As for locations, I think it's a rabbit hole of wasted design effort to require that a location be "mapped and detailed" before you use it.

I'm sorry, but I need the visuals. I must have the map, and I cannot on-the-fly map making. We play in a VTT (Foundry), and it takes time to build, import, and set up walls/visual line of sight on a map. Does playing D&D "require" this? No. But without the line of site features, there are spoilers all over the place as the players can view the entire map. 

And no, I cannot do theater of the mind. It just does not work for me, especially once a battle starts. My players similarly like to see positions, angles, cover, lines of sight, etc. There is no way I would be able to successfully "pants" this.

Additionally, I am horrible at coming up with off-the-cuff descriptions. I've seen what people like Mercer can do. I cannot do that on the fly. Now, mind you, I can absolutely bury Mercer with a descriptive passage like nothing he's ever attempted, if I am given an hour and a word processor, and time to think and write. But I cannot do it on the fly, so my descriptions of things that I have not worked out beforehand tend to be terse, limited, and (after the fact, to me) highly unsatisfactory.

On the fly, I will say something like, "It's a guard room and you see some guards and they have weapons." That's what I can come up with live while the cameras and mics are on and we are in Zoom.

Working in quiet and writing it out, I will write something like, "The room is dank and musty. The only light is provided by a flickering candle on the table. Two scruffy men in leather armor were seated in rickety chairs at the table, playing some sort of game with a pair of dice, and there are a few copper coins on the table near the dice. The men look around as you enter, and the chair legs scrape as they rise to their feet, hands going to their swords."

Some people can do the 2nd one on the fly - I cannot.

Additionally, I am not going to be very good at coming up with town layouts, shop names, NPC personalities, etc., again, completely on the fly. I can do it, but it will be patently obvious to the players that I am just winging it, and it won't be anywhere near as good as what I can do with some prep time.

Sure - like I said that it doesn't work for some people. 

And I hadn't considered VTT battle mats; I'm pretty much theatre of the mind with abstract maps ( at best ).

I'm not trying to say my way is the way anyone "should" be doing it - just that if you can adapt that kind of style, it lends itself to a very flexible game narrative, with pretty efficient design energy expenditure.

It can - however - lose some of the polish and detail that a more pre-planned approach will have.

In person I would not be as concerned with maps. But online with zoom + VTT... the maps are quite important, since I can't do things like set up miniatures and match boxes for walls to help the players see what is going on.

Just out of curiosity do VTT allow for or have a simple "white board" mode for like old school football play diagrams  (PCs are the O's, opposition are the X's, the big X is the dragon)?  I guess that would render the whole VTT moot aside from the character sheets (in which case you might was well be playing in DDB encounter builder).  I usually do theater of the mind, but will occasionally make recourse to a white board if spatial relations really need to be put down (most often when we have melee combatants in different spots of the battle space and ranged attackers are also in the mix).  .  

Yes, you can do "white boards" on them.

Again, I am not good at just coming up with a dungeon map that is any good off the top of my head. I need to mull over it, do different drafts, think on it, do more drafts, etc. Nothing I come up with is any good in first draft. I have to produce the map and start populating it with denizens, and then I get more ideas, go back and revise, etc. There is no way to revise when improv'ing and I am just not good at it.

Some people are -- great. I am not. I know my strengths, and my weaknesses.

Incidentally, I have no problem doing the improv of a game like Ironsworn - solo. But I wouldn't try to do that with a group of players unless we had all agreed to let random dice rolls determine the story.

So the way I used to do it, and am returning to now that I've returned to the game, I generally create a "sandbox" with a few major "locales" (lairs, centers of power, "scenes of the crime" type things) where the major encounters are going to be.  I create maybe 3-4 encounters for each region of the sandbox, so minion types, some powerbroker types (who can either vouchsafe PCs through an area or make an area a nightmare for them depending on the PCs interaction), maybe a natural hazard or other danger.  Then I do basically a link analysis.  Mapping out either an X-Y grid if there's really only one power structure, or do a full on webbed network if we're talking about a factionalized environment or a war zone.  From there my adventure is sort of a SITREP that just explains to me (and gives me notes or "facts on the ground" to explain to PCs as they come across them) the general conditions and conflicts in the area, and a rough idea as to how they'll play out if the PCs do nothing.  Then the PCs through their action produce ripples in the network, and so the plot goes forth.  I want to say I got this style of sandbox with a story as backdrop probably from playing Twilight: 2000 back in the day than any particular D&D experience.  The Europe adventures were a little railroady (the last module actually involving taking a train), but the U.S. ones were a bit more open world, particularly the one set in New York City.  The whole module was just explaining post apocalyptic metro politics and foodways.

