Say that you want to randomly pick one of the PCs:
2 = coin flip, even/odds
3 = d6/2
4 = d4
5 = d10/2 or d6 + reroll 6’s
6 = d6
7 = (sure, I guess) d8 + reroll 8’s
8 = d8
9 = (seriously?) d10 + reroll 10’s
10 = d10
11 = stahp, u hav tu mny playrs
Obviously you can use this sort of technique for any random number you need to generate.
This is a sequel to Random GM Tip: Calling in the Big Guns. That article dealt with strategies for dealing with PCs who go to powerful patrons for help; NPCs that logically should want to help them with their current situation, but whose involvement would effectively sideline the PCs and possibly remove them from the scenario entirely.
This article deals with a similar problem: What happens when the PCs, when confronted with some horrible crime or circumstance, do the logical thing and report it to the proper authorities? For example, the police. Or the CIA. Or the army. The big, organized forces of Little Guys who enforce civilization.
Many of the techniques from the previous article will also work for this situation (and vice vera), but in practice they’re different enough to pose unique challenges. For example, while it’s relatively easy to explain why Elminster is busy and can’t help right now, it’s more difficult to explain why the entire police department would be so preoccupied that none of them can respond to a crisis.
(Realistically, of course, the difference between the Big Guns and the Little Guys is a spectrum with plenty of gray in the middle of it: The Chicago PD is definitely the “proper authorities.” A small town sheriff without backup looks a lot more like a solitary patron.)
In my experience, calling in the Little Guys also tends to be more disruptive than calling in a Big Gun. I think this is because most RPGs are structured around small bands of extraordinary heroes. Whereas Big Guns tend to work in the same paradigm, the inclusion of Big Brother seems to simply drown the PCs out. To mix my metaphors, the PCs end up being a fish out of water.
(This assumes that it’s the players who are deciding to reach out to the NPCs. Oddly, if the situation is reversed and it’s the GM who’s pushing the NPCs into the scenario I find that the exact opposite is true: Big Guns become far more disruptive and the Little Guys are manageable. I suspect this is for the exact same reason. The Big Gun operates in the same paradigm as the PCs, so when the GM tries to shove one of them down the players’ throats it feels as if the PCs are just being replaced by a newer, shinier model that they don’t get to play. Whereas when the Little Guys show up uninvited, they tend to be interpreted as simply another obstacle that our strong, independent heroes need to figure out a way to overcome. But I digress.)
So the PCs have picked up the phone and called the cops.
What happens next?
#1. THEY DON’T BELIEVE THEM
This solution can be basically a genre convention for any modern campaign featuring the paranormal. Think of shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural: If you go to the cops babbling about werewolves, they aren’t going to believe you. They’ll probably just end up making the problem worse.
You can even use this paradigm in campaigns where the PCs are the authority. In fact, if you frame it correctly, it can let the PCs both simultaneously belong to a government agency AND be a small band of extraordinary heroes. Think The X-Files.
But this conceit doesn’t require the supernatural, either. Think about the beginning of Die Hard, where John McClane is continually trying to convince the LAPD that the terrorist threat is real, but they keep dismissing him as a kook or prank caller.
#2. LOST IN BUREAUCRACY
Alternatively, the PCs detect an oncoming crisis, warn the appropriate authorities, and… nothing. The authorities don’t do anything. Or they do something, but it’s misguided and doesn’t actually solve the problem. Or there’s a committee that’s going to figure out what the proper course of action is, but it’s clear by the time they’re done deliberating that the asteroid will have already obliterated Venice (or whatever).
Look no further than restraining orders that take three weeks to process when the guy bought a gun yesterday, the government response to the climate crisis, or the clusterfuck pandemic response in places like Brazil, England, and the United States. If anything, it becomes even easier to find malfeasance, mismanagement, and neglect at the local level.
You can send a strong signal early in a campaign that the Little Guys aren’t going to help the PCs by sending the bureaucracy looking for them first. Think about Walter Peck, the abusive EPA rep in the original Ghostbusters.
#3. THE BAD GUYS ARE CONNECTED
Coming back to Die Hard, do you remember that scene where McClane is celebrating because he can see the cop cars coming down the boulevard… but then the bad guys call it in as a false alarm and the cops flip off their sirens, turn around, and leave?
