I have never, ever, in 19 years of gaming (20 in a few months) ran a published adventure.

I lie: a couple of years back I ran Sarah Newton's Escape From Venu adventure for Mindjammer. And a month or so ago I ran Through The Drakwald, the adventure in the WFRP 2e core rulebook.

In both instances, I was very dissatisfied with the result. I felt I was fumbling things to proceed in a certain manner (i.e. railroading my PCs) in order for the adventure to pass through certain "checkpoints". The structured approach to events feels constraining, and I feel like I was robbing players of their choice. I was less at ease to improvise, I didn't know for sure how much "wiggle room" I had in case PCs did something unexpected, how much I could bend the script before it broke.

Today I ran a different scenario, with a different group: PCs are all travelers forced into a roadside inn by inclement weather, when three strangers running from otherworldly forces arrive seeking shelter under the same roof, only to bring horrific forces of Chaos down upon them -- come midnight the inn was attacked by a Chaos sorcerer and a pack of six Chaos Hounds (a critter I improvised on the spot combining stats from Dire Wolves, Giant Wolves and Chaos demons), vs. 4 PCs and 3 relatively unskilled NPCs.

It was a relatively easy fight with most PCs walking away unharmed, except for the Dwarf Watchman who was bit twice, and down to 1 Wound when the last monster fell. (note to self: more and/or badder foes next time.) 1 NPC was killed in a suitably dramatic (and mechanically handwavey) manner, complete with guts spilling on the floor and a mercy killing by the Kithband Warrior (after a heal check suggested to him he was beyond hope).

It's probably the most hackneyed and unimaginative scenario ever, but it was my hackneyed and unimaginative scenario. I had all the wiggle room in the world because I ad-libbed the whole thing and didn't write down a single thing (even the monster stats were cooked up on the spot). If the PCs decided to run away and leave the strangers to their fate, I was cool with it; they'd probaby have to deal with the same Chaos sorcerer, plus powerful artifact, later down the road if they stuck to the region. It's certainly not "sandboxy" -- the strangers and their pursuers arrived at the same tavern, in the same night as the PCs, not because of anything the PCs decided to do, but because the GM decided it -- but I suppose it works for a campaign jump-starter.

This is how I did things back in the day. This is how I've always run my games; we arrived home from school, I cracked open the D&D RC on the Mystara maps at the back, and as players traversed each hex I rolled on the wandering monster tables (in the wilderness) and urban encounter tables (when in town), and improvised from there. Met an alchemist? He's got an order for an exotic component, some body part from some monster only a big burly Fighter with a two-handed sword could hope to harvest. Ran into an orc patrol? What the fuck are orcs doing this close to civilization? It's a skill I've honed to the detriment and atrophy of any sane attempt at prep.

I admire and envy GMs who make copious notes and set up sprawling maps and stat dozens of NPCs in advance... but it's just not my thing. All for the best, maybe; I work 80+ hour weeks and can't afford to spend a lot of time crafting material (I actually feel a bit guilty from taking so much wondrous material from this forum's contributors, when I have so little from my own hand that I can share). The few times I made notes, my own notes felt constraining to me. That's how fucked up in the head (brain damaged?) I am.

I think I can work with "location-based adventures" like most old school, AD&D 1e and B/X modules (e.g. "here's a dungeon [or city, or wilderness map] for you to explore at your own pace and however you damn please"), which straddle the line between setting supplement and adventure module as we post-Dragonlance, AD&D 2e generation kids -- the middle children of the hobby -- understand them.

Sorry for the long and rambling post.

Let me know what you all think.

It depends on the individual comfort level, the game system in question, and the quality of the campaign materials.  It sounds like you have found a pretty comfortable level that works for you, which is not easy.  

Every time I have the most fleeting notion of running D&D 3.x, I recall the couple of times even basic sketches of an adventure got bogged down with encounter design, and that was just complete unfun for me.  On the other hand, I am pretty sure I could wing it and come up with a pretty fun couple of sessions with MSH, Star Frontiers, Cyberpunk2020, Traveller...

Speaking of CP2020, when I was running a game ages ago, I had to all but railroad the characters and brow-beat the players into giving up their day jobs and, you know, become cyberpunks.  It was a bit frustrating throwing out hook after hook only to have them avoid it like the plague and punch in for work the next day like everyone else.  But that was more of a group dynamic issue than anything.

