I just compiled all my notes for my next campaign, which is in the early stages of planning, into a single word document.
That word document is now 40 pages of notes.
 It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
 |
It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
I just compiled all my notes for my next campaign, which is in the early stages of planning, into a single word document.
Are you writing a novel or playing a game here.
For a novel it would need to have one coherent throughline, it's more like a web of different scenarios and potential consequences of those scenarios, and then ideas about those consequences, and then completely unrelated stuff. It's just a giant incoherent blob of something. There are some bigger "clusters" in there, probably 3 or 4 of them, but overall it is just a mess - one scenario about social conflict centered around different political institutions, one scenario about infiltrating and/or stomping out a thieves nest, one scenario about an expedition into a northern mountain range while accompanied by a shady NPC, one scenario about an isolated village being seemingly cursed with a mysterious desease, one scenario about a minor dragon stealing an important object that needs to be returned....
I need to stop writing every single thought down just because it might be vaguely RPG related.
>Flowchart prep.
Oh shit no. Never do that. That's a massive waste of time. You're not programming a videogame.
You're wasting a lot of time and energy for not a great outcome. Your players are going to know you have consequences and ideas planned ahead of time, and your game will suffer and feel forced.
Just prep your setting and the characters in that world. Tie in some key npcs the the player's goals in a way that will generate conflict, let the players pick sides and make choices. Once they've done down a path, sit down and think how the world is going to change and react, and basically just keep repeating this. Enemies and adventures will organically be made this way.
The only "prep" work anybody should really be doing are dungeons
Yeah, consequences was a poor choice of word. I don't mean consequences of potential player actions, but consequences of the situation being the way it is. I'm not writing a linear plot (nor a tree of multiple alternate linear plots), if anything I am writing a complex initial situation (that at this point I'm probably splitting up into several smaller campaigns.)
I'm not writing it as a story, like I said. Also, we don't play a dungeon crawler system, dungeons aren't really a neccessity.
TDE, or Shadowrun, Mr. German? Or maybe you got exotic and it's Trudvang?
TDE
>it's more like a web of different scenarios and potential consequences of those scenarios
I am a shit GM but I played with a really good one and when talking about GMing (I wanted to run a side thing) he told me that this is the worst thing you can do. You don't want to think in terms of scenarios but characters/forces at work and focus your prepping on that. That's what he said at least, I didn't run shit in the end lmao playa4eva
>OP gets to the first session of his game, already exhausted and burnt out from writing the tax policy of every nation in the world (he claims this is fun and that his game world need to be realistic or else he'll become a troony weeaboo)
>Players are excited to share character ideas and begin talking about backstories
>Someone makes up an event and location that are essential to their character's motivation
>OP starts screaming at them for being so rude they don't even read his lore and walk all over his hard work getting HIS game ready for them
>They back down because they're here to have fun, and sand off all the interesting corners of their characters so they don't catch on anything
>Game dies three months later
>OP returns to make a post complaining about how players just don't care about the world and never try and integrate their characters into it
We play in an already existing setting everyone is familiar with, the PCs are well established from previous campaigns and their prior decisions largely drive a lot of these notes, and I value my players (as they are my friends) just as they value my GMing. And like I said, I did not write lore, I wrote scenarios. At the moment I am just overwhelmed by this amount of brain sludge and how to organize it.
You have never actually played a game and get all of your info about it from /tg/
You haven't been in a game in so long that you've forgotten what it's like.
>Players are excited to share character ideas and begin talking about backstories
makes up an event and location that are essential to their character's motivation
>>OP starts screaming at them for being so rude they don't even read his lore
clap, applause, this one
Only 40 pages?
Post it in pdf then. Can't imagine what the point.
Some of my players post on /tg/, so I don't like sharing my notes here. They're not in English anyway.
It's not flowchart prep. It is "write down whatever you think of" prep. By "consequences" I don't mean a web of possible alternate futures depending on player decisions, but rather "how does this situation I am describing affect its surroundings" and "what other aspects does this situation bring with it".
>"write down whatever you think of" prep
That's even worse. You should only be prepping what various antagonists and factions are intending to do, not everything that could happen. And you definitely shouldn't be deciding on consequences in advance.
>You should only be prepping what various antagonists and factions are intending to do, not everything that could happen.
For that I would need to have definitive factions and antagonists in the first place. Of which I have some options, but I have to sit down and mold the bucket of dough into more coherent forms. And, of course, trim the fat. I do not intend to use all of these 40 pages, they are just a collection of raw ideas at this point.
