My Campaign Planning Cycle
Ryder asks in my previous post about level of readiness in your campaign planning how I find time to work on my campaign between game sessions. My current recipe is very successful, based on years of trial and error and from facing a ton of time theft from other parts of my life.
Bi-Weekly Game Sessions
We play every other Thursday night, from 6:30 until 10:30. My players have families, jobs, friends, and other hobbies, so gaming every 14 days is a great compromise. I say compromise because I could game master every day, if given the opportunity.) GMing daily would actually reduce my preparation needs!
Game mastering every other week lets me split my planning time into two phases: gathering ideas and thoughts, and design.
Week 1: Gathering Ideas and Thoughts
The first week involves mulling over previous session events, NPCs, plots, the campaign arc, and the game world.
Unless the entire session was spent in a small cardboard box at the bottom of a lake, there will be consequences to character actions from the last session and earlier sessions. Even if, for some weird reason, the whole game was spent hacking wandering monsters, that activity at the least would change the ecosystem in the region, providing fodder for new encounter and plot ideas.
Did the PCs change the attitude or behaviour of any important NPCs? (Let’s say death is a form of behaviour change, lol.) Did they knock out the top layer of the food chain, the bottom layer, or any important layer in between? Did something new get introduced into the mix, such as a disease, powerful magic item, or important knowledge?
For a week I’ll noodle over what the PCs have done and how that makes an impact. This is a great opportunity to do blue sky thinking about consequences, unshackled with having to make decisions or designs at this stage. This is a great time to introduce new elements just so they can react to the PCs, or to loop in old elements for a surprise, or to connect two elements to stir things up. By element, I mean NPC, plot, location, treasure – any noun in your game.
What author said the most important part of writing fiction is the question What if? Was it Ray Bradbury? I can’t remember. For anything that comes to mind about any aspect of the campaign while I’m driving, or watching TV, or doing email, I’ll ask What if? Why? So what?
This interrogation is a great way to chew on ideas to see what sticks, what reveals holes, what needs more noodling. For a whole week, without any pressure, I’ll just think and imagine the campaign, adventure, and game world, letting everything slowly circle the bowl until week two comes around.
Week 2: Design
By the time week two arrives I’ll have several leading ideas. I will have thoughts burning away and many ideas jotted out on paper or in my Getting Things Done RPG email organization system. It’s time to create stuff for consumption in the next game session.
Design is one of my favourite parts of game mastering but it’s easy to procrastinate. I’ll get busy with other priority stuff or I’ll come home tired and not feeling creative. I’ll have an e-zine to publish, or a family thing, or….a thousand excuses.
It’s rare now that I get a large block of time that I can either devote to design or last the entire way through without interruption or distraction.
My solution is to craft an encounter a day. Seven days, seven encounters. Sessions, on average, consume four or five encounters. This gives me a buffer of two. Sometimes I won’t make seven, so I need to draw on my buffer. Sometimes I’ll take an old, outdated, and unused encounter and update it for current campaign power level and situation. During game sessions, the PCs will do something unexpected, and an unused encounter is perfect to stall with or to drop in and make new game progress.
Mike Bourke made a comment about just writing 1-3 lines for game elements until they are needed, and then he’ll flesh them out in greater detail. This is an excellent tip. I’ll have several encounter seeds like this written down by the end of week 2 as well. These will be for ideas whose time has not come, for encounters currently relevant but I’ve run out of design time, or they were given low priority because they weren’t likely to trigger.
As for world design, that’s trickier and I’m behind the curve on that right now. My top priority is prepping encounters for use next game. That usually leaves me few cycles to do world creation. However, I’m always thinking about the game world, and it’s being fleshed out in the ol ‘noggin. Soon I’ll have enough of an encounter buffer from extra designs or from dropping in one of the published modules I’d like to try out in my current campaign – or a session will be cancelled – and I can spend a couple weeks on world design and documentation instead of session prep.
