Your D&D Prep SUCKS. This is why.

my D and D game sucked until I started preparing like JK rling and playing like Stephen King I'm the deficient master and we dungeon Masters are always looking for quick fixes for our game prep and despite the amount of advice out there my subscribers still want to hear my take on how I go about prepping my games so in this video I'm going to give you my method that's worked for me over the last decade of gaming and maybe it'll be just as helpful for you as it's been for me I used to lay in bed all night stressing over my upcoming game it felt frustrating trying to find the perfect balance between just enough prep that would get me through the next session while not overpreparing and having to scrap entire notebooks worth of time and effort I don't believe there's really any way around it preparing a good session takes work but the skill lies in not how much you've prepped but what you prep and how you present that prep to your players because if you try to force whatever Adventure you've made on to them you might be railroading now that term has been tossed around so much that I feel like it's kind of lost its meaning to me railroading is when a game master enacts a predetermined outcome within the game World despite the player character's involvement in that outcome because it takes away the player's agency I heavily prioritize player agency in all of my games because no other medium in entertainment can match the amount of agency allowed in tabletop roleplaying games not books not movies not video games even in games like balers 3 the developers can only code so many choices and alternative consequences I want you what if I'm only playing D and D for the combat or the dramatic role playing there are mediums and even other tabletop games that do those things better players willingly playing out the adventure you've prepared for today's game is not considered railroading but I don't want my players to feel like they have to follow along my story just because that's what I want them to do so how can I both prepare prepare a game session that I can actually use at the table while maintaining that player agency well I do that by prepping my Game World like I'm JK Rowling but I play out my Game World like I'm Stephen King what's that mean well in the world of fiction writing there are two camps writers often fall into known as plotters and pancers writers that are more plotters tend to outline their stories before actually writing them while the pancers write the story based on their feelings in the moment relying on their characters to show them how the plot will play out now in actuality most writers fit somewhere in the spectrum between the two Styles but rling is famously known to be in this Camp by her meticulous notes for Harry Potter this mass of material was generated some of which will never find its way into the book we'll never need to be in the books it's it's just stuff I need to know for my own pleasure partly for my own pleasure and partly because I like reading a book where I have the sense that the author knows everything they might not be telling me everything but you have that confidence that the author really knows everything while King has gone on record several times that the opposite approach is the best way to create a story I feel like you have to follow the characters and you have to follow the story where it leads and the last thing that I want to do is to spoil a book with plot so you know I think I think the plot that plot is the last resort of bad writers is a rule I'm a lot more interested in character and situation and you'll follow it where it goes so how do these writing styles relate to game prep it means I write and detail my Game World as if I was plotting a Noel but preparing your entire game world like your JK Rawling doesn't just happen over a weekend but here's how I would start first we start small scale don't map out a whole continent just map out the one town then put three or four progressively more dangerous or interesting locations around that town that's within about a day's travel if I'm empty on ideas I use this table from frog god games' to of Adventure design if you want an official module example check out the dragon of ice Spire Peak from the fifth edition's Essentials SE or if you want an even better designed and organized alternative I suggest the black worm of Brandford regardless you probably won't get all the details nailed down before the game that's fine the less time you have to prepare the smaller scale you should go don't prep the whole town then prep the tavern don't prep five different NPCs just prep the barkeeper that the party is going to be both getting the quest Hook and the reward from start from the simplest most manageable idea that you can come up with and then build your world from inside outward rather than outward in your players don't care about the shape of your continent they don't really care what war happened 100 years ago what they want to know is what's surrounding their character and who or what can they interact with now during the game I take a mental note as to what my players are asking questions about throughout the evening that determines what I'm going to prepare further for next week's game because I follow my first rule make my players feel important I prep what's interesting to the players if your cleric is asking about all the different religions in your world Now's the Time to flesh out religions if the fighter wants to hunt down monsters like he's a Witcher spend the next week drawing up monster layers if the Bard wants to know the personalities and relationship statuses of the Barkeeper's daughter the blacksmith's daughter the captain of the Guard sister and the princess start working on some of those Outer Planes for you to banish him to so we're prepping our game world like rling but what does playing the game actually look like with this sort of prep well if I try to play the game like rling I'm going to want certain things to happen to my protagonists only problem is that I don't control my protagonists my players do and if my goal is to have as much player agent as possible I can't force certain