This scenario covers any number of possibilities for how the bad guys can counter the PCs notifying the authorities, like the horror and suspense movies where the heroes see something suspicious and call the cops, but by the time the cops show up, the bad guys have had a chance to make everything look normal.
It may be even more insidious than that, however, with the bad guys having already infiltrated the Little Guys: That might just be a few crooked cops so you don’t know who to trust, or it could be a conspiracy that secretly controls the entire local government. (Or an invasion of body-snatchers to the same effect.)
#4. THEY DEFER TO THE PCs
At the opposite end of the spectrum, let the Little Guys recognize that the PCs are the most qualified, the most skilled, and/or have the most insight into what’s happening. They’ll either partner up with the PCs or simply put resources (and manpower) at their disposal.
One variant of this that can work particularly well is for each PC to be put in command of a squad of NPCs. You can let the players run the whole squad or, if the squads split up to pursue multiple objectives simultaneously, you can use troupe-style play (in which all the other players take an NPC in the current PC’s squad).
But what really makes this technique work is to actually put the players in charge: Give them access to the resources, but let them figure out how they want to utilize them.
This can be a fine line to walk if you want to make sure that it doesn’t permanently transform the campaign, but it’s usually not too difficult to justify why this is a temporary circumstance that only applies to the immediate situation. (Although maybe permanently shifting the campaign is exactly the right way to go!)
This post contains SPOILERS for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist.
A unique challenge to running urban campaigns is figuring out what happens if the PCs, confronted with some horrible crime or circumstance, do the logical thing and seek help from powerful allies. And the scope of this problem tends to grow as technology (or its magical equivalent) improves communication, travel speeds, or both. (Low level D&D characters in the middle of the woods tend not to have any recourse; modern teenagers with cellphones are a completely different story.)
In my experience, the problem also intensifies in what I’ll call mythological settings, where single individuals (powerful wizards, Sith lords, starship captains) can be possessed of immense power. This is because it can be both easier for the PCs to get access to these characters and often harder to explain why they don’t want to get involved.
Let’s take a step back for a moment: Why is this a problem?
First, it really mucks up the challenge level of the scenario when Batman calls in Superman to deal with the Joker. Second, it’s dramatically unsatisfying to go through all the preamble of a conflict only to be sidelined while Elminster heads off to experience the end of the story.
Now, let’s address the elephant in the room: There’s often an unspoken genre convention and/or table agreement that calling in the Big Guns is generally poor form and shouldn’t be done because it’s disruptive to the desired experience. If you want to make that a spoken agreement more power to you, but there are a couple things to be aware of:
First, this can actually create a different sort of problem for some players because it creates a tension between what their characters should be doing (based on their understanding of who that character is) and what that character is allowed to do. For some players, making this an explicit, spoken agreement can resolve this problem (because with the option definitively off the table the tension disappears). But for other players, it will actually make the problem worse because either acknowledging the tension or explicitly prohibiting the choice is even more disruptive to their roleplaying.
Second, calling in the Big Guns is not exclusively a problem. It’s also an opportunity. And there’s a lot of really cool experiences that you’re taking off the table if you just flat out ban these interactions. Superman shouldn’t just swoop into every Batman story, but World’s Finest crossovers can be really awesome.
On the flip side, this also means that sometimes players call in the Big Guns because it’s what makes sense for their characters to do… but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to do it as players! They don’t want to be sidelined while the Big Guns take care of everything, and they’re actually hoping that you’ll reject the offer so that they can have done the right thing in roleplaying their character truthfully AND get what they want by continuing to be in the starring roles in the rest of the adventure.
All of which means that, at some point, you’re going to run into a situation where the PCs decide that it’s time to call in the Big Guns.
What happens next?
#1. IT WORKS
They call in the Big Guns, the Big Guns have a good reason to be involved, and they come in and deal with the situation. Problem solved!
The trick here is to frame getting the help of the Big Guns as being the major accomplishment and then just letting loose and really enjoying the curb-stomping done by the Big Guns as the reward for a job well done.
If you want an example of this from another medium, look at The Lord of the Rings. Most of The Two Towers consists of the heroes trying to convince one major ally or another to put some skin in the game: Theoden, Treebeard, etc. Or take this scene from the movies:
Pippin literally summons an entire army to help solve his problems.
