You Are Too Prepared!
Poor Quest Giver. I would know that megalomaniacal snarl anywhere. That’s because I’ve worn it myself more often than I’d care to admit.
While going back through the Handbook-World backlog in preparation for today’s rant, I discovered two previous comics relevant to session prep. As it happens, both “Prep Time” and “Zero-Prep” are all about efficiency. We’re all busy people, and getting your pre-game ritual down to an hour or less a generally desirable thing. But even if I am in favor lazy GMing, I think it’s worth exploring the upsides of over prepping as well.
Now I won’t blame you if your first reaction is to roll your eyes and mutter, “What upside?” Over prepping is largely unnecessary, leading to stress, burnout, and even (when GMs fall too in love with their own ideas) railroading. But consider what you do get when you put in the extra time and effort.
If you’re running a module, reading and re-reading will familiarize you with the resources at your disposal. You’ll be able to reference stat blocks and plot points more easily, making for a smoother experience during play.
If you’re running homebrew, then a more robust game world is suddenly possible. Name lists for NPCs, backlogs of wandering encounters, and more thought-out descriptions for your fabulous locales all become available.
And if you happen to be a crafty sort, set piece dungeons and special effects are on deck to blow your players out of their seats.
So while Cavalier waits on that quest scroll (I hope it’s not too important), let’s talk about all those show-stopper sessions that took a little extra time and effort to put together. I’m talking big 3D dungeons, professionally designed handouts, themed meals, and complete campaigns worlds that you know like the back of your DMG. In other words, tell us about the session you worked hardest to put together. Why was it so labor intensive, and what was the payoff? Sound off with your tales of over-prepping down right down in the comments!
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Are we sure Quest Giver is a Human? That snarl is as big as his head. And most people don’t file their teeth to incisors.
You think maybe he’s a couple of Fizzgigs in a trench coat?
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lSnzoeZMljM/maxresdefault.jpg
No wonder Quest Giver partakes in the pipeweed in his off time.
Consult your local druid before attempting to self-medicate.
warhammer fantasy, I crafted an elaborate catacomb, with lots of twisting pathways and full maze. Spent two evenings with bottle of well fermented produce crafting it, only to have my players luck out with their path choices and hit home skiping roughly 90% of my work. next time I add locked doors and hide the key to another side of the maze. And hope my dwarf miners don’t start making their own way
Was this a craze-elaborate 2D map that used up half a dozen vis-a-vis markers, or are we talking fully-painted and assembled 3D terrain?
just a 2D, took a lot of inspiration from the mythical minotaur, to a point it was a potentiql encounter, weakened from base stats naturally setting being warhammer and me not wanting to give my players a chalenge not murder them as easily as my breath drops people after garlic-blue cheese combo.
I will admit to being a massive over-prepper. I am starting a new campaign in the next month and my notes currently fill three lever-arch files. Sure, its excessive, but I find adventure writing a massive de-stressor, and something to do on holiday when the other half is lying in the sun or reading a book. And in my defence, the vast majority of this was produced during the lockdowns of the last few years, so it served a purpose there.
While over-prepping always draws suggestions of railroading, I find it can do the exact opposite. I did all this writing before I knew what characters, and even to a certain extent, which players, would be taking part in it. So I have had to leave it wide open to account for the massive variety of character that might show up (which partially explains the humongous page-count). Sure, I know who the villains and power-players are, but I have got to allow for the party to come at it from many different directions, or even turn the whole thing on its head and join the other side, so there can’t be tight rails, or the whole thing would collapse. Likewise, the magic items I have created have been done completely without knowing who and what might find them. Compared to ones created while a campaign is in flow, where you can almost guarantee who will want each item, and you feel pressured to provide what the party wants/uses, rather than freely what fits the location/bearer.
And finally, overprepping enhances my at the table experience. Why you ask? Because I am a little daft, and I tend to write little jokes and sidebars into my notes for me to find later. Sounds silly, but more than once I have been caught laughing at a joke reference I wrote in to an encounter years before and subsequently completely forgot about!
I think you’re doing it right. The temptation is to say, “I made this dungeon, so you’re doing the dungeon come hell or high water.” If you treat all that “fun work” as optional, however, then you don’t have to worry about the railroad.
“If you’re running a module, reading and re-reading will familiarize you with the resources at your disposal. You’ll be able to reference stat blocks and plot points more easily, making for a smoother experience during play.”
But that’s just regular prepping. Which is why I don;t run modules, too much reading and I’m going to end up winging it anyway once the PCs go off the module’s rails.
