill: The actual procedure by which a dungeoncrawl is run was significantly obfuscated in 3^rd Edition and was completely removed from the rulebooks for 4^th Edition.

The result is that GMs generally don’t even consciously realize what scenario structures are, so they end up just kind of muddling around using gut instinct and a random amalgamation of half-realized scenario structures they’ve picked up through osmosis, most or all of which are just various flavors of railroading.

So I obviously think it’s really important for GMs to make the conscious decision to think about the scenario structures they use, and make sure they’re using the right scenario structures for the scenarios they want to run (or which they need to run because of the decisions their players are making). One of the things that storytelling games have been doing very well compared to RPGs over the last ten to fifteen years is, in fact, spelling out specific procedures for GMs to follow.

As part of that original series on Game Structures, I also talked about designing custom game structures, using the example of how to design structures for running a campaign about a starship plying interstellar trade routes.

With this series I want to challenge myself – and you! – to do more of this. The truth is that even one of these structures unlocks the ability to confidently prep and run dozens of scenarios. When I figured out node-based scenario design, it meant that I could suddenly design and run incredibly complex mystery scenarios as a matter of simple routine. When I figured out the party planning structure for effectively running large social events, it was like opening a door to a room that I’d never even knew existed. What else is hiding out around here, lurking just within arms reach and yet somehow completely beyond our grasp because we’re blind to the possibility?

So this series is going to look at specific types of experiences and say, “How would you prep this – and then run this – for an RPG?” The results won’t have been playtested (yet!), so it’s possible that what we come up with won’t work in actual practice. But the goal will be to get specific enough to provide a concrete framework for prepping any number of scenarios. Or, if we run into something truly challenging, enough detail to spark meaningful analysis and discussion (similar to my Thinking About Urbancrawls series, which did, eventually, result in a specific structure being created).

I suspect that most of our challenges will be prompted from linear mediums like films, books, and comics, but real life could also easily provide examples. (Hexcrawls, for example, were born as much from the inspiration of real life expeditions like Shackleton or Marco Polo as they were from the travel sequences of The Lord of the Rings.)

Of course, some would-be “challenges” will have obvious answers: Sherlock Holmes? Well, Three Clue Rule with a side-helping of node-based scenario design. Next!

We’ll be skipping those.

Our goal is also not to specifically ape our point (or points) of inspiration: Even if we could create such a narrowly focused scenario structure, what would be the point? What we’re interested in is finding a structure that will allow us to create any number of similar experiences, preferably with so much flexibility that the results might end up looking absolutely nothing like our original inspiration. (Think about how something like Moria becomes the incredibly flexible structure of the dungeoncrawl, which in turn expands into the generic structure of the location-crawl, which can end up being used to model a technologically-riddled skyscraper in a cyberpunk setting.) The points of inspiration exist to help us think about and unlock that structure.

I’m also hoping that seeing my process of working through these challenges will also prove more generally useful by demonstrating the process by which I create and prep these structures.

Finally, I really do want to be challenged here. So if you have some tricky situation or a narrative example of an experience you’d like to create for your group, throw it my way, either in the comments here or via Twitter.

We’ll be getting stated on Wednesday with…

Raiding the Death Star!

SCENARIO STRUCTURE CHALLENGES
Challenge #1: The Death Star Raid
Challenge #2: Race to the Prize
Challenge #3: McGuffin Keep-Away
Challenge #4: Heists
Challenge #5: The RPG Montage
Challenge #6: Innkeepers

Discussions about using published material in your RPG campaign – settings, scenarios, etc. – tend to break down into two camps: Those who eschew it as heresy and those who argue that it’s a necessary time-saving device for many GMs. Where people fall on this spectrum will often vary depending on the type of material being discussed: Many of those who declare all GMs who use published scenarios as unconscionable hacks would nevertheless be completely baffled by someone suggesting that their use of published Monster Manuals betrays their creative weakness and incompetence.

(As you can tell, these are often “fun” discussions.)

I tend to take a third position in this debate: When used properly, high quality material isn’t just a time-saving device or a compromise. It will improve your game and give a result better than what could have been achieved without the third-party material. (Which is not to say that every campaign can or should include published material, because there are other creative agendas to consider.)

