Why is "Don't overprepare" such common advise given to DMs? sometimes it seems like people are allergic to putting effort into building adventures. Railroading typically happens when a DM is underprepared for their sessions.
>>97844013People don't really understand what good prep looks like, so they assume "a lot of prep" means writing shit that's sort of orthogonal to gamable content, like detailed ancient histories or granular population statistics for entire continents. People do that, get burnt out, and then swing too far in the other direction because "if less prep is good, obviously no prep is best."
Because GMs with little experience go in tunnel vision, prep one thing in depth, then players go do something else somewhere else, and GMs have to improv everything anyway.
Have you tried NOT playing DnDogshit?
>>97844013How do you run your games. Post examples of your prep material.
Over preparing is fun.And you can take things you don't end up needing, and use them later.I have even overprepared as a player, just for the sake of having some fun in-character dialogue handy.
>>97844013Inexperienced GMs tend to not know what sort of prep is actually helpful, and so the advice is simply to avoid overthinking it or doing more than you need.Because the sooner a GM is actually running the game, the sooner they get more experience and get a better feeling for what's actually useful to prepare.
>>97844051I've never had to play something other than D&D.
>>97844059I detail a town, a broad strokes overview of a couple other towns, I detail a cave, a dungeon, and prepare a few wilderness encounters. Then my players are let loose.
>>97844013Railroading is much more likely to happen with too much prep rather than two little. Railroading consists of limiting (usually via contrivances) the ability for players to make choices or experience outcomes in a manner that the GM has predetermined. Period.Here's why "Don't overprepare" is useful for ALL DMs:>Players will make decisions you haven't prepared for>Players will solve problems in a way you haven't anticipated and using fiat/arbitration to limit this because you didn't pre-plan their solution is shitty railroading>GMs want to use what they prepare. They'll often shoehorn what they prep and it becomes jarring and unnatural >GMs want to use what they prepare and so they'll contrive for the next thing they've prepped to occur in spite of it not following rationally>Some GMs get stressed by attempting to prepare for the contingent options and player choices>Much of the time you spend prepping might be wastedGiven this, finding efficient methods to prepare; such as key details and NPCs, maps only when necessary, situations instead of "plot", and preparing for obvious contingencies but being able to flex if needed by mastering the rules.>>97844082If you're going to use the prep, it's not over preparing.
>>97844145>post example of your prep material
Because prepwork is tiring and minimizing it will make sessions more pleasant for you as a DM. You are a player as well, and you are under no obligation to do overwork yourself.
>>97844013the only reason to play TTRPGs over video games is the responsivenessprepslop takes that away
>>97844013Because the intended advice is more like “Concentrate on getting the important shit prepared instead of the chaff”, but few people have experience in determining what’s usable and what isn’t. So they simplify it so newbie DMs get in the habit of figuring out what they need to prep for at all if they do.>>97844159In my experience, it happens with too little prep, but not because of the material itself is lacking. Rather, it comes from an inflexible GM who doesn’t have the experience in thinking on their feet and/or refuses to admit when they’re well out of their wheelhouse and want to keep it in a lane they think they can control. The railroading is more of a desperation move rather than one borne of malice, but it still can cause bad feelings all around.
>>97844013Oh, I've seen this one. They're plotting to steal a franchise from the 80s and make it suck.
>>97844013Precisely to prevent railroad. People often end up taking 'prepare' as 'detail every nook and cranny in corridor B1 of the baron's barracks' and not 'remember the party doesn't actually have to go through the front door'. GMs often get one vision of how their campaign is going to go, then that vision has to meet the players. The more prep work, the more the average GM has to throw away when the players meet the road.The secret to achieving the right amount of prep work is making things that can easily be repurposed within the same area of the campaign, broad context of the world the campaign is in, or in an entirely different campaign.
>>97844159>Railroading is much more likely to happen with too much prep rather than two little.This is a misconception, the only DMs that railroad consider it to be a tool, they use it in place of improvising. Improvising is made much much easier if you've prepared ahead of time.
