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

Hillfolk includes some brief notes on how to decouple the DramaSystem and use the entire thing as a cap system, using a traditional roleplaying game of your choice to resolve procedural scenes while using the DramaSystem as a storytelling game for resolving dramatic scenes. I haven’t had a chance to try that yet myself, although it sounds potentially interesting. One of the things that caught my interest when reading through the DramaSystem, however, was the way in which its character creation procedure was capable of creating a group of PCs rich with dramatic potential, relationships, and tension.

And I also noted how easy it would be to strip that process down and streamline it into a generic core that you could use with any RPG (and most STGs) without using anything else from the DramaSystem. So even if the DramaSystem holds absolutely no interest for you, I think you’ll find this potentially very useful.

STEP 1: ROLE IN THE GROUP

Each player defines a role for their PC in the group. Some roles will be defined by their responsibilities; others may be defined in their relationship (familial or otherwise) to the characters holding those roles. Don’t shy away from setting a clear chain of command: Roleplayers often avoid doing that, but the tensions within a well-defined chain of command is a rich source for dramatic play. (Bear in mind that chains of command don’t necessarily need to be linear: Different characters can have ultimate power over different spheres of influence. For the excitement that can generate, study the history of the USSR’s Politburo.)

STEP 2: DEFINE RELATIONSHIPS

In reverse order, each player defines the relationship between their PC and another PC.

When you define your relationship to another PC, you establish a crucial fact about both characters. You can make it any kind of relationship, so long as it’s an important one. Family relationships are the easiest to think of and may prove richest in play. Close friendships also work. By choosing a friendship, you’re establishing that the relationship is strong enough to create a powerful emotional bond between the two of you. Bonds of romantic love, past or present, may be strongest of all.

As in any strong drama, your most important relationships happen to be fraught with unresolved tension. These are the people your character looks to for emotional fulfillment. The struggle for this fulfillment drives your ongoing story.

Defining one relationship also determines others, based on what has already been decided.

Players may raise objections to relationship choices of other players that turn their PC into people they don’t want to play. When this occurs, the proposing player makes an alternate suggestion, negotiating with the other player until both are satisfied. If needed, the GM assists them in finding a choice that is interesting to the proposing player without imposing unduly on the other.

Keep track of relationships as they are established during character creation with a Relationship Map. Represent each character as a name with a box or circle around it. As relationships are defined, draw lines between the characters and label it with the nature of the relationship.

Repeat this process until each character has a relationship with every other character.

STEP 3: STATE DESIRE

A PC’s desire is the broadly stated, strong motivation driving their actions during dramatic scenes. The desire moves them to pursue an inner, emotional goal, which can only be achieved by engaging with other members of the main cast, and, to a lesser degree, with recurring characters run by the GM. Your desire might be seen as your character’s weakness: it makes them vulnerable to others, placing their happiness in their hands. Because this is a dramatic story, conflict with these central characters prevents them from easily or permanently satisfying their desire. Think of the desire as an emotional reward that your character seeks from others. The most powerful choices are generally the simplest:

• approval
• acceptance
• forgiveness
• respect
• love
• subservience
• reassurance
• power
• to punish
• to be punished

Note that these are emotional, not practical goals. If you find yourself drawn to a practical goal, delve past it to find the emotional need behind it. Veruca Salt, for example, craves material things in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but it’s because she’s desperately trying to elicit true affection from her father.

STEP 4: DEFINE DRAMATIC POLES

Driving any compelling dramatic character in any story form is an internal contradiction. The character is torn between two opposed dramatic poles. Each pole suggests a choice of identities for the character, each at war with the other. Events in the story pull the character from one pole to the next.

You’ll want to make both the poles and the conflict between them as clear as possible: In most dramatic scenes featuring your character, you, the GM, and the other players will want to play into this conflict, thus creating dramatic interest.

• Mark Thackeray (To Sir With Love): anger or civilisation?
• George Bailey (It’s a Wonderful Life): ambition or responsibility?
• Hamlet (Hamlet): justice or revenge?
• Joseph Cooper (Interstellar): adventure or family?
• Brian O’Conner (The Fast and the Furious): law or friendship?

STEP 5: WHAT YOU WANT FROM OTHERS

Finally, bring your dramatic poles into focus by declaring what they lead you to seek from particular other PCs.

