I’ve been really, really active over on a DnD influencer’s discord. It’s like I’ve found my purpose in life, hanging about their advice and questions channel, throwing out advice while also learning new things from others.
One thing that I keep seeing come up over and over again there is that people keep trying to write to/prepare/modify things that aren’t going to happen for a while. To illustrate the breadth of this instinct, one wanted to plan details several sessions in advance, while another wanted to do modifications to a published scenario 9 levels away from what the characters will be doing when the campaign gets started.
If you want to get overwhelmed and burned out, please do that. You’re going to find that everything has changed by the time what you’ve prepped comes up and you’re going to have to prep again from scratch because nothing will be happening the way you projected it would. This overwhelm will be compounded by the fact that you’ve been doing that for every session after the first, with prep overlapping between sessions. That fact that things will be different should be one of the things that thrills you as a player of TTRPGS, not the cause of severe distress.
Let’s look at why you don’t want to thoroughly prepare beyond a few sessions (or even 1 session) and what to do instead to keep your overarching story together and coherent.
First, you never know what the players will ACTUALLY do in the session about to be played. Usually (but not always) you have a plan for what you *want* to happen that session but the PCs do something completely different. That’s thrilling when that happens! What do you do to adjust? In the moment, even? It might make you nervous, but it can also be fun to figure it out right there and then.
Often, if not usually, these actions result in a different outcome than expected EVEN IF the expected objective is fulfilled. Or, at least, things will be different in the world and your vision of what the world will be moving forward needs to adjust.
Imagine you’ve spent many hours perfecting what you think will occur even one session from now, only to have to trash all that work because the immediately next session went a completely different direction than you expected. That’d suck, wouldn’t it?
Now imagine that you’ve got a basic idea of what you *think* should happen in that session-after-next–but that’s it. Very few details. You can establish the goal of what you *hope* will be accomplished in the next session but have the flexibility to not lose your ability to adjust on the fly because you were so bought in to YOUR vision of what was supposed to happen. And you still have the ability to adjust what you think *might* happen the next session before you start to flesh it out.
Now, I know it’s not that black and white. Sometimes you can and should prep two sessions ahead. For example, if the characters are heading to a safe house to interrogate a bad guy, it’s a good thing to know what the bad guy knows in case a) the PCs get there earlier than in a second session and b) because you might not have time to figure that out just before.
But…in general…
Now imagine that you’re trying to plan out how to modify encounters not one or two sessions past the next one but levels and levels of character advancement from now!!!
That’s a recipe for heartbreak. So much will be changed, such as the way the world has been affected by the party’s previous actions. The party will also have shown itself to be able to handle completely different levels of encounters than what was planned beforehand. These two together often means needing to completely redo, from scratch, whatever work you put into preparing the encounter the first time.
Sooooo…what SHOULD you do?
Three things: 1) Plan the big stuff as a rough outline (or mindmap, or bullet list) and 2) plan the next session (at least a decent amount of it). Then 3) adjust the big plan to the new reality. How does this help?
(By the way, I do this both for homebrewed and published adventures. I’ll go over doing this with published adventures in another post.)
First, planning the overall story without very much detail gives you a framework of what you’d like the story to work towards while still giving your players the room to provide all the details. You can specify the big bads, the big locations, the big plot moments, the biggest NPCs (which shouldn’t be many), and the biggest macguffin(s). Remember to be thinking “big”. Not minor macguffins. Only 3 to 5 major NPCs, the main lieutenants to the BBEG and the biggest good guy contacts, for example. If this were a Tier 2 campaign, I wouldn’t worry about anything that isn’t potentially earth-shaking or city- or kingdom-threatening.
You still know what is supposed to happen, generally, and can still guide the players through that story, *hopefully* with few variants. But if you lock in details at a high level, you’ll feel dismayed if and when you can’t get the PCs to stick to the script.
Second, planning only the next session (two at most) allows you to completely take your cues from what just happened in the prior session, not just from a pre-written tale. Did the characters do X instead of Y? “No problem, here’s what will be happening as a result of Y and I’ve got several ways of helping keep the overall story progressing. I’ll have A, B, and C available going forward that can still keep to the main outline.” And, if they don’t do A, B, or C, you know enough about where you hoped things would go and can probably improvise option D on the spot.
As mentioned above, there ARE some things that you might want prepped and ready for stuff that might happen anytime between the next session and three sessions later. The example I gave, knowing what an NPC who was likely to be interrogated knew, is a good example. The interrogation could’ve happened the first session, but, depending on circumstances and player decisions, could’ve happen multiple sessions later. (As it was IRL, it was about three sessions.) And sometimes you have to prep things for a session that simply won’t get used at all…ever…because you’re trying to take player decisions into account while providing options to keep the overall story on track.
But, for most of the things you’d be prepping for any given session, try to only plan one session ahead so you can stay on top of “What did the PCs do THIS time???” shenanigans.
Third, you now will have a sense of what difficulties will lie ahead for YOU, the DM, in maintaining the story as first frameworked. 99% of the time you’ll still be able to keep the main storyline at the highest level. (“BBEG wants to destroy the world on the Solstice from their fortress using Macguffin #1! The Party probably stops him with the help of Macguffin #2 that they retrieve from the Plane of Stuff!”) But even some of the big (but smaller than “really big” stuff) might change. Maybe they didn’t succeed in getting a piece of a big-ish macguffin that would eventually help them get Macguffin #2. How might that change things? You might have to change how Macguffin #2 is acquired using yet another minor macguffin–not even developed yet (don’t tell your players!)…or, in extreme circumstances, maybe Macguffin #2 needs to be replaced with Macguffin #3!
The fundamental building blocks, though, are the basic outline of the overall story and what is needed to have fun at the next session. What you need for the next session is usually enough prep to feel more-or-less comfortable improvising half of what’s happening to guide the PCs through the story without railroading them.
Thoughts? Put them in the comments below!