“If you’re running homebrew, then a more robust game world is suddenly possible. Name lists for NPCs, backlogs of wandering encounters, and more thought-out descriptions for your fabulous locales all become available.”
I get all that without the prep. But yes, if you can’t seat-of-your-pants create all that, do some pre-work.
“And if you happen to be a crafty sort, set piece dungeons and special effects are on deck to blow your players out of their seats.”
This is truly what my way ends up lacking. Though if my group were the sort to say “Next session let’s go do X!” and be able to stick to it, I’d be more willing to put in the work to make stuff like that for them.
So if I’m reading this correctly, you get “more thought-out descriptions for your fabulous locales” by… not preparing them?
I get that improvising yields cool results, but methinks you’re overselling it a bit.
“So if I’m reading this correctly, you get “more thought-out descriptions for your fabulous locales” by… not preparing them?”
Same basically. I can prep up everything (that I can think of) in advance and then have to make up more stuff when the PCs spur-of-the-moment go somewhere unprepared for… or I can just skip the prep and make up the same descriptions and locales when they go somewhere.
I’m insanely phenomenal when under-pressure, not so good at all absent the pressure. (I’m really a slough without any impetus to “doo eet” as the kids say.)
I have mentioned I’ve been (not) working on a campaign for over seven years because I don’t have a group pressuring me to play it on the site I’m building it on haven’t I?
Inversely, on the same rpg messageboard site I’m running a game that I didn’t even start, didn’t plan to run, wasn’t in charge of plot for, or maps, fluff, NPCs, or anything, but took over when the GM had a “small” emergency and I was his “rules Co-GM” (literally I signed on to help him with the rules as he doesn’t know GURPS well)… so they disappeared over a month ago and I’ve been running by the seat every since (making NPCs, maps, fluff, backgrounds, plot, etc), because I have Players clamoring for more, so the pressure to “get it done” is there.
I’ve done more writing for that game in one month than I’ve done in over seven years for the game I have no Players for yet… all because of pressure. It makes diamonds, and I am coal.
(I figured this out about twenty years ago and I’ve run games this way ever since.)
I think I’m going to quibble with the idea that going over-and-beyond “just enough preparation” counts as “over-prepping.” I spent 6-10 hours a week setting up sessions for a Vampire game a ran back when dinosaurs walked the Earth, and I never considered myself over-prepared, even though the players never encountered 75% of what I laid out. But there’s something to having enough background information that the world and the characters who inhabit it seem real, rather than popping into existence moments prior to the PCs rounding the corner.
The best part of it was the mini-newspaper that the players received at the beginning of (almost) every session that was designed to convey to them what was going on in the world around their characters, the sorts of news events (local and otherwise) that their characters would know about, and might need to take into account when planning their actions and movements. The players also learned to skim it for telltales of other entities that they needed to pay attention to. A suspiciously high number of “large dog attacks” in Rogers Park, could be mundane, or it could be werewolves. It became a way of dropping hints and directing characters without needing to have quest-giver NPCs pointing them to where it might be helpful for them to go next.
But the best part about it was that I could bring in characters whom the players had overlooked in earlier sessions, and when the players started following those threads, they encountered situations that made sense, given that they’d been plotted out in the background. One of the player characters had been a prosecutor before being Embraced, and I’d been keeping a running log of what one of the bailiffs in the local courthouse had been doing. She’d pop up from time to time, and the players treated her as window dressing. But when one of the players decided she was suspicious and the group started digging, the fact that she had a backstory with the world, including interactions with other NPCs, made for a rich mystery story that lead the PCs to understand that someone else had been quietly tracking their movements. That someone else was also mainly there because it made sense that, in a world of supernatural creatures, someone would be looking to keep tabs on known entities, but the players (being players) concluded it was all about them and very nearly blew the lid off the entire Masquerade in going after this character that they thought was out to get them.
But in the end, I find that working out background relationships and other things that are going on, normally out of sight (and therefore out of mind) of the PCs, creates a world where the players understand their character’s actions have impacts on the rest of the world, and world has impacts on them. It all makes for an enriching play experience.
> quibble with the idea that going over-and-beyond “just enough preparation” counts as “over-prepping.”
I see a lot of chatter about the value of improvising. “If you can’t learn to react to your players, you won’t advance as a storyteller.” I think these folks are worried that detailed world-building lead to railroading, the idea being that you’ll nudge your players towards the stuff that you find interest. This can be (but is not necessarily) true.