As for your hackneyed plot, it's a pretty common set up in comic books. One popular variant is that the guy(s) on the run turn out to be the real bad guys. A good example of this is Captain America annual #3 1976 written and drawn by The King. Cap is summoned to a farm in the midwest, helps a farmer defend a strange visitor from aliens only to have the visitor turn out to be a space vampire dude.

Butcher, the biggest reason I haunt this forum and mostly post useless crap?

1. I flat out have no time.
2. These guys are just way smarter than myself.
3. I am LAZY.
4. People explain logically what's percolating in my mind.
5. Why would you work when you can borrow/steal?

The list goes on but you get the gist right? But the Wall of Text does make me and my brain go into autoshutdown.

There are actually several things going on in the OP.

Two remarks which I might develop later:

(1) it's not about "prep or no prep." It's about what you prep, and how you prep.

(2) notes you write to run an adventure of your own making can be composed in different ways. They don't have to read like published modules, or even complete sentences. Also, the organization of the information can reflect a certain fluidity and dynamism that could work for you.

Actually I gleefully embrace your style of GMing. "No plan survives contact" is a good maxim to remember. Whether it' a war plan, sports playbook, or theatrical script, upon contact it has to survive with improvisation. So why would rpgs be all that different? Since there's no backtracking and editing, so much of what happens is "in the moment," which probably explains why people still like live sports, live theater, etc. There's a special magic in being in the moment where time does weird tricks and we live on the edge.

It's also one of the reasons I don't really enjoy modules. Outside of a cursory look at the land and the people and the connections between, anything more complex than 3 dots connecting is too big of a LEGO piece for me to play with on the fly. And far too many modules are about a whole schemata to reach a final product. At that point I feel like I'm building pre-fab plywood furniture.

For example, as much as I loved my LEGO Technics, I felt too stifled to tinker with them outside of the manual's planned out examples. Like I was going to break it, or make just a lumpy mess of non-functional gears. But the basic blocks were simple and sturdy enough for me to feel like I could build anything (well, "anything" while looked through the rosy-colored glasses of imagination). Different tool sets inspire different creativity from people.

Prep sucks. This is why pants have seats.

I tend to prep the "set up" for an adventure, or maybe the first half of an evening's game session, by which time the players will have inevitably taken matters into their own hands. After that, I fully expect to be 'winging it' so I just write down a few notes outlining likely decision points/outcomes. If I'm lucky, the adventure goes more or less in the direction I expected, give or take a few extra twists.

Or maybe not. Sometimes one of the players goes altogether "off the map" in the first five minutes, at which point I quietly shut my notebook and put it away. Then off we go....

In any event, my session notes are generally one page per game session, with a paragraph per scene, allowing about an hour of actual play for each scene. That doesn't include stats for NPCs, monsters, vehicles, or whatever else needs written up, but whenever possible I use pre-gens or "off the shelf" stats to cut down prep time.

Edited to add: I have done "no prep" games, but that just means I haven't written anything down. Even in those cases I still tend to have about a page of session notes "in my head" prior to the game which I've been too damned busy to type up. I wouldn't run every game that way, but it's doable in a pinch.

Great topic, gotta catch a flight, will post later. I'm just posting to subscribe now.

Quote from: Benoist;559100There are actually several things going on in the OP.

Two remarks which I might develop later:

(1) it's not about "prep or no prep." It's about what you prep, and how you prep.

(2) notes you write to run an adventure of your own making can be composed in different ways. They don't have to read like published modules, or even complete sentences. Also, the organization of the information can reflect a certain fluidity and dynamism that could work for you.

See?  Ben saved me some time.

I will amplify through opinion.  Hate me if you will.  

I have used canned adventures before. Used to do it a lot.  Am old enough to say I have not bought one in 20 years+ however.

In general, I believe that if you know what kind of prep you need, a prepped GM is always going to make a deeper/more immersive setting than the same non-prepped GM.  Always. Not always a better individual session, mind you, but a deeper, more immersive setting.

Now, trust me on this.  Ben, me, and every other long-standing GM here has done a hundred or so sessions where the PCs have gone off the rails by 5 minutes into the game, and ended up winging 99% of it.  Always fun, and a necessary GM skill.  But as soon as the PCs know anything is made up, they are seeing the hands on the strings.  

