Where to next?
That's it. By following this rule, you can present a truly open sandbox to your players with NO extra work for you! You can present them with five or six dungeons near town and still only have to prepare one. You can litter your dungeons with adventure hooks, stuff your random rumor table full to bursting, and as long as you ask your players what they want to do NEXT session, all you have to do is prepare just as much as you would anyway. No extra work - you're working smart instead of hard.
"And what if my players change their minds between sessions?" I hear you asking. Just be straight-up with your players, tell them that whatever they pick at the end of their sessions is going to be what they're doing the next session, so they'd better be sure. As you add maps to your referee binder you'll have some more degree of flexibility as well. A shrine they explored a few sessions ago can be re-explored with a simple re-stocking procedure.
This idea is probably (almost certainly) not a new one, but it has radically transformed my games and refereeing style for the better, and I don't see it talked about enough, so I figured I'd jot down a quick article for it.
Another question you may have, especially if you don't already have a game in progress, is how to make this principle work for your first game. To that, I say just begin your first session outside your starter dungeon. Simple works best. "Here is a dungeon. There is treasure in it. Go get that treasure," works perfectly to begin with. Then, stuff that dungeon with interesting adventure hooks - treasure maps, dead adventurers' journals, denizens of the dungeon who barter their lives for information about other caches of treasure around the countryside - and ask your players what they want to follow up on the next time they meet.
An example: in my home game, my players were exploring a megadungeon, but had passed by a wizards' tower on their way to the main dungeon. At the end of one of the sessions, they told me that next session they wