Hello all! As the title says, I am a brand new DM about to run my very first game for my gaming group (we've been friends for over 10 years, played table top games together for over 3 years) and I'm wondering if I've put too much thought and planning into my campaign's story.
I homebrewed my own world, made maps, and I've easily written 5 sessions worth of material thanks to some hyper-fixation once I volunteered to try my hand at running a game. I know my players, and I know they appreciate having clear goals and structure, but I also want them to have options. I feel like I've maybe railroaded them a bit for these first four sessions worth of material I've written up, so I'm trying to offer some branching paths starting with the 5th session. How do you write your sessions up? Do you just have multiple paths from the get-go? Or are there more structured itineraries until the group finds themselves with more options?
Not enough planning is feeling like you aren’t ready to play your next game. Too much planning is planning for things beyond your next game.
My advice is to plan only to the point of what your players are likely to do next session, with a few contingency plans if they go off the rails. Planning more than that is pointless, unless like you said you railroad your players into it.
Now world-building is a different matter. You can make as much of the world as you want, but just remember to focus on the vicinity of the players first.
Its only too much planning if you are attached to the plans. Planning 5 full sessions is a bit too much because you don't know what the players will do in the first.
It also depends on what kind of planning you are doing. If you plan what will happen then you will be at a loss when the players inevitably don't do what you thought they would do. But if you plan locations and flush out NPCs and what they are up to, then you have all the info you need to improv and lead the players without railroading them.
I typically have long term ideas about what the BBEG is up to and how they are progressing. I know what the players need to defeat them. An I only plan one session at a time. As the story moves along i flush out lore elements as they become relevant. I also incorporate character backstories into the lore and the overall quests as they become relevant.
There's a range of preferences among both DMs and players, but in general I don't advise having a 'campaign story' at all. Instead, you have a situation. The standard way I set up plots is:
The bad guys have an objective.
The bad guys have a plan for how they're going to achieve that objective.
Something about this plan is likely to bring them in conflict with the PCs.
I have a theory about how the PCs can interfere, but if and how the PCs actually do so is up to them.
They will continue their plan until events (such as PC actions) make it no longer possible, at which point they'll come up with a new plan. I don't generally try to figure out what their backup plan is until after the PCs have interfered with the first plan.
But just know that you can plan out all you want, but there's a really high chance things wont go as planned. Whether that's players doing something you didn't expect and have to react and bridge the gap between chaos and order, or you feel like this new direction they take you in has much better potential.
There's also the risk of over planning and making things feel very railroady to the players.
When you say that it's your first time DMing for your friend group/ttg group of 10 years, should I infer that it's more or less their first time playing in a regular D&D game?
If so, I wouldn't worry about overplanning. I'd very much recommend you all stay on a railroad until you know what you're doing, rules wise. Run what you have for the first session as close as you can to it, and see how much time it takes.
Oh no, we've been playing for years now. I'm very familiar with their play styles and I know they often prefer clear goals and set quest structures so they don't feel "lost".
I would make sure to know generally what the end result/conflict is going to be, and have main dungeons that the players might encounter soon ready. Besides that, I would plan 1-3 sessions, on the higher end if you play often or think there might be weeks you’re too busy to work on it.
Okay, so it sounds like you've got a good bead on things then. Some players are self-starters and some like being on a roller coaster. Nothing wrong with that.
No matter what you do, you will simultaneously under- and over-plan. The players will go places you don’t expect, and ignore the places you do expect.
The best advice I can give with branching paths, is to have them make the choice about where to go next at the end of the session. Then you only have to plan for one direction for the next one.
I think the feedback you're getting is pretty on point. No one's going to give you the right answer for you and your group. If you're just starting, being aware of preparation gives you a step up over a lot of folks. In the end though what's going to happen is any given session your first few times out you're going to be frustrated because you prepared a bunch of stuff and used like 5 percent of it or you're going to be stressed because you felt caught off guard for the entire session, and sometimes you'll have a balance of both. Giving yourself time after each session to do a sort "after action." That could be simply thinking over the game in your head or actually keeping a journal with a written review (a sort of game diary is useful for campaign continuity but I actually keep more stuff in my head than in my notes. Eventually you'll get an understanding of what you need to do to prepare for your group.
