Don’t write every part of your adventure in advance. Unless you and your players are OK with some strong railroad tracks or agree to follow plot hooks, it’s a recipe for wasted content.
That doesn’t mean write an adventure or campaign, it means write an outline and the next session or three of content and then see where the party starts to go. A good thing to get in the habit of is ending a session right after a major decision has been made, especially if it pertains to traveling. Try to align the end of a session with the party’s decision on what cave, cellar or town to travel to next. Then you can prep it as needed.
That’s good advice. Unless everyone agreed to run a prewritten module, expecting the players to do too specific things and go to too specific places is ill-advised.
Pre-planning too far, even with collaborative players, can fail to provide what they want. Only as the campaign progresses it will become clear what the players gravitate towards and what are their dispositions.
The GM can keep some general ideas for the future events and potential conclusions, but fleshing them out before they are imminent will only lead to wasted effort and disappointment. Being able to think on your feet is very important for a GM too.
Conversely, players should understand that GMs also have ideas of what they want to see, so they should at least try to pick up on some cues.
Everyone should remember that the core of TTRPGs is collaborative storytelling.
Honestly even if everyone agreed to a linear story, they can jump the rails without even knowing unless you have clear and explicit communication. DMs should be willing to say “hey, you can do this, but just so you know I never considered this action and might need to make up some nonsense on the fly or take a break to do some new prep” if they think it’s necessary. Clear communication beats hiding behind the curtain for the sake of immersion every time.
I was a player in a campaign a while back where this basically happened - we all knew the DM had plans and thought we were following them, but he revealed at the end that pretty much the last half of the campaign had been panicked improvisation of material that he wasn’t happy with, because at one point the NPCs we’d been traveling with got on a boat to a new continent and invited us along, and in absence of other clear plot hooks we said yes. Apparently all the prep was on the previous continent and he riffed a ton of interactionless filler descriptions, a random dungeon, and a half-baked new plot, rather than saying “you can go with them but to be clear you’d be leaving my prep”. In our particular group’s case, we would have happily changed our mind on that basis, but even if we’d gotten on the boat we would have been in a position to understand and enjoy the new adventure better knowing that everyone (including the DM) was venturing into the unknown together.
Me, a player: “So my options are the left door or the right door?”
You, the DM: “Yes.”
Me, a player: “I choose the left door.”
You, the DM: “FUCK!” tears up 300 pages of notes
Do such idiot GMs really exist or are they just made up for the memes?
It’s mostly a joke, but there is a kernel of truth.
A lot of us forever DMs secretly want to be writers, but we haven’t really thought our plots through. Reading advice from The Alexandrian and Angry GM really helps.
I once had a campaign that had such a scripted ending, the GM took over one of the PCs to control what they would say and do in the finale.
Yeah, but I actually have a DM like this. He put a giant, ominous, spectral raven on a passenger boat with us, and we all said, “uh, fuck that, let’s walk away.” So the session ended about 5 minutes later as he “got a call” about a very important excuse he needed to take care of.
You were clearly supposed to choose the right door! Don’t you remember the cryptic mumblings of the old man six sessions ago? And the song the dwarves sang when you went to the tavern in session 1? Do you even take notes?
DM: “Ahem! Stanley went through the redd door.”
My sister DMs but before she got really into it she asked me to play a practice game and got extremely frustrated with me. I managed to pick literally every option/choice that continued to push the story so far outside its intended narrative she had to shut the game down because she an out of material to make up on a whim 😅
She told me later that she writes a few extra side quests for players like me in the future that literally like to go rogue 🤣
This is why I only give plot hooks, not planned out plots. I figure out how things would go without intervention, then see how the players fuck it up by their actions.
I used to build my stories out of glass, but my players broke them and it hurt. Now I make them out of clay and we can all build it together.
Maybe you shouldn’t have made the campaign so easy
“Yes, that would completely bypass the dungeon I spent the last 2 months building. So I guess uh…I take 1d6 psychic damage and we’ll move on.”