This approach works if the players see the Big Guns as a manifestation of their will; no different than a fireball or a powerful magical artifact. THEY were the ones who called on the Big Guns. This can be a tricky balancing act to pull off, but it can be immensely satisfying when you do.
#2. THEY’RE BUSY
The Big Guns are busy doing something else and therefore cannot help.
This can be used preemptively if there’s a time crunch (“Sorry, Harry, Dumbledore isn’t in his office right now”), but it can be equally effective if the conflict comes up at the last possible second: “Great. Glad we’re all gathered here to go down into the Vault together. Now that we’re fully committed to this course of action, let’s— Wait! There’s a tarrasaque attacking the harbor! I’ve got to go!”
This works better, of course, when it emerges naturally out of the narrative. For example, in my Dragon Heist campaign the group had recruited Renaer and the Black Tears to assist in raiding the Cassalanters. That gig resulted in them “arresting” (i.e., kidnapping) Lord Cassalanter and taking him to the Blackstaff. At this point, I could clearly see the risk of the PCs’ contributions for the rest of the campaign getting washed out by a confluence of powerful NPCs: The stakes had gotten high enough that it would be hard to justify the Blackstaff and the Open Lord of Waterdeep not getting directly involved. So I framed the Blackstaff’s response accordingly: She called up Renaer and the Black Tears to help her perform a rapid-fire investigation of the Cassalanters to accumulate the evidence necessary to “make the arrest legal after the fact.”
The Blackstaff and Renaer were still helping the PCs, but only off-screen and tangentially.
You can also bake larger priorities into the setting. For example, in my Ptolus campaign there’s an invading army that’s marching towards the city. No matter how dire the stakes are in whatever scenario the PCs have gotten themselves involved in, it’s not hard to argue that preparations for a literal war are more important, giving me an easy trump card that I can play any time I need it.
On the other hand, you don’t actually need to go into a lot of detail as long as you’ve firmly established that the NPC in question is tied up in more important affairs; that they’re operating at a higher tier than the PCs. For example, when the Dragon Heist PCs later sent word to the Blackstaff that they’d located the Vault, the Blackstaff simply replied, “Good luck! Let me know how it goes!” The implication was that she was busy doing something else and trusted the PCs to take care of it.
On that note: You usually want the NPC, even though they don’t have the time or resources to deal with the problem, to acknowledge how clearly important the information the PCs are bringing them is, rather than belittling it. (Unless, of course, the PCs really are just wasting their time with trivialities.) This validates the players’ actions AND ratchets up the stakes.
The quickest way to achieve this effect is for the NPC to say, “This is clearly very important… which is why I’m deputizing you to deal with it.” In my Ptolus campaign, for example, I had the Commissar specifically deputize the PCs to deal with the local activities of the chaos cults. Ergo, any time they discovered some new, horrible thing that the chaos cults were involved with, the official response could neatly default to, “Keep up the good work!”
Another effective way of handling this brush off is for the Big Gun to give the PCs’ some form of assistance, even if they can’t get directly involved: A suitcase full of cash. A platoon of elven archers. The phone number of an old friend in Cairo they should talk to. Et cetera.
This idea of rewarding the PCs for going to the Big Guns is a common theme here: Even if the Big Guns turn the PCs down flat and refuse to help, if there’s still some sort of reward for having gone to them in the first place, then the players will feel validated in their choice. (It also tends to just make sense, unless the PCs were completely off-base in their belief that the NPC would care about what’s happening.)
#3. THERE’S A REASON THEY CAN’T HELP
Later in my Dragon Heist campaign, when Lady Cassalanter kidnapped one of the PCs’ adopted kids, the PCs sent a message to the Blackstaff.
Since we’d already established that the Blackstaff was investigating the Cassalanters, there was no good reason for her not to drop everything and come to help. But I knew that a fight with Lady Cassalanter would become trivial if the Blackstaff was involved, so Lady Cassalanter erected some wards around her location that would have specifically detected the Blackstaff’s approach (since she knew that the Blackstaff was now involved and had been investigating her family). The Blackstaff detected the wards, warned the PCs, and veered off. She’d be nearby, but with Lady Cassalanter holding a hostage it was just too risky for her to come barreling in with the PCs.
