😖 I was wrong

Sometimes, experience means nothing

Prepping is hard. I admit, even after GMing for more than seven years I still struggle sometimes. You may have read my article about prepping your first session, and why I was trying a different method recently. Well, this article is the continuation of the latter.

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Did your method work?

No, my players didn’t even get to the interesting points. They wanna explore the world to do meaningful things, but they want to know what they are going to do before going on an adventure. A real adventure has a meaningful goal, and the fun comes from the problems we face along the way.

The problem with my approach is that the players would only discover an interesting goal after going to that place. Another problem is that I prep too much and not even 10% of it is used. Wasted prep is wasted time. Either you manage to fit the wasted prep somewhere else, or you watch it rot in your notes.

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Jim Parkin

So there’s another method I just came up with. I’ve based myself on Jim Parkin’s method, the creator of Weird North and the writer of d66 Classless Kobolds. Few weeks ago, I asked the FKR Discord this.

And Jim Parkin’s answer was amazing: simple and precise. But, when I tried prepping with his method and I felt something was… off. His advice is spot on, but since we are different people, we need different stimulus to convey the same thought process. I suggest you to do the same. Take my and Jim’s advice, and try to understand the process first and only then you adapt the methodology.

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Session Prep

I separated prep into two parts: Session prep and World prep. They are two different beasts, and I will tackle only the first one. Those are the five steps of the Session Prep:

1. 🧭 Rumor: The introduction of your session, and the major clue to engage your players into action.

2. ⏳ Timer: After some pre-determined time, something really bad will happen. The sweet spot is when you don’t know if they will succeed or fail.

3. 😱 Revelation: Something that surprises everyone, and either changes their whole perspective on the situation or escalates it from 0 to 100 instantly.

4. 🗺 Location: A small simple map of the location where the conflict might happen.

5. 🏆 Treasure: Two or three main custom (not rolled from a table) rewards that the players can find during the session, either before, during or after the conflict. Most of the times it might be the villains weapon and something else.