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Rules (wip):
My players stumble upon an abandoned version of one of my Dwarf Fortress cities.
I already know the whole layout backwards and forwards without needing to work with a map, and it has traps, epic architecture, purpose to every room, little random stuff scattered through, and I can usually come up with some kind of theme or ending to the dungeon for if they get that far into it. Easy peasy.
Exactly this, but for my world building hobby. I've been setting on a fully formed civilization with clashing cultures, centuries of history, historical figures, folklore, and recipes for more than a decade now. If I don't have a mission lined up in game I can just slot in my own lore.
Yeah. Or video game levels you love, or fiction, or anything. As long as it’s something you thought was badass when you were dealing with it, then you’ll probably have it fleshed out already in your mind so you can put your main focus into making it badass when your players are going through it, not just fumbling around with encounter tables or whatever.
My favorite go to, one I've used twice in the same campaign and no one was the wiser, is to throw some ridiculous fight at the party out of nowhere, let them sweat it out for a round or two, and start dropping hints it isn't what it seems.
I had them stumble across a black dragon in a cave as a lvl 1 party once. After scaring the shit out of them, for a round or two, someone "finally noticed" that the wings seemed to be made of tar covered cloth. Druid did a nature check and realized that's not what a black dragon roar sounds like at all. Literally 5 kobolds in a dragon coat.
One time, I thought we had canceled but everyone pinged me about why I wasn't logged in to roll20 yet (got my weeks mixed up). Luckily one other person did too, so I told the party I was going to puppet their character so they would level up too. I had that character betray the party by leading them to a trap. They defeated the player character (I used their actual character sheet to fight the party), for them to discover it was a doppelganger, and the trap was the diopleganger's lair. they solved through a bunch of traps and random creatures from the diopleganger's managerie of tortured -to-the-point-of-insanity minor monsters until they found the actual player character that (as they discovered) had been kidnapped the night before.
One other time l, over lockdowns, I had a friend miss a few months of sessions due to some serious and very depressing circumstances. He still wanted to continue once life had calmed down. We were doing an Avernus campaign, and I had been NPCing his character, but I told him to fast forward to his character to the current party level (about 6 levels) and not tell anyone he was going to rejoin the play sessions or log into roll20 until I gave him the go ahead. About 15 minutes in, the party is sailing down the river Styx when they see a damaged flying fortress crash landing, streaking by overhead. They hear a hellish scream and see a buck naked tiefling jumping out of the ship directly for their raft. At this point my friend logs into discord and yells "I WANT MY SHIT BACK YOU IMPOSTER BASTARD!". combat began immediately whereupon he fought himself and regained all the loot the imposter had been carrying. The party had a hell of a good time that night, and he never did explain (in character) what hell actually happened to him.
The idea of the Dragon which is just 5 kobolds in a dragon coat is amazing :)
Literally 5 kobolds in a dragon coat.
Hahaha, this is so brilliantly funny. Well done. If I were in your party I certainly would have approved.
A shopping trip can kill half a session if it's been a while. Then maybe one of the shopkeepers has a problem that would be worth one of the nicer items in their shop if it were taken care of for them.
A shopping trip can kill half a session if it’s been a while.
Do you really have fun running a session like that? Me and my players would die of boredom.
I think a lot of it is the dopamine of getting to upgrade your character.
Also, I have observed that people LOVE getting everything together to get kitted out for a mission. If there’s some special equipment they’re going to need to go into the temple, and they’re trying to think what they would need once they get there and running around town putting it all together, they just get super excited and it gets them amped up for the adventure. It is fun in my experience, although yes YMMV.
I don't really like running them, but my players enjoy it from time to time and it always seems to take half a session.
They get itchy when they have too much gold. And a couple of them have taken to collecting t-shirts from the places they visit.
For some reason, my players tend to like it, but as a DM, I've always found it boring as hell.
