Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Power Up Your Prep
11 Plays4 months ago
In this episode of Tabletop Tune Up, we dive into the essential skill of prep—why it’s crucial, and how it can make your GMing smoother and more flexible. We explore how preparation lightens your workload during sessions, allowing you to improvise and adapt easily when the story takes unexpected turns. Your focus in prep includes the rules, your players' playstyles, and the necessary story outcomes for each session. With practical tips on forecasting player decisions, avoiding overprepping, and keeping the focus on your players, you'll find practical ideas to make your preparation more efficient and power up your GMing game!
Recommended
Transcript
Allen Iverson's Practice Rant
00:00:00
Speaker
I mean, it listen, we talking about practice. Not a game, not a game, not a game. We talking about practice. Not ah not not the game that I go out there and and die for and play every game like it's my last. Not the game. We talking about practice, man. I mean, how silly is that, man? We talking about practice. I know it's important. I do. I honestly do. But we talking about practice, man. What are we talking about? Practice?
NBA Passion and Iverson's Commitment
00:00:58
Speaker
Hey, welcome back to Table Talk. Tune up, Ben. Hey, we're talking about practice. I think that came through in the opening there. Yeah. Hey, are were are you much of an NBA fan back in the day? You know, I think most of the games I've watched, either either watched with my dad or with you, it's not something I tend to pick up a lot on my spare time. Yeah.
00:01:16
Speaker
You know me, man, I was just a huge and NBA kid back in the 90s. I loved the 80s and 90s basketball. And you know, Allen Iverson is one of my all-time favorites. Nobody worked harder than him on the court. People might have worked harder than him off the court, but nobody hustled more than him. Most minutes played, most minutes hustled. What a legend.
00:01:41
Speaker
He goes out there and dies for that game, Mark. That's right. That's right. You know
Importance of Practice and Preparation
00:01:45
Speaker
what? And in practice, we're going to be talking about practice because practice is is what makes our games better because we're not all gifted with those natural talent and gifts. You know, Alan Iverson, if he was a GM, he wouldn't need all this practice, but we do. We're mortals. That's right.
00:02:05
Speaker
Yeah, now practice is another way of talking about planning or prep There's a couple senses though practice right and we're gonna talk about that planning or prep. Yeah, I guess you you know in a basketball game practice is Preparation and maybe preparation is a better word for what we're doing for our game. Yeah, we're talking about preparation There's a different sense of practice in which you just play a lot of games. And I mean, the longer you GM, the longer you play these games, the more experiences you're going to have that you're going to learn from, and you're going to become a better GM that way. But yeah in terms of preparation planning for gameplay, that's our topic for today. Talk to me about why this is an important thing, Mark.
00:02:44
Speaker
Well,
Preparation and Improvisation in Gameplay
00:02:45
Speaker
you know, practice or or preparation as we're we're calling here, it just makes everything so much easier. You're trying to lighten your you know your workload. As you get better, you need less of it because you know kind of where to practice, where to prep. You know, these things allow you to kind of go off the script. I don't know, if I'm not prepared either mentally or on paper, I can't go off script.
00:03:12
Speaker
I mean, I i could, but i get lost I'll get lost and the campaign might get lost. so Preparation actually helps you with improvisation. It helps you with managing things in the moment. It helps you and your players throw curve balls at you. You're not sure what to do, but you know what? If you have done your prep, well, you know what's around the next corner or you know what's over in the next town if they decide to leave.
00:03:35
Speaker
Or and if you've even thought
Storytelling Preparation Tips
00:03:36
Speaker
about it or visualized it, you can kind of go a little off, off script for a while, you know, you, so these things are all kind of important. So let's, let's talk about preparation. Ben, how do you prepare? You know, you and I have talked a lot about how we're a little bit eclectic. Our interview guest last episode, Tad Lekman is plays a lot of different games too. And one of the first things I'll do is got to make sure I've learned the rules.
00:04:02
Speaker
And if I haven't got all the rules down, that's OK. But you do have to kind of let your players know they're in for a a little bit of a rough ride. So I think the really important thing is to get to know those rules as best you can. If the table has a rules lawyer at it, that's OK. Collaborate with them maybe ahead of time. And then as you're going through the game, you can turn that rules lawyer into your rules lawyer, your advocate.
