>have to run a session tomorrow>haven't had time to prep anything>no backup filler sessions left in stockwat do
Beach episode.
>>94727214Grab a pre made adventure.
>>94727301i'm running an ongoing campaign session, and it's a modern setting, hard to adapt anything that suits what's established without hours of rework
Ask ChatGPT to do your prep.Report back if your players found out.
>>94727331What is you current enemy?Have them attack at an inconvenient time and improvise from there.You can fill a lot of time with combat chaos.Interrupt their next checkin with their NPC liaison. Do a drive by kidnapping or something.
>>94727214Follow the shortened steps from the lazy DM guide. Might take an hour at most.
Fake your death and start a new life in Guam, literally your only option at this point
Boardgame night might be more fun than unplanned TTRPG night. Just saying. It depends on the person, sometimes unplanned TTRPG night is more fun than anything. You have to be good at improv, and you have to give yourself room to improve, but most importantly you have to contrive a situation where the PCs don't see a single obvious answer so that they interact with each other (making plans and arguing) instead of with you.
>>94727214Prep your session instead of fucking around on /tg/. Or run a better game with less intensive prep.
>>94727214Read few one page dungeons and flesh out something that works.
>>94727214The tax man cometh. Or maybe the local sketchy for-profit cult keeps interfering with their business. Or the local political elements have begun agitating for something that would really fuck them over. Or some other mundane triviality that can otherwise spiral out of control. Maybe they get wrapped up in a police investigation as potential witnesses to some crime they didn't commit. Maybe they pass by a fire and have an opportunity to be a hero (or loot). Maybe they find a dead guy and have an opportunity to play detective. Maybe a local gang is having an internal dispute, and they're in the firing line. Maybe they just wake up in an unfamiliar location after a night of debauchery the copious amount of drugs in their system aren't letting them remember.
>>94727214If you need more than 30 minutes to prepare an RPG session for an in progress game then what are you even doing? Just throw some basic job at them with a vaguely interesting set piece and a surprise complication in mind. Use whatever setting appropriate basic goons as the enemies and come up with characters on the fly for anyone the party tries to speak to. You've been taking in cliches your whole life, toss a few in the pot.Alternatively, do something light. Beach episode can genuinely work. I ran a whole shopping episode session in a bazaar, letting the players browse for rare items, find people to follow up on some clues and questions they'd accumulated previously and coming up with micro quests from vendors to get them discounts.Learn to go with the flow. Knowing how to construct an elaborately prepared session is all well and good, but being able to improvise and spin something from basic ideas while the game is in motion is a far more valuable a skill in my experience. If you need to reorient during the session, feel free to call a 5 minute break to think, have a smoke, make a drink, let people piss, etc.
>>94727678>If you need more than 30 minutes to prepare an RPG session for an in progress game then what are you even doing?idk, been asking myself that for 20 years.
>>94727678>>94727261I think we need something light honestly, we've had a lot of heavy and dark sessions lately so it might be for the best but I want them to have stuff to do potentially rather than risk them getting boredHow do you make a beach episode work? I usually do plot-forward stuff
>>94727214Dump your notes in ChatGPT and ask for a quick adventure given by X.
>>94727214This is why I only run sandboxes.
>>94727214pirate "Eureka 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters", choose whichever plot has tags closer to what your campaign is currently like.
>>94727214suddenly pirates attack
>>94727214Improvise. AKA: The best part in a RPG?
>>94727214A tall glass of bleach. It takes all problems away>>94727261More like "bleach episode"
>>94727214It tooks 1-3 hours top to prepare a single session, and that's if you suck at it. Stop complaining, sit down and begin to work.Here some pointers: have the pc start in media res, employ a "dungeon" structure, don't bother balancing things out but be mindful about telegraphing potential pitfalls (to avoid blatant gotchas, which are especially annying if it's apparent that you didn't prepare much). Also check /osrg/ and /srpgg/ for random tables, they may came in handy if you find yourself struggling mid game and in need of a spark of inspiration to asspul something on the spot.
>>94727214Think about where your player characters are, what their long term goals are, and think about what would be an interesting thing that happens next. Does one of them have an ongoing revenge plot? Give them a hook to follow.Do they just want money? Have them stumble on what seems like a golden opportunity that is too good to be true. Do they just want to fight monsters? Look around for what you consider to be a cool monster and build an adventure around that creature's abilities. And so on. If all else fails, give them a princess to rescue. It may seem cliche, but you'd be surprised how on board players are for an unironic, no subversions, princess rescue. GMs are usually so afraid of playing to such a simple trope that players never actually get the chance to do this one simple classic thing in their entire gaming career.