Depends how well you can roleplay it. Don't let them just buy the longsword they want... Or if you do, have there also be a super duper double ended longsword of doom™ that's not actually for sale, but could be if you could just do the shopkeeper a favour....
I stufferd a store in for my players to shop (Foundry) because it had been a while, and just grabbed a pre-built one and tossed it in...
they spent the night planning and implementing a massive heist because one item cost too much for them to afford and they wanted it..... I had NOTHING for this (half the players beliefs on the shopkeeper, how they worked and how they could be robbed was based on some crappy random generated name and they had made "assumptions"...)
Found out later they thought I planned it all
In their defence, Blades in the Dark, set a trend of having a formal downtime phase which is about upgrading team, healing physical and mental wound, and advancing your side project, and I heard player telling me that they've spend 2 (short) sessions on it.
Even on more classic games, having the player looking what to buy in the books, then finding a shop having it, negotiation with the shopkeeper and so on, can take a lot of time.
s a DM, I’ve always found it boring as hell. 👍Maximum Derek👍 English4•
I don’t really like running them, but my players enjoy it from time to time and it always seems to take half a session.
I was both a player and a GM in a lot of FitD games, and its downtime is not just a D&D shopping session, it's another phase of the game covered by the rules.
D&D-like shopping sessions, in contrast, are just table talk.
While my players will easily kill 30 minutes collaborating on what to buy, a session like this is definitely more fun if there are NPC's involved.
We had a memorable session when the PC's found the Emporium of Evil, where they tried to find the magic items that weren't TOO cursed, speaking to all manner of morally questionable merchant. (They bought a lot, actually.)
You can also brainstorm the next quest this way. Whether or not the party wants to take a quest from a one of these merchants, they can certainly hear rumors. You can see what they take interest in, and build your next plot arc off of that base.
Some trouble can always pop up when the shopping is winding down, requiring decisive action by the party.
Assuming a D&D 5e game, I load Kobold Fight Club and click until I find monsters I can build a little story around.
A while back (including enemies from Tome of Beasts) I got Spawn of Akyishigal and Giant Ants, and after a few overland battles they found a beleaguered anthill.
By the next session I had my dungeon made and some lore surrounding it.
The giant anthill had carved its way into an ancient tomb of an orcish warlord who had managed to seal the Demon Lord of Cockroaches with her in an attempt at everlasting life. The actions the players take can result in her rising as a Mummy Lord or in Akyishigal being freed.
All from going "Hey, these enemies work well together."
Here's a link to it:
If I have absolutely nothing prepared, like I don't even know anything about the world or the situation the players are in, then I reschedule session 1 ;)
You almost never have nothing prepared. If I didn't prepare for a session, it just means whatever was there gets built upon in a more rudimentary way, areas have less detail, characters are more rough, no nice maps, but otherwise everything is exactly the same. The stuff you do in preparation just means that the session will be better. If you don't prepare, you'll essentially just do "preparation" on the fly and it's called improvisation. You don't do drafts and discard them for something better, you just always go for the first thing that comes to mind.
So idk, for me, not preparing for a session is pretty simple, I just do everything the same just in less time.
Get yourself Sly Flourish’s Lazy Dungeonmaster and The Return of the Lazy Dungeonmaster, first of all.
To answer the question, think of a strong start, maybe a combat to give me room to think between turns. Think of 10 secrets and clues. Grab a map from Dyson. 5 Room Dungeon it. And if you’re pressed for time, ChatGpT can be super handy pulling together tables and last minute prep.
So, like usual then?
If it's a new game, I start off with a basic adventure I always have tucked away. A good starter adventure is a lifesaver sometimes.
If it's an ongoing game, then we probably have stuff we were still doing? Just recycle the prep from last time wherever possible and play for time. "Oh, yes, you have the treasure from the depths of the dungeon, but now your rivals have seized the place and you need to fight your way back out! Totally not just doing this to reuse the dungeon map."