> I never considered myself over-prepared, even though the players never encountered 75% of what I laid out
Another question to ask is “do I enjoy this work?” Are you prepping because you enjoy the worldbuilding, or because of a compulsive need to cover every last base? The former is a fun part of the hobby. The latter threatens burnout.
For what it’s worth, I think that a bit of graphic design for an in-universe gazette sounds like a marvelous addition to a game world. It’s the kind of “above and beyond” that can make a campaign special. Here’s the tricky bit though: that may not be over-prepping for you, but it could be for another GM. In that sense, it occurs to me that “over prepping” might be more about mental state than any tangible activity.
Some GMs love to build worlds. Some Players love to build characters.*
Just for fun! Who’d imagine it! Not me. I actually dislike doing both of these things. World prep and character genning, I reach a point where I just ‘want it done” and have to force myself to grind out the last half.
For world building? I don’t bother anymore, as GM I can build that on the fly as the PCs hit the edges of the map.
For character building? I have to grind the last bit out, the PC needs to be done enough to play. Sometimes I’ll leave stuff off for later, background elements, or if build points can be banked, or money spent during play… but I have to get to a playable state and that’s the grind. Once it’s in play? That’s fine, I can do the rest as it either comes up or as I feel the pathos move me.
.* That’s literally my best friend. He just makes characters for fun. I don’t get it. Used to give me mild anxiety, I’d mention an idea for running a game and he’d mention the next day he’s already made up 4 different characters… and now I felt I had to run that game!
I eventually learned to ignore him, he just makes new characters when he has an idea, he never expects to play them, he just… I don’t know. Like’s playing with builds? I’ve never understood it.
I am definitely an over prepper, but I have to be since my campaigns tend to be completely open world without any specific direction for the party to go. Since they can go anywhere (within a reasonable distance, my game world is BIG), I need to have at least a semi-fleshed skeleton to hang plots on for everywhere in that area. I tend to have a ton of random encounters always at hand, covering all the levels and terrain types. All the little towns and hamlets also get a quick NPC brushup so I can remember who is there and what services are available. All the larger towns and cities have fairly fleshed out districts and important NPCs are fleshed out beyond the “random noble with a quest” type.
That said, most of that all takes place BEFORE a new party sets forth. Having all that available means I can be as flexible as necessary without a lot of prep during the actual campaign. If I’ve got several cave dungeons available, then I can plop one down anytime things get slow. I also steal maps and things from modules to help cut down on prep time.
Most prep I’ve ever done was a three part quest I lured the players into. Every NPC had a full background, every encounter was crafted and mapped, and there were many chutes and ladders were set up to dump them back into the main story line. Even though my players were used to just taking off, they did a good job of staying pretty close to the quest line. I don’t mind doing things like that every now and again, but for me that is too much work for a limited amount of play time.
I think that “support the open world playstyle” business was part of the motivation behind this thing:
https://www.amazon.com/Mini-Dungeon-Foe-AAWMDT5E-Jonathan-Nelson/dp/0989973646
I remain quite proud of my contributions to it. If I had it to do again though, I’d change up the workflow. So much of that project was “here’s a cool map. Now invent a premise for the pre-existing location.” That wound up meaning that, rather than several options for “cave dungeon” or “forest dungeon”, we wound up producing a bunch of self-contained stories. You can adapt some of them, but most require some narrative prep-work to make ’em fly as a drop-in for an ongoing campaign.
All of which is to say: creating a load of flexible material seems like a solid way to make “open world” style gaming work. In that sense, the definition for “over prepping” would seem to change with campaign style.
My brother (in his DMing days in the early 80s) was a HUGE over-prepper, with hand-painted pasteboard dioramas for the minis to romp in and tons of hand-illustrated play tiles.
My friend Bill works for a printing company, and so his sessions often have tons of maps, manipulatives, and illustrations.
Probably out of a reaction to this, I have some maps or handouts and we use minis, bottlecaps, or whatever is handy to map out combat or marching order when necessary. Theoretically, prep time is a breeze.
UNLESS I’m adapting some older module or Dungeon magazine adventure. Then I usually
a) plan to use it as-is and adapt it to the current chosen edition’s rules on the fly,
b) figure that a just a little prep work wouldn’t be all that bad and generate the creature stats ahead of time,
c) reason that the writing isn’t horrible, but certainly not up to my standards of prose and copyediting and begin to make “speaking note” changes as I retype it in easy-to-read fonts with better layout,
d) realize that the maps are rubbish by modern standards and probably need to be redrawn/photoshopped,
e) come to the conclusion that the theme was good, but the initial premise was flawed and decide to rewrite the whole thing from scratch.