After 2-3 sessions, do not be afraid, or at least build up the nerve, to ask your group "how am I doing?" Most people will brush off the ask with appreciation for your work. Accept but then press, "well, let's have a required answer here from everyone. Everyone needs to give me either one thing in the game so far they want me to amplify or they want to see more of, or they have to identify something they want less of or would like me to change how I go about handling it." Whatever feedback or insight DMs gain here is all well and good. I value it too. But you're focus group are really the folks who sit with you regularly and actually play with you.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I just want to thank everyone for the multiple points of view and tons of great advice. I guess I'm just full of nervous/excited energy for running my first game. Ever since I started tinkering with Beyond and catching up with Critical Role, I've been dying to get back into a fun high fantasy setting again.
yeah there's no such thing as too much planning, just be prepared to change your plan entirely when one of your players does really creative or really stupid which sends the campaign in a completely different direction, and don't let yourself fall into the mindset that some DMs seem to where they get angry at their players because their players do something that makes all of their plans pointless, don't punish creative players reward them, also if you build an encounter and your players find some way to skip it entirely or go in another direction, don't just throw that encounter away, keep it in your back pocket because you might find somewhere else appropriate to plug it in and they can sometimes be a life saver to have something set up to hit your players with if they go somewhere you're not expecting just yet
I am often described by my friends as planning too much, currently I am about 5 - 10 sessions ahead (Depending on how many side quests they do) so no matter what location my players go to, there's always something prepared, whereas my other friend whose a DM, only plans 1 session ahead, making sure at the end of the session we tell him what our plans are for the next session so he can prepare that week.
There's no such thing as too much prep, but you have to be prepared to scrap huge amounts of stuff if the players don't visit the area you go to.
My party are based in a town currently, I have bullet point quest ideas throughout the town, I started with about 20 NPCs very roughly sketched out (name, race, description), people like the mayor, the wizard who owns the magic shop, the head of the town guard, the key council members. I know who the bbeg is but my party have only been given glimpses which at the moment they have no idea what has triggered that glimpse.
Before my players formed I had a very rough world idea, sketched out a map, with lots of TBC blank areas all over it. 13 sessions in I have populated about 1/4 maybe less of that map, fed mainly by the players backstory, where they come from etc and my own ideas and thoughts.
My pantheon I have created as time has gone on, the party cleric needed to know which god would fit their calling, I decided which temples and clerics where in the starting town. But I still couldn’t tell you who my war god is, or which god is responsible for keeping secrets because my players don’t need to know.
I end each session in such a way that I know where the party are going next session so I can prepare the combat encounters, I have maps sketched out roughly for key encounters I imagine my players should get to eventually but I don’t properly create them on inkarnate until it is clear they are on the path to that point.
What I do have are bullet point notes about my world, I am immersing myself constantly in my world in my head during the day, if my mind wanders it is to my world, tweaking or throwing out ideas, the ones that stick them get notes down on a post it and then of those the ones I like get put into the Google doc.
"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." - Dwight D. Eisenhower
I think you're fine. Let your players deviate from your plans, if that's how they feel. That doesn't mean you'll have to throw out your plans entirely. You might be able to modify them.
I definitely plan several adventures into the future, so I know my plot has somewhere to go. But I don't necessarily plan them down to the level of encounters. That way I haven't wasted too much effort if it ends up not going in that direction.
There's an art to planning with the awareness that plans fall apart when they encounter reality. A more blunt formulation of Eisenhower has been sometimes attributed to Mike Tyson, but also a bunch of others, "Everybody's got a plan, until they're punched in the face." In other words, planning is more preparation to be literally "on top of your game." You should know your world enough so that if PCs go off course, it's not too much work to know where they're going. Rolling with it, so to speak.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
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Hello all! As the title says, I am a brand new DM about to run my very first game for my gaming group (we've been friends for over 10 years, played table top games together for over 3 years) and I'm wondering if I've put too much thought and planning into my campaign's story.