If it's an ongoing game and we just had a good cutoff point? Thank god that player just arrived. Ask them what they're expecting will happen this session, nod sagely at their guesses and work from that. "Oh, you're hoping you'll fight that cult sometime soon? You never know, it might come up sooner than you think!"
Everything else is just good prep advice. Keep generic NPC templates and tokens you can use for anything. Use a whiteboard for any maps you need. Give your players control of the plot so you don't have to come up with it.
ive your players control of the plot so you don’t have to come up with it.
Indeed, this is an under-stated GM tip, player can come up with the plot. It eases the GM life
It's part of the reason I love running heists: the players are the ones doing most of the planning.
I don't schedule a game if I'm not going to be prepared
Didn't have three weeks to overthink it? I'm not ready! 😭
3 weeks to do real life shit, 4 days to procrastinate, and 3 days to hurriedly slap everything together :P
The Gamemaster's Apprentice is the single tool you need for this scenario. Add in a playing card oracle and you can basically randomly generate a session on the fly.
Nice suggestion, threw it in my cart for later! Looks really cool.
Play Battlestaions This was my last group’s actual fallback… that started to become our main game because it was more interesting than my campaign O.o
First, vibe check. Let the players shoot the shit a little more than usual out of game. While they do this, you do a little last minute brainstorming or note-taking/reworking.
Second, if you let them drive the convo, they will usually give you some clues when they finally get bored and start asking each other to calm down and start the game. Things like "I want to find out what so and so has to say about the mission we just got from who's his face!" Or "I want to kick that (minion of the bbeg)'s ass! Let's get moving!"
This tells you what your players want. Now you have some focus on what you need to spitball.
Now it's down to your improv skills. Yes-and helps a ton here. You ask what they do and it just works, or works with consequences. Ask them to roll some checks and if they roll high and it isn't stupid they succed and do the thing or get the info.
If they roll low something bad but not lethal happens. Minions show up, NPCs laugh at them, etc etc.
If you panic, ask them to roll a check and figure out what is is for while they are rolling the die and adding the result. At some point it's just art which you get good at with practice.
Good luck!
So, here is my approach, in the context of a campaign. On my campaign, I tend to have a short list of NPC/Faction/Place and enjoy keeping the campaign on a shorter space rather than a whole multiverse.
So my technique would involve.
Ask the players to give me a summary of latest session, that I'll crosscheck with my notes.
Ask the player what they want to do, following these events. having reccuring NPC/Places/factions mean that I can improvise how these person react to the event (if they do). This will easily burn a hour.
While all of that happen, I have time to think about how to relaunch the story, either there is an event which absolutely makes sense in the context The local mafia isn't happy that you dismounted their drug production lab, when you come home you find a miniature coffin with a bullet inside in front of your door or, even though it's a bad practice, I throw a "randomish encounter" A big etheral cloud forms over the magic equipement store, and you can see some ethereal creature leaving that cloud and ear screams of bypasser being attacked The latter adds a combat buying me an extra hour to find-out why this shop exploded.
Then, I can let the player investigate these events, it may-not be the most complicated investigation I ran, and kinda linear, However, it's enough to keep going to the end of the session, and have new elements to develop for next time
For a one shot ?
In general, I organize them when they're ready, and I have a lot of one-shot scenario ready on my computer, alternative would be pulling a zero prep game.
I gave myself a vague outline of a plan, I'll wing it.
It’s easier for me because my table is a bunch of 9-12 year olds. Most of the time I’m just prodding them to do something, anything, then I get rewarded with the monk randomly punching someone in the bar because “we hadn’t had any combat yet.” I made some nemesis NPCs but I can never predict what these kids want to do so I wing it the whole time.
Is that honestly such a big deal? If it's long term chronicle/campaign than i'm sure you have lots of plot threads hanging around waiting to be woven into a new story. If it's a new chronicle just make a session zero - players will keep talking a make most work for you. And if it's a one-shot.. Well, than you improvise, i guess.