I've done this with Descent into Avernus, supplemented by a GMsGuild pub written by the authors that added an additional path to the two in the adventure, plus two intelligence networks (Burney the Brass Dragon and the Yuggoloth's respective spy networks) who've both actually done the power mapping I've described in game.  Once the characters leave Elturel in one campaign or debark the River Styx in the other, they do whatever the Hell they want, so to speak, maybe meeting at Zariel's sword, maybe just showing up at the big fight at the end with whoever they ultimately side with.  I'm playing Avernus as a place where intelligent encounters are more likely to parlay if not out right talk than immediately roll for initiative, my players naturally fight only when they have to and prefer to ask questions before shooting, so not too worried about some locales inhabitants being overkill if they just landed on the plane.  Out of the Abyss, Storm Kings Thunder, and to a lesser extent the Tiamat modules are all rife for this sort of unbinding.  Rime of the Frostmaiden possibly but it's a little compact.

The mention of encounters brings up another point about why I don't like to "pants" it -- I tend to mull a good deal over "dungeon ecology." I try to make sure that each room has some sort of natural inhabitant or natural function, and that all the rooms make sense and go together. I want the place to feel real. I can't do that with random rolls, because the roll tables have no idea what is in the other rooms, and I am not good enough to just come up with this kind of thing on the fly.

Quote from BioWizard >>

Additionally, I am not going to be very good at coming up with town layouts, shop names, NPC personalities, etc., again, completely on the fly. I can do it, but it will be patently obvious to the players that I am just winging it, and it won't be anywhere near as good as what I can do with some prep time.

 

With the caveat up front that I once again recognize that an improvisational style just isn't for some people, and that perfectly fine:

Looping back to this, I think you can have your prep time, without building a rigid structure. Remember, I said, "It also helps to have a backlog of semi-stock locations and NPCs that you can quickly pull out, tweak a bit, and toss in the ring"?

Being Flexible is not the same as Being Unprepared. It's a question of where you put your design efforts, not if you put in preparation time. An improvisational style is not making it all up as you go; it's carefully constructed elements with which you can be adaptive to whatever your Players are doing.

Someone who is trying to be flexible and adaptive doesn't need to stammer out " yeah ... you stumble into the ... naughty nixie inn? ... and see the bartender ... Steve? ", you can pull up unused NPC tavern barkeep sketch #47, and generic tavern map #23 ( sure, it's the identical layout as that tavern the Party was in 8 months ago - but they're not going to remember ). If you're really run into a corner, there are dozens ( hundreds? ) of random generators out there. Fantasy name generator alone has ensured that there are no barkeeps named Steve in my Persian analog culture taverns, and there are plenty of other resources to ensure that I always have a tavern map if I need one - and I'm good enough with a web browser ( and delaying tactics ) that I can pull out something like this in real time.

Improvisation is a skill. It takes practice. You don't get better if you're never willing to do it. I don't accept "I can't do it".

Improvised descriptions can be tougher. It helps if you can just visualize the room in your head ( you can even crib your mental image from television or movies ). But one thing I learned is that for the most part detailed descriptions don't matter. Why? Because the Players are mentally filling in the detail for you - they can't help it, it's reflex. When we read about a setting in a novel, we aren't provided with exhaustive descriptions of every detail ( unless we're reading George R.R. Martin ), but we picture the room in our minds, and if asked to invent and describe minute details never provided to us in prose, we could do so. Your Players are doing the same thing. They really can't help it; it's what humans do.

The moment I got this was the moment that I had a Player describe a scene back to me outside of a game, and got most of the details wildly wrong, according to my mental picture. But you know, none of those differences between what I was envisioning, and what they were envisioning had any practical impact of the game. I had the world in my imagination, and they had the world in theirs, and my description to them was functional enough that those two worlds overlapped enough that we could play the game without issue.

All that is required is a functional description of the room "you stumble into a guard room", one or two ( at most ) distinguishing details ( bare stone walls illuminated only by the flickering candle in the middle of rough wooden table ), and a "call to action", which are the elements of the room which invite the Players to interact with them ( the group of scruffy leather clad men who, until this moment have been playing cards at the table, scrabble for their weapons - what do you do!? ). That's even a checklist you can follow.

Is it a skill that takes practice? Yes. Is it hard? I'd say a middling amount.

I get that it can be scary. As GMs we feel like we're putting our imagination out there, and we feel that we're being judged on its quality, and so we get stressed. However, we have - for the most part - a sympathetic audience. The Players are there to be fooled; they want to help. They'll mentally fill in details, ask questions for clarification if something is important ( or you can correct them when you detect they misunderstand something relevant ).