00:04:25
Speaker
I love rules rules
Session Planning and Engagement
00:04:26
Speaker
lawyers at the games, Ben. I'm honest, because I'm not the best, sometimes the rules. ah So I always like it when I have somebody there that could kind of like keep me on the straight and narrow. Excellent. Now, Mark, tell me about preparing when it comes to story.
00:04:42
Speaker
So when I'm thinking about preparation and I'm thinking about story, I'm trying to think it really about where I'm going to begin, what's going to be the meat of that session and how it's going to end. So i'm I'm kind of thinking of them as like just that session and I want to have a good, exciting beginning or intriguing beginning, but I really want to stick a landing by the end of that session. So I'm thinking about that
Handling Unexpected Player Decisions
00:05:04
Speaker
when I'm preparing. There's a little bit of a cliffhanger maybe at the end, there's revelations to unfold.
00:05:10
Speaker
that kind of I won't say it's quite as tight as a three-act structure, but clearly there's things you want your players to have to solve and work on during the session. Correct. Yeah. To do that though, right? you've got to have This is collaborative storytelling. You're not writing a book, as we've said. so How do you get a feel for what the players are going to do? Tell me about how that process goes.
00:05:33
Speaker
First of all, you've got to know your players when it comes down to it. But you don't always have that luxury. So if you don't know the players, know their characters. Trust that they're going to play those characters ah in a way that you might say expect. But let's assume you know those players. You've been friends with these people. You know what they like. You kind of know a little bit of their capabilities and their play styles.
00:05:55
Speaker
You kind of have a sense of what they may or may not do during the session. It's not always a guarantee, Ben. I'm running a game right now and I really kind of was leaning on the thought that players might have some curiosity about a few things that they had no curiosity in. and Sometimes they look at that thing you laid out there for them and they're like, nope, yeah they move on.
00:06:18
Speaker
and I'll be honest, I didn't handle it terribly well. i mean i just I relied on that and I just had this entire set piece predicated on the fact that they might have at some point been curious about something they clearly were not. and I had to adjust, frustratedly on the fly, not my proudest moment, but we got there.
00:06:44
Speaker
But the idea is that you can't rely so much on that. You just kind you
Predicting and Guiding Player Actions
00:06:48
Speaker
have to make your best guesses and go with the flow and fake it till you make it. One of the things to make sure you end with, you were talking earlier about knowing where you want to land at the end of a session and how you're going to end things up.
00:06:59
Speaker
is there's got to be something here where you kind of say, okay, well, my players could make any choice, but I think they're going to want to go in these ways. I think they're going to want to enter that castle or I think they're going to want to you know retreat and find a place of safety to recuperate after that you know big fight. Maybe they're going to go research, right? But you want to try to forecast a little bit about what they're going to do and and what kinds of things are out there for them.
00:07:24
Speaker
Some of the way that you do that is just by managing what information they have access to. One of the things I'll do a lot is players at a metagame level know that they're here to follow the threads that you're laying down. But if you are very careful about what threads you're laying down, there's only so many ways they could go. And so that gives you a little bit of a way to focus on certain directions.
00:07:45
Speaker
kind of In layman's terms, you know Ben is setting up what's going to transpire the next session. He's basically asking the players by the end of that session, hey, what's your plan? Where are you going? Maybe he's asking overtly. Maybe he's just forecasting by the direction they're telling him where they're going to go. This allows
Session Recaps and Player Feedback
00:08:03
Speaker
Ben to kind of plot and plan with efficiency.
00:08:07
Speaker
One trick I'll use for this is at the end of the session, and maybe you've been in a classroom before where a teacher will kind of recap the lecture at the end of the lecture and say, well, today we covered this and that in the next thing. We talk about session recaps at the beginning of a session, but you can also do it kind of at the end to recap what people have found and to help them understand where they might expect to go next time.
00:08:28
Speaker
just like it was a cliffhanger in a show. yeah All right, friends, while you've clearly beaten this monster and you have learned the secret lore of such and such, what mysteries await in the town of so-and-so down the way? And then all of a sudden you've just placed that seed in their head that that town is where they're going to probably get answers to whatever questions you laid down in this encounter.