( Vreeg's Fifth Rule of Setting/Game Design

The 'Illusion of Preparedness' is critical for immersion; allowing the players to see where things are improvised or changed reminds them to think outside the setting, removing them forcibly from immersion.   Whenever the players can see the hand of the GM, even when the GM needs to change things in their favor; it removes them from the immersed position.  The ability to keep the information flow even and consistent to the players, and to keep the divide between prepared information and newly created information invisible is a critical GM ability.

(Cole, of the RPGsite, gets credit for the term).)'

Anyway, your post hit a nerve, because I also work a ton and travel a decent amount.  And I think if I was trying to run someone elses adventure, I'd stumble, etc.  But something I have learned is to spend my prep time creating setting depth stuff and big-picture prep stuff along the probable event path instead of that much short-term, railroadish prep. As well as spending a few minutes neating up notes from the session before (CRITICAL!).So that sort of takes advantage of the free flowing game, and then if you keep adding setting/world/game data into the same place, you end up with a much deeper, immersive setting that you can riff off of inside game play.

Back to work here.

I was working on sort of a pen and paper AI for a while there, but eventually decided that, like streamlined encumbrance systems, that way madness lies. You can use one of the GMless systems to sort of achieve the same effect, but that needs a lot of player buy-in to what is basically an elaborate magic 8-ball.

Anyway I'm now struggling through an adventure design mechanic GMs can use to work players round to the main plot points and eventually get more or less to where they are going, reactive plots. Its not railroading since there are multiple possible outcomes to each adventure, the trick is to keep track of how each major action affects the rest of the game world.

Short version, reasonable prep that won't be wasted if the players go off and do something else entirely, in the unlikely event that I ever find the optimal solution.

I prep all week mentally without jotting down notes until about an hour before game time. My mental prep consists mainly of starting where the PC's left off and then what iffing their courses of action from there. My group is good because they usually tell me in advance "we want to go here / do this / look for this" next week so it makes it a little easier. If i need a map I'll scribble one down or steal one from another module. I might check the interweb to research an idea or two but that's about it.

My notes usually consist of major npcs the party might meet, abbreviated monster stats, and a list of events likely to happen. Oddly, I'll even write down quotes or statements I want to use.

I usually have a story arc going on as well (peasant revolt, lost civilization, dragon reawakening, new cult, etc.). The PCs might or might not get directly involved in the arc, but they'll see effects of it during their adventures. I find this helps add a little continuity to the campaign without locking the party into a fixed role.

Pete

Quote from: The Butcher;559066I have never, ever, in 19 years of gaming (20 in a few months) ran a published adventure.

I lie: a couple of years back I ran Sarah Newton's Escape From Venu adventure for Mindjammer. And a month or so ago I ran Through The Drakwald, the adventure in the WFRP 2e core rulebook.

In both instances, I was very dissatisfied with the result. I felt I was fumbling things to proceed in a certain manner (i.e. railroading my PCs) in order for the adventure to pass through certain "checkpoints". The structured approach to events feels constraining, and I feel like I was robbing players of their choice. I was less at ease to improvise, I didn't know for sure how much "wiggle room" I had in case PCs did something unexpected, how much I could bend the script before it broke.

Today I ran a different scenario, with a different group: PCs are all travelers forced into a roadside inn by inclement weather, when three strangers running from otherworldly forces arrive seeking shelter under the same roof, only to bring horrific forces of Chaos down upon them -- come midnight the inn was attacked by a Chaos sorcerer and a pack of six Chaos Hounds (a critter I improvised on the spot combining stats from Dire Wolves, Giant Wolves and Chaos demons), vs. 4 PCs and 3 relatively unskilled NPCs.

It was a relatively easy fight with most PCs walking away unharmed, except for the Dwarf Watchman who was bit twice, and down to 1 Wound when the last monster fell. (note to self: more and/or badder foes next time.) 1 NPC was killed in a suitably dramatic (and mechanically handwavey) manner, complete with guts spilling on the floor and a mercy killing by the Kithband Warrior (after a heal check suggested to him he was beyond hope).

It's probably the most hackneyed and unimaginative scenario ever, but it was my hackneyed and unimaginative scenario. I had all the wiggle room in the world because I ad-libbed the whole thing and didn't write down a single thing (even the monster stats were cooked up on the spot). If the PCs decided to run away and leave the strangers to their fate, I was cool with it; they'd probaby have to deal with the same Chaos sorcerer, plus powerful artifact, later down the road if they stuck to the region. It's certainly not "sandboxy" -- the strangers and their pursuers arrived at the same tavern, in the same night as the PCs, not because of anything the PCs decided to do, but because the GM decided it -- but I suppose it works for a campaign jump-starter.

