GM's Tip of the Week

A GM’s work is pretty intensive; we spend a lot of time on a world, we spend hours writing background, NPCs, hooking together plot – and that assumes we aren’t starting with a published module or adventure path. It’s a lot of work, and not all of us have a lot of time to do that kind of time-intensive plotting, not to mention all the writing.

A good solution for the time-crunched is not to plan. Turn your players loose in a small part of your reality and see what happens. Not only does this take a chunk off your work load, but it gets your group invested in the game; a win situation all around!

For those of us starting with modules or adventure paths who still want to use this technique, go for it. Check player histories for what I call ‘big rusty hooks’ – things you can use to personalize the campaign, and make appropriate adjustments. Be careful though; doing this can sometimes lead to /more/ work. But it will give you alternatives for fights or areas you don’t want to include for some reason. A good example; I dropped a whole book from Rise of the Runelords because I just didn’t like the set up, and replaced it with something that came out from the backgrounds of two of my players.

The group got what they were supposed to get from the dropped module, the players got a wild shock and I got to sit back and watch them think their way out of Alcatraz Lite. Everybody won. And that’s what you want in the end; everybody getting something out of it. Everybody winning.