AND FINALLY, f) see that, once again, it would have taken me less time to create something whole cloth if I hadn’t thought, “Hey, I can save some prep time if I just grab a canned adventure out of my old gaming stuff.”
I learned the ropes with a very… let’s call them a “deliberately-paced” group. In consequence, I overcorrected the other way, pushing DO MORE STUFF NOW!!! at my players rather than letting them wander through the world. Crazy how the early games wind up impacting GM style years down the line.
As for the canned stuff, I feel ya SO HARD. My megadungeon is mostly solid, but we’ve got to the point in the campaign where I’m putting in a lot of elbow grease to make the material make sense given the peculiarities of the group’s play-through.
The DM I played with in college had a heavily-planned-out campaign, with quotes from various books for each session’s intro…right up until we got greedy and tried to break a large chunk of cold iron (which in this setting had its properties because it was radioactive) with a lightning bolt spell from our halfling treehugger (custom class).
After barely escaping a lethal dose of radiation and sailing downriver in a cobbled-together boat, we discovered the Queen who’d sent us to the ruins to retrieve cold iron (the ruins were called Wormwood, which was actually a translation of the site’s ancient name before the apocalyptic ice age, CHERNOBYL) was organizing an evacuation of her kingdom which was effectively ceasing to exist as the environmental damage we’d unwittingly caused rendered its entire population refugees. Meanwhile the horde of hobgoblins we’d heard rumors about massing on the kingdom’s borders was breaking apart and retreating, their Khan either dead or deciding further westward expansion of his empire was now untenable.
Our DM had planned for us to become involved in a war against that Khan and eventually confront him, but now that whole plotline had to be thrown out and replaced, resulting in a pivot to discovering buried treasures of the pre-apocalyptic sci-fi utopia the world used to be and discovering the ancient robotic armies of the Clockwork Spirit, eager to rise and restore the old world by forcing all human DNA’d ancestries into cryogenic stasis while genociding the rest! And then fighting the Tarrasque and the most adorable great wyrm red dragon on Segways! So yeah, we forced our DM to rewrite the entire back half of his planned campaign!
If your DM was an over prepper, he dodged one of the big dangers. Throwing out days and weeks of hard work because of player shenanigans can be a tough pill to swallow. But if you want to avoid the railroad, it’s what you’ve got to do. Kudos to that dude for doing it right!
Yeah, the quest is probably not too important. Probably has nothing to do with that new pirate menace sailing the seas with her skelebot crew. Quest Giver can be as fast Brick here.
I give you my solemn word that today’s quest has NOTHING to do with tomorrow’s Handbook of Erotic Fantasy comic.
…
That’s a 12 on Deception.
Ah, got it. QG is behind on doing some NSFW commissions. I guess inuniverse he’s the one who draws all the pinups on the patron. Wait, that’s meta gaming. Roll for Insight… 1. Well golly gee , I guess if you give me ya’lls solem word on it.
What if I give you a nice <_< instead?
One of my first 5e characters was a Cleric to the Moon Goddess, who printed several pamphlets about the wonders of her Goddess, and how werewolves are actually just friends we haven´t gotten to know yet. I would hand them out regularly to the other players and make new ones during downtime.
As for sessions, it was a boss (Actually a miniboss, followed by the actual boss encounter) encounter, that escalated because I recently got ahold of some figures, among them a giant (Let me tell you, nothing quite sells just how large a giant actually is as much as when you places its figure besides the players). So it ended up involving several moving parts. Places the boss could move to, to use special abilities, places that summoned minions for it and various locations with a bunch of other effects, either constant or triggered. All of which were destructible by the party. Causing half the party to chase after the Boss, while the other half focused on keeping minions away or destroying the various obstacles. Also used various improvised things as props, such as plastic boxes for hills and such.
Generally my playmat game is pretty flat, due to space and time concerns not really allowing me to use all that many props. As well as the fact that it doesn´t really come natural to me to build a playmat battlefield, due to coming from a more theater of the mind focused background. But props can really add a lot to a physically represented game.
Especially when you’re going for a big boss battle, it can be worth it to put in the extra time for the vertical dimension. I wouldn’t want to do that for every session, but if you’re talking special encounters then do it up!
Don’t suppose you’ve got any pics of the setup to share?
I prepared a castle with guard shifts, patrol routes, an outer wall with stables, a church, a prison, and a fountain all plotted out on a large map. These were all on graph paper before being put to the mat. On top of that, each building was at least two stories, and I put several secrets in as well as a door that could only be opened by the mage on a roll of a 20, anything other check would fail and result in damage. The whole nine yards.
