You can of course plan the big lines of the campaign, but the more precise you get and far ahead of the present, the more you will either lose or railroad to not lose. Both suck
10 minutes in advance, take it or leave it
Same. I’ve come to realize the more i plan, the less flexible i am and it leads to bad improv.
At this point i just think of a couple story beats or cool scenes i want to do, then we start rolling dice and see what happens.
Or you can be like my boy who barely plans the next room
Am I your boy?
Me: Planning 1 session in advance.
My players: Getting through 1/3 of what I expected and planned for.
Honestly kind of a godsend when that happens.
Thats why I never stop my players from roleplaying. It saves on preps
You know the famous quote?
Plans are worthless. Planning is everything.
What is this word planning?
It’s that thing you do in the shower the night before the session and forget to write down “but it’ll be fine” and then you forgot half of it and only remember the dumb voice you gave the shop keeper. That, plus those notes you wrote down and you’re sure you knew what you had in mind but now you’re not sure what “damp lich” was supposed to mean.
I think the player types is important.
I’ve had players who will engage with stuff and make good things happen, and then I don’t need to play very much. They’ll see the awkward tavernkeeper and the village blacksmith and run cheering into ROM COM TIME. Can’t really plan for that.
But I’ve also had players who are just wallflowers. They don’t take initiative. They don’t push for their own goals. They’re timid and easily discouraged. “The tavern keeper doesn’t want to give you the staff. It was his grandfather’s, he says, and he doesn’t want to hand it out to just anyway.” “Uhh… uh… ok… i don’t know what to do. Can I charm person him?” “You can, but that’s an escalation and people will be mad if they find out.” “Oh nevermind I don’t know what to do.”
Meanwhile the other party got the staff by getting him and the blacksmith to finally go out on a date, and now they’re all on great terms.
The timid party needs more planning (but still only a session or two in advance) because otherwise they’re going to just stall out and get frustrated.
Maybe one day I’ll have a group that’s consistently engaged, thinks about the game between sessions, and knows the rules of the game reasonably well.
I’ve had some success planning “set pieces” instead of sessions. I’ll generally know what kinds of enemies the party could encounter at any given time and just have some fights ready just in case. Same thing with NPCs, I’ll have a bunch of names and simple descriptions on a sheet so I don’t have to make them up on the fly (and as a bonus they’re now written down in case they come up later and I forget who they were)
What is “plan?”
Lol, my brother! I never have a plan. I built a bunch of encounters and quests on roll tables and have them as posts on the board in the Adventurer’s Guild. They have tons of agency because I am exploring the world along with them.
I always over plan things. I’ll plan encounters appropriate to level. I’ll plan NPCs. I’ll plan dungeon themes. But I won’t plan a dungeon themed encounter unless I know they’re heading into that dungeon because it’s where we ended the last session.
To put it another way: I never plan so specifically that a thing can’t be moved to another place unless I’m positive it’s coming next.
People complain about the mercer effect but I think his take on this is the best approach
Not all the balls to the walls set producing and stuff, but how he keeps important encounters ready in his back pocket should things turn back in that direction
There have been two encounters now where Matt said if the players had gone about them differently, they would have become next campaign antagonists.
I do not think it’s really possible to consider the preps of Critical Roll to any normal table. Because it’s their job. They can spend time again and again and redoe and recycle and lose work and barely feel it.
We normal DMs do it in our spare time. Not only are we not paid for it one way or another like Matt (which benefits greatly now of his preps per CR’s moneymaking) but our free time is limited as it is. That’s why you shouldn’t over prepare. To not lose whatever preps you managed to squeeze out of your scheduling,
But even keeping encounters just in case is a 5 out of 10 idea. In the sense that where players are, what level they are, what equipment they got, the terrain, type of enemies, etc. is still improvisable in the same quality as adapting a cookie-cutter encounter to where they are would be. At least for me. Recycling and improvising sometimes takes just as long.
I will be saying that if I would be making money out of my preps, I would prep a lot more. And depending on how much money, if it can be enough to live on, I could prep for hours and hours everyday to have every situation covered and not feel it as much when things go in a way where 3 hours of my time go in a puff of smoke.
The only way I’m planning 3 sessions in advance (beyond very broad strokes) is if the players have spent the entire session being unjustifiably paranoid of a random NPC who was never meant to be more than set dressing, rather than exploring what is presently prepared for them, hence what I actually meant to happen gets pushed back. So, all the time.
I mean, you should have the current adventure planned. That’s probably ten sessions, right? If it’s a bigger dungeon it might be 20 sessions.
Do you send your players into a dungeon without designing the dungeon first? What the fuck.
You should also always have at least the beginning of the next adventure planned, because at any time, the players might decide to give up on this one and move on to the next one. This could happen because they run out of clues, or because they think it’s less important than their other goals, or because they disagree with the NPCs trying to get them to do it or for some other reason. They could also try to do the next adventure and this one simultaneously, especially in an urban campaign where everything is happening pretty much in the same place.
Stuff you planned that the players don’t do is WAY better than stuff you didn’t plan that the players do.
Lol
