by Michael Shea
Thinking back on a D&D game that went poorly, how much of the outcome was due to a lack of preparation? What could have you prepared to avoid the poor outcome?
Certainly with RPGA and pre-published modules. Runs by such DMs can be abysmal because it is hard to improvise when you don’t know the core.
There are also times when I’ve tried to be true to what I wrote a while back, but which I had not prepped recently. It is very hard to do that - you are almost better off running complete improv and making up for the intended story progress with the following session.
If you had only 30 minutes to prepare for a D&D game, how would you prepare?
I would give up on most of my prior plans, take a bare outline, and improvise. The 30 min might be spent on one focused activity that will yield results, such as cool terrain with stock monsters or a great exploration puzzle.
Where do you come up with your ideas for your game? What influences you as you prepare to run a D&D game?
I consider these critical:
Lots of RPGA adventures, since this pulls together tons of authors with different influences. Also, running those different RPGA adventures for varied audiences teaches me a lot about how to increase the fun of a wide variety of players.
Different RPGs, because they teach me different approaches/frameworks.
I try to find the best DMs I can and learn from them as a player in their games.
What are your most useful tips, tricks, and tools when preparing for your D&D game?
For me it is about knowing what kind of game you want to run, finding the level of preparation you are willing to do sustainably to achieve those goals, and then using that time effectively so it yields great results consistently.
Dave “The Game” Chalker
Dave “The Game” Chalker is the lead editor for the gaming website Critical Hits and freelance designer for both Wizards of the Coast and Margaret Weis Productions. Dave has been running D&D games for twenty years.
What D&D game preparation activities have the most positive effect on your game?
Brainstorming, outlining, and organizing.
What D&D game preparation activities have the least positive effect on the game?
Pre-scripting and trying to be funny.
Thinking back on your most memorable and enjoyable D&D moments at the table, how often were they pre-planned? How often were they spontaneous?
Usually, the best moments came from pre-planned moments or ideas reacting against the players in spontaneous ways. The spontaneous moments on my end can be fun, but my best sessions come from where players take the story seeds I provide.
Thinking back on a D&D game that went poorly, how much of the outcome was due to a lack of preparation? What could have you prepared to avoid the poor outcome?
Usually the parts that fall flat are those I haven’t generated enough cool ideas for or just wasn’t a good enough concept to base an adventure off of. This can be because of lack of time, or just not enough energy put into an idea to turn it from OK to make it sing.
If you had only 30 minutes to prepare for a D&D game, how would you prepare?
Try to generate hooks from previous sessions, grab ones that come to mind as making sense as following previous games, and see what I have on hand that works with those hooks. Then during the game I can pull out appropriate encounters, etc.
Where do you come up with your ideas for your game? What influences you as you prepare to run a D&D game?
The K-Mart Blue Light Idea Special. But seriously, I take in ideas from everything I read, watch, listen to, etc. Combining ideas in new and interesting ways powers a lot of my sessions. Usually I try to have campaigns with a specific genre or tone in mind, so at the very least, I fall back on that core campaign idea and try to steal ideas from that similar genre: like if I’m running a survival game, I research similar. If I’m running a revenge fantasy campaign, I look at those, etc.
What are your most useful tips, tricks, and tools when preparing for your D&D game?
Always look at ways to follow up on previous hooks, NPCs, leftover encounters, etc. Those are your best source of inspiration while also driven by the previous actions and decisions of your players. You can inject your own stories, twists, and turns, but the best stories come from meeting your players halfway. Also, don’t underestimate the value of just flipping through a book of monsters, looking at what maps you own, playing around with miniatures, etc. instead of worrying about details early.
Jeff Greiner
Jeff is the host of the Tome Show and it’s related Dungeons and Dragons and RPG podcasts as well as running Temporary Hit Points. Jeff has been playing D&D for 23 years.
What D&D game preparation activities have the most positive effect on your game?
Encounter design is the key for me in 4e prep. Making sure I have the right mix of creatures, obstacles, and little tricks to make it interesting and unique is hard to do time and time again, and yet when I haven’t taken the time to do it the games don’t go as well. It’s sometimes the unsung hero of prep in my games. If I work hard on encounter design it’s usually not noticed, but if I don’t put in the work everyone feels it.
But if I can highlight a secondary activity it would be finding ways to make the story matter to each PC. It’s not a tangible concept in prep most of the time because you aren’t walking away with stat blocks and maps and the like, but when I come up with some way to make a player’s choice of feat or paragon path really matter in a game then that player suddenly buys into the story in a way they didn’t before and they appear to have a lot of fun seeing where it all goes.
What D&D game preparation activities have the least positive effect on the game?
Setting up Dungeon Tiles. I invested in them, so I occasionally like to use them, but I’ve never had anyone tell me how awesome the Dungeon Tile set up was and I have at least one player who typically says that he would prefer a drawn map to a well laid out set of Dungeon Tiles. That said, it could be a few players giving me an impression that may not be true for a silent majority…but the data I have says that using Dungeon Tiles is the least impactful prep I can spend my time with.