You Gotta Enjoy Campaign Design
A final word on this is you need to enjoy creating stuff for your campaign. This is different than feeling lassitude or being too busy or frazzled to get into the right frame of mind for creation. If designing stuff is not your thing then this approach will not work for you. The second week will be hell and full of avoidance, guilt, and bad feelings because you are avoiding something you set out for yourself to do. That path leads to burnout and eventual departure from game mastering. Look for other preparation methods, game systems, or game master styles to make up for a role that traditionally has required a lot of design work.
That’s my campaign planning cycle. What’s yours?
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January 28th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
That’s a great planning cycle. I like the move from concepts/ideas to defining those to creating the session.
Mine tends to be deductive in that I go from the specific to the general. What are the characters going to do next? From that specific, how does it branch out to affect the larger picture? I try to work within the idea of story arcs, but I don’t have that down. Personally, 4e makes planning a lot easier than previous editions as I can plan by level, so to speak; what encounters will move the party from level 2 to 3, and how do those fit into the broader story to create a progressive campaign and not episodic leveling? Once I have an idea of how various encounters will fit together to move the party where they want to go (with lots of room for them to spin things on their heads), I work out the exact encounters with special attention to the characters various spotlight abilities or characteristics.
Rafe’s last blog post..The Three "R"s of Session Planning
January 28th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
[…] out his new GM Advice blog at CampaignMastery.com. Recent posts include My Campaign Planning Cycle and DM Tool: Scrabble Tiles for Your Minis & […]
January 30th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
I wish I had the two weeks in between sessions, that would help me always be ready, especially on weeks when I have a ton of homework/responsibilities.
February 5th, 2009 at 3:28 am
[…] brainstorm or document, and then change the structure – move things around – as you write. When I plan for game sessions, I’ll leap from one idea to the next, in no particular order once I get going. Sure, I could […]
February 5th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
John, I’m grateful for your comments, I’ve put them in use. I’ll tell you how they work.
February 27th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
I follow a similar model for campaign prep and design. The area where we probably differ is that I work from the world down to the encounters, where it seems you work from the encounters up to the world. My weak point is in encounter planning, in that I hardly ever plan encounters and usually improvise them as they come along. I just started a new bi weekly campaign and I’m trying very hard this time to actually plan the encounters and really streamline the campaign for maximum awesome fun impact. If you have any advice It would be greatly appreciated.
Jack Crow’s last blog post..Awesome Pic of the Week
February 28th, 2009 at 10:34 am
@Jack: Top down is a great approach to session planning. First, it gives you a ton of details to ad lib with when needed. GMs who only plan encounters find it more difficult to make things up as they go within the context of their settings, and consequently end up with more consistency issues to clean up after games.
Also, top down is less reactive to the PCs. This helps create realistic situations and settings.
As for tips on encounter planning, is there something in particular that gives you difficulty? If you can narrow your request a bit I’ll use it for an upcoming Ask the GMs feature.
March 1st, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Thanks Johnn, feel free to use this for an ask the GMs feature if you want.
I generally use the fly by the seat of my pants method of encounter creation. Sometimes it works out, most of the time I am disappointed with the end result and wish I’d planned it better. The advice that I’m really looking for is;
1) What is a good starting point for designing an encounter?
2) What are some suggestions for making unique encounters that keep the players guessing and excited?
2) What are some suggestions for plotting important story point encounters while avoiding the standard “boss fight” style confrontation model?
3) Rules (d20 is fine) or suggestions for environmental effects during an encounter. Such as; Falling rocks, battles on rickety bridges etc…
4) Pacing. How do you ensure the encounter is well paced and exciting?
Thanks for the help.
Cheers,
Jack
Jack Crow’s last blog post..How I play the game
March 4th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Great questions Jack! I’ll put these in the queue.
March 18th, 2012 at 7:14 am
[…] Autor: Johnn Four Übersetzung: Michael Beck Originalartikel: My Campaign Planning Cycle […]