{"id":32042,"date":"2016-05-07T03:59:40","date_gmt":"2016-05-07T07:59:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=32042"},"modified":"2016-05-07T04:01:29","modified_gmt":"2016-05-07T08:01:29","slug":"rutskarns-gminars-ch3-find-your-swing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=32042","title":{"rendered":"Rutskarn&#8217;s GMinars CH3: Find Your Swing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By now, three posts into my series of GMing tips, some of you may be tapping your feet and waiting anxiously for the &#8220;real&#8221; advice. It&#8217;s all well and good to talk theory and principles, but to a novice GM the real mysteries are more looming and practical. The questions I get are rarely along the lines of &#8220;how do you maintain the complex illusion of authority with a group of players?&#8221; Far more often, people want to know how you go about actually planning a game. How do you conjure up an adventure from nothing? What do you need to plan, research, write down, and what can you afford to fudge or make up? Do you use a template? Do you write stuff down? Where do you even begin?<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s plenty of direct and practical advice to be given here, and I intend to give it&#8211;and soon. But before we move on to such practical matters, I&#8217;d like to address and hopefully allay the underlying tone of anxiety I often hear behind that question. The implication is sometimes clear: &#8220;I don&#8217;t know the answer to this, and therefore, I probably don&#8217;t have what it takes.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But the thing is, you couldn&#8217;t know what the right way to plan a session is. There <em>is <\/em>no right or wrong way to plan a session. Consider the following GMs, all successful in their own way.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Abby doesn&#8217;t like planning adventures or dungeons, but she does fill up a notebook with nonplayer characters. In her notes she has a whos-who of kings, shopkeepers, assassins, thieves, spies, musicians, cooks, and assorted rogues. She doesn&#8217;t make any big plans, she just writes the characters down one after another. Occasionally she sees connections between characters and makes note of them. Very rarely she mixes things up and comes up with a location instead, a tavern or cave or mystical portal. All this just makes sense to her. When it comes time to run her game she lets her players figure out where they want to go and what they want to do and slots in interesting, relevant characters and locations from her notebook as the situation calls for them. As a result, her players feel like she&#8217;s got a cool well-thought-out world planned out and they&#8217;re always happy to meet the next kook, gladhander, villain, or victim she&#8217;s prepared for them.<\/li>\n<li>Brian has his priorities nailed down: he comes up with his fantasy world first and foremost. He writes a history of the realm that spans from the dawn of civilization to the modern age, filling up dozens of pages of a binder in the process, and then he comes up with the names and goals of only the most important people in that world. For each leader he determines a major goal and outlines primary assets used to accomplish them. He comes up with a story hook that will get the players involved in these intrigues and sketches out rough &#8220;outlines,&#8221; like teasers for episodes of a television show, of the first three or four sessions. As long as his players don&#8217;t really surprise him, he&#8217;s got a pretty good idea of what they&#8217;ll do from session to session and he has plenty of time to dream up interesting problems for them to solve. As a result, his players feel like they&#8217;re part of a solid thoughtfully-planned and dramatic political intrigue.<\/li>\n<li>Caroline doesn&#8217;t plan sessions or write characters, but in between games she thinks a lot about the player characters. <em>What would this character do if the prince died? What would make that character angry? What would this character do if hit on by the queen? <\/em>Upon watching a dramatic confrontation in a horror movie, she reflects that a similar confrontation would be very engaging for the players to get into with a crazy NPC and makes a mental note of it, along with a few dozen similar mental notes about scenes that&#8217;d be fun. She squirrels all these little scenarios away and, as she improvises her way through the bulk of her sessions, keeps an eye out for moments where she can push things into one of them. As a result, her players get a spontaneous game while still enjoying the occasional thought-through dramatic scene.<\/li>\n<li>Derrick plans the arc of his game&#8217;s story ahead of time&#8211;the players are called to action, they journey <em>here<\/em>, they find <em>this<\/em> out, they explore <em>this<\/em> place, they defeat the evil villain. Before each session he finds some interesting monsters in his rulebooks and designs simple dungeons around them, ensuring that in addition to the broad strokes of the campaign&#8217;s story he has a precise idea of what&#8217;s going to happen in the next session of each adventure. As a result, his players get a classic fantasy story where they&#8217;re never at a loss for what to do and get plenty of exciting combats.<\/li>\n<li>Emily has no time to think about or plan her game at all. She sits down and wings it every single time, and by now, she&#8217;s pretty good at it. She has to take notes to make sure she doesn&#8217;t straight-up forget what she did last week, but her players respect that they&#8217;re getting anything but a linear experience&#8211;they&#8217;re not locked to some prewritten path because there clearly isn&#8217;t one, and every course of action is permitted. She maintains the Illusion of authority mainly by having complete conviction in her world and running it in a way that makes observable sense, implying that her world, if not precreated, is at least competently simulated.<\/li>\n<li>Felipe finds interesting prewritten adventures online. He reviews them carefully to make sure he understands them and can run them fairly and knowledgeably, and as a result, spends more time working on his game than any of the above GMs. His players feel like they&#8217;re getting a fair, balanced, and professionally designed experience&#8211;because they are.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s not even that different GMs do things differently. It&#8217;s that different GMs plan individual <em>campaigns <\/em>differently. At the time of this writing I&#8217;m running three games, and my process in preparing for each one is unique to that campaign.<\/p>\n<p>My first game is an old-school <em>Dungeons and Dragons <\/em>campaign with very high stakes and very brutal combats. I don&#8217;t exactly plan the individual sessions&#8211;the players are experienced and proactive and set their own goals. Instead I come up with villains aligned with the enemy faction and determine conclusively their personalities, goals, resources, and character builds. I plan out monsters and random encounter tables that I think will come up, but leave the manner and order in which they&#8217;re brought into play open. I do this to create the ultimate tense heroic fantasy experience.<\/p>\n<p>My second game is about a party of opportunists and criminals in an alternate-universe Earth who&#8217;ve learned to hop between sympathetic dimensions of fantasy and magic. It&#8217;s about exploring surreal fantasyscapes, and as a result, I don&#8217;t plan anything in advance but come into each session ready to improvise my ass off. I do this because I&#8217;m reasonably good at it and because it adds to the anarchic feel, something that might be compromised by overpreparation.<\/p>\n<p>My third game is about conspiracies and dark magic in 1980s Los Angeles. I run the game online and like to have tokens saved to represent certain characters and places; as a result, I&#8217;ve come up with dozens of people and locations and keep the rest of my planning very loose. I&#8217;m basically figuring out the conspiracy as I go along, alternately seeding intriguing clues (and listening to the interesting theories the players come up with) and taking note of any interesting coincidences.<\/p>\n<p>For your first few adventures, before you&#8217;ve found the appropriate style, it&#8217;s probably a good idea to plan more&#8211;I&#8217;ll have a post about that soon. But if you find that you&#8217;re not using that planning, or that you don&#8217;t need it, you don&#8217;t need to keep it up. It all comes down to what you need to get the job done.<\/p>\n<p><em>Round-table question for GMs: Has your planning style evolved over the years? If so, how?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By now, three posts into my series of GMing tips, some of you may be tapping your feet and waiting anxiously for the &#8220;real&#8221; advice. It&#8217;s all well and good to talk theory and principles, but to a novice GM the real mysteries are more looming and practical. The questions I get are rarely along [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tabletop-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32042\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}