I homebrewed my own world, made maps, and I've easily written 5 sessions worth of material thanks to some hyper-fixation once I volunteered to try my hand at running a game. I know my players, and I know they appreciate having clear goals and structure, but I also want them to have options. I feel like I've maybe railroaded them a bit for these first four sessions worth of material I've written up, so I'm trying to offer some branching paths starting with the 5th session. How do you write your sessions up? Do you just have multiple paths from the get-go? Or are there more structured itineraries until the group finds themselves with more options?
Not enough planning is feeling like you aren’t ready to play your next game. Too much planning is planning for things beyond your next game.
My advice is to plan only to the point of what your players are likely to do next session, with a few contingency plans if they go off the rails. Planning more than that is pointless, unless like you said you railroad your players into it.
Now world-building is a different matter. You can make as much of the world as you want, but just remember to focus on the vicinity of the players first.
Its only too much planning if you are attached to the plans. Planning 5 full sessions is a bit too much because you don't know what the players will do in the first.
It also depends on what kind of planning you are doing. If you plan what will happen then you will be at a loss when the players inevitably don't do what you thought they would do. But if you plan locations and flush out NPCs and what they are up to, then you have all the info you need to improv and lead the players without railroading them.
I typically have long term ideas about what the BBEG is up to and how they are progressing. I know what the players need to defeat them. An I only plan one session at a time. As the story moves along i flush out lore elements as they become relevant. I also incorporate character backstories into the lore and the overall quests as they become relevant.
There's a range of preferences among both DMs and players, but in general I don't advise having a 'campaign story' at all. Instead, you have a situation. The standard way I set up plots is:
Definitely plan.
But just know that you can plan out all you want, but there's a really high chance things wont go as planned. Whether that's players doing something you didn't expect and have to react and bridge the gap between chaos and order, or you feel like this new direction they take you in has much better potential.
There's also the risk of over planning and making things feel very railroady to the players.
When you say that it's your first time DMing for your friend group/ttg group of 10 years, should I infer that it's more or less their first time playing in a regular D&D game?
If so, I wouldn't worry about overplanning. I'd very much recommend you all stay on a railroad until you know what you're doing, rules wise. Run what you have for the first session as close as you can to it, and see how much time it takes.
Oh no, we've been playing for years now. I'm very familiar with their play styles and I know they often prefer clear goals and set quest structures so they don't feel "lost".
I would make sure to know generally what the end result/conflict is going to be, and have main dungeons that the players might encounter soon ready. Besides that, I would plan 1-3 sessions, on the higher end if you play often or think there might be weeks you’re too busy to work on it.
Only spilt the party if you see something shiny.
Ariendela Sneakerson, Half-elf Rogue (8); Harmony Wolfsbane, Tiefling Bard (10); Agnomally, Gnomish Sorcerer (3); Breeze, Tabaxi Monk (8); Grace, Dragonborn Barbarian (7); DM, Homebrew- The Sequestered Lands/Underwater Explorers; Candlekeep
Okay, so it sounds like you've got a good bead on things then. Some players are self-starters and some like being on a roller coaster. Nothing wrong with that.
No matter what you do, you will simultaneously under- and over-plan. The players will go places you don’t expect, and ignore the places you do expect.
The best advice I can give with branching paths, is to have them make the choice about where to go next at the end of the session. Then you only have to plan for one direction for the next one.
I think the feedback you're getting is pretty on point. No one's going to give you the right answer for you and your group. If you're just starting, being aware of preparation gives you a step up over a lot of folks. In the end though what's going to happen is any given session your first few times out you're going to be frustrated because you prepared a bunch of stuff and used like 5 percent of it or you're going to be stressed because you felt caught off guard for the entire session, and sometimes you'll have a balance of both. Giving yourself time after each session to do a sort "after action." That could be simply thinking over the game in your head or actually keeping a journal with a written review (a sort of game diary is useful for campaign continuity but I actually keep more stuff in my head than in my notes. Eventually you'll get an understanding of what you need to do to prepare for your group.