That's a fair point. In general when not prepared in long term campaign, I have enough running stuff to not need to prepare more.
But reading some other forum, it seems that some people are super anxious about prep and need hours of prep for every game night. Sure sometimes, I am on a creative mood and want to do these hours of prep, and come with a twisted plot, some maps and illustrations. But very often, I can just use all the ongoing stuff to improvise.
So I agree, not such a big deal
If I'm truly unprepared I'll just recommend we play a board game instead. With that said, if we are playing in a larger campaign I've often prepared lots of things that haven't been used with because they seemed like a likely path at some point that went untaken, and I might just nudge players in one of those directions and balance any numbers on the fly if it was prepped a couple levels before.
Grab any two factions with competing interests, loosely define some scenario where they're narrowly deadlocked, hook the group in via a scheming interloper who has mysterious (TBD) motives. Hash out all details by yes-anding. If ever there's a lull, or I need a climax, the current underdog makes an unexpected power play.
If I have nothing prepped, it's goofy random sidequest night.
One of my favourite sessions ever started when the player the session was focused on called out due to work. With my plans derailed I had ninjas crash through the window, steal her famous recipe book, then run off and leap into the back of a van with her biggest rival at the wheel. It turned into a driving battle on the highway with characters leaping from vehicle to vehicle while a supervillain chef pelted them with capsaicin-laced muffins. It ended with an elderly PC duking it out with a morbidly obese NPC (neither of which had any points in fighting) in front of a police station. They traded single points of damage until the cops finished laughing and arrested them both.
It helps I'm playing Fate, so it doesn't require a lot of prep. My 2nd favorite system, CofD, also doesn't require a lot of prep. Dnd's math is so wonky it needs more prep.
In both of those systems stats are pretty constrained. A dude has like 5 health levels on average and you don't need to scale things to player level like that.
I usually have a couple factions in the game that are up to no good. They can always start some shit by kidnapping NPCs or advancing their plots. Maybe today's the day they dig too deep and a balrog awakens in Central Park.
Indeed, for C/W oD you can easily have some "standard stats" in mind to build NPC quickly ? Something like 3/5/7 dices depending whether it's beginner/intermediate/master (I haven't GM-it for a while so the formula may-be different) works very well at turning a one sentence description in NPC skill
This mostly happens to me when it is very clear that the session is going to be about resolving something about player X's backstory, and their work schedule changes.
The easiest way, is to use a generator, like https://donjon.bin.sh/scifi/random/.
I might not fully use the suggestion of "A minor executive named Jasper Catlow needs a crew to frame a rival named Porter Gammon for corporate espionage. However, the client hires a team of assassins to eliminate them after the job.", but it's easy enough to change some nouns to make an interesting one-shot.
I think one way I have seen was to at first session get list of few details about PCs, then pull out an adventure based on it. Eg. If your cleric told you there is a food his religion forbids, he is suddenly ordered to deal with a heretic who argues othertwise.
Npc with a sob story, but they're shy so it takes some conversation (time to think and roll with what the players think might be going on) before they will reveal it.
Sexy goblin
I recommend you give the players a Bag of Beans. Its a chaos machine and a great method to get your players to do something fun without completely derailing the campaign. We all really enjoy the pink toads (random monsters) since you can just roll up something crazy and do a combat.
We had the mummy lord come up which ended up being a huge plot point after they let it sit for a while. It changed the course of what we wanted to play in a fun way.
Wait for everyone to arrive. Even the late ones. Then order pizza. Fuck around until pizza arrives. Then everybody has to stop whatever they're doing to eat the pizza. By now it's 2 hours after starting time. Have NPCs socialize with the party. Throw a pack of goblins or something at them. Have the party go fight with the locals over how much of a reward they should get. The store is closing in 10 minutes so we have to pack up for the night. The end.