(This was also a hybrid because the Blackstaff actually gave them valuable intel on where Lady Cassalanter might be holding their son, so she’d already helped them to a certain extent and the PCs had been rewarded for calling her in. You can read about what happened next in this campaign journal.)
In my Ptolus campaign, another major element of Act II is the exploration of the Banewarrens. These, once again, pose a potentially existential threat in the middle of the city, and there once again needs to be some explanation for why the city authorities and other major players don’t come barging in to resolve the crisis. In this case, I simple turned the Banewarrens into a point of religious dispute. The two halves of the schismed Church effectively checkmated each other, and the civil authorities in the form of the Commissar refused to get involved because of the tangle of Church politics.
#4. SPLIT THEM UP
“We have not come here by chance. I do not believe in chance. When I see three objectives, three captains, three ships, I do not see coincidence. I see providence. I see purpose.” – Morpheus, The Matrix Reloaded
Now that the Big Guns have been called in for the actual op, split the group up: While the Big Guns do one thing, the PCs need to do another.
For example, we could imagine a Dragon Heist campaign where the PCs have successfully recruited the Blackstaff or Manshoon or Laeral Silverhand to come into the Vault with them and retrieve Neverember’s stolen hoard. But as the Vault cracks open, the bad guys suddenly arrive with something so incredibly dangerous — the Cassalanters summon a pit fiend, or Xanathar himself shows up with a bevy of gazers and mind flayers, or Jarlaxle teleports in with a platoon of elite drow mercenaries — that the Big Gun has to deal with it. They turn to the PCs and shout, “This could all be a distraction! Get into the Vault! Make sure the gold is secure!”
This is also a good example of how, as the GM, you want to pay attention to why the players want to call in the Big Guns. For example, they may have concocted some incredibly convoluted scheme that requires them to be in nine places at the same time and they have no idea how they can pull it off by themselves. That’s a perfect opportunity to just lean back, let them bring in the Big Guns without fuss, and then peel them off into separate action groups.
#5. FLIP IT AROUND
Now that the Big Guns are involved and putting themselves in charge, they send the PCs to do something crucial for their success.
Returning to our example of the Dragon Heist Vault, when Jarlaxle shows up with his force of drow mercenaries, the Blackstaff turns to the PCs and says, “Hold them off here! I’m heading into the Vault!” Once the drow goons are defeated, the PCs follow and discover the Blackstaff standing over the dragon she’s just slain. A dragon?! Phew! Good thing they called her in!
If you’re more dramatically inclined, you can also frame this so that the PCs show up just in time to take the shot that finishes off the dragon. “Thank you!” says the Blackstaff. “It was a more difficult foe than I had expected!” Or whatever.
You can also reverse expectations here by making it LOOK like the crucial part of the mission (i.e., the thing that the Big Guns are going to go do) is one thing and the ancillary goal is some other thing, while in reality it’s actually the exact OPPOSITE. So the PCs get sent to pursue the ancillary goal in a supporting capacity, but then it turns out they’re actually doing the absolutely vital thing that’s going to save the day! (“I thought Griznak was going to be at the fort?!” “Yeah, well, he’s here, and we’re out of time. Let’s go!”)
#6. THEY ARE THE BIG GUNS!
The zero-to-hero dynamic of D&D tends to get ingrained to the point where we sometimes forget that it’s fully possible to have a campaign dynamic where there AREN’T any Big Guns to appeal to because the PCs are the biggest guns around.
This can be particularly true within a specific set of parameters.
Even in D&D, it’s quite possible to run a campaign where, once the PCs hit mid-level play, they’re the most powerful people in town (and possibly for hundreds or thousands of miles around).
On that note, even if they aren’t the biggest guns in town, this is nevertheless a great time to have low-level adventuring parties come knocking on the door with problems that they need a Big Gun to solve for them.
FURTHER READING
Random GM Tip: Calling in the Little Guys
In “On the Use of GM Screens” a few years back I shared my personal best practices when it comes to using GM screens. Probably the biggest reason I like them is the vertical reference space: One of my secret weapons as a GM is simply arranging my reference material so that I can lay out multiple elements (stat blocks, room descriptions, campaign status document, maps, NPC roleplaying templates, etc.) simultaneously. I can thus cross-reference material by just flicking my eyes back and forth, and can often easily compare information directly instead of having to flip back-and-forth.
