Running Adventures With Little Preparation
Running Adventures With Little Preparation
Preparation
Copyright 2000 by Brennan O'Brien.
[email protected]
Johnn asked me to write on a topic dear to my own heart. Between career, family, and too
many hobbies, I often find I don't have a lot of time to come up with adventures for my
characters. When game time comes, I tend to make it up as I go. The traditional wisdom
says for every hour of game time, you need about an hour of prep time. In this article, I
hope to pass on some of my techniques to change those hours of prep time to a few
minutes.
Twist It Up A Bit
Now, I have myself four basic points about the Demon adventure. In order to make the
adventure interesting and memorable, I need to flesh it out a bit. I begin asking myself
questions about the plot. What item are the characters trying to recover? Who is asking
them to recover it? This is where you need to focus on breaking the clichs of adventures
and twist things up. Doing so allows your material to stay fresh and prevents your players
from guessing what you are up to.
In the case of the Demon adventure, I figured out that a minion of the demon hired the
characters, and that in order to 'break the aura of magic and recover the item', the party
would need to place a 'focusing crystal' on the suit of armor at the bottom of the dungeon.
In reality, the armor was actually the skin of the demon, and by placing the crystal on the
armor, the demon could return to it's skin and once again awaken.
So, now I have an adventure in which the characters are being duped into helping the
demon. Sweet. A great conclusion (if I wanted an ongoing enemy), would be to have the
demon escape after he tries to off the characters to prevent their meddling later.
Problems
Two main issues tend to crop up when running a game in this fashion, continuity and game
balance. With continuity, because you are making so much up on the fly, its common that
you will make a decision in one game that is different in another game. This break of
continuity challenges the players willingness to suspend their disbelief in your games.
When you do make a decision, write it down for yourself for later or otherwise record it.
This way your adventures stay consistent to you, and your players know the "unwritten
rules" of your games.
The second major problem in this style of play is balance. It can be difficult to come up
with creatures which are both good challenges and aren't so powerful that they decimate
the characters on the first round of combat. The solution is twofold. First, one we are all
familiar with, is to fudge dice rolls. If an encounter isn't going well (either too much in favor
of the characters or of the monsters) fudge your rolls to favor the loosing side. Secondly, it
is a LOT easier to lean towards a weaker encounter and power it up as you play than it is
to weaken an encounter in the middle. For example, I know I am going to throw a bunch of
gobins at my characters. I guess that each character can take on 1.5 goblins and win. I
guess wrong. I throw 9 gobs at 6 characters, and mid-way through the fight the characters
are getting slaughtered. Why would the goblins leave? They're winning.
Instead, I will guess low on what the characters can take and amp the encounter upwards
if I need to. It makes a lot more sense to me to start the encounter with 6 goblins and add
anywhere from 0 to 6 more as reinforcements midway through the battle. This way, I can
tailor the encounter to the characters on the fly while remaining balanced to what they can
take. These sorts of encounters are challenging, but they are neither automatic wins or
suicidal losses.
Similarly, balance your treasures. A good way to do this is to go very weak on the treasure
through most of the adventure, then rewarding the characters as a function of the final
encounter. This allows you to come up with only one treasure which has to be well
balanced versus many, and generally will allow you greater accuracy on the level of
rewards necessary than trying to randomly generate treasure for each encounter.
Do Use Minatures
When you have a well programmed adventure laid out, it's easy to keep in your mind
where things are. You've learned the adventure, know the opponents, etc. When you're
playing on the fly it is a LOT more difficult to keep all these things in mind while also
keeping the adventure moving forward. Use minatures. It allows you a place focus as your
characters move through your world, and gives you a better overview of what your
characters are up to. Using miniatures takes a huge burden off of you as you run a game
off the top of your head.
Resources
Pulling off a good on the fly adventure requires you have ready access to a lot of
resources. As you build your plot, extrapolate what you need as you do your design. In the
Demon adventure, I knew I needed a dungeon floorplan, stats for the demon and stats for
several undead encounters. While these vary by gamemaster, game and style, here are a
few resources to keep in mind:
The Net Book of Plots provides many good basic scenario ideas. Often these
adventures can be tailored to a variety of genres as needed. Many sites maintain a
copy of net books, so just use your favorite search engine to locate a copy near
you.
Computer game websites provide great material for quick adventures. Need a
dungeon? Go grab the floorplans for one of the Ultima Online dungeons. Similarly,
Irony Games provides tons of dungeons, caves, etc on their website at
http://www.irony.com/webtools.html
Finally, tools like random plot generation tables from gaming magazines, the little
game "Once Upon a Time" by Atlas Games, and the old TSR products "Book of
Lairs" and "Deck of Encounters" can provide some great quick material to build your
adventures from.
Conclusion
So how much time did I save in using these techniques to create an adventure? It took me
about 45 minutes to come up with the Demon adventure. The adventure lasted about 9
hours. So, it took me 5 minutes per hour of play. Not bad at all.
Good luck with your own endeavors, and happy "on the fly" adventuring.