The mission was to sneak into the castle, find some invasion plans, and get out quietly. There was a contact in the city they’d retreat to and get out safely.
They ended up botching the espionage, alerting the entire castle, and throw all the dinner furniture on the roof (for parties) off the roof, release the royal guard’s griffins, assassinate royal family members, break some prisoners out to cause extra chaos for their retreat, poison the castle’s well, and left behind an item that explicitly tied their mission to their benefactor.
With the enemy nation alerted to their attempt at thievery as well as the death of a general and the escape of the royal family as well as the royal guard’s flying mounts, the capital city was put on lockdown and the plans for invasion were changed significantly.
In short, the party screwed everything up in the most dramatic way possible and I had to throw together a week-long chase sequence as they retreated to their home nation.
Sadly we never continued that campaign; I moved away and drama happened.
I think that’s the advantage of the thoroughly planned-out dungeon. There straight up *more stuff* for the players to mess with.
My Starfinder game had a similar scenario, as the players’ cult impersonation ended in pitting several cultists against all the random monsters in the haunted asteroid. It turned out to be a great way to enjoy chaos without getting bogged down in every little encounter.
“Name lists for NPCs, backlogs of wandering encounters, and more thought-out descriptions for your fabulous locales all become available.”
This kind of prep is never over-prepping, because it’s *reusable*. If you don’t use those names or wandering encounters or descriptions *this* session, you can use them in the next one. Or in the next adventure, or the next campaign… It never gets wasted.
What is wasted prep then?
I’d say it’s important to prep the right things. In my youth (middle/high school), I often wound up making intricately-planned adventures with tons of maps and NPC stats and backstory and stuff, only to flounder as the players did something I didn’t think to plan for.
Sadly, I’m not sure anything except experience and familiarity with your players can help you there.
Are there more up-to-date tools that you prep now? More flexible NPCs or encounters that will be serviceable at multiple points in the adventure?
I am over prepping right now! My players are planning to sneak through a city. Are they going to take to the rooftops? Sneak in the alleys and streets? Swim through the canals? I don’t know, but I’ve got a series of events/complications planned for each route!
And in the back of my head, a nagging voice is telling me that they’re just going to hop on their pig dragon and ignore everything I have written down.
Griffon patrol! They’ll have to get down into the alleyways if they want to sneak through. Chase sequence leads into choice of “dive for the canals / hide in alleyways.”
Or you could just let flying work. Gods know that tends to happen:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/flighty
Pig dragon you say? If it yet to secure a moniker, might I suggest Roast Pork? Or Crackling?
The dragon’s name is Squealy Nord. He was a pig originally but was transformed after eating several magical items inside a pocket dimension.
I’m glad Squealy Nord is still getting work. Thought he did a great job in the original We Be Goblins! Best supporting porker material all the way.
I am finishing up those modules now, actually. I added in some Pathfinder Society modules to spread out the leveling and added in my own finale. (How did I ever have time to write my own entire campaigns?!)
My party of murderous goblins has just finished traversing some tunnels to Sandpoint and are going to attack the temple of Shelyn while the rest of their gathered tribes attack the town proper. Destruction and mayhem for all! Hurrah!
This came at a great time! As Im DMing a session 0 tomarrow, and have been stressing over three different possible champains for the players to pick from.
Running through the beginning few sessions worth of co temt in my head over, and over.
I just need to calm down, and stop overthinking it.
I supose in my own way, I’ve been over preparing, by preparing three champains at once, for one group.
A jungle island “find the maguffin(s) to open the temple door.”
Wrestling against three factions wile trying to kill a dragon hoarding the kingdoms sunlight, making it eternal night.
And last but not least, getting paid to clear out ruins, and oops, you released a Race of evil snake-folk, now be distracted by them wile the real BBEG is right u der ypur noses.
I’m really rooting for numbers 2 and 3.
Well hey, I think you’re done prepping. You’ve got your premises in order. No sense in doing too much more with ’em until you know what’s what.
If you’d like to jazz up the “choose your premise” portion of the festivities, you might try writing a short pitch for each one. This is the same shtick you do when you’re pitching novels to publishers.
“In a world where [description], a [campaign premise] awaits. Now an [unlikely protagonist] must [quest], or else [stakes]. But an evil [antagonist] wants [dark bad motivation] instead. Will our heroes [save the day] before [doom]? Choose this campaign and you just might find out.”
Play madlibs with all three of your premises, then see what your players like. Take it away from there.
Good luck in any case, and happy gaming.
Thank you, I just may use that when I pitch my champains!