Recently came across this post on writing up a redacted document of all of the important info related to the world / story, and un-redacting things as the PCs discover. This lets them know what they don’t know, and kind of the shape of what they don’t know. https://ttrpg.network/post/20269477
Which reminded me of this well-known write up, Don’t Prep Plots, which, while not entirely incompatible, is at least a very different approach.
Got me thinking of the way I do things, and a mix of all of the different things I have read. I try to run a pretty sandbox style game, but still have a lot of stuff going on in the world for the players to follow. In many cases the players will go towards something I haven’t prepped or thought much about, and that improvised collaborative story telling lets me as the GM find out new information about the world right alongside the players.
I have started to think of this kind of gm prep as “Mad libs prep”
Mad Libs is a game where there are pre-written sentences, with blanks that need to be filled in by the players. E.g. “We get into our <noun> and <verb> to the beach” - players don’t know what the sentence is when picking the words, so you can end up with that becoming “We get into our toaster and sleep to the beach”. The idea is to have enough existing structure that things can get where they need to be, but with enough unknowns that can be filled in with whatever the players (who don’t know the whole story) throw out there.
For GM prep, this can be knowing that there is an evil wizard who wants to take over the kingdom, and he needs <noun> to do it. The missing noun can be filled in by the players without them knowing.
For example, they become very interested in hunting for ancient magic artifacts? The essential <noun> is a legendary amulet and now the PCs are in a race against the mad mage to decipher its secret location.
Or maybe the PCs become monster hunters for hire, and the <noun> is the scale of a dragon or something similar, and the PCs run into the evil guys and uncover the plot.
Or perhaps the PCs really latch on to a side NPC that doesn’t have much background fleshed out and <noun> becomes this person, who has some previously unknown connection to events that is discovered along the way (e.g. Martin Septim in TES IV).
The idea in general is to have enough material to know interesting things will happen, but not getting hung up on having every detail filled in. This also can be holding the things you do have prepared loosly, so maybe you had planned for the BBEG to have a secret lair in the mountains, but the PCs are really into a swampy forest area and end up wanting to spend all of their time there. Rather than “Ok, the BBEG has been up here uncontested the whole time and now the world ends, you all die” - the <location> of evil layer is now deep in the wilderness, which can lead to a lot of changes, creating new lore, creatures, quests, etc.
Maybe all of this stuff is obvious but I am a relatively new GM and have mostly been figuring it out on my own. I’d love to hear other prep methods and tips!
I think that could be a good fit for groups who play TTRPGs mostly for the mechanics or the interactions between player characters. It keeps the action flowing and makes it easy to adapt to the players’ wishes.
The cost is that it opens up the risk for plot holes and makes the setting less dense. With every blank that you fill in, you need to make sure that it doesn’t contradict things that have already been established and that it won’t cause problems further down the line. If you’ve already designed a cool mountain fortress for your BBEG and suddenly it needs to be deep in a swampy forest, you’ll probably have to redesign it from the ground up or else it will feel very out of place. Foreshadowing also gets a lot harder and basically every plot line boils down to “somehow, nobody ever noticed this threat/opportunity until the point the heroes showed up”. That’s absolutely fine for a more spontaneous format but if you want a long campaign that leads to an epic climax, it usually feels a lot cooler if the players can look back and see that they had been working towards that goal since day one even if they hadn’t known back then. That’s a lot harder when you as a GM don’t know enough of the details to hint at them.
Of course, at a smaller scale, this is something that most GMs do. If the plot requires the party to talk to a certain NPC to get vital information and the party absolutely refuses to interact with them, the relevant information must come from somewhere else. Maybe a different NPC, maybe they find a note, maybe something entirely different. But at least for the way I structure my campaigns, that’s more of an exception to fix problems rather than something I leave vague on purpose.
As for other prep methods, I’m working on a short essay on how I design crime/detective modules. I’ll link it here once it’s done.
Overall: go for it, experiment with it, see how it works for you and let us know. There is no wrong way to be a GM as long as your goal is to build something that’s fun for everyone at the table. Even if you don’t reach that goal on the first try.
Good points! There are definitely limits to this.
Foreshadowing is something I have tried to do and would like to do more of. My current campaign and the only long running one I have experience with is all homebrew, and we did start at a place where I had the world itself pretty well fleshed out, but a lot of the character and faction stuff changed quite a bit over the first couple of months. The big changes were early enough that it didn’t really cause problems for our table, but I have experienced what you say, where some of the foreshadowing that I tried to do in the first couple of sessions kind of became irrelevant. This was mainly because I realized the thing I was originally intending to foreshadow wasn’t that interesting and needed to change as the players began living in the world. We are at a place now where the players have mostly uncovered all of the key lore, and I believe they will confront the BBEG soon.
I have learned a lot running this game and it makes me excited to build and run more!