I draw an analogy to theater: Yes, it is possible for a theater company to perform nothing but material developed by the people performing it. But the reason theater companies choose to mount productions of Hamlet is that (a) the creative input of the playwright spurs creativity from the other participants that wouldn’t exist without that input; (b) the act of creative interpretation is unique, rewarding, and distinct from blank slate creation; and (c) the specific interpretation of a particular production creates a communal dialogue and shared experience with other productions, which can enhance both the short-term and long-term rewards of the production.

Similarly, when one runs the Tomb of Horrors it’s not just that the module can create experiences the group would not have created on its own: The group can also benefit from the experiences others have had with the module, and the shared experience (for example, being able to swap tales about what happened in your version of the Tomb) can create long-term enjoyment that wouldn’t exist with bespoke material.

More than merely the shared experience, though, I feel that using pre-existing material can have a positive impact on your campaign that extends far beyond the immediate utility of the material itself. One of the primary ways this is true is through the use of reincorporation when adapting the material to your campaign.

CREATING ELEMENTS

Before delving into that, let’s take a moment to discuss what reincorporation is. For any creative element in roleplaying there are three moments of instantiation:

• Creation
• Repetition
• Reincorporation

Creation is the moment at which the element is first conceived. Repetition is when that element is used again. Reincorporation is when the repetition of an element reveals it to have connections to other pre-existing elements.

For example, you create a bounty hunter named Nafassk. Repetition happens when Nafassk shows up again hunting another bounty. Reincorporation happens when you reveal that Nafassk is working for the PCs’ old patron, Prelate Cadal; it happens again when it turns out Nafassk frequents the same tavern the PCs do; it happens again when Nafassk is hired to kill the PCs; and so forth.

(The distinction between “repetition” and “reincorporation” can be a little hard to grok, but notice that repetition of Nafassk only serves to add additional details about Nafassk. When Nafassk is reincorporated into the narrative, on the other hand, it’s not only our understanding of Nafassk which is deepened; we also learn more about Prelate Cadal, the social scene of the tavern is enriched, and so forth.)

Due to the unusual nature of roleplaying games, it should be also noted that the creation-repetition/reincorporation sequence may not match the sequence of how that material is encountered during actual play. One example of this is foreshadowing, in which the GM creates an element for inclusion at Point X in the campaign, and then includes repetitions and/or reincorporations of the material before the players reach Point X as a herald of what’s to come.

Creative personalities often worship in the Cult of the New, and GMs are no exception. It can feel far more exciting to create something shiny and new rather than reincorporating existing material. But reincorporation builds meaning; it builds relationships; it builds significance. Sometimes the joke is funnier when you bring it back than it was the first time.

(This is usually less true of simple repetition, which is why just quoting Monty Python isn’t as funny as when Monty Python throws a wooden rabbit at you.)

Superhero comics understand the balancing act between novelty and reincorporation: It would get boring if Batman faced off against the Joker in every single issue. But the Joker also becomes a richer and more interesting character as a result of his history with Batman.

ADAPTATION THROUGH REINCORPORATION

How does this relate to the use of published material?

For the moment, I’m going to look at this through the lens of published scenarios, although the same advice can apply to the use of other published material. Generally speaking, published scenarios are generic: Their content is obviously self-contained. Every creative element that the published scenario introduces is, by necessity, new to your campaign.

(In many of my published works, including the core style guides for Infinity scenarios, I make a point of including suggestions on how the material in the scenario can be seeded into your campaign before the scenario started – what I call “Groundwork” – and also how elements of the scenario can be carried forward into future scenarios of your campaign. But that’s more the exception than the rule, and it’s still limited to being a one-way transaction.)

What I’m suggesting is that one of the first things you should do when adapting published material to your campaign is to look for ways to reincorporate existing elements of your campaign instead of simply using the new elements introduced by the published material. Does the new scenario feature a vampire villain? Can you use that vampire lord the PCs encountered a couple months ago? Or maybe this new vampire was sired by the vampire lord? Or could you adapt the scenario to feature the lich who’s the primary recurring antagonist instead?

This approach can seem counterintuitive for those who think of published material as primarily being a timesaver, since you’re often ripping out perfectly good material simply to create more work for yourself in tweaking existing elements of the campaign world.

