Quote from: Haffrung;736284I'm curious how a DM can improv a sandbox campaign that has dungeons and such. Generate the maps randomly as you go?

You know when you draw a dungeon as part of prep, you do that only at the table.
I would agree that improvising a dungeon is tricky. It tends to be easier if you take a place you know really well and port that you can port. So for example your old high school. You just need the layout then you can riff off it and its simple.

Its easy to fall into illusionism as well. You get a great idea for a set of rooms say based round a wizards laboratory or something but the party don't bother to open that door. To avoid this I always decide what is behind a door before I put it into play. If it doesn't get opened then ...

Like with any dungeon you design you want to try and make it make sense this zone the ruined temple is populated by bugbears the old mine is populated by whatever etc etc. If you do that and you have a rough floorplan in mind you can ad lib a dungeon complex fairly easily and the PCs will enjoy it like you worked it all out last night

Not a whole lot actually. I start the campaign with a wide sketch of big events that are probably going to happen, then add to this stuff all the time various NPCs with ambitions, usually focusing on wherever the party is at the moment. I also have a few backup adventures with me, in case they get off the map pretty heavily. I also prepare key NPCs and locations (such as dungeons) in advance, so I can also get hang of their tactics.

Because I tend to run sandbox games, I make very extensive notes to ensure that the players can feel free to wander about without running into areas where I have nothing planned or described.  I aim to make the game-world feel richly detailed and immersive.  My current Planescape campaign, for example, has around 350 single-spaced pages of notes, give or take.  What I don't prepare beforehand are "stories": quest seeds and encounters, sure, but not "plots."  Once the game actually starts, I end up improvising extensively all the time.  I also take lots of notes during a given game to keep track of things I make up, which is as or more important than preparing notes ahead of time.

It's possible to improvise dungeons and stuff, sure, but in my experience they're rarely as well thought-out and constructed as prepared dungeons.  I like to include unique magic items, puzzle-rooms, patrol patterns, passwords, specific sets of keys that go to specific locks, etc.  This level of complexity is challenging to come up with on the fly, and in my experience a totally improvised section will inevitably feel cruder and less polished or verismilar than one that's been at least sketched beforehand.

Quote from: RPGPundit;735793By "improv" I mean running a session with zero planning beforehand, going totally off the cuff?

Do you do this most of the time? Half the time? Regularly? Very rarely? Or never at all?

Define the scale. Zero planning beforehand is in a way almost impossible, as I did choose setting locale and premise. Even continuing into a campaign where we left off with no new added material, the "past is still prologue" if you will.

That said I very much work as an artist does: start with topic and choose perspective, this goes into a sketch, sketch fleshes into depth, depth into value, value into color, and color into details and highlights. And I rely heavily on randomness creating content as much as character interest focusing my efforts. So I may have a town in basic topic and perspective, but players who focus on inn food menus and gossip among the laundry women will get eventually more until there's detail. And if I am dry for ideas, or ambivalent, I roll the dice to choose for me.

Creating interesting prep blind often can lead to wasted time if my players end up ignore it. I still make some of course, especially around mover and shaker NPCs. However I have embraced openly talking to my players beforehand about what they are interested in doing next session. This saves me so much time on prep because they already expressed where they plan to focus their energies -- and in turn I can do the same.

Once I get a few sessions in however, and finally fleshed interesting locales and NPCs, I feel bolder in knowing my world. That's when I feel really free in letting the characters (a place can be a character, too!) speak for themselves. That's a different level of improv, and likely unrelated to your meaning here. That's when stuff like motivations and actions can just about create themselves.

Quote from: Brander;736246And yet you said it was "Bad Dms". To quote:
So because Bad DMs couldn't do it well, no DM can...  Sorry, that doesn't compute.

Which I explained was me being rpgsite pc to soothe egos here.  Evidently yours has been bruised regardless.

Quote from: Brander;736246And I no longer find it necessary, which has helped as the demands of my family and job have increased, while still allowing me to run games periodically.

More power to yas.  I wouldn't enjoy your games.
ymmv

Quote from: jibbajibba;736248I think you have a specific play style that requires a lot of prep.
Whether you developed the style because you like prep or you like the games it produces and I assume enjoy the prep enough to make it worth while.