Thinking back on your most memorable and enjoyable D&D moments at the table, how often were they pre-planned? How often were they spontaneous?
I have moments that are highly memorable from both categories but for different reasons and what’s more, most memorable is not the same as enjoyable. My party remembers quite well the time they let the evil cult summon a slaad to terrorize the city because it wasn’t any of their business. Not enjoyable…but they’ve remembered it for years. Some spontaneous moments led to highly planned moments that were memorable and enjoyable. For example, to avoid a TPK I had a trapped demon lord save a PC in the early days of my campaign. For the next 3 years the other players taunted him about having a “demon master” that told him to do things. The only thing the demon did say was that in the future the PCs would be powerful enough to free him and they would. All of that was spontaneous…but it set me up to spend the next few years planning for when they would eventually free that demon lord much to their own surprise…and they did it willingly.
I guess to sum up, the most memorable and enjoyable times in my game come in three categories. 1. Big story moments that, through careful planning, tied into the PCs/players personally, 2. Unplanned moments that took the story in unexpected directions but then allowed me to plan for in other ways, 3. Character moments…players/PCs will do things you aren’t expected and sometimes those things are awesome, hilarious, or definitive for the campaign (which, of course, are things that you can’t control or plan for at all…if you could you wouldn’t need other players).
Thinking back on a D&D game that went poorly, how much of the outcome was due to a lack of preparation? What could have you prepared to avoid the poor outcome?
The failure of my game sessions almost never have anything to do with prep. It’s almost always about a story that d
idn’t go well or a challenge where I went too far as a DM. That said, I avoided failures due to game prep several times by having some simple strategies in place. When the players went an unexpected direction I am usually able to convert things over to a role-playing/problem-solving heavy situation where prep is less needed and allow that to cover the time for the rest of the session, giving me time to think and prep for the new direction. Over time I also became good at avoiding this problem because I got to know my players and what motivated their PCs well enough that I could provide them with choices where I was pretty confident I knew where they would choose to go.
If you had only 30 minutes to prepare for a D&D game, how would you prepare?
I’d pull monsters, ideas for gimmicks and obstacles, and a bare concept for a story (which I’d probably look to the monster selection for inspiration).
Where do you come up with your ideas for your game? What influences you as you prepare to run a D&D game?
Typically as I read game products and/or listen to podcasts I see or come up with story ideas that are calling out to me to be told. As for influences there are ones internal to the campaign and ones that are external. My players, their choices (both mechanical choices and story choices) help inform me what to do next (although not always in the expected way) internal. And externally, I consume media I come up with ideas, as I read game products/blogs, conduct podcasts, and listen to advice from others I often ask myself “am I doing that in my game?” and if I’m not “is there a way I could to make things better?”.
What are your most useful tips, tricks, and tools when preparing for your D&D game?
Find inspiration from the things you have to do anyway. Look for the monsters to use and then come up with a story as to why they would all be together and why the PCs might be coming after them. Draw your map with odd and interesting things on it…THEN come up with what those things are and lastly, what mechanical effect they have. Get help from others. One of my favorite things to do that works really well for me is bouncing ideas off of other people, be it in a BtDMS recording, by writing about it on THP, or just asking Twitter or whatever friends happen to be on Skype that night. Fresh minds with less stake in the larger campaign will often help me come up with ideas that I never would have thought of and, because I’m hyper-focused on story, I know will be made to work well in the larger campaign.
James Grummell
James Grummell is the 2008 Iron Dungeon Master and third-place winner of the 2011 PAX East Dungeon Master Championship. He’s been a Dungeons and Dragons dungeon master since 1990; running 2nd, 3rd, 3.5, 4e, and Pathfinder games.
What D&D game preparation activities have the most positive effect on your game?
Despite my love of the story I am giving the players, I feel the most core element to running a game is knowing your monsters. Their tactics, their powers, etc. You can improvise a lot of aspects to your game and get away with it. But the math of the game is hard to fake. If you just run a monster without a stat sheet in front of you, the players for the most part pick up on it. When they realize you are not being bound to the same rules they are playing by you lose some of the trust they place in you. And that makes for a bad game.
What D&D game preparation activities have the least positive effect on the game?
Trying to come up with every possible scenario the players can do in the game session. You should not railroad your dungeon encounter into a one-way path. Players want the freedom to know they can explore your world no matter the story you have prepared. By the same token you should avoid naming every building in a farming village in case the party ever asks about the name of the blacksmith. Unless the party has absolutely announced prior to the game they are going to do something, you need to generalize as much of the game as you can. I heard a theory once on time travel that the universe would compensate for a paradox. If you killed Hitler in an attempt to take his place and win WWII for Germany, the universe would adapt. After you killed Hitler, possibly to keep the German army following your leadership, you had to impersonate Hitler. In the end you will most likely die defeated in possibly a slightly different location from the original Hitler. Aside from a few minor details. the future will turn out somewhat the same. Your games should be the same. If you plan the party to meet a Wizard in a Tower, but the players choose to never go there, have the Wizard out on some errand later on for them to meet up. Do not force your players to go to the Tower but also avoid coming up with an entirely different person to impart the information you wanted to give them.