The obvious reason for doing this is that, by reincorporating elements into the scenario, you enrich the scenario: You make it more personal for the PCs. You create deeper meaning. You give the events greater significance.

What may be less obvious is that this works both ways: The pre-existing context of your campaign flows into the published material, but the context of the published material also flows out into your pre-existing material, resulting in long-term value that can last long after the scenario has been completed.

For example, I made the decision early on when developing the Western Lands setting I’ve used for most of my D&D campaigns since 2000 that there would only be one pantheon of gods. And, moreover, that pantheon would consist of exactly nine gods and I knew who all of them were.

This creates a significant limitation for me when adapting pre-existing scenarios which feature religious edifices and institutions. Which, this being D&D, is practically all of them. Often, like Roman cult-looters, I can simply equate the scenario writer’s god with one my own: God of the harvest to my goddess of the harvest, warrior god to my warrior god, and so forth. But each time I do this, my gods and goddesses tend to accrue additional details. It was thus that Vehthyl, the God of Magic, also became the Clockmaker. And Crissa, the Mother, gained the aspect of the Defender, in which form she is often depicted with the Sword of Justice and the Shield of Truth. (And this, in turn, also began to give new light to her relationship with her son, Itor, the God of War.)

When I adapted Rappan Athuk and The Tomb of Abysthor from Necromancer Games to form the heart of another campaign in the setting, I realized it would be useful to have smaller religious cults. This led to the creation of the Saint Cults, which venerated their chosen god through the Saints who had become living conduits of their god’s will. This concept would grow to become so central to the campaign setting that in my Ptolus campaign one of the characters actually became a living saint.

As you can see, this actually works great with cultural aspects of your campaign world. Fictional cultures are often very flat and one-dimensional. Reincorporation through adaptation tends to force the kinds of messy compromises and weird regional variations that you see in real world cultures. And it doesn’t have to be limited to the big, mythological elements: Instead of moving to the new town described in the next adventure module you’re using, add the NPCs and locations in the new material to the PCs’ existing community (and figure out their relationships to the existing community).

The bridges that you can cross with these techniques can be quite large. For example, I once ran a (sadly abortive) campaign mixing the Freeport Trilogy from Green Ronin games with Greg Stolze’s City of Lies for Legend of the Five Rings. Blending the byzantine Eastern politics and Opium Wars of City of Lies added incredible depeth to the Mythos-infused pirate town of Freeport.

And it’s really those surprises – those unexpected juxtapositions and compromises out of which immense creativity erupts – that makes this technique so incredibly rewarding.

Go to Part 1

Smart prep is generally about targeting the highest value prep while seeking to avoid prep that’s wasted (i.e., never used at the game table). Maximum bang for your buck, in other words. Which is not, of course, a radical insight. The devil is in the details here, so here are three general principles that can help you zero in on the high-value prep.

DON’T DUPLICATE IMPROVISATION

Compared to a “zero prep” scenario (where you literally prep nothing), smart prep is always going to add quality. Because smart prep, by definition, is adding elements that cannot be improvised at the table.

Technically, of course, everything in the game world can be hypothetically improvised during play. So what you want to focus on is the stuff that adds value by virtue of being prepped. This can vary a lot depending on the premise, the system, the GM, and the players involved, but what you want to look for is stuff that is:

• Time-consuming to create
• Requires special tools
• Benefits from considered thought
• Difficult for you to run off-the-cuff

Particularly valuable prep targets are the things that can never be improvised on the fly. Props and handouts are perhaps the most obvious example of this.

What you can improvise effectively also depends on your own strengths as a GM. It will change over time and it will vary based on the system you’re running. I talked about one facet of this in The Hierarchy of Reference, but it applies across the board. Maybe you struggle with having dynamic battles featuring clever tactics, so you spend a little effort prepping Tucker’s Kobolds. Maybe you find it easier to run Pathfinder monsters if you make a point of highlighting feats you’re unfamiliar with and jotting down a note about what they do. Personally, I know that I get too tight-lipped with NPCs revealing the deep secrets and conspiracies of the campaign (because I once ruined a campaign by getting too loose-lipped with those secrets and it’s a Pandora’s Box you can’t close – if the PCs don’t know something they can always learn it later; if they learn too much they can’t forget it), so personally I focus a certain amount of effort on prepping exactly what NPCs know and what clues they can supply.

