The first thing you need is a good, improvisational background. Improv is the key to good TRPGs; without it, you'll never be able to respond to your players in a natural way. Further, the most important thing in a tabletop game is the feeling of agency--the sense that players are capable of making meaningful choices. If your game doesn't inspire a feeling of agency, your players are not going to be getting everything out of the game that they could. So already in trying to address overpreparing, we have two ideas that complicate things: the story must be able to change in response to the players, and the story must allow the players to make meaningful choices. Without these two ingredients, it doesn't matter whether you overprepare or underprepare--your game will be an abbreviation of what it could be.
So let's say that you've practiced your improv skills and committed to making your players capable of choices. Now it's time to write a session for your player characters to explore. For sake of an example, let's say your story is about a small town which is being raided by bandits and needs help defending itself. You're envisioning a story of the common person being held down and the heroic deeds of the players. So you want to write your session notes about a group of townsfolk who need help with a small group of bandits. Then the townsfolk at large come together and request the further help of the party, who are asked to venture into the nearby woods to clear out the bandit camp. In the end, the leader of the town makes the party official heroes of the town and holds a great banquet to celebrate being free of the bandits. This is a good outline. You may be tempted to fill in further details, but I would steer you away from doing so. This framework for a session is very spare, but it should be enough to run the session.
You can avoid overpreparing if you let yourself be comfortable with not having everything spelled out already. When I prepare for my sessions for the mystery campaign, I keep my notes about this brief. Three or so small scripted events and a few details about the characters involved is enough to run a session, truly. The benefit of this method of design is that you have the general framework for your session and you can plug in details as you see fit, but if the players deviate from the path of the story, you're not dealing with the loss of a great deal of prep work. And the players will deviate from the path of the story--it's what they do. I can easily imagine this example playing out as follows: the players meet the initial townsfolk and hear about the danger of the bandits, but the players are so invested in the townsfolk that they hang around chatting rather than going to deal with the bandits. You don't have any notes on what to do now. You have to improvise. You could take several possible routes: the townsfolk could become very concerned about the bandits and plead with the party for help now; the bandits could come and attack town again to get the players moving; you could even go off in a new direction and have the townsfolk ask for help with a new problem such as building defenses for the next attack. The thing that matters is that your story honor the players' contributions, so if the players do leave the realm of your outline, just go with it.
I've been speaking with a friend recently who is interested in GMing for the first time. This friend is very concerned about overpreparing, which is part of why I decided to write this article. And I understand why they're concerned; writing your first adventure raises a lot of questions about how to prepare for the unexpected. Their theory is that if they were to construct a storyline with multiple possible paths, not unlike a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story, they would be able to anticipate all possible player actions within reason. I respect this approach, and it does have strengths and abilities which make it a good strategy. But I would counter that no amount of preparation can prepare you for player choices. The very friend who wants to create this branching-path adventure is a part of my mystery campaign, where the players decided to investigate a murder by starting a business. What I'm saying is this: you can't ever anticipate every player choice. The best you can hope for is filling in the spaces between your plans and the players' actions, and if you already have to fill in the details between things, why not lean into improvising? If you're already playing it by ear some of the time, why not most of the time?
So it's clear that we need to be ready to abandon our plans if the players get a wild idea--but what can we actually prepare that won't put us on a path to railroading? I'll refer here back to my mystery campaign outline. I prepare for those sessions with a simple set of information, and that outline will work for just about any campaign or one-shot. Here are the components:
- Secret to Discover: I use this to guide the overall session, as this is the end goal of a session. Because we're running a mystery, progress is marked by discovering information, but this idea could also be expressed with something like "End Goal," or something that indicates this is the success condition for moving on to the next part of the story.
- Setup: In this section, I explain the context of the session and why the players are doing what they're doing. I include any information that sets the story up and rules that will keep the story moving. This can be an especially useful bit of information midway through a campaign, as it tracks the previous progress of the players towards their goals.
- Characters: Here I list any NPCs who will figure in the story as I have outlined it. I try to include enough information about each character to be able to portray them in a unique way; at the very least, you need a name and a race and a general age, not to mention the frame of a personality. Developing these characters in this space here will allow you to have a good idea of the major players in the story before you get started.
- Clues: Again, this term exists because I am running a mystery campaign; you could substitute this with "Scenes" because they are simply the major story moments that I have determined will occur before the end of the session. In my outline, these clues lead from one to the next sequentially, but you don't have to follow that method. Take care when writing these scenes to not include any assumed player actions. Only what you can execute on your own should be represented here.
- Bonus for Completing Session: This can be in the form of experience, loot, statistical bonuses, or any other boon you may want to bestow on your characters. I generally like the reward to fit the action thematically, such as rewarding good investigation with a boost to Investigation.
And that's kind of all you need to run a session. Anything beyond this will encroach on the players' territory of making meaningful choices, and it will blow up in your face when the players decide on another route to success.
I have been ignoring one detail here: some GMs don't mind overpreparing and having to play it by ear midway through. If that's you, congratulations! You have more patience and acceptance than most folks. If you like the act of preparing and don't railroad your players with your plans, you're doing everything right. But for most GMs, overpreparing can be a demoralizing part of the game, and since the point is to have fun, you want to avoid that. So abide by this guide, write just the right amount of prep work, and watch your game open up to player decisions.
That's all for now. Coming soon: how to describe setting, how to involve player character-related NPCs in the game, and how to allow player characters to customize their appearances. Until next time, happy gaming!
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