The vertical reference space of the GM screen, therefore, is basically free space. I’ve already covered every inch of table space in front of me (and often have a TV tray to one side for additional reference material), so basically creating more space in the third dimension is a huge advantage.
Now, the most common thing I put in that vertical space is my system cheat sheet. It’s virtually always useful when running a game, and putting that information into the vertical plane means that my horizontal surfaces can be focused on scenario-related material. These cheat sheets can also be prepped ahead of time
But this is not the only way you can utilize that vertical space! This is a trick that I didn’t think to include in “On the Use of GM Screens” because I don’t use it very often, but it can be very effective upon occasion and you may find it even more useful than I do.
Basically, 3M makes these removable restickable glue sticks:
They can be used to essentially turn any piece of paper into a Post-It note. And that, in turn, means that you can turn any piece of paper into a swap note that you can quickly paste up or remove from your GM screen.
For example, you can print out the stat blocks for your current scenario. Here I’ve grabbed an Orc War Chief accompanied by a warband of Orcs, and also a second encounter featuring a Werebear and his pet Owlbear:
And then, while running the game, you can quickly use the restickable glue stick to attach them to the GM screen for easy reference during an encounter:
Other stuff that you might find useful as a swap note:
As I’ve talked about before, what reference material a GM finds useful will often be very specific to that GM, and will often change over time. So experiment with different options, and pay attention to the type of information that you had to stop and scramble for (or just really wish you’d had handy) during your last session.
You can also just keep a straight-up stack of Post-Its that you can scribble out transient-yet-important information onto.
This is also works on the other side of the screen, too! If you have visual references for the players (like, say, all those photo handouts that are part of the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies), you could similarly turn them into Post-Its and slap them onto the front of the screen. If you’re going to do this a lot, it might argue for using a simple pattern for the player’s side of your screen. You could even go for a collage approach, where instead of removing the references you just keep layering them on top of each other, creating an ever-evolving visual motif of the campaign that continues to grow as the campaign goes on.
PROVISOS
In my experience, this technique only works passingly well with the old, thin cardboard-style screens. But it works great with the modern, glossy, board-stock screens that have become de rigeur. It works even better with modular screens like those from Pinnacle, Strategem, and Hammerdog.
You don’t want to leave the notes attached for an extended period of time. I first used this technique with my Eclipse Phase screen and I ended up leaving a few swap notes attached when we moved on to other games. When I opened the screen up a couple of years later, I found that the glue had chemically deteriorated and left a chalky residue that was difficult to clean up.
If there’s one fundamental lesson I think you should take away from Don’t Prep Plots or Smart Prep, it’s to think of your prep as a collection of tools that you can use during the game rather than a story you’ve written. Or as a box full of toys that you can play with at the table (the same way the players are playing their characters) rather than a script to be read from. Or whatever other metaphor works for you.
Those previous articles already discuss this principle in both general and specific terms, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time today retreading that ground. I’m going to assume that you’ve already discovered the joy of actively playing scenarios, and what I want to talk about today are the toys you could be playing with, but may not realize that you already have in your toybox.
Perhaps the best way to explain what I’m talking about is by way of example.
NEWSSHEETS
For my Ptolus campaign, part of my campaign status document is a list of upcoming headlines/articles in the local newssheets. For example:
And so forth. The current version of the sheet has the next fifteen or so days of newssheets mapped out and I do the same thing in my Dragon Heist campaign for broadsheets in Waterdeep. Some of the news items tie into future scenarios, others reflect the ongoing activities of the PCs, and some are just random events unrelated to the PCs.
The primary reason I started prepping these is the obvious one: My players were routinely checking the local newssheets to see what was going on in the city and it was useful to give some thought to what they’d find when they did.
Although designed as a single-use tool (PC wants to look at headlines → give them the current headlines), once I had the tool in my campaign status document I began discovering that there were actually lots of different ways that I could use it. For example:
To find these hidden tools, I just had to stop thinking of the list as being specifically “this is what appears in the newssheet” and started thinking of it in the more general sense of “this is what’s going on in the city / what people are talking about / what’s in the public consciousness.” What looked as if it was very specific content actually had a much broader general utility.