00:08:48
Speaker
Let me just jump to another thing that we might prepare as we're as we're running these games. We're going to be stepping back and taking a look at what's working and what's not working. We want to be really have our fingers on the pulse of kind of what's happening. This requires you to have your head up, your ears open, you know you're listening, you're picking up the audio cues from people. Knowing what is working successfully and not helps you economize your time when you're preparing for that next session.
00:09:17
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. I mean, one of the things that's so important, we've talked about listening, but it's not something you just do at the beginning. It's not something you just do in one session. I've had games where I was playing long-term with people over several dozens of sessions even. And in one case, I tried to, hey everybody, let's do kind of a war game style battle in this town, right? And I kind of telescoped out of the players' views and I had them all kind of managing whole units of people. It was like,
00:09:45
Speaker
almost like taking ah ah a war game approach to a dnd game let's say. He really did it we had to actually kind of adjust as we played and that was actually a little tough in some ways but it was more important that we made the adjustment than that i kind of tried to force people through until i had.
00:10:02
Speaker
time to think about it how to do it it a different way later. That's good that you made that adjustment. you're You were like, you were queued in, you were listening, you were seeing what was happening and you had the kind of wherewithal to to make that adjustment and how to go once you did make those those changes.
00:10:21
Speaker
ah Better. i mean you know The thing is is that you can recover goodwill if you show that you're willing to make those changes and be responsive to your players. We've talked about how when you listen and when you react to what your players are doing, then your players will learn that their voice counts. and so When I started making those changes and adjustments, they saw that I was making that shift and then they stayed engaged.
00:10:44
Speaker
Yes, you
Visualization Techniques in Gameplay
00:10:45
Speaker
actually turned that into what was the negative you kind of turn into a positive by showing your willingness to listen. I would I would think. Yeah, I think so. Listening continuous listening especially is important. And then Mark uses term visualization a lot. So when you're thinking about what's working or what's not or what kind of direction you're going to go. Tell me a bit about what visualization is like as an ongoing process during the game.
00:11:08
Speaker
Visualization is something I probably picked up pretty early when I was playing sports and stuff. You kind of visualize your you know your success, so to speak. You always have to practice like, hey, when I'm wrestling, if this person's doing this move, I'm going to do this. So you're in your mind, you're kind of imagining your, it's like a chess game, you're going to be moving these around. It's not that different though when you're when you're at a table,
00:11:31
Speaker
and you're imagining all the different routes players can go, places they might want to investigate or see or do, and just spending a little time with your imagination. I mean, this is a game of imagination, right, Ben? Sure is. Yeah, you spend a little time with your imagination, visualize in different places you're going to travel, and just even doing that, the simple act of imagining that helps you be prepared for it.
00:11:55
Speaker
We're talking about
Effective Planning Without Over-preparation
00:11:56
Speaker
the value of preparation, but of course you can over-prepare. What does over-preparation look like? Mark, have you ever over-prepared for something? Yeah. So many times, man. Ben, I and i swear, I kid you not, I have i have worked up entire dungeons, like massive layers, and I just threw them away because I had prepared so early in the game that I thought like I wrote out this campaign,
00:12:25
Speaker
And I realized like midway through that like I am never going to get to this spot. And by the time we did get to that spot, I was like, they are not on board with this. like There's no way they're going to do this. So don't plan so far out that you you don't know what your the game's going to be like by the time you get there.
00:12:44
Speaker
The further out you plan, the more loosely you want to hold to that plan. yeah and We've talked about the value of sort of starting small and sketching in high-level pieces. and so I think the idea would be, like you know if we're talking about what you're doing this session, plan well. If you're talking about what you're going to do next session, have a plan. Have some places to go. Have some things that you think are connecting to this session. but maybe a little bit loosely held in case the players decide to do something else. If you're talking
Maintaining Flexibility in Gameplay Preparation
00:13:11
Speaker
about like sessions plural from now, that's when you want to be ah quite a bit looser and have maybe some bullet points, maybe some ideas for a set piece, action piece, something like that. But yeah you don't want to, as you're saying, draw out whole maps and create really detailed stories and all that kind of stuff. yeah
00:13:30
Speaker
That is the truth. I mean, you can get way too far in the weeds and that kind of stuff. Honestly, you know plan for the short term. You can have long-term ideas, but with visualization, you might want to have several long-term ideas. And then as you get closer, you might pick the the one that you think is best or might come up with a new one. Yeah.