>And you definitely shouldn't be deciding on consequences in advance.
I'm not really doing that, I'm mostly writing down stuff about initial situations.
> Some of my players post on /tg/, so I don't like sharing my notes here. They're not in English anyway.
Gosh, pick one.
Just another spam thread.
I pick both because both are true. Do you speak German? No? Then why would you want my notes anyway?
Because otherwise the thread is meaningless.
>Have a map layout or two, 3 if it's a really intense session
>Prepare at least 2 challenges for the players in the form of something they need to pass to get to what they want, could be combat, could be a conversation
>Write down roughly 100-150 words regarding ideas or background information
>I am now done prepping for a 5 hour session
>Players have fun
>I have fun
> 🙂
Do you have a girlfriend from Canada too?
>Do you have a girlfriend from Canada too?
No.
It was a figure of speech, Data. A form of ironic communication.
I just informed you that I am German, Anon. You should be more forgiving towards your fellow autists.
pdf or it didn't happen.
Is that unusual?
>Factions & Faction rosters.
>Random event tables.
>The local ecology.
>Some faction style 'fronts' that move on a weekly basis and have progress clocks rather than on player actions, because this isn't PBTA
>A city with districts.
>Some custom tailored random tables for unpredictable events.
>A couple of NPCs who offer goods and services.
40-80 pages sounds about right for a campaign. It's pretty front loaded work.
How do you handle progress clocks and make sensible decisions about the outcomes of each factions weekly maneuvering? Do you have some sort of mechanic to resolve it?
I spell out a single course of events: what happens if the PCs do nothing. And then I improvise from there based on how the PCs meddle, according to my notes on what the factions' goals, plans, and approximate resources are. I don't put in a specific personnel number, but a ballpark estimate is alright. But that stuff is set up for me to improvise on the fly.
Sometimes factions with conflicting goals, I might advance their progress along their tracks according to dice and then need to adjust things, and do it between sessions, but when I do that it's just to surprise myself a bit more, the players don't notice the difference there.
The main thing is prepping improv tools you can use a variety of ways rather than limited circumstance situations that are only useful once, and may never come up. You want your prep to be efficient. Sure, make a 40-80 page document but fill it with stuff that you will use repeatedly.
Similarly, don't design a special map for everything. Collect maps you can grab and use as needed.
If your prep is good, you can pick it up with another group, run it again with few changes, and get a very different campaign out of it as a result, because so much will be driven by player choices. And even if you change the NPC project goals and keep the rest, that should be a pretty small job.
You could use something a bit more sophisticated than a progress clock, and use a Gantt chart or a pert chart. To track their plans. That would be a better use of your time than flowcharting potential outcomes, most of which won't happen.
But basically, prep like people do for OSR or sandbox games. You can either grab JA's New book, or grab it for free and filter out his rambling yourself from his blog, if you're not familiar with the techniques.
Yeah? My starting notes for my current campaign were probably about forty or fifty handwritten pages. We're now at several hundred.
Try Scrivener; it helps you organize things better.
I find it way easier to make interconnected webs of images, text and symbols, give them ID markers and turn it into a highres image file. I can then include longer sections of text, references, handouts and quoted segments for each chapter of the campaign and link it back to a section of my board using the ID. It's a little chaotic, but it's great for quick-referencing and keeping track of interconnected plot details that I need to keep in the back of my mind.
What program do you use for ID markers?
You are vastly overpreparing, and it's going to make your game rigid, inflexible, and stale. You need to learn how to more efficiently use your time and more effectively improvise on game day.
>In a sandbox there are no hooks.
Wut. No no, in a sandbox there are tons of hooks, a default action they can take (like "explore the wilderness"), or they can do anything else they want, and the campaign is about their choices. Shit happens based on what they decide to do and not do, but there's no "but thou must!" (Or else the world ends). Everything is simple prepped at much lower levels of detail, with improv tools prepped for whatever the players do. The hooks? That's what you prepped. The hook. Then you use your flexible prep when the players go after one (or do something else).
>Playoids don't know what they want.
*This* is generally true. Most people have no self awareness.
>Illusion of free will
It's not more work to provide actual free will, only more front loaded.
Look. I get It. You would love to be a writer and ttrpgs somehow fill that necessity.
I have a proposition though. How about instead of writing It as If It is a story, with linear sequences of play, you design a world with points of interest, a hub area, a central Dungeon, a main villain location (depths of the central Dungeon) and play a game that flows naturally pulled by the players own decisions?