In an order determined by the GM, each player declares what they want from another specific PC. Examples could include:

• love from the object of your affection
• approval from a mentor
• to punish your mother

The player of that character then defines why they can’t get it:

• “I could never love one of a lower caste.”
• “If I give you approval, you would stop trying.”
• “I will not punished when I am blameless.”

If necessary, both players adjust the statement as needed to reflect the first character’s understanding of the situation. (Note that it is crucial that the PC cannot get what they want at the beginning of play. If the other player feels that their character would readily grant what the first PC is asking, then the stakes must be raised or changed.)

Repeat this process until all characters are named as the objects of at least two other characters’ wants. (Additional, unaddressed relationships may be defined or developed during play.

This material is covered under the Open Gaming License.

Many GMs – possibly most of them – are bad at prepping.

This is true even of GMs who run good games. You’ll frequently hear the mantra that if everyone’s enjoying your game, then you’re doing it right! There are a number of problems with this belief (starting with the fact that enjoyment is not a binary property), but bad prep habits are a really important counterexample: If you’re spending fifteen hours prepping to get the same results that you could be getting with only an hour of prep, think about what you could be doing with those fourteen hours you’ve saved. (And not just in the rest of your life; think about the things you could be doing with that time that would make the experience of you and your players even better.)

LOW-VALUE PREP

Which brings us to probably the most common prep problem: GMs who burn themselves out with low-value (or no-value) prep. They either spend inordinate amounts of time prepping material which is never experienced at the table and/or they prep material which doesn’t actually enhance what’s experienced at the table.

One of the leading causes of low-value prep seems to be published scenarios. Most RPGs don’t include any meaningful advice on scenario prep, and the RPGs that do include such advice are generally inadequate or misguided (often being written by designers who are, themselves, engaged in bad prep; the problem is, after all, endemic to the hobby). It makes sense, therefore, that lots of GMs instead turn to published scenarios as an example of what they should be doing.

Unfortunately, published scenarios are a terrible example of what a GM should be prepping. And I’m including all of my professionally published scenarios in this condemnation.

First, even in an ideal case, what I need to write in order to clearly communicate the ideas in my head to someone I’ve never met is VERY different from the notes I need to run a scenario for myself. Here’s an actual quote from a homebrew scenario someone sent me for critique:

“There are eighteen goblins living in this rocky cavern, which is largely similar to the other caverns in this area. If it’s morning, the men will be asleep and the women will be cooking breakfast. If it’s afternoon, the men will have left, leaving only the women behind. In the evening, however, all of the goblins will be here. You should also carefully consider whether the PCs’ actions elsewhere in the dungeon have alerted the goblins to danger, in which case the men will either leave 1-2 of their number to protect the women during the day; or all may remain at home if the danger is seen as particularly acute.”

Leaving aside the profligate verbiage, who is the “you” in this text? If this is how you’re prepping your scenarios for your personal use, who are you talking to? You don’t need to explain your intentions to yourself.

Second, most published scenarios are bad. This isn’t really a surprising revelation (Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap), but they’re often systemically bad in a way which collectively lead GMs to believe that scenarios are “supposed” to be prepped in a way which will also result in their scenarios being systemically bad.

Railroading is perhaps the most common example of this. But in terms of bad prep, the even more damaging example is Choose Your Own Adventure design, encouraging GMs to waste their time prepping elaborate flow charts filled with an ever-increasing amount of material that they know will never be used because it’s literally designed to NOT be used in its entirety.

Third, these problems have become increasingly exacerbated by the fact that a sizable portion of the audience reads published scenarios as a form of storybook pulp fiction instead of surveying them as a tool for creating memorable experiences at the gaming table. More importantly, the RPG companies know this and are writing their scenarios to satisfy this audience.

Here’s James Jacobs, the Creative Director at Paizo responsible for their Adventure Paths, on the subject:

Paizo more or less exists as a game company today (and not merely as an online RPG store) because adventures sell. If they’re done right. And by “right,” I mean “fun to read.”

Because I suspect the majority of adventures published by game companies are never actually played by most of those who read the adventures. (…)

And adventures, which tell stories, ARE fun to read. (If they’re built to be read.)