It can also be useful to keep in mind that some stuff you find hard to improvise can be made easy to improvise if you prep the right tools. Procedural content generators are an obvious example of this, but it can also include stuff like “if you’re bad at coming up with names on the fly, prep a list of names”.

Beware, however, the temptation of believing that something has value simply because it requires prep. If you build something that has no (or little) value to you and your players, the fact that you couldn’t improvise it during play is irrelevant, and the amount of work you put into something doesn’t create value.

For many GMs, I find that stat blocks fall into this category. In many systems, creating stat blocks on the fly can be quite difficult (particularly if you don’t have a high level of expertise in using the system), and so customized stat blocks clearly fall into the category of things which can’t be improvised at the table. As a result, GMs will sink huge amounts of time into carefully building and tweaking every single stat block in their scenarios.

The question you have to ask yourself is how much value you and your players are really gleaning from these stat blocks. How much is giving the ogre in Area 5 a unique stat block compared to the ogre in Area 6 really improving play? Frequently, the answer is “not at all”; in fact, the players may not even notice the distinction. I’ll go so far as to argue that having an unnecessary panoply of different stat blocks can actually have a negative value compared to re-using familiar stat blocks, as the quality, pace, and tactical creativity of combat encounters can see significant improvement as the GM learns and masters what the “ogre stat block” is capable of doing.

Which is not, of course, to say that you should never customize a stat block. Well-designed stat blocks can create unique gameplay and tactical opportunities that are exactly the sort of thing that requires prep to realize at the table. They’re a good example of the sort of balancing act and constant self-diagnosis you have to engage in as a GM to make sure your prep is on point.

AVOID WASTE

Smart prep also means that you work to minimize the amount of material you work on that never makes it to the table. It doesn’t matter how potentially awesome something is; if your players never experience it, then its effective value is zero. The more wasted prep you have, the more it will drag down the average value of your prep overall. Or, to put it another way, every minute you spend working on stuff your players never see is a minute you could have spent working on stuff that they do.

Something I think is almost universally a waste of time is prepping a lot of specific contingencies based on hypothetical choices the PCs might make. (“If the PCs enter from the north, then the goblins will… If the PCs enter from the south, then the goblins will… If the goblins can see a spellcaster, then they will…”) Even if it’s not material which can be trivially improvised at the table (and it almost always is), you’re still basically guaranteed to end up prepping a bunch of contingencies that will never be used. You’ll gain a much higher quality-to-prep ratio from virtually anything else you choose to prep.

(See Don’t Prep Plots – Tools, Not Contingencies for a more in-depth discussion of this.)

The mistake some GMs make, however, is trying to eliminate waste at the table by forcing their players to experience the content they’ve prepared. (Railroading, in other words.) That’s the wrong way to do it. Where you need to work at eliminating waste is when you prep, which you can do by controlling what you prep.

Ironically, the fear of railroading can lead some GMs astray by convincing them that they aren’t “allowed” to prioritize their prep: “I don’t want to assume that the PCs will go somewhere specific, so I need to prep everywhere that they could even potentially think about going!”

But, as I said in the Railroading Manifesto:

It’s often quite trivial for an experienced GM to safely assume that a specific event or outcome is going to happen. For example, if a typical group of heroic PCs are riding along a road and they see a young boy being chased by goblins it’s probably a pretty safe bet that they’ll take action to rescue the boy. The more likely a particular outcome is, the more secure you are in simply assuming that it will happen. That doesn’t mean your scenario is railroaded, it just means you’re engaging in smart prep.

A large part of avoiding waste is, in fact, about learning how to identify the likelihood of a particular outcome by:

• Discerning what the PCs are likely to affect vs. what they won’t affect
• Predicting the choices your players will make

The caution, of course, is that this is only valuable insofar as your predictions are accurate. Otherwise you can end up committing all-out to a course of prep that will all end up on the waste heap.