>>97844281You have a very poor understanding of the benefits of preparation. It results in many more responses to player actions.
>>97844474You are describing literally preparing a railroad.
>>97844505While a railroad is technically included under the later definition, I was talking more in the distinction of repurposing various individual ideas rather than broad swaths of a campaign. The railroad is defined as all options leading to the same outcome, regardless of player choice. If repurposing the statblock of local ogre that was meant as a major fight at level 3 into a part of a larger encounter at level 7 is railroading under your particulars, then use of a bestiary is railroading, as is any repurposed dungeon map.
Seems you dumb niggers need to be put to GMing 101 and since I'm feeling generous I'll school you mongoloids. Here's what overprepping looks like:>for this session, the adventure will be in the village of greengrass, the blacksmith is a secret cultist of the demon erebor'zul and he's doing a ritual in the basement of his smithy that will poison the well and turn all the villagers into demonspawn because the cult is gathering a demon army under orders of the local lord Baron Evilheart who is also a secret high ranking cult memberYou're already concocting a long term plan in mind, you probably already have an idea of the demon army, the baron's city etc. so you're gonna consciously or subconsciously try to place your characters on that railroad.Here's what proper prepping looks like:>for this session, the adventure will be in the village of greengrass, and the well is poisonedThat's fucking it. When the characters interact with the well, you yourself don't know what the poison does, who did it, and why they do it. React accordingly in combination with your players' hunches, what is thematically appropriate in the moment to reward their deductions, and keep it fucking self-contained in the village of greengrass.
>>97844681>deductionsinferences
>>97844681First one’s fine if the party’s the one being hired to help with the ritual. Knowing what the ritual does means they might get to decide to hijack it and use the demon spawn to start their own campaign of burnination.
>>97844310>>97844477Sure, I hear you. I think maybe I'm just speaking from my own perspective having played and GMed for many, many years. I have also done no-prep "challenge" games and minimal prep. My prep is very, very light.However, my own personal experience has been that when I've been railroaded it's always by a GM who had a specific outcome planned and begin putting up the invisible bumpers to keep us on the specific road he had planned/prepared for us. I don't know how this happens if you don't have anything planned. I think where we can agree is that being able to improvise on the fly to enable player choice is a mark of excellent GMing.
>>97844748It's not fine because if you know who's responsible and why he's doing it you're gonna put some railroady shit like>uhh roll for rumors, some villager says "ohh I was drunk one night and I saw the blacksmith digging in the village outskirts">uhh as you pass by the smithy you smell a faint scent of something rotten>uhh you find a secret compartment under the floorboards of the blacksmith's workshop and it's an icon of erebor'zul
>>97844755>I don't know how this happens if you don't have anything planned. Generally to the tune of “it doesn’t cause of p, uh, reasons I guess”>I don’t want to cross the bridge, I want to go around>you, uh, you can’t>why?>uh…um…you don’t find any other ways around>at all?>y-yeah…>>97844772You’re not being specific about what’s wrong with that in and of itself, sir.
>>97844772You aren't describing railroading, you're describing hooks and clues.
>>97844681I don't think you know what railroading is. Nothing about that initial scenario is a railroad. The players investigate or they don't. A railroad would be forcing them to a specific end in spite of their choices.Having things happen that players can engage with is not a railroad as long as the option exists without coercion (which is why "if you don't to X the world will end plots"
>>97844797I'd argue your example is prep/improv agnostic. Either you randomly came up with a river and a bridge or you prepared for a river and a bridge. The problem isn't whether or not you had a bridge. The problem is stifling reasonable player choices.>>97844902There seems to be a lot of confusion about that in these threads. People think that linear contingencies or even folks following from one lead to another is "railroading". It's not. Railroading is when you force things to happen in a contrived or arbitrary fashion (as opposed to following naturally from the world or player action)
>>97844931Yeah, pretty much. Railroading imo is mainly in the aspect of shutting down choices made by players, whether it’s from having a specific guide you wanted followed to the letter or because they got into a situation where they’re very nakedly trying to work around a lack of content via resorting to “because I said so”, they just asked for an example where one can railroad vis lack of preparation .