I think you are cheating the players if you are merely bullshitting your way through a session

Quote from: jibbajibba;736248In the past I have done stuff like preparing a complex dungeon on tiles cut out and stuck to black card so you can it all out as you go blah blah but then the Players just don't go to the at dungeon and its a waste of 2 hours of my life

Why I have dungeon tiles, 20 minutes, done.

Quote from: jibbajibba;736248My Mum used to do insane prep. So take a city have an A5 index card for each building which NPCs, story hooks all that a bit liek a MMO or something. Vast ammount of effort.
But at the end of the day you can spoof that with imagination and experience.

And you don't think the people sitting on the other side of the screen has those same imaginations and experiences?

Why I said most people don't give a shit, they want to play so they accept that you have a standard set of npcs.

Quote from: jibbajibba;736248I am more concerned that you can tell each of my NPCs apart by their vocal nuance (not accent per se more the style and timbre of speech) and that all the NPC plans are well conceived and executed as well as that NPC can manage with out exceeding their horizon (the limit of their knowledge, skill experience etc) than I am that the dungeon is laid out in an interesting manner or the maps look pretty.

And you think you are far better at this spur of the moment then taking some time and triple checking that your environments are distinct?

Quote from: jibbajibba;736248I like a nice prop but I tend to use them more for the Murdery Mystery Business than a RPG session because in an RPG session me describing the book, dagger, goblet is probably more useful than me bringing a simulacrum.

Hitting as many of the senses as you can heightens the experience particularly for 'jaded' or experienced players.  

Quote from: jibbajibba;736248So I get your love of prep and I bet it produces some great games but I don't think that means improv games are weaker, have less depth or less immersion.

I do.
ymmv.

Quote from: Haffrung;736284I'm curious how a DM can improv a sandbox campaign that has dungeons and such. Generate the maps randomly as you go?

Just takes practice, describing landmarks that PCs and NPCs will remember.  Can't use a map though.  I mean players will make maps for themselves if they like.  But then they realize after a bit that they don't need to be drawing or writing anything down for role-playing.

Quote from: jibbajibba;735976One thing I fund very useful when I was runnign Vampire were my Jyhad cards.
When the PCs got to a new town I woudl randomly pull 1/2 a dozen jyhad cards and that made the adventure.

I reckon I could use magic cards to the same effect and since each set has a great theme and setting I could make some effort to read it and use that as the setting.

Yay, someone does the same as I do! :cheerleader:

As I played and collected Magic the Gathering, Jyhad, and Legend of the Five Rings, I have a right gold mine of random content generators.

One of the neater tools I am testing out is using these cards in Random Encounter Tables. Besides personalities you can use certain cards, like Jyhad minion cards, or L5R fate cards, as responses or immediate NPC motivations. For example, draw Deflection (Jyhad)? Vampire is trying to dominate the conversation into getting you to believe his version of blaming someone else.

In some ways tables are easier, but there's these neat little 3x5 index card accordions that'd be perfect for transport. Coolest thing about cards is you can readjust your tables dynamically, even mid game. i.e. Scorpion personality you met at Beiden Pass on the way to the Crane lands? Move that card into the Crane or Lion encounter deck.

This is a awesome tidbit of prefab content used as random content generation prep for aiding in-game improv.

I got me thinking about degrees of prep in rpg's.

So I concluded the following:

1) Prep is desirable, assuming the gm does not become a railroader or paralyzed  if the prepped material is bypassed by the characters.

2) Improv is desirable in the context of being flexible even if you do mammoth amounts of prep.

3) Pure improv with no prep is not ideal, but many gm's likely do quite well at improv.


I would classify myself as good at improv but vastly preferring lots of prep.

Great thread and interesting answers.

Quote from: Brander;736242I don't avoid it, I consider it one of the best tools in the toolbox.  No matter how smart or witty I think I am, when it comes to ideas, the players usually outnumber me and are thinking in parallel with one another.  It's hard for one mind, no matter how smart or witty, to compete with that.  If one or more of their ideas is better, I steal it.

