How do I stop delaying over and over my "magnum opus" TTRPG campaign?Since I'm not good at improvisation I feel like I need to worldbuild every single detail beforehand, otherwise I won't have an answer for the crazy shit that the players would try to pull off, and I would creating either awkward silence thinking or plot holes.
>>98239421I already pulled my magnum opus, I didn't even realize it was my magnum opus at the time. Doesn't matter. My players ruined it all the same.
>>98239421Some books are three hundred pages, some are five. Doesn't mean they're bad books. Just get your players into some meaty hooks and have fun. If you have trouble making games last a long while, simply add unique twists and allow them to tell you where they want to go. Most of my games simply involve the players choosing to do random ass shit and me pulling it out of my ass with a few general plot points made beforehand.You've heard this advice before, I'm positive we all have, but just make a little bit for the players and let them inform the next session, ask them where they want to go and build to order.
>>98239421Write a book.
>>98239421If you think it’s your magnum opus before session 01, it’s going to be a miserable campaign. The quality of the campaign comes from how much fun your players have in it, not because you expertly placed leitmotifs whenever the secret BBEG shows up.
>>98239421You need to cleanse yourself first
>>98239421Just play games retard.
>>98239421You're delaying because you're afraid to put your "magnum opus" to the test of actual play, because you subconsciously know it's poor quality.
>>98239421I'm not very into ttrpgs, its not what I'm really on the board for, but it seems intuitive to me that its more like improv than like writing a novel. Like I know some prep and an idea of where you want to angle things is important, but fundamentally if you approach it like this your players won't see or bump into 99.999 percent of the work you've done, and any split second decision you could make for stuff you didn't strictly plan out probably works about as well as something you wrote pages of lore for.If anything it could be counterproductive. Instead of spontaneously being able to built the world to accommodate what would be interesting given player decisions, you're too mentally locked into a prior conception of every little knook and cranny to even see the possibilities that are there given a blanker canvas. I get not thinking you're good at this improv stuff but I don't know, my strong suspicion is that if a gun was put to your head to prevent you from getting hung up and scanning through endless different possibilities and force you to just make a decision, you would actually come out with stuff your players think is perfectly good even if you're very critical of it.
>>98239421Instead of building a big giant thing, run one to four shots in your campaign world that focus on specific portions of it. This will allow you to build it out more organically, help you work on running games and improv without worrying about fucking up some pie-in-the-sky campaign idea you have, and also figure out what works, what doesn't, and what actual, useful prep looks like.
>>98239421If you suck at improv, you are a not a very good gamemaster. This is basically the critical skill expected of you, that's like trying to go into sales while not being a people's person. Sure, you can compensate with prep time somewhat, but there's a ceiling and you'll approach it rapidly. The answer is not to prep more, it's to get better at improv. This is not difficult. Do ten low-prep oneshots. Do a small sandbox campaign. Train with Claude if you are into sucking dick. Join an improv group if you are *really* into sucking dick.
>>98240666Sadly some people don't have the gift, Satan. I know that this is something I've seen DMs struggle with until they give up a failure. Nothing really helps except "get good."
>>98240685I think that part of the problem is bad prep. If you spend all of your time writing about the ancient history and demographics of [fantasy city] and very little time on the motivations and desires of the major players in [enemy cult] it's going to be much harder to improv the reaction of [enemy cult] when the players do something unexpected. If you prep strong NPCs and factions with solid goals and motivations, and sites that make sense and can be utilized in different ways, it becomes much easier to improv organically.
>>98239421>Since I'm not good at improvisation I feel like I need to worldbuild every single detail beforehand,This means the campaign will be subpar. There is no RPG without improvisation, anyway.
>>98240890Actually running a game for a few months now, I really didn't understand this at the beginning. Now I can prep four hours worth of events in less than two, bordering on one. I play online though, so have a grain of salt with that one.
