Don't do too much, or you will waste time and efforts
Don't do too much, or you will waste time and efforts
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
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I just plan out the world and where the NPCs are, and what their goals are. I don't really plan out what is going to happen with the story. I just let the players decide that, and have NPCs react appropriately to them when necessary.
Still things to prep. Encounters, maps, forces, terrain, ecosystem, descriptions, etc
Yeah, things that, so long as they don't teleport somewhere for literally no god damn reason, will only change in response to something they do. If you plan for there to be a bandit camp in the, but they avoid it and set fire to the forest somehow, now forest bandits flee into the plains and set up camp again, interact with something there, or disband.
Oh yes, we all know the legend of the moving dungeon :)
Encounters, easy. You were going to prepare those anyway.
Maps, not as easy but there's resources online in a pinch.
Forces... What do you mean by that?
Terrain... That's just maps again, right?
Ecosystem... Yeah, you're definitely over-preparing at this point.
Descriptions... You shouldn't have been prepping this anyway. If you know what the thing looks like, you can describe it yourself during the game.:laughs in random table generation:
I haven't actually prepped a session in ages. I learned The Keep on the Borderlands well enough, and use the encounter generation rules from the Rules Cyclopedia for everything else.
I procedurally generate everything while we play. Which makes it a game for me, too - I get to interpret the results of the rolls in whatever way seems most appropriate and fun at the moment. And, in the end, it doesn't really slow anything down compared to 'normal' DMing, where I'd often have to cross-check notes, the adventure, etc to determine how the PC's actions play out.