>>94727214PDF related
>>94727214That's literally how I run many (if not most) of the games I master.I ran an entire six-hour Shadowrun session involving a plot to employ a binary biological weapon on the lunar colony, a Gibsonesque AI puppetteer posing as a variety of different (fictional) (meta)human characters via phone (I titled the adventure "But Who Was Phone?"), an off-the-cuff Sam Elliot (Narrator from the Big Lebowski) rendition of a trucker hauling cargo to the spaceport for launch, a variety of other characters, places, et cetera.My group was fully engaged the entire time... so much so that, in retrospect, their minds were blown by how much fun they had... WITHOUT ANY COMBAT! (Yes, I ran a highly-engaging Shadowrun session with zero combat, but there were plenty of other conflicts & tasks).Their minds were blown yet again when they saw that... my notes... consisted entirely of a few words & numbers jotted on an index card, merely to provide a touchstone for the world within my mind.It also helps that I was moderately consuming alcohol. Yes, the "Balmer peak" is real. I probably drank like five beers and three cocktails plus there were a couple of shots. What can I say? A finely oiled machine....Anyway, just run with it. Be totally committed. When you need a moment to "figure out" something, pretend to roll dice & consult charts behind your GM screen. Have the players roll checks once in a while without telling them why; maintain suspense by remaining mum on the results (they'll think they missed something, and waste like ten minutes trying to figure out what they missed, while you spend those ten minutes taking a breath and generating everything you'll need for the next hour in your head)....should I become a professional (paid) Gamemaster? (I literally just fake the rules & rolls in order to ambivalently craft an engaging experience for the players to enjoy.)
>>94727214Improv. Some of my best sessions ever have been full improv. It requires deep setting familiarity to avoid contractions but you should be able to do it.
>>94742089Improv from being blindsided by player antics can lead to some of the best sessions. Had this happen the other day:>gang are on an island village following plot hooks I threw out>have a random encounter where pirates show up looking for them (they stole something from the BBEG like 20 sessions ago)>design the encounter so that they'll run and hide with the villagers>instead they decide it's a good idea to go out and wave their dicks around and taunt the pirates then set up some Seven Samurai defenses to help the villagersI had to improv battle maps, the amount of pirates, lore for the captain of the ship and what all the villagers were capable of, all while indulging their questions and overpreparing. It snowballed into a big King of the Hill fight against like 15 dudes vs them and some named NPCs until they eventually got beat up by the captain and taken prisoner. I genuinely have no idea what's gonna happen next, everything I'd planned out for the next few sessions has been derailed, and I'm here for it.
>>94727214So what did you end up doing?
>>94727214It takes like 30 minutes of active work to prep a session>Gather some statblocks for likely enemies>Generate some NPCs if you need themThe rest is improv.
>>94727695Everyone is at the beach. Even if the focus isn't on being horny a general air of horniness should pervade the beach episode. Make sand castles. Play volleyball. Go surfing. Fight a giant shark. Fight the lifeguards.
>>94727261sure
>>947493465 beat dungeons arelame, everyone worth being around can see through your sock puppet theatre.
Why would you need to prepare? All you have to do is decide what happens. I've never prepared for a single session.
>>94742089How else could you possibly run a game? Unless you can read minds, you don't know what choices the players will make. And if you did somehow know, what would be the point of playing at all?
>>94749563Who said anything about a dungeon?
>>94749755>He doesn't even know how his own bullshit works Makes sense really.
>>94749872Not a single post in the chain you replied to includes the word "dungeon". Wanna try that again?
>>94749880Oh shit you have no idea. Lmao
>>94749909Yep, you lose.
>>94727214Make some stuff up.
>>94749921No one tell him.
>>94749968That you lost.
go fuck already, faggots
>>94749754Plenty of premade adventures are railroady and try to account for most reasonable player choices. Some groups are just fine playing that because they're more engaged by the interpersonal party relationships built between the linear points of progression or fine with "acting out" a clearly laid out scenario long as they can paint it their own color.I don't really agree with it, but hey, if it works for you it works.
yikes.
>>94749983>>94750263Nou.
you lost.
>>94754456>So blasted they can't even link a postNope. You couldn't find your own asshole with a map and both hands.
>>94727214Roll some random encounters from a table of your choice.Bonus points, hard mode: no rerolls, go with whatever comes up on your very first roll, no matter how ridiculous it is.Make sure the random encounters include some quest hooks. You don't even have to know how the hooks are resolved since the players might not even find them. For instance: one of the monsters that attacks the players is carrying a book bound in human flesh, or a treasure map.Use "Quantum Ogre" technique wherever you can: All encounters don't even have to have different quest hooks. If the players don't find the treasure map after the first encounter, maybe they find it somewhere else.Statblocks can be improvised completely depending on where the story goes.Dungeon rooms can be improvised too. Or maybe you draw one or two "Quantum Dungeon Rooms" that move around depending on what quest the players decide to investigate.Don't worry if the Quantum Rooms don't make sense for the locations the players decide to explore. If that's the case, don't use them, just draw the dungeon room ad-hoc.Everything can be improvised this way. Once the players decide to persue a plot hook, try to throw some random encounters at them until the end of the session, or relate the random encounters to the plot that the players chose. After that, in between sessions, you're fleshing out encounters that lead to the resolution of the plot hook that the players decided to persue.In general, in a 4 hour session with a 30 minute lunch break, I have had luck with:1 or 2 Combat encounters (just know that players can sometimes circumvent these with socials or charm) 1 or 2 Social encounters. These can also be quest hooks.1 or 2 environmentals. These can be traps, natural hazards, or simply "points of interest" like monuments or historical sites that flesh out the world.The plot emerges out of the player's decisions. Don't stress about it, just go with the first thing that pops into your head.
>>94727261I just realized now ive never had a beach episode in a campaign. Once i start the next "season" of one of mine (i went on hiatus and also treat it a bit like a sitcom) thats going on the list of plans
>>94762807if you're using quantum anything, the plot certainly does not emerge from the players' decisions. they may as well not bother showing up.