This is how I did things back in the day. This is how I've always run my games; we arrived home from school, I cracked open the D&D RC on the Mystara maps at the back, and as players traversed each hex I rolled on the wandering monster tables (in the wilderness) and urban encounter tables (when in town), and improvised from there. Met an alchemist? He's got an order for an exotic component, some body part from some monster only a big burly Fighter with a two-handed sword could hope to harvest. Ran into an orc patrol? What the fuck are orcs doing this close to civilization? It's a skill I've honed to the detriment and atrophy of any sane attempt at prep.

I admire and envy GMs who make copious notes and set up sprawling maps and stat dozens of NPCs in advance... but it's just not my thing. All for the best, maybe; I work 80+ hour weeks and can't afford to spend a lot of time crafting material (I actually feel a bit guilty from taking so much wondrous material from this forum's contributors, when I have so little from my own hand that I can share). The few times I made notes, my own notes felt constraining to me. That's how fucked up in the head (brain damaged?) I am.

I think I can work with "location-based adventures" like most old school, AD&D 1e and B/X modules (e.g. "here's a dungeon [or city, or wilderness map] for you to explore at your own pace and however you damn please"), which straddle the line between setting supplement and adventure module as we post-Dragonlance, AD&D 2e generation kids -- the middle children of the hobby -- understand them.

Sorry for the long and rambling post.

Let me know what you all think.

Prep is for wimps

I ran a game at Gen Con. It was Amber.

MY prep was I made up 8 PCs and thought of a plot (which I changed in play to introduce a big bad) and a location for which I downloaded a map of Dubrovnik.
The game ran smoothly, I never refered to the rule books I never refered to my non-existant notes.
Feedback was uniformly excellent with requests for copies of my skill system, character sheets and notes.
The one major comment was that the game ran so well becuase of how well prepared it had been. Because I never refered to any notes the 7 players all assumed that I had played the scenario several times and wondered how it had turned out each time..... how I laughed (inside)

The "Illusion of Preparedness" is essential to a good "World in Motion" campaign.  If you come into a town and the players think that most of the buildings are cardboard standups with one or two "actual encounters", then their trip through the town will be much less enjoyable then if they think that no matter what door they go to, there will be a prepped person there.  Now maybe the GM has 100 pages of notes on this town, or maybe he has 1 page of notes and can wing it like a mother, it's the same to the players.

How much do you have to prep?  Just enough.  Just enough so that your players get in the habit of expecting stuff to not be generated on the fly according to what they do.

Quote from: StormBringer;559072Every time I have the most fleeting notion of running D&D 3.x, I recall the couple of times even basic sketches of an adventure got bogged down with encounter design, and that was just complete unfun for me.

Tell me about it; I tried my usual GMing style with 3e (Iron Heroes, to be precise) exactly once, and got a TPK right in the first session. Granted, unfamiliarity with the rules was a factor here, but I was seriously put off.

Quote from: StormBringer;559072Speaking of CP2020, when I was running a game ages ago, I had to all but railroad the characters and brow-beat the players into giving up their day jobs and, you know, become cyberpunks.  It was a bit frustrating throwing out hook after hook only to have them avoid it like the plague and punch in for work the next day like everyone else.  But that was more of a group dynamic issue than anything.

I am very much of the Raymond Chandler (or was it Dashiel Hammett?) school of thought: "if things come to a standstill, have a couple of armed goons kick down the door" (or in modern parlance, "if all else fails, ninjas attack"). If players won't bite, they get bitten. Not so hard that it'll kill them, but any setting worth adventuring into is a dangerous place, and attackers out of the blue raise questions they can investigate.

Quote from: Gib;559078As for your hackneyed plot, it's a pretty common set up in comic books. One popular variant is that the guy(s) on the run turn out to be the real bad guys. A good example of this is Captain America annual #3 1976 written and drawn by The King. Cap is summoned to a farm in the midwest, helps a farmer defend a strange visitor from aliens only to have the visitor turn out to be a space vampire dude.

Damn, I wish I'd thought of that.