The reality, though, is that this is a skill which you can learn and improve. Particularly if you focus on doing so. There are also techniques you can use to increase your hit rate, perhaps the most valuable of which is a simple question:

What are you planning to do next session?

It’s a simple question, but the answer obviously gives you certainty. It lets you focus your prep with extreme accuracy because you can make very specific predictions about what your players are going to do and those predictions will also be incredibly likely to happen.

Even this isn’t infallible, though. The worst example I’ve had of wasted prep in the last decade or so was when the PCs said they were interested in going to explore a dungeon at the end of one session, but half of the party wasn’t firmly committed and at the beginning of the next session they managed to convince the others that it wasn’t a good use of their time and resources. Unfortunately, in the interim I had written a really nifty 70 page dungeon that I then had to toss out. (That dungeon is the Lost Laboratories of Arn.)

And this is where we end up looping back to Tools, Not Contingencies. Because the other way to avoid waste is to prep a toolbox. As I wrote in Don’t Prep Plots:

You can think of this as non-specific contingency planning. You aren’t giving yourself a hammer and then planning out exactly which nails you’re going to hit and how hard to hit them: You’re giving yourself a hammer and saying, “Well, if the players give me anything that looks even remotely like a nail, I know what I can hit it with.”

“The players have ruined my adventure!”

If you ever catch yourself thinking that with anything other than glee, it usually means that your players have done something that you didn’t expect and now you’re at a loss for what to do next. It’s also usually a pretty good indicator that something has gone awry with your prep.

In practical terms, it should be very easy for your players to do something that you hadn’t anticipated. But it should be very difficult for them to do something that you have absolutely nothing prepared for. Most of the time you should be able to just keep doing what you were doing before: Selecting the tools built into the scenario and actively playing them. They did something unexpected and now the guy you thought was going to be their patron is, in fact, their arch-enemy. But you still had the guy prepped, right?

In some cases, the PCs will end up tumbling into a section of the scenario that was prepped for a completely different type of interaction. (Common variations include “I didn’t think I’d need a stat block for that character” in relatively complex systems where stat blocks are time-consuming or “this will involve several dozen pieces moving in directions I didn’t anticipate.”) If this happens, call for a 5 or 10 minute break so that you can juggle the pieces into place smoothly.

In extremely rare cases, the PCs will manage to perform a complete scenario exit. When that happens, you can usually bring the current session to a close and spend the time necessary to prep the new scenario. Whatever action they took to exit the scenario is usually the answer to the question, “What do you want to do next session?” but it never hurts to double check. You can also ad lib along the new path for a certain distance until the new frame is both clear and the PCs have clearly committed to it. (If you imagine that the campaign is currently in Houston and the PCs decide to go to Dallas, you can probably get a fair distance down the freeway or all the way to the city limits of Dallas as you wind things down for the night. Partly because it will help focus your prep, but also because the players will sometimes abruptly reverse course and head back to Houston.)

With all that being said, remember that some waste is unavoidable. That’s okay. Your goal is simply to minimize it.

MAXIMIZE UTILITY

You may have already noticed how these principles of smart prep blend together: You avoid waste by prepping for improv. Keeping yourself open to improvisation means you don’t prepare material that’s likely to be wasted.

The same is true of our last principle.

Maximize the utility of what you prep by developing material that:

• Can be recycled
• Has flexible use
• Is multi-use

By maximizing the utility of what you prep, you avoid redundant prep. You can also generally reduce your overall prep while actually increasing the amount of quality play you get from your prep at the same time.

For example, imagine that you’re prepping a goon squad for Baron Destraad. If you spend a lot of time figuring out exactly how to position them in Room 16B and the tactics they’ll use in Room 16B, then you’re limiting the utility of that goon squad to Room 16B. (You could, of course, simply ignore that prep, but that means you’ve wasted that work.)

Here you can see the principle of not duplicating improvisation directly feeding into the principle of maximizing utility, but it’s more than that. Maximizing utility inverts that equation: It’s not enough to just avoid stuff that you could improvise; you also want to look at how your prep improves your improvisation. Building a goon squad that’s specialized to Room 16B gets you a different goon squad (and a less useful goon squad) than a goon squad that is prepared so that Baron Destraad can use it in any number of nefarious ways.