But you never get better at it if you never use it. And the flexibility it affords us an amazing ability to roll with whatever our Players throw at us.

One the subject of flexibility, the reason I'm such an advocate of GMs being flexible and adaptable really comes down to the question of Player Agency - and for me surprise.

If I tell my Players that they can only ever go into those Narrative pathways that I have rigorously pre-defined, so that I never have to scramble, and I never feel uncomfortable, then I am restricting their choice in the game. I can say that "they can go anywhere in the world, and do anything", but I don't really mean it, because as soon as they do, the game ends. No Player wants that, so we're really conditioning them to never make the GM uncomfortable, and to always follow the pre-plotted Narrative, or we'll take their fun away.

That isn't giving the Players freedom at all. If I did that, I might make a really big, branching, and complex railroad, complete with switches and side tracks - but ultimately it's still a "choose your own my adventure" story.

That isn't always a bad thing. Some GMs, and some Players, are perfectly OK with that style of game.

But it isn't for me. I love the creativity, and the uncertainty. I love seeing the crazy things that my Players come up with, and rolling with it. I love being as surprised as my Players as to how the Narrative unfolds. For me, just executing and adjudicating a story line where I already know how it turns out is tedious.

For me, the flow of the Narrative is a collaborative effort, where I have the ability ( and responsibility ) to manage and exercise editorial oversite over ( if for no other reason than to use narrative management techniques to heighten drama and depth of story ), but I never have the ability to completely control and dictate. 

If I'm going to give the Players equal say in the Narrative, then I had damn well better to be able to roll with their punches :)

In my day-to-day job, I'm a consulting Sr. Business Analyst (BA).  The relationship between my career choice and why I've liked to by a DM for 30+ years is very symbiotic.

BA and DM comparison:

1. Start with an assumed goal that has been sold by our sales organization.   In gaming terms, I've purchased an off-the-shelf-adventure that was created by someone else.
2. Gather the stakeholders and get them to state their goals and what they think project success is.  In gaming terms - session 0.
3. Kick-off the project Milestone 1.  In gaming terms - run the first couple of sessions.
4. Continue to evolve as requirements become more solid.  In gaming terms - "read the room" and adjust/adapt so we can have a fun time.
5. Wrap up and close the project.  In gaming terms - bring the adventure or campaign to a close.
6. Return to Step 1 if doing a new project with the same customer.  In gaming terms - go to Step 1 or Step 3 if doing another adventure thread.

My point - gaming is very social and the biggest advantage of this type of game is that any adventure is a guideline (as is any project) and being fluid or adaptable is an illusion.  As you gain more experience and have more adventures under your belt what looks like agility is you just leaning on your toolbox of experiences (having a library of premade/prepurchased generic maps, making encounter set pieces that you can reuse, attend conventions with other groups to get ideas, etc).

Good luck and good gaming.

When in doubt, roll and shout!

Greg Volz

Quote from BioWizard >>

The mention of encounters brings up another point about why I don't like to "pants" it -- I tend to mull a good deal over "dungeon ecology." I try to make sure that each room has some sort of natural inhabitant or natural function, and that all the rooms make sense and go together. I want the place to feel real. I can't do that with random rolls, because the roll tables have no idea what is in the other rooms, and I am not good enough to just come up with this kind of thing on the fly.

I think this is largely a red herring.

D&D - or any TTRPG is not a simulation. We have no practical need of details or design elements that don't contribute to the the stories in our heads, or to present the setting to the Players. When the GM takes time and effort building details into the world or adventure which will never have any practical impact on the storyline, or have any meaningful influence on the design of the practical elements, that's wasted effort.

I agree 100% that details need to plausible, realistic, and consistent - up to a point. It's more accurate to that say that to the Players ( possibly including the GM ), the Adventure cannot appear implausible , unrealistic, or inconsistent. There's a wide gap between not presenting story or environmental elements which are so incongruous that the Players notice and this loose immersion, and designing a complex local ecology. There are absolutely background elements which will have an influence on those Player-facing elements, and they need to be considered - but it can be really easy to go too far. Writers call that "world builders disease".

There is a middle ground between not screwing up the plausibility of the Narrative, and getting lost in the design weeds.

As to the topic of random tables - I don't let random tables dictate design choices to me, anymore than I allow a coin toss to make choices for me. If I flip a coin, it's not really important what side comes up, but it is important as to how I feel about what came up ( that's my real subconscious choice ).  I use tables to suggest elements that I might not have come up with if I'm in a creative rut. But it's my creative responsibility to meld those elements into what I'm designing in a logical and plausible manner. I am not making random element salad, I'm being creative in the kitchen with what I have in my refrigerator. And I am always as free to reject, or re-roll, on the table until I do find something that I can creatively use, or use that random roll to spark an idea of my own - just as I'm not required to use everything in my refrigerator when I'm cooking.

