Heya , how do you guys prep/keep notes using old school pen and paper and pre written campaigns?
i tend to just write bullet points with the page nr down for prep and read teough what i think my players will get to that session. During session i just take notes on some noteworthy stuff and basicly thats it. I’m wondering how other people do it
Different people will have different methods, and not all methods may work for the same people. For a famous example, Matt Mercer does a LOT of prep work, has detailed lore docs, whereas Brennan Lee Mulligan relies a lot more heavily on improvisation and his lore documents are highly sporadic and disorganized.
If you're only going to run a pre-written module strictly on-book, you probably don't need a lot of notes. If you're going to tweak things, or have ideas for scenes/NPC/dialogue to add, that'll require more notes.
EDIT: For instance, I'm running Spelljammer Academy, and was dissatisfied with a villain's thought process, and motivation for a specific act of villainy, which seemed to only serve to incriminate themself. As written, it felt like there were missing steps in the plan. I thought about it and worked out a better motivation and plan, to patch some of the holes.
Honestly, pre-written adventures require no prep at all on my part. Like literally none.
For good or bad, if you follow that book there's little to nothing that you as a GM should need to keep track of. The only real improv that's needed is NPC dialogue, but you get that with almost everything. The books tend to give you the gist of how the NPCs will respond. It is perhaps the simplest way to GM. The book is open in front of you behind your GM screen, and you flip through it as you go.
The caveat to this is if you're running a more advanced adventure like CoS or Vecna. In which case you might need to keep track of some stuff, but I just have a separate sheet on which to record these (effectively a handwritten version of the page in the book).
Heya , how do you guys prep/keep notes using old school pen and paper and pre written campaigns?
i tend to just write bullet points with the page nr down for prep and read teough what i think my players will get to that session. During session i just take notes on some noteworthy stuff and basicly thats it. I’m wondering how other people do it
Different people will have different methods, and not all methods may work for the same people. For a famous example, Matt Mercer does a LOT of prep work, has detailed lore docs, whereas Brennan Lee Mulligan relies a lot more heavily on improvisation and his lore documents are highly sporadic and disorganized.
If you're only going to run a pre-written module strictly on-book, you probably don't need a lot of notes. If you're going to tweak things, or have ideas for scenes/NPC/dialogue to add, that'll require more notes.
EDIT: For instance, I'm running Spelljammer Academy, and was dissatisfied with a villain's thought process, and motivation for a specific act of villainy, which seemed to only serve to incriminate themself. As written, it felt like there were missing steps in the plan. I thought about it and worked out a better motivation and plan, to patch some of the holes.
Honestly, pre-written adventures require no prep at all on my part. Like literally none.
For good or bad, if you follow that book there's little to nothing that you as a GM should need to keep track of. The only real improv that's needed is NPC dialogue, but you get that with almost everything. The books tend to give you the gist of how the NPCs will respond. It is perhaps the simplest way to GM. The book is open in front of you behind your GM screen, and you flip through it as you go.
The caveat to this is if you're running a more advanced adventure like CoS or Vecna. In which case you might need to keep track of some stuff, but I just have a separate sheet on which to record these (effectively a handwritten version of the page in the book).
Pre-written are to my mind a no-prep thing.
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