This idea of “using Baron Destraad’s goon squad in many different ways” can also be expanded to “using this goon squad to be many different goon squads”. This is what I mean by recycling material: Ten sessions after the PCs have dealt with Destraad’s goons, the PCs tee off on the Dragon Mafia and the Mafia decides to send them a message in the form of some thugs. Rather than generating all-new stats for the thugs, you can just grab the stats for the goons, maybe tweak them a little bit, and throw them back into play.

You can also design material specifically to make it more recyclable. You can also recycle material simultaneously instead of sequentially (within the context of a single encounter, for example). In my Ptolus campaign, I needed to design a squad of twelve knights who would act as allies of the PCs. Giving them all the exact same stat block proved a little too bland for recurring characters working in concert with the PCs, so I decided I wanted two different stat blocks (one for each half of the group). Rather than designing two completely different stat blocks, however, I used the same stat block and just swapped out the list of maneuvers (from the Book of Nine Swords) that each bloc of knights had.

A quick word of caution here, however: A quagmire that can be easily mistaken for recycling material is the “quantum ogre”, a common form of railroaded illusionism in which the GM forces the players to experience a particular encounter no matter what choice they make. If they go to the forest, they encounter the ogre. If they go to the mountains, they encounter the ogre. The ogre is what the GM prepped, and so the ogre is what they are going to fight!

The distinction between responsibly recycling material and quantum ogre illusionism can be difficult to precisely define, but it’s a really important distinction and one which radically transforms the form of gameplay at the table.

If you’re trying to figure out the difference for yourself, a lot of it just boils down to being aware of your own motivations: Are you trying to force a goon squad encounter on the PCs? Or are the actions of the PCs logically resulting in them running into a goon squad and you’re just looking for a way to quickly get a goon squad into play?

Another good, albeit not perfect, self-check: Would you be equally likely to recycle this goon squad even if the PCs had, in fact, encountered the first goon squad? If so, your recycling is probably not being motivated by a desire to enforce a preconceived outcome.

The process of recycling is really no different than using a goblin stat block from the Monster Manual. You’re simply turning your own body of pre-existing prep into a resource for continuing to build the game world, rather than relying on something designed and published by a third party.

Closely related to recycling material is reincorporating material: Instead of taking material you’ve already developed and using it in a different form, you take the material you’ve already developed and just literally use it again.

The term “reincorporating” comes from improv, where it refers to building on bits that have been previously established instead of creating all-new bits. By reincorporating material, you build depth into your game – depth of background, depth of relationships, depth of knowledge. You’re also saved the hassle of creating something entirely new from scratch.

This is something I discuss in more depth in Juggling Scenario Hooks in the Sandbox, but it’s a technique that can be used in any campaign. For example, in my Ptolus campaign there’s an abandoned castle which has been used as a cultist’s lair, a hideout for the PCs, a safehouse for someone the PCs were protecting, and as the headquarters for a group of religious freedom fighters.  And every single time this castle comes back into play, not only do the players become a little more emotionally attached to it, but I also get to reuse the amazingly detailed floorplans I have for it.

(To be fair, my players have been almost wholly responsible for the reincorporation of this particular castle.)

Need a tavern? Use one you’ve already created. Need a villain? What if it’s an old foe coming back instead of a new face? Need someone to hire the PCs? Make it a patron they’ve worked for before.

Not everything should be rooted in the familiar, obviously, but reincorporating material is not only a great way to maximize the value of your prep; it can also maximize your players’ engagement with the game world.

CONCLUSION

I’m not going to pretend that this is the be-all or end-all of smart prep. What I’ve tried to provide here are some fairly broad principles that you can hopefully use in guiding your own prep.

Because, ultimately, these are very specific and very personal decisions: The stuff you value and the stuff your players value may not be the same thing other groups value. Maybe your group finds detailed floorplans are valuable and evocative visual aids. Another group might not. Heck, the same group might not find them as useful in a different game, or even just in a different session. Stuff that’s useful for one type of scenario might be useless for another.

With that being said, assuming there’s interest, I’m hoping to continue this series in the future, sharing with you a few of the more unusual tools and strategies I use in my own smart prep.

Go to Part 3: Status Quo Design