Random tables are a creative aid - they do not design for me, and as such, I don't allow them to create nonsense - but they sure can help when I'm not feeling up to the challenge of creating things completely on the fly, out of my own head.

I think you have misunderstood my meaning of "dungeon ecology." It's an old school term for "the elements of the dungeon fit together and make sense."

For example, let's imagine there are two sides to a dungeon and in the middle is a yawning chasm with no visible way to cross. You put it here to challenge your players, who don't have flight, so they have to figure out a way across. All well and good. But then they get across the chamber and find out there are goblins on both sides, who apparently are all part of the same tribe.

Well now, how exactly do the goblins exist as part of the same tribe with a yawning chasm between them?

If I can't answer that question, then to me that element of the dungeon doesn't make sense, and I'm not going to be happy. IMO, it also will destroy verisimilitude.

Similarly, why are all these different monsters, if there are different ones, living in the same place? If I can't explain why the roper, the goblins, the cave lion, and the bandits, are all hanging out in the same dungeon, I'm not going to put them all in there together. How do they interact with each other? What are they doing there together? Do some of them fight each other? I'd better know the answers to that or it just becomes a bunch of "monsters to fight" in "rooms for combat." And I don't think my players want that.

And no, this is not a request to ask if someone can come up with a reason here for why the goblins live on two sides of an impassable canyon or the monsters I listed above live in the same place. Given time, I could come up with that, too.

Given time.

My point is that I do not do well trying to answer questions like that on the fly, so I prefer to plan it out.  I don't think the fact that I like doing that is a red herring.

Biowizard, your ecology is my link analysis.  Intelligence analysts (both within the military and law enforcement as well as the business sectors) map out the relationships of entities within an area, what I'd also call an ecology.  It's a map, but it doesn't just show geographical location, but relationship location.  Derived from these analytic work products and further analysis of signal, open source, and human intelligence, one can produce activity charts (that show for instance, the operation of a crime syndicate involved in making money off some sort of criminal enterprise and the movement of that cash into safe harbors, or say the Abyssal chicken economy in Avernus, basically a flow chart) or an event chart (a top lieutenant of said criminal syndicate violently secedes from the organization, the chart reflects who killed who and who sided with who, it's basically a timeline).  Those are reactive analytical products, in strategic planning, one can also use the link analysis to preform proactive imagining work products.  You have a bunch of entities tied together, a proactive product gives ways to anticipate what would happen if you (or your PCs) start pulling or tripping over those strings.

There's a lot of times in a dungeon where characters get to a four way intersection so have three options to take.  Earlier dungeons kept things rather static, but I'd think modern design would provide some guidance as to how actions the PCs make if they come from S and go W will produce reactions from E and N.  The world design thinking I'd encourage if it was a DM's bag builds on that.  But having a "tighter" game where the DM has a lot of imaginative inventory into the nitty gritty of specific locations is also a fun game, my DM style is clear, but I've played with both types of DMs and have fun with both.      

Give them a prophecy 

Give them a prophecy 

What says they'll want to follow it?

Quote from BioWizard >>

Give them a prophecy 

What says they'll want to follow it?

Or interpret it in accords with the DM's orthodoxy?  PCs are already heterodox on a meta level ;)

Talk with your players about what each of you want out of the game. If all of them want to play an open-world style D&D game where they get to kill all the NPCs and mess around, that's the kind of game those players want, and a plot-heavy campaign may not be right for them.

Your own fun matters too though, and if D&D really isn't fun for you if there's no underlying storyline, then either try talking to your players out of game about trying to follow the story a little bit more, or find a different group to DM since even if they're your friends, not every player and DM fit with each other.

Swadloom has the right of it.

Quote from Whiskeyjack8044 >>

Quote from Zozeph1212 >>

Yeah, I started this campaign after I knew of the greatness of a session 0, but I will definitely have one for the next campaigns I run.

 Feel free to have an "Intervention" session too. It's better to have a session where yall realign your expectations together and talk things out than to just hope it gets better. It won't and you'll burn out. 

 
As part of your intervention, you might ask the players where they plan to go next. Then stop the adventure for the evening. Play a board game or something  

 You can then spend the time before the next game session preparing for chicken chasing and look for places to drop hooks for the original adventure idea. If the players are still not interested in your story, then now would be the best time to find out. 

I say make a map. All the quests will be on the map. it will expand when they finish quests. if they go off the map, they will find lots of ruins and zombies, if you return and it is on the map then then have the NPCs say it has been re-built.

(probably a bad solution, however, if you work your story around it, it will work out nicely!)