00:13:54
Speaker
I'm pretty notorious about blowing up my plans the night before a game session and starting from scratch because I've come up with some better. So it's funny how inspiration strikes, isn't it? It does. And sometimes it's just, it ruins your afternoon. Well, yeah. Here's something else though that's important guys is even if you're going to do that, even if your players decide they're going to turn left and go down the road you haven't planned for instead of turning right and going down that road into the dungeon you meticulously crafted. Don't throw those dungeons away. Don't throw those notes away. Don't throw any of that stuff away because you will reuse it someday in the future. When you need a dungeon to pull out of your back pocket, it's going to be there.
00:14:36
Speaker
You might just find like another group is just ready for that. like They're like, this is the dungeon for this group. I'm going to break it out, rep repurpose it. That work can be put to good use. well and This is
Improvisation with Prepared Material
00:14:48
Speaker
actually a good note too because preparation can help you in a lot of ways when it comes to improvisation. Obviously, the more you've prepared the world or the more you've prepared what you know about NPCs and bad guys and locations. Obviously that helps you if the players turn some way or another that you didn't expect, then you've got information. But even more to the point, having a whole backlog of stuff that maybe you've used or thrown away or only partly used or whatever, um you can pull that stuff out and use it improvisationally when your players go somewhere you didn't expect them to go and all of a sudden now you need a dungeon or now you need an NPC or something like that.
00:15:24
Speaker
Or maybe maybe there should be some sort of charity where you could donate your dungeons dungeons for for poor children who've never had good dungeons before. That's right. Well, it's just a season of giving, Mark. That's true. we're We're kind of getting there. um So yeah, we've talked a lot about preparation and and visualization and how they can make your prep better. And we've kind of like talked about the importance of prep.
00:15:49
Speaker
But all these things, like all this prep, really, we come down to it. It just makes you stronger, makes your games better, and allows you to kind of be able to wing it a lot easier when you want to go off script. Because you've kind of gone through the motions behind the scenes, you could do all that. So don't give up on prep and don't shortchange your game by doing no prep.
00:16:17
Speaker
I think the entire act of running a game as a GM is a very face-to-face act. you know It's not something where we've got our noses in books reading out box text and mechanically doing everything. right If I'm running a game with you in it, I'm watching what you're doing and it's It's when you're unsure about what's behind that door that I'm going to then maybe ask you to roll on something. Or it's yeah all kinds of ways in which I'm not playing the game, I'm playing you, the player, and the medium through which I'm doing that is the game. The more you've prepared, the more rich that medium is, the more you can draw on it and interact with your players in great new interesting ways.
00:16:53
Speaker
And experience really
Experience and Reduced Need for Preparation
00:16:54
Speaker
comes into this a lot. As you GM more, you just prep a lot less. You might do some in the beginning, but like I find sessions where I don't have to do any prep because I've done it maybe earlier. I kind of know where things are going. This is where the experience kind of kicks in guys. And you're going to find yourself more efficient and just frankly better.
00:17:15
Speaker
Yeah, I'll say this. I tend to do the most amount of prep. I probably do two thirds, three quarters of the amount of prep I'm going to do for a whole adventure sequence around the time of the first two or three sessions. And then what'll happen is the rest of the time I'm i'm just making adjustments. Yeah.
00:17:31
Speaker
most of the prep is happening at or before even that first session in a sequence I'm running and then after that it's just hey let's see what unwinds okay they did this so now maybe I need to throw in a couple extra monsters there or I need to put another mystery here or hey they didn't pick up that clue so guess what I'm gonna have to find another way to bring that in but you're not having to write everything from scratch once you get things up and running And we talked a little bit about learning the rules, but like this is kind of, you know learning the system as well is going to be important for for preparation. like I will say this, like one of the things, if there's a game that I can run well, but I know the rules really well, I know the system and the lore, it just makes everything a lot easier. If I'm jumping into a game, like maybe i'm I'm playing some sort of mystery game that I don't really know much about this realm or or this place,
00:18:21
Speaker
That's gonna be a lot more prep and I'm a little intimidated by that sometimes. Yeah, that's a good note. One of the things about preparation is that preparation is a way of both playing to your strengths and shoring up your weaknesses. You're going to have a great time with whatever the strong parts are that you work on. And Mark, you do a great job prepping things with respect to art and description, just really creative, interesting ideas. And then I know that you spend a lot of time making sure that you've got the parts where you feel weaker, kind of shorter because you spent the homework time ahead of time making sure that was ready to go.