>>97844310>>97844477No, i think pill guy is right. A GM with zero prep cannot railroad you, because there isnt a track. If you dont prep at all, literally all you can do is improv by definition. The rails show up when there are paths set out, and whatever you want to do would derail that plan. You cant kill the princess because if you do the guards would execute you, there would be no adventure and the game would end. Which really shows why setting and enforcing expectations about the kind of game you're playing is so important, and why you should prep effectively. Reasonable players are normally fine if you just ask them not to kill the princess, but dumb cunts will bitch and moan about it, so you plan the encounter such that killing the princess is impractical or too expensive, and any attempt would loop back to your intended paths anyway - half railroad half quantum ogre. Dumb cunts will bitch and moan about that too, but if you've ever run a game you'd know why its standard practiceYou cant ever prep more than two steps ahead because players WILL jump the rails and you cant afford to prep five encounters a week and only ever use one or two. So even though you should expect and design for alternate options and branching paths, you should be planning single problems with multiple solutions and not multiple optional problems. God help you if you plan multiple problems with multiple solutions, which is what "dont overprep" is really all about. At the end of the day the story will collapse to just one things that happened, you technically never need more prepped than whatever that exact line ends up being.
>>97844976>A GM with zero prep cannot railroad youFor what it’s worth, I’ve seen it happen. Once gave a player a chance to run a game. Dude prepared a village, a bunch of goblins to fight, and nothing else. Anything to do in town that wasn’t related to asking about the goblins was met with “you hear nothing interesting” or “they didn’t have that here”. Anything related to leaving town was met with “there’s nothing there”. The one time we asked what would happen if we just stayed at the inn and drank was “you can’t do that”, no reason behind d that. And it just kept on like that, up to the point we forcibly marched ourselves to the goblins instead of ambushing them because he didn’t prepare a map beforehand for that, whereupon the goblins were slain and…well, the game ended because that was the most he bothered to write down. People are used to the idea of a railroad being a giant set of barriers everywhere, like an iron cage. They haven’t met the version where you’re walking along a bridge in an empty void.
>>97844681Your first green text is 100% superior to your second one, and you're too dumb to realize.
>>97844563>repurposing the statblock of local ogre that was meant as a major fight at level 3 into a part of a larger encounter at level 7Why would you even put in the effort to repurpose something into something completely different. That's not easier than just making something new.
>>97844772Rumors are the hallmark of a good sandbox campaign. The key to them is to allow them to be untrue, and even contradictory. However there's nothing outright wrong against being told a rumor that highlights something you've prepared. Breadcrumbs=//=railroad
>>97844681Brother you made your shit so much worse by cutting out Baron Evilheart. Baron Evilheart is a man you can build a whole campaign around.
>>97844976>A GM with zero prep cannot railroad you, because there isnt a track.Bad take, even with zero preparation you can find yourself railroaded. They're not mutually exclusive.
>>97844976>players WILL jump the railsGOOD, you shouldn't have fucking rails.
>>97844013>hy is "Don't overprepare" such common advise given to DMsbecause you get diminishing returnsif you prepared a massive 500-room castle with every single spoon, fork, and knife and their monetary value tracked, your effort is going to be wasted when your party interacts with almost none of it>sometimes it seems like people are allergic to putting effort into building adventuresbecause its common for new DMs to think absolutely every single situation has to be accounted for when thats not true>Railroading typically happens when a DM is underprepared for their sessions.just because you can be underprepared doesnt invalidate the pitfall of overprepping
>>97845245>if you prepared a massive 500-room castle with every single spoon, fork, and knife and their monetary value tracked, your effort is going to be wasted when your party interacts with almost none of itThis is only an issue if you never intend to reuse the castle. Of old it was very traditional to run the same adventures with new groups. These were often distributed as "modules."Of course, by the standards of neo-nu/tg/ I'm fairly use modules are intolerable railroading.