>>98240685You can still sidestep it or work around it; the important distinction is to abandon the notion that enough prep means that you can get away with zero improv. A terminal case is a wiki page instead of a setting and a plot. This is not a game, or at least not a roleplaying game.To actually be helpful, here is some advise that meaningfully improved my player's improv abilities when they give me a GM holiday and take up the mantle. I've been doing this for twenty years so I can vouch that these tools actually do something.1.) Cache your improv within prep. You have twelve islands? Assign a thematic domain (Zodiac signs, whatever), you can expand the theme on the spot without filling up a novel worth of Notion pages. You can do this with characters too, or, crucially, with plot points or arcs. 2.) Outsource shit to players. Yeah, yeah, muh authorial integrity, whatever. This works, they are not idiots usually and also care about your world or the plot.3.) Take smoke breaks alone (or whatever the same thing is for euros and americans). Five minutes is 2% of a session. You can think of a lot of stuff in five minutes. Your players don't expect you to insatntly answer what happens next. This actually is also great for dramatical tension, surprisingly.4.) Improv classes actually help, sucking dick or not. Just not comedy improv, find theatre kids in the area. Get through the cringe and you'll get tons of useful tips, and experience.5.) If you are still horrible at improv, you can do a trick. Right before a session, think of a way how *everything* gets off the rails. This is your fallback. Things usually tend to either adhere to the general plan or collapse entirely, and mid-points are rare.
>>98240940There's also even smaller stuff you can prep that will help keep the session going. A list of 20 setting appropriate names, 20 unique physical traits, 20 single phrase attitude descriptions, 20 architectural descriptions, shit like that can make really help you out when the players are suddenly looking for a random music store in the city or you need to pull a random dockworker out of your ass. That shit is where LLMs come in handy, random name lists and shit are are a great use case for chat gpt.
>>98240971Eh, funnily enough, that stuff works much better if you already good at improv. Had a few games where it felt like I'm actually playing with a bot for a GM. "His name? Oh... He says that he is called [JOCKEN] and [HAILS FROM THE ISLAND OF KERTA] and [HE HAS A CROOKED NOSE & A QUEER SMELL TO HIM]."
>>98239421>my "magnum opus"Your magnum opus so far.
>>98240971>That shit is where LLMs come in handy, random name lists and shit are are a great use case for chat gpt.Every game you run is trash.
>>98240993Eh, maybe. I'm good at improving situations or reactions, but random names and descriptions are my downfall. I guess that's another bit of advise, learn what your weak points are and figure out how to use prep to mitigate those as best you can>>98241040Ah, yes, my games are ruined because I generated a list of random old west names in chatgpt. I'll be sure to tell my players that they didn't actually have a good time.
>>98239421Every new campaign is your magnum opus campaign because you will get better at dming everytime. It's less about what's in it and more about how you do it.
>>98241056It would never occur to me that coming up with Old West names for things is something someone would ever try to avoid. Its so easy. You literally just think for half a second. They don't have to be that good. You can literally just call towns nouns from the Bible. Penitence. Deliverance. Perdition. You can do sinister noun's mundane geological feature. Gallows Gulch. Dagger Hill. Coyote Ridge(Apparently this one's real but I'm not american and don't think I've heard it before. Probably did subconsciously. In fact I'm realising I definitely got it from New Vegas, but it still shows the point.)
>>98241056No, they're ruined because you think using ai for little lists is reasonable.
>>98241127It is more than reasonable, but not doable on the fly, without human checking if the names are all out of whack.Like any AI shit, really.
>>98241127That's literally the only thing it is reasonable for.
>>98240624>Like I know some prep and an idea of where you want to angle things is important, but fundamentally if you approach it like this your players won't see or bump into 99.999 percent of the work you've done, and any split second decision you could make for stuff you didn't strictly plan out probably works about as well as something you wrote pages of lore forI mean yeah, I dream of these grand campaigns with meticulous prep but my magnum opus seems to be the one campaign I'm actively half-assing and making up on the fly
>>98239421>Since I'm not good at improvisationThen you're not meant to be a GM. Simple as that, really.
Is improv really a skill or not? How a person would get better at it? (excluding having to play games and "fake it until you make it")
>>98239421I don't really understand the problem. You've got a group you play with but aren't running this campaign? What are you doing instead?
>>98250035It's something you get better at by playing games and taking it till you make it. As has also been said in the thread, if you do good prep, it will be easier for you to improv certain things, and you can also prep certain things that you might need to improv (names, short descriptions, NPC demeanors, etc.) ahead of time so you have some sort tools to fall back on/help with improv. There are also probably books about dramatic and comedic improv that might help, but I don't know, I haven't read any of them.But yeah, practice is practice. Run some one shots.
>>98239421Have you tried playing games fuckwit?