00:18:52
Speaker
And folks, if you got ideas for PrEP, anything like that, we'd like to hear them. So
Listener Preparation Tips
00:18:56
Speaker
send it to us at tabletoptuneup at gmail dot.com or comment on the YouTube channel and we'll be happy to respond.
00:19:09
Speaker
Well, as
Balancing Encounter Challenges
00:19:10
Speaker
always, Mark, it is time for our tune-up segment. Here's our tune-up for this week. We have someone who wrote to us and said, coming from D and&D, I have a clear sense of how to set encounter challenges for a party of four to five. But now I'm running a game in a different system and my party is only three players. There's not a lot of guidance in the system about how to calibrate the challenge of the encounter. So what should I do?
00:19:31
Speaker
and i'll tell you a pretty simple idea and i do this even for games i'm experiencing because sometimes you don't know if players are just gonna walk through encounters pretty pretty easily pretty handedly there's always a few more goblins with some torches behind door number two in around two or three hey they just might come in and throw some fire yeah now is this your way of of one being able to amp up an encounter and the idea is that you're gonna kind of err on the side of it being a weaker encounter Yeah, I think I'd err on the side, of particularly if I don't know the system terribly well, I'm going to err on the side of a weaker encounter. Maybe the players don't know the system and they're trying to figure things out. If I have the the next wave of the encounter ready to go, if i've I realize, oh, this they're getting they're struggling here, yeah that wave too doesn't have to happen.
00:20:19
Speaker
I like your point about having stuff kind of waiting in the wings or having little contingencies. One of the things that I'll do as well is not just doing that with like monsters that might be around the corner or that could be alerted, but also with environmental challenges. Yeah, complications. Right. Maybe the players are coming into some place and there was going to be a difficult terrain in some spot or there was going to be some Kind of an environmental hazard that was going to give them a negative modifiers to their roles or something like that. That's a great idea, Ben. Because like there's nothing I like more than having an encounter and having a third element to an encounter. yeah you know like ah ah Something that in the environment is also causing problems.
00:20:54
Speaker
The cool part about that is that if you know the players have been struggling, you don't have to add that in and they won't know it was there and miss it. yeah If the players have been walking through everything, you can add that in pretty much on the fly and it's going to become important and they're going to have to work around that.
00:21:09
Speaker
Do you know one thing I i think of when i I think of your suggestion about adding in an environmental problem? All I can think of is Steven Spielberg. He is so good in his movies about always throwing in that third problem. I mean, it's not enough that Indiana Jones is fighting a guy by a plane. Now we have to worry about a propeller spinning around that could cause a problem. You could do so many things. It's the propeller that's spinning around. It's a problem. It's the fire that's tracing its way back to the gas container. It's the lady that's locked in the front of the plane and she can't get out and you've got to go figure that out. yeah There's so many dimensions you can do. so
00:21:48
Speaker
That would be kind of my general sense of encounter challenge is look for environmental stuff, look for stuff where it's easy to add or remove monsters to your point mark. One other thing I'll do too is in a system where you're not really sure or actually even in the first combat or two with players you haven't played with before, start with maybe just one enemy per player character. Intrinsically there, you're balancing the action economy, you're balancing the terms of engagement. And then just make sure that your villains don't have much stronger you know abilities than your heroes do, which typically they won't. And then what that lets you do is you can kind of see how they do and give them a little bit of a ah light run and light exercise before they start getting into heavier and heavier stuff. And the cool part is the direction of challenge then is up and up and up and up from there. So start small, as we say with everything else, start slowly and then scale as you go.
00:22:43
Speaker
That's some great advice, Ben. And I think that kind of sums up our our tabletop tune-up, you guys. And I think that ends our show a little early. i feel A little early. You know, I'm looking forward to hearing how this one comes out. I'd love to hear what people do to balance their own encounters and love to hear what they do for practice. So you guys, this week, a little bit shorter episode, but we'll be back next week. Until then, keep those days rolling. Hello. Get your tune-up.
00:23:53
Speaker
tuna