However this is something I wouldn't care for as a player, unless it was explicitly stated we were in a collaborative storytelling game. In many situations, players are speculating about the unknown because they're trying to find a course of action or simply because speculation is an enjoyable pastime. In both cases part of the "payoff" is finding out whether you guessed right, which is quite different from finding out whether the GM liked your idea. Using the latter as a criterion while allowing the players to think they're speculating about established reality is illusionistic. (And that's on a different level from letting players think they're trapping with established reality while you improvise based on pure extrapolation.)

I had a GM once who deliberately avoided listening to player planning sessions in order to avoid being influenced in her creation of the opposition. This allowed all parties to be genuinely surprised by the results.

I honestly cannot see them in opposition. You cannot have one without the other. All RPGs in my mind take both concepts in various measures to create the state of play.

Sort of like when estar talks about one's "bag of stuff," we cannot really be separated from what we already know and experienced (sans amnesia). So just the mere act of choosing a game system, selecting a setting -- even a prefab one -- and running a module cold will still have prepared choices baked into the session before the word "GO!" You chose subject, structure, time, place, viewpoint, etc. and all with the bundle of everyday assumptions that go with them.

Same goes for improvisation, otherwise the RPG notion of nigh-infinite human response to a given situation is empty. Creatures are too ingenious to predict all their responses. Prep is wonderful, but if you cannot attempt what would be unexpected and sense that which is not already detailed, your GM is either a god or you have restraint on your choices.

In a way it's like trying to divide out what's nature versus nurture to me. I cannot really imagine an RPG session existing without the other. That's sort of what makes these games exciting compared to other stuff on the market.

Is that a followup to Bill or me?

Quote from: Sommerjon;736303I think you are cheating the players if you are merely bullshitting your way through a session


 Hitting as many of the senses as you can heightens the experience particularly for 'jaded' or experienced players.  

I think we disagree on the GM's job here. The GM's job is to portray an exciting  world, drive the game forward and help craft a fun experience. Prep is one of the tools that can help with that, but it's not a baked-in part of the job description. If two GMs describe the same room using the same words, and one has written the description beforehand, while the other thought it up on the spot at the table, the effect for the players is exactly the same.

It's interesting that you use the word cheating. Do you mean someone breaking the rules, or someone taking the easy way to get the same result?

I agree that trying to hit as many of the senses in your descriptions makes for better play, I definitely describe things in the sense of "You hear, you see, it feels, it tastes" etc. Sensory descriptions aren't exclusive to preparation, though.

I see people bandying about the term "Illusionism". Everything said about the world at the table is an illusion. Everything the GM has written beforehand is illusionism. These worlds are imaginary, and writing them out before the game doesn't make them any more objectively real. All it means is you are making more of the creative decisions before the game than you are during the game.

Prep is useful. It's a good way for GMs to play, especially if they find the act of preparation enjoyable. Improv is also useful, and an equally valid way to play. Each method has their strengths and weaknesses, and they aren't mutually exclusive. Plan as much as you want, and improvise as much as you need. Neither style inherently makes you a bad or good GM.

Quote from: Adric;736377Prep is useful. It's a good way for GMs to play, especially if they find the act of preparation enjoyable.

Most of the enjoyment I get from GMing is as a solitary creative outlet. Sitting at a table in the evening writing up a lair, a faction, some NPCs, a geographic feature. I don't have a lot of time for it, and sometimes the inspiration runs cold. But I can always manage a few hours a month. If GMing to me was just the live monthly session, I'd just as soon be a player.

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;735814That's not to say that my sessions are pre-planned, quite the contrary. A given session may in fact be improvised if players "deviate" from the material that I have prepared, but in that case I have at least something to fall back on, and extrapolate from.

In a long campaign the prep is considerably less than with one-shots, since much of the setting is already defined and npcs still follow their relative agendas.
But even then, I don't run anything without further prep.

I do this too, though I tend more towards one-shots or pre-written campaigns than campaign it myself (I don't think I have the concentration for it).

Quote from: Arminius;736368Is that a followup to Bill or me?

That would be Bill's "Improv versus Prep" tag. You're just too fast with the topic-fu for your own good. Caught in the crossfire!


edit: Adric, to spare us all a conflagration, I'll note that illusionism has become a well established jargon, on this site at least, and similar elsewhere. Someone will come along and define it for you according to our specialized community usage. Needless to say you're not wrong per se, but we all know once you're on a board like this (fans, for fanatic!) everyday vernacular is going to eventually be redefined into jargon.