outcomes to happen just because that's what I wrote down earlier this week when my players meet my pre world I have to play things out as if I was Stephen King with a bag of cocaine and a graphically detailed sewer scene involving child I need to let the characters guide me on what happens within the world I've created but deficient wouldn't that mean some or even all of your prep from earlier could be trashed no not necessarily because my prep looks like this I spend most of my prep time preparing the beginning of my games instead of the middle or the end because I have this law I follow a law that I didn't discover but I'll be the first to give it a stupid name at least until someone corrects me in the comments of somebody else that came up with a better name and that is deficient law of narrative influence in tabletop role playing games and I Define my madeup law as such the game master possesses the most willfully surrendered narrative influence of their player characters at the beginning of the game this influence diminishes relative to the amount of time that has passed after the game master asks what do you do what this means is that in the first 5 minutes of a session I can put you almost anywhere I want and you will probably agree that yes this is where the game session begins this is doubly so if you're starting a new campaign or a one shot I can start the session with you all in a Tavern I can start the game with you all tied up in prison I can start my campaign with you on a tentacled alien ship with a tadpole I've narratively forced into your eyeball and you're probably not going to say but I wanted to buy some potions at the shop with my spare starting gold you control time space and anything that appears in front of the player's noses but if you were to try that 10 minutes or even 10 seconds after you ask the players what do you do it starts smelling like a railroad you know that joke about setting up all these Adventure hooks only for your players to start wandering between the blank spaces of your prep I don't start my games with hooks around my players I start my games with hooks already in their mouth let me show you an example with both a standard tabletop opener and how I would start my sessions let's say for example we really want our players to get captured or put in a moment of weakness so they can meet this new antagonist that you want them to hate for the next few games you're going to have this guy's goons show up in the tavern and then when the players inevitably surrender your new Big Bad Evil guy is going to strut in and gloat right right no what's going to happen is you start the game with your players all sitting in the tavern you let them banter back and forth a bit to get into the swing of things and then 30 NES crash into the tavern telling you to surrender and as you raise your hands I ain't no I cast Fireballs I'll Attack the nearest n and I will sneak attack the barkeeper you're a paladin are you are you sure you want to fight this I said there's like 30 of them yeah and I cast fire ball and now you look like a bad DM that set them up for failure but an alternative opener using the unofficial law of narrative influence would look something like this let's start the game the N Warchief throws your drink in your face causing the pungent Aroma of red dragon Crush to sting your eyes your hands are bound as the three of you sit in the middle of the now desecrated sleepy Dragon Tavern this was supposed to be a quiet dinner that wine dripping off your face cost you six gold pieces just for the glass the Warchief licks the drops on his hands and says weak drink for weak man he gestures at four of his Warriors to stay behind to finish you off as he leaves through the kick down door riding off into the night with his warband as the screams from the barid and the inkeeper gr f the four remaining nlls begin to debate which of you they're going to eat first what do you do but I wanted to buy some potions at the shop with my spare get out of my game when you start the session with the hook in media res the players can still try to ignore that particular hook but if you made that opening line personal and tantalizing it won't take much to go them into following your prep because I can't control what my players do once I've released them into my world but I can wag a bone in front of their nose before throwing it now can we take this law of narrative influence too far Yeah the more precarious of a situation you start them in the more trust you'll need between the players and yourself that you're not forcing them into some impossible scenario or a decision that they didn't want to make a simpler example of this would be to start the session at the adventure site instead of playing out the shopping scene at Town followed by traveling across the Wilderness only for them to get distracted at something you mentioned offhandedly while describing their surrounding ings I mean you can do that but know that once you give autonomy to the players you can't take it back not without looking like a jerk anyway now one of the more important things I do at the tail end of my session when either the adventure has been completed or I feel like I'm doing way too much improvising is to find out what the player's next goal is it might be as simple as continue on this current Quest but whatever they decide what their goal is for the next game that's the hook I put in their mouth at the start of next week because prep is all about focus and prep that's focused on the player's current interests is prep that I typically don't see wasted but no matter how you prep your games you won't make it far without what I cover here in this next video dming is a lifelong marathon of Mastery if this video gains traction I'll do more like these but for now start small prep that small world as if you're JK rling but discover that world along with your players as if you're Stephen King that's all I got for now see you

Channel: Deficient Master

Views: 139,201

Keywords: dnd, dungeons and dragons, d&d, ttrpg, pathfinder, rpg, game master, dungeon master, dm

Id: ESHOSCLOGpo

Length: 12min 2sec (722 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2023