I’m a planner. It drives me crazy when I don’t know what is happening next (or for the next few months, for that matter). As a gamemaster (GM), you’ll have to decide how far ahead to plan your sessions. Roleplaying games (RPG’s) present a special challenge to your planning: players and the dice have an effect on what happens next.
In this article, we’ll look at three time frames from planning your sessions, their advantages and disadvantages. As always, there is no “One True Way”, and you may use all three time frames under different circumstances.
ONE SESSION
In some cases, GM’s will only plan for one session. For example, there’s no point in planning more than one session for a convention game. If you are starting with a new group, you may want your first session to be self-contained. This gives them the opportunity for a complete adventure right off the bat. Also, some GM’s only plan for one session to better respond to their players goals and interests. Sometimes something a player says or does provides clear direction for planning the next session.
Single session planning does have some drawbacks. If players burn through your adventure faster than you planned, you’ll have to scramble for “what comes next.” You may not be able to foreshadow the next session, It’s difficult to provide hooks for a future story if you don’t have one in mind.
TWO TO THREE SESSIONS
Planning a couple of sessions (or so) ahead has a lot of advantages. You’ll always have extra material if your players complete a major task early. You’ll be able to foreshadow the next session and provide story hooks early. Three sessions or so can form a nice mini-campaign. Planning a few sessions ahead still allows you to respond to player interest. While you may not address the very next session, your players still won’t have to wait long.
To avoid railroading when planning several sessions, you may want to consider Island Design Theory. This allows you to plan ahead (good for your own sanity), while still allowing the sessions to move around (good for player empowerment). If you don’t want to change the order of your sessions, you can also just change the goal. Instead of entering the Tomb of Possible Dismemberment to find the Sword of Eld, they can go in to capture the scoundrel Mr. Raeus instead. A final issue is that you may plan sessions and then not use them. Sometimes player actions take the campaign in a different direction. Be sure to save these unused gems for another time.
LONG TERM
In this time-frame, you map out the campaign from beginning to end. The goal is to hit the major plot points and reach the finale. You may have side adventures along the way, but they are not the main focus. This allows you to use foreshadowing and recurring villains to craft a true epic. This sense of an over-arching story can help motivate players to return session after session.
This time-frame can be especially susceptible to railroading. Again, Island Design Theory can help keep the campaign more fluid and responsive to the player characters actions. It also requires a lot of foresight and planning on the GM’s part. Some GM’s may not want to feel so constrained. If you decide that you’d like to change the flavor of a campaign in midstream, players may still want a resolution to the main storyline. Lastly, you may plot out an epic campaign, only to have real life cut it short in the middle. Sadly, it happens.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Of course there are many other options. Some games support developing sessions collaboratively on the fly. No (or minimal) planning needed. Another option is to have a general campaign goal in mind, but to prepare sessions as you get to them. Ultimately, you’ll have to see what works best for you and your group.
How far ahead to you prepare? What other benefits and concerns can you suggest? Let us know below.
I follow the Dungeon World philosophy, which I read right before I started my d&d 5e campaign.
I only build the current adventure, but potential future adventures are foreshadowed (based on my campaign fronts).
It really depends on the sort of game you’re running, I think. When I was running more episodic games, where the adventures were more discrete, I only planned enough to run that particular few sessions. When I was running campaigns that had a goal or endpoint — like my short Babylon 5 game, or the more recent and long-lived Battlestar Galactica game, I had an overarching plan and theme, with a few waypoints — things that either had to happen (with variations on a theme), but generally. My most recent campaign has been much more sandbox — I had a few ideas, but mostly I would throw something at the players each session, see what happened, and play jazz on their reactions.
Generally, I like to have a few episodes hazily planned out, and I firm them up, adapt them, or swap order as the players wreck havoc on the game world and take an interest in certain paths of action.
I recently was running a home brew campaign where I knew the end big boss based on character back grounds and goals. Then we ran a player motivated sandbox. Based on what plot hooks they followed I wrote an adventure and let them follow it, doing improv if they turned left when the story turned right. They returned to most stories they were interested in and completed them on their own time. Occasionally I entered NPCs to move them forward to the end game. I am not sure what style this is, but it worked.
Over all, my style usually is melded to the campaign the players want – an not always successfully! Sadly my home brew campaign was recently ended by life occurrences. The villain awaits the party in vain.
John, I’m not a planner, at least not a planner like you are, and that’s cool but I wanted to provide an alternate thought for this article.
How about no sessions which can look a little like long term but is about giving yourself the tools to react to the players on the fly. I mean you didn’t actually specify what is prep for your session so lets look at what one could prep for one week so they can play multiple weeks without a lot of follow up prep.
Give yourself a goal for the antagonists or conversely a goal for the PCs
Put together a bunch of locations with some bullet points to help describe them
Put together a bunch of NPCs with some bullet points to help present and play them.
If your games require stat blocks and such or a location map then you’ll need those too but you can come up with some simple templates and then just improvise off of the general themes and information you’ve given yourself.
Such general templates are just taking CR X stat blocks for D&D and reskinning them as you need and even adding or removing powers as you need to. If you’re looking for that balanced encounter kind of referee play that looks more like a mini’s skirmish game this might not be the best way to do it unless you understand and have internalized how the numbers of your game work. It does work exceptionally well for play where you’re more interested in collaborative storytelling where you’d like to have a base to build on so you can just create stuff on the fly.
When it comes to a map you can always just craft or grab your map and then jot notes down on the map for yourself for what kind of things you want to have in there as reminders and then use your general templates plus your NPCs, locations, and knowledge of what the antagonists are trying to do to act and react to the PCs.
It’s a different kind of prep to go along with the three that were presented and I just wanted to slide it out there.
I think a lot in terms of Dungeon World, and only prep the next session. I always try to get a good idea of what my players are going to do in the next session, even if I have to ask to them what their characters plan to do now that they’ve escaped the Spider Forest.
I’m running a campaign using Savage Worlds, but I picked up Dungeon World a couple months ago and really like a lot of the ideas presented there. Like Justin, I also make campaign and adventure fronts to get an idea of where I want things to go, but ALWAYS “play to see what happens”.