>>97845253>This is only an issue if you never intend to reuse the castle.re-using unused material is a way to make sure your overprepping isnt totally wastedbut that doesnt change the fact that you overprepped in the first placemitigating the issue doesnt mean it wasnt one in the first placeits better to have something and not need it than vice versa, but its even better to walk in with the exact amount of material the players will use>Of course, by the standards of neo-nu/tg/ I'm fairly use modules are intolerable railroading.even back in the days of ADnD the average group was making up their own campaigns and not relying solely on modules
>>97845209>>97845192No, if you already planned the demon cult and Baron Evilheart then no matter what your players do in that village you're ALWAYS gonna lead them to the cult and/or the Baron
>>97845293Your logic doesn’t make sense sir. Why are you this certain this will “always” happen?
>>97845245Are these details wasted? the different houses, the different NPCs, what and where their life savings are stored. It's a good habit to know these things. It enhances verisimilitude and gives a stat buff to improvising.
>>97844051This isn't a system issue, it's a GM/storytelling issue
>>97845320>Are these details wastedthey arent wasted, but theres obvious diminishing returns when you find yourself creating stockrooms just to fill out the blank spaces on your mapyou can have an identical experience when you learn to include what is and isnt important to the game
>>97844041This, you have to go in expecting the players to go off the rails. Yeah have an outline and all that, but make it flexible and able to adapt to your players coming at it in unexpected ways. No plan survives contact with the enemy.
>>97844013You are fucking retarded. Your whole post is just fucking retarded.>>97844051You too>>97844082This guy is the least retarded motherfucker in the whole thread and he's a redditfrog poster.
>>97845025I dont really see the difference? In that case the GM prepped something and forced you to play exactly the thing he prepped. Its more obvious if they cant improvise small details to save their life, but its the same principle right?>>97845222You cant be "on rails" unless someone lays a track. Its in the fucking name. You're an idiot misusing a term you dont understand. >>97845236You're also an idiot using terms you dont understand. You dont even know what rails are. And i seriously hope that AI generated thumbnail isnt from your youtube channel, because yikes.
>>97845397Upon reflection, “prepped” is an over generous interpretation, since despite saying he prepared a village, he didn’t actually prepare a village. He prepared a map that he stole off google search, which isn’t a sin in and of itself, but he didn’t populate it with anything. No npcs, no locations, no descriptions, nothing. It was blatantly obvious he was basically making this shit up on the spot cause he got lazy, and resorted to “because I said so” cause he backed himself into a corner and knew it.
>>97845411Kek. Well, thats definitely a different way to do it
>>97844013Because it's a fuckton of wasted time and effort. The best thing you can do is have a general outline for several different plausible outcomes and fill in the blanks as things progress. If you're putting excruciating detail into every little thing 99% of it is going to be completely ignored and you're going to be blindsided by something you didn't think of and had zero preparation for because you were so hyperfocused on an expectation of things going how you planned.
>>97844013Because most GMs - particularly those that need advice - over-prepare. Likely outcomes include>forcing the players into things you have prepared>floundering when they do something else because they thought they had covered "everything">burn out and resentment because they have done a lot of "useless" work, particularly in contrast to the playersA novice's prep is mostly going to suck because they don't know what they're doing. It's likely to be a linear story, which leads to railroading, because that's their main experience of stories. Including a lot of RPG modules.
"Why shouldn't I do more work that won't improve the game and will go to waste?"Gee it's a fucking mystery.
