Improvisation vs Planning
So the other day I was running one of our later sessions. It was session 176 (for reference, book two has just been published and it is currently sitting at the end of that book starting the beginning of session 12), and the players were being dangled between two different factions that could bring them to the upcoming boss fight. Rather than them picking a side, they managed to manipulate both sides and get them both to believe the party is helping their faction. This brought them to the boss’s room without them needing to fight a mini boss along the way, and removed minions from the battlefield that could have tied them up were they to be dealing with the main boss alone instead.
(Obviously there are massive spoilers in there, so please forgive my vagueness in describing the situation).
Why do I bring up something that will probably happen in book… 30 or so… when I’ve not even released book 3 yet? I’ll tell you.
See, I do a lot of prep for this game. Have been for almost a decade now. I’ve created factions, NPCs, dungeons, stat blocks, magic items, mundane items, and put in hours upon hours of research into mythology, history, and technology to the point where I’m pretty sure I’ve ended up on some watch lists for the sake of realism. I’m not saying this to brag, but to point out that a lot of work goes into creating a campaign, when you know full well that there is a very strong possibility that some of it will never see the light of day. In fact, I’ve mentioned before that three factions I created went practically unused based on my player’s choices early in the game. Two of which were never put in the game or books, one of those two I’ve actually forgotten about and cannot find the files that had these original notes in them.
Player agency creates more variables for outcomes than any roll of the dice. I learned long ago that I shouldn’t put too much into my planning because once I start getting bogged down with minutia, I’ve also started wasting my own time. The odds of my players going down this specific of a rabbit hole is astronomical. The better idea is to just create some kind of outline they can follow, and that I can adapt on the fly. Certain things require great detail, lots of NPCs that you’ve met have their own character sheets on my phone, some have access to spells that either were in UAs (unearthed arcana) or that I created, and some have entire dialogues prewritten as box text.
Others get made up on the fly and I have to ask Nicole to restate something from the notes for me so I can remember their names because I couldn’t be bothered to write it down in a notebook last session, so now I’m in a mad rush to recreate someone or something from two weeks prior and hastily read notes. Guess which is often the preferred method of my group.
Currently there are two NPCs helping the party: one is a new DMPC meant to give them insight into one of the factions they’re currently working with, while the other was an afterthought that I came up with first by one player asking if there was a karaoke machine in the room he stepped into (three guesses who that was) and the second being I finished rereading the story that inspired this part of the arc. The thought out character with a backstory and character sheet is getting sidelined by the improvised character, and not just by them, but by me. Their interactions with her are just so much more interesting, that the other is warming the bench.
Now, I’m not always going to say that improv is better than planning. Having at least a semblance of a plan makes for a much better night at the gaming table. A post-it note with “sexy goblin” written on it will only get you so far, but with the right table and a little trust in yourself, blending the two ideas together will go a long way to making your games that much better.