Thinking back on your most memorable and enjoyable D&D moments at the table, how often were they pre-planned? How often were they spontaneous?
One of my personally favorite moments involved a gateway being opened by a group of players. Some of the players entered the portal to find a world overrun by undead. Eventually the party discovered that time moved slower, making 1 round on the undead plane equaling 5 rounds on the Material Plane. When a Demigod level Lich entered the scene, the players in the (fast) Material World watched in horror as their friends ran for the portal in slow motion as very slow fireballs and rays of energy came at them. The conditions of the portal and the Monsters were planned, but the players reactions to the conditions were totally spontaneous. One such enjoyable outcome was players shooting spells into the portal only to see them reduce speed. The players on the slow side were forced to dodge when the spells came right at where they were intending to go. The casters had not taken the delayed time into account you see. The scene built in tension to one player sacrificing his life to close the portal. Not able to get to the other side in time, he stretched his arm out, extending it ahead of him through the portal long enough to activate a magic item at the accelerated time of the Material plane. And of course you know the Scene where you ran into the Huntlands and avoided Arthurs traps was completely unplanned.
Thinking back on a D&D game that went poorly, how much of the outcome was due to a lack of preparation? What could have you prepared to avoid the poor outcome?
I cannot think of many games I have felt went poorly due to lack of planning other than considering preparation for the player’s reactions. One of my players was searching for her brother, a dwarf, who apparently was kidnapped. They spent several sessions chasing down the trail only to discover the Dwarf in bed with another Man engaging in risque acts. I had made a backstory about the Dwarf was in love with a town Chef. Knowing their love would cause a scandal, the dwarf had engineered the kidnapped story and ran away with his lover. Before I could explain that to the player, she walked out, refusing to ever play in my game again. She had assumed I had made a joke out of her character’s quest and it is still one of my DM regrets. I should have considered my audience reaction more. I will say games I have done zero prep time on have given me the least satisfaction. Just sitting down and running with nothing prepared, I felt like I was a drowning man trying to tread water. From looking up monsters, to describing a scene, I can do it if pressed but the game is solely for the players benefit. I feel drained afterwards and feel bad about a poor effort on my part even if the players have fun. The best game sessions I found have typically had at least 2–3 hours prep time (less if I did a lot of work prior to the campaign), had an idea (like two planes running on different time flows) that I really wanted to see play out, and was flexible enough to adapt to the players actions.
If you had only 30 minutes to prepare for a D&D game, how would you prepare?
I would decide on the level to run.
I would randomly roll some monster types (Natural, Aberration, Fey, Etc).
I would randomly decide to do a City, Wilderness, or Dungeon Adventure.
I would randomly pick 2 treasures for the game and 1 consumable.
I would pick 1 Minion and 1 Solo level appropriate.
I would then pick 2–3 Brute/Soldiers/Controllers and/or Artillery to use.
I would then take all of that and break it down into some encounters.
If I had time I would work in some terrain or traps. If not, I would add it as I go.
I would tend to also draw the maps as I went.
Where do you come up with your ideas for your game? What influences you as you prepare to run a D&D game?
Usually the ingredients I put together randomly prior to the start of the campaign decide the story for me. I am just packaging them up into a fun adventure. I think it speaks to my love of food network reality shows like Chopped and Iron Chef.
Still Prior to any campaign I usually have a special event I want to play out. Like a table sized Maze. I tend to build the adventures leading up to that big event.
What are your most useful tips, tricks, and tools when preparing for your D&D game?
An Excel Spreadsheet detailing what game elements I will be using for each session (Treasure, Key Monsters, Enviornment Effects, Factions, Etc).
MSPaint to screenshot the monster stats from the Compendium. Then pasting the stats side by side in MSPaint to make a large PNG file. Then I upload that to an iPad for easy reference for an encounter. Legos with sticky putty under dungeon tiles to give the map a 3d look.
Tracy Hurley
Tracy Hurley is the creator of Sarah Darkmagic, co-producer of The Tome Show, one of the members of the 4 Geeks 4e, and a freelance columnest for Wizards of the Coast. Tracy began her dungeon mastering experience with Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition, running both a home campaign as well as numerous introduction to D&D events at both Gencon and Pax East.
Note: this interview was conducted face to face at Gencon on 18 August 2012 at the JW Marriott in Indianapolis, IN. Tracy reviewed and approved the following transcribed notes.
What D&D game preparation activities have the most positive effect on your game?