>>97844059Here's how I'm running my current game :Player starting situations : The only rule I implemented was that each player should have their hero begin in the same starting village, but they can be anywhere in that town as per their hero's interests (ie they don't have to all be at the tavern). Now, in my particular case, there is a solid gameplay reason for this related to exploration and biome rules, but I would still more than likely implement this anyway. It's actually my preference to allow the players to decide independently of each other where they begin play according to their occupations and interests without any restrictions (and that's what I did in my last game), but I decided this would be more expedient for the particular sort of game being played. Obviously, after they've all familiarized with the system and world specific rules by way of the starter town and one or more tutorial quests, they will be free to go in any direction they please, for any reason, and may stick together or separate as per whatever their heroes believe most efficient for their goals. All of this is included in the game pitch presented to the players when they're deciding whether to join nearly verbatim as written here, and I make no attempt to disguise it as anything other than gameplay convenience. Surrounding the stater town are several biomes that I refer to in general as regions. Each features its own theme, environmental hazards, creatures, properties, etc. Each region has a peril rating and hostility level that determines how severe bad stuff is, and how dense / likely to be encountered per turn bad stuff is. Peril is generated by various sources in the world, and is destroyed by sinks (mostly towns and outposts). It flows along gradients from regions of high peril to low, so regions tend toward an equilibrium value over time, which is higher the closer they are to sources. Sources and sinks may both be created and destroyed by the activity of players and >>
>>97845626other beings in the world, so the average peril of regions can fluctuate over time. There are various rules related to exploration, but these are more procedure than preparation. That pretty much covers the general setup, everything else is generated during play.
>>97845411So what's the problem?
>>97844772None of these are railroading unless you force the players to pick one, or if they voluntarily pick one but you invalidate their decision and force them to pick a different one. Or if they pick one, and interact with it, but you only let them interact with it in a particular way you had in mind.
>>97844976No preparation at all means no game and nothing to do, which is shit for everyone involved.
>>97844211Go content scrape somewhere else
>>97845698No game troll.
>>97845708Sure anon, sure.
>>97845411The fundamental problem there isn't how much or how little he was willing to prep, but the unwillingness to improvise. It wouldn't have mattered if he made a list of NPCs and shops if he was unwilling to come up with what they had for sale on the fly, or come up with any topics of conversation other than pointing the party towards the goblins anyway. The quality of the prep is going to reflect the person running. If he's unwilling to even pause and try to make up something interesting on the fly, then his prep isn't going to be any different. Adding more quantity won't improve the quality, it just means you'd be waiting for weeks for this lazy guy to finish writing down enough notes to railroad you into fighting goblins anyway.
>>97844013Yeah I would have to agree with you here. I remember seeing that some fiction authors would write hundreds of pages about their world that no-one else would see just so when they were actually writing the content of their book their world felt believable. Overall I don't think it is bad to overprep detailed population statistics, heraldry for your fictional houses and ect so long as you stick to one setting and keep expanding on it. This is because of the aforementioned reason, the more prep you put into this autistic amount of detail the more well thought out your world will seem to your players.As for actual game prep I would recommend not prepping plots but adventure locations, cities, towns and the like with a few hooks so that the players can sink their teeth in and get involved. Its an Adventure game not a story game. Also let the players fail, meander, prepare, research and then succeed, the game should take as long as it should take, and don't skip the "boring" details. Make them interact with every NPC they buy items from. Make them mark the route they wish to take on the map then roll the random encounter tables, check for no. appearing, encounter distance and monster reactions. Make them follow the dungeon turn system and keep strict records of time. Roll on the disseise table every week to give them extra challenge. and lastly TAX THE FUCK OUT OF THEM.By doing this you can get more bang for your buck with your prep as sessions take longer. It also allows the players to do what an RPG says on the fucking box and actually roleplay.
>>97844976>A GM with zero prep cannot railroad youOf course he can, if he just arbitrarily decides what you're going to be allowed to do after the session started, even if he had nothing prepared.
>>97845950if you are enjoying what you are writing, then you arent over preparedbut "dont overprep" is obviously aimed at newer DMs who have a tendency to just make a whole bunch of things that never get used, and its a good to build a habit of choosing to prioritize the things your players actually interact with first