Quote from: Benoist;559100There are actually several things going on in the OP.

Two remarks which I might develop later:

(1) it's not about "prep or no prep." It's about what you prep, and how you prep.

(2) notes you write to run an adventure of your own making can be composed in different ways. They don't have to read like published modules, or even complete sentences. Also, the organization of the information can reflect a certain fluidity and dynamism that could work for you.

I realize that I could have statted the strangers and the monsters in advance, and drawn a map of the inn and the surrounding countryside just in case, notes that could have assisted me without toiling away at my freedom to improvise ("wiggle room" as I called it above) at all.

I didn't because (1) I am utterly disorganized when it comes to my gaming life, and (2) I am used to winging it. I know that it's a risky proposition as far as mantaining emulation and the "illusion of preparedness" (thanks, LordVreeg) but it's worked for me so far, so I'm inclined to belive that either I've got good at it, or my notoriously casual players aren't the most demanding audience. And because I'm so hard-pressed for time (who over the age of 25 isn't?), I end up glossing over prep because I've never experienced any untoward effects from lack of it (except maybe for the above-mentioned ill-fated Iron Heroes game, which was as much or more about lack of familiarity with the system as it was about lack of pre-game notes).

Quote from: Opaopajr;559103Actually I gleefully embrace your style of GMing. "No plan survives contact" is a good maxim to remember. Whether it' a war plan, sports playbook, or theatrical script, upon contact it has to survive with improvisation. So why would rpgs be all that different? Since there's no backtracking and editing, so much of what happens is "in the moment," which probably explains why people still like live sports, live theater, etc. There's a special magic in being in the moment where time does weird tricks and we live on the edge.

It's also one of the reasons I don't really enjoy modules. Outside of a cursory look at the land and the people and the connections between, anything more complex than 3 dots connecting is too big of a LEGO piece for me to play with on the fly. And far too many modules are about a whole schemata to reach a final product. At that point I feel like I'm building pre-fab plywood furniture.

You sound like your style is pretty close to mine; in fact your screed on modules is pretty much my opinion on most of them. I'm just wondering whether "no plan survives contact" segues logically into "screw plans, let's wing this bitch from end to end". More specifically, I'd like to understand whether I'm missing out on something by not jotting down at least rudimentary notes.

Quote from: LordVreeg;559131In general, I believe that if you know what kind of prep you need, a prepped GM is always going to make a deeper/more immersive setting than the same non-prepped GM.  Always. Not always a better individual session, mind you, but a deeper, more immersive setting.

The realtive impunity with which I've been doing this for the last few years might have everything to do with the fact that it's been 12 years since I've last run a regular, long-lasting campaign (except for my DAR campaign, but 1 year of monthly sessions isn't exactly "long-lasting" in my book).

Quote from: LordVreeg;559131The 'Illusion of Preparedness' is critical for immersion; allowing the players to see where things are improvised or changed reminds them to think outside the setting, removing them forcibly from immersion.   Whenever the players can see the hand of the GM, even when the GM needs to change things in their favor; it removes them from the immersed position.  The ability to keep the information flow even and consistent to the players, and to keep the divide between prepared information and newly created information invisible is a critical GM ability.

(Cole, of the RPGsite, gets credit for the term).)[/I]'

Anyway, your post hit a nerve, because I also work a ton and travel a decent amount.  And I think if I was trying to run someone elses adventure, I'd stumble, etc.  But something I have learned is to spend my prep time creating setting depth stuff and big-picture prep stuff along the probable event path instead of that much short-term, railroadish prep. As well as spending a few minutes neating up notes from the session before (CRITICAL!).So that sort of takes advantage of the free flowing game, and then if you keep adding setting/world/game data into the same place, you end up with a much deeper, immersive setting that you can riff off of inside game play.

Back to work here.

Again, your post suggests to me that a group of casual players and a dearth of long-running campaigns has a lot to do with my success at running zero-prep games. Also WFRP has its depth sort of built in, and easily stands out right at character creation for a bunch of D&D-heads, when you crank the Medieval caricature up to 11 with toothless peasants and witch hunts and stuff, and when you factor in the weird half-Satanic, half-Moorcockian Chaos imagery. (I still have to track down a copy of The Warhound and The World's Pain, which I am convinced might be the single most important entry the WFRP "Appendix N").

Anyway, good posts, people. Keep 'em coming!