(no subject)

[seekingferret]

After a bunch of delay caused by COVID messing up peoples' schedules, I'm picking up my D&D campaign again tomorrow night. Session 9, and I started this campaign last June on a theoretically biweekly schedule, so I can hardly blame COVID for all of the delays. We've all been busy for different reasons at different times, but I'm glad people have been having enough fun to be putting in the effort to keep it going in spite of that. I'm also really glad I've been diligent about writing detailed session reports and sending them out the next day, because there's no way in hell I'd remember what happened in Session 8, which was back in February, otherwise.


I have the rough skeleton of what I need to set up for tomorrow night in mind already, but I'm running into some limits of my preplanning. I could carry tomorrow's session on plots already set in motion and it would be an okay, fun session, I think, but I'm really itching to throw in some new curveballs that I haven't really thought out. I introduced a couple of factions in Session 3, the Faery Wedding (all the way back last July), that haven't cropped back up yet and it's probably time to bring them back in, and I have a cool encounter idea for how to do that, but I don't have a clear picture in my head of how they interact with some of the other factions on the board and I'm worried that'll lead to some sputtering at the table unless I map out a bunch more stuff first. I think I'm going to go for it, though. Try to make a faction map at lunchtime, it'll be useful for the campaign going forward for me to have a better picture of how those things work anyway. I rely too much on improvisation, I think.

Comments

[angledge]

I guess I've never really thought about how much pre-planning a DM has to do to make a long-term campaign work well. I've only flirted with playing D&D.

[seekingferret]

Only as much planning as you need to feel comfortable. Some DMs and rulesets allow more improvisation based on the setup, others require the DM to have a very clear sense of the world in their head/notes in order to be able to react to the players' choices.

This is my first longterm campaign, after periodically running oneshots for years, and playing for even longer. I'm very much still figuring things out, the dynamics of what is possible storytelling-wise in a long-term game are much different than a one-shot.