To be clear, I understand the meta-fictional appeal of reading an RPG scenario. There is a creative act of closure that takes place when reading a scenario and imagining how the situations it describes might play out that’s a fairly unique (and enjoyable) experience. And I understand the commercial need to appeal to as broad an audience as possible in order to make your products profitable, particularly in an industry like RPGs where your sales will be anemic even at the best of times.

The problem is that there are a number of things you can do as a writer to enhance the enjoyment of the reader that are actually inimical to the runner. And I’m increasingly seeing these elements in published adventures: Bloated descriptions. Material sequenced so that the reader is given a Shocking Reveal!™ instead of being sequenced for easy reference by the GM at the table. Narrative discourses and background information for which there is no clear vector for the players to ever learn of them.

Some writers do this because they are intentionally aiming for the reader market. Some writers don’t actually run adventures themselves and are writing for their own preferences as people who only read adventures. (This is shockingly common, and often encouraged by publishers who respond to the word “playtest” as if you had grown a second head.) And some writers are just following the examples they see in print from others, and which they have come to think of as the “correct” way to write up a scenario.

A lot of GMs follow a similar impulse to this final category of writers: They’re looking for an example to learn from in prepping to run their games, and the examples they’re using aren’t even primarily designed to run a game from in the first place.

LOW PREP

There has, in fact, been a backlash against low-value prep.

One particularly common form of this backlash are “low prep” or “zero prep” philosophies. You’ll find these in games specifically designed for such play, like Technoir or Lady Blackbird (along with a metric shit ton of storytelling games like Ten Candles, Hillfolk, Fiasco, and so forth), but also presented as a more general philosophy about how traditional RPG scenarios can be prepared.

These low prep strategies can be very effective, and have a great deal of utility in specific circumstances. (I’ve talked often in the past about the usefulness of having RPG experiences that can be picked up and played as casually as many board games can be, for example. Low prep systems are one way of achieving that.) But what it reveals for many long-time GMs is that their prep is bloated and ineffective and wasted. For some, their low-value prep is so bad that it actually has a negative value. Literally doing nothing results in better sessions than what they were doing before.

This leads some to believe that all prep is a bad idea. But this is an overreaction, trapping some GMs in a stunted ideology that can be just as limiting as the low-value prep they were practicing before.

Even in less virulent extremism, low prep philosophies can seductively convince GMs that they’ve solved a problem when, in fact, they’re only masking it: They discover that the prep they’ve been doing doesn’t work, so they do less of it and their games improve! All better, right? Problem solved!

Except they haven’t actually stopped doing the sort of prep that doesn’t work… they’ve just dramatically reduced the amount of it they’re doing. Eating less cyanide is good, but what you should really be doing is not eating cyanide.

You can find an example of this in the first section of Michael E. Shea’s The Lazy Dungeon Master. The book preaches a good message about GMs wasting a lot of time on prep that doesn’t add value to their games, but the alternative structure it teaches is to prep four things, each on a 3×5 card:

1. A beginning scene.
2. Three paths your game might take.

These paths can either be a Choose Your Own Adventure (where, after the initial scene, the PCs can choose one of the other three paths or, alternatively, none of them), in which case you’ll prep four things of which at least half of them will never be used. Or it can revert to a linear, pre-plotted sequence. But because the GM didn’t spend as much time prepping this linear, pre-plotted sequence, Shea’s argument is that it will be more likely that the GM will be willing to just throw it all out as wasted prep.

Shea recognizes that plot-based prep doesn’t work, but in the absence of any other paradigm, the only advice he can offer is to just do less of it.

SMART PREP

Which, ultimately, leads us to smart prep – the way to focus your prep on stuff with a high utility value while avoiding prep which is either unnecessary or likely to be wasted during play.

Whereas the goal of a low prep philosophy is to reduce the amount of time you spend prepping, that’s not the primary goal of smart prep (although it might be a side effect). When you’re practicing smart prep, the goal is to make sure that every moment you’re spending prepping is maximizing the positive effect that prep has on your game sessions. You might even end up spending more time prepping. For example, I spent dozens of hours prepping the Eternal Lies campaign, but the result included hundreds of props and visual elements that created a unique and memorable experience for everyone involved.

Smart prep is all about thinking long and hard about your prep methods to see if there are ways in which you could be achieving the same results (or better results) with less prep. (Or using the same amount of prep to achieve more.)

So let’s talk about what that looks like.

Go to Part 2: The Principles of Smart Prep