After 2-3 sessions, do not be afraid, or at least build up the nerve, to ask your group "how am I doing?" Most people will brush off the ask with appreciation for your work. Accept but then press, "well, let's have a required answer here from everyone. Everyone needs to give me either one thing in the game so far they want me to amplify or they want to see more of, or they have to identify something they want less of or would like me to change how I go about handling it." Whatever feedback or insight DMs gain here is all well and good. I value it too. But you're focus group are really the folks who sit with you regularly and actually play with you.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I just want to thank everyone for the multiple points of view and tons of great advice. I guess I'm just full of nervous/excited energy for running my first game. Ever since I started tinkering with Beyond and catching up with Critical Role, I've been dying to get back into a fun high fantasy setting again.
yeah there's no such thing as too much planning, just be prepared to change your plan entirely when one of your players does really creative or really stupid which sends the campaign in a completely different direction, and don't let yourself fall into the mindset that some DMs seem to where they get angry at their players because their players do something that makes all of their plans pointless, don't punish creative players reward them, also if you build an encounter and your players find some way to skip it entirely or go in another direction, don't just throw that encounter away, keep it in your back pocket because you might find somewhere else appropriate to plug it in and they can sometimes be a life saver to have something set up to hit your players with if they go somewhere you're not expecting just yet
I am often described by my friends as planning too much, currently I am about 5 - 10 sessions ahead (Depending on how many side quests they do) so no matter what location my players go to, there's always something prepared, whereas my other friend whose a DM, only plans 1 session ahead, making sure at the end of the session we tell him what our plans are for the next session so he can prepare that week.
There's no such thing as too much prep, but you have to be prepared to scrap huge amounts of stuff if the players don't visit the area you go to.
My party are based in a town currently, I have bullet point quest ideas throughout the town, I started with about 20 NPCs very roughly sketched out (name, race, description), people like the mayor, the wizard who owns the magic shop, the head of the town guard, the key council members. I know who the bbeg is but my party have only been given glimpses which at the moment they have no idea what has triggered that glimpse.
Before my players formed I had a very rough world idea, sketched out a map, with lots of TBC blank areas all over it. 13 sessions in I have populated about 1/4 maybe less of that map, fed mainly by the players backstory, where they come from etc and my own ideas and thoughts.
My pantheon I have created as time has gone on, the party cleric needed to know which god would fit their calling, I decided which temples and clerics where in the starting town. But I still couldn’t tell you who my war god is, or which god is responsible for keeping secrets because my players don’t need to know.
I end each session in such a way that I know where the party are going next session so I can prepare the combat encounters, I have maps sketched out roughly for key encounters I imagine my players should get to eventually but I don’t properly create them on inkarnate until it is clear they are on the path to that point.
What I do have are bullet point notes about my world, I am immersing myself constantly in my world in my head during the day, if my mind wanders it is to my world, tweaking or throwing out ideas, the ones that stick them get notes down on a post it and then of those the ones I like get put into the Google doc.
"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." - Dwight D. Eisenhower
I think you're fine. Let your players deviate from your plans, if that's how they feel. That doesn't mean you'll have to throw out your plans entirely. You might be able to modify them.
I definitely plan several adventures into the future, so I know my plot has somewhere to go. But I don't necessarily plan them down to the level of encounters. That way I haven't wasted too much effort if it ends up not going in that direction.
There's an art to planning with the awareness that plans fall apart when they encounter reality. A more blunt formulation of Eisenhower has been sometimes attributed to Mike Tyson, but also a bunch of others, "Everybody's got a plan, until they're punched in the face." In other words, planning is more preparation to be literally "on top of your game." You should know your world enough so that if PCs go off course, it's not too much work to know where they're going. Rolling with it, so to speak.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.