One of the interesting consequences of identifying and using these “hidden” tools is that it will often highlight places where, as described in Smart Prep, you can completely eliminate unnecessary prep. For example, when I first started prepping news stories for a campaign I would often get very specific: What newspaper were they published in? What was the headline? Et cetera. When I started using these tools in different ways, I realized that these details were often superfluous waste. The thing that was actually useful was the core piece of information. Everything else could be improvised during actual play depending on how the information intersected with the PCs.
This is not to say that the contextualization isn’t important. (Exactly the opposite!) It’s not even to say that this sort of contextualization shouldn’t be prepped. For example, you can see here how I researched specific newspapers from the 1930s for my Eternal Lies campaign. Note how easily you can grab one of these newspapers and combine them with a news item like the examples above and instantly contextualize the information: You don’t need to prep a specific newspaper for every single article in order to get the same effect in actual play. Similarly, it’s quite probable that if the PCs are getting this information from a PC or a tavern, then it’s also something you’ve prepped.
You can also think of this as prepping a collection of more generic tools that can be combined together in order to flexibly respond to any number of possibilities, rather than prepping hyper-specialized tools that can only be used in one specific way. Looking for your “hidden tools” is one way of taking a specialized tool and making it more widely useful. (Note, though, how this greater utility often takes the form of less prep, not more!)
But it’s important not to mistake this for a reductio ad absurdum where the goal is to eliminate all specificity. If you look at that same Eternal Lies campaign, for example, you’ll find any number of instances where I prepped very specific newspaper articles, books, or the like.
PERMISSIVE CLUE-FINDING
The principle of permissive clue-finding, described as a corollary to the Three Clue Rule, is actually another example of using hidden tools.
Basically, when you design a mystery scenario, you prep a specific list of revelations that are necessary to solve the mystery and then you prep specific clues that point to each revelation so that the players/PCs can figure it out. The principle of permissive clue-finding is simply to provide meaningful clues in response to PC-initiated investigations even if they are not the clues that you prepped ahead of time.
The revelations on your revelation list are, effectively, your hidden tools: You know that solving the mystery lies in grokking those revelations, so when the PCs start pursuing an investigatory path you hadn’t anticipated, all you need to do is figure out how (or if) it can be related back to one of those revelations.
HEXES & RUMORS
Here’s a technique I used when running my OD&D hexcrawl.
I wanted to seed the campaign with rumors, so I decided that new characters would begin play with 1d4 rumors and existing characters could make a Charisma check in the downtime between sessions to pick up a rumor. I experimented with a traditional 1d20 and, later, a 1d30 rumor table, but because it was an open table with several dozen players and even more characters the rumor table would basically get burned up as soon as I stocked it. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time restocking the rumor table (particularly because many rumors were never pursued, which felt like semi-wasted prep), so rather than rolling on a rumor table I started just randomly selecting one of the hexes on my map, looking at what the hex contained, and then just improvising an appropriate rumor.
So, for example, I might randomly select Hex C2 and read:
C1 – WHITE DRAGON LAIR
Queen of the Claw – Elder White Dragon (AC 2, 12 HD)
- Suspicious of Dyre (hex A1)
- Daughter (Paicyro) ran away and knows a secret entrance (hex C8)
- Remembers a time of Ashardalon and opposed him when she was a wyrmling
Sired a pack of half-dragon dire wolves (AC 2, 4+2 HD).
Served by the Twelve White Claws, elite anubian warriors chosen for the honor in a gladiatorial combat once every 10 years.
TREASURE: 8000 silver, 30,000 gold, 98 gems, 10 jewelry
And come up with any number of rumors like:
You can probably come up with another half dozen such rumors yourself, even without knowing the wider context and lore of this particular campaign world.
Note that the hexes are still fulfilling the primary function I had designed them for (being discovered during a hexcrawl). It’s just that they were now also being leveraged and put to new use. (With, you’ll note, no additional prep on my part whatsoever.)
CONCLUSION
The point here is to reprogram your brain so that when you prep X in order to do Y you don’t lock down on the idea that Y is the only thing you can do with X.
Along the way you may discover that, instead of trying to prep something in order to do Y, it makes more sense to cut out the middleman and go straight to prepping something that’s directly designed to be flexibly used in multiple ways. That’s great! Y will still be taken care of, but now you can also take care of a bunch of other stuff.
At a macro-level I say don’t prep plots, prep situations. At the micro-level, we might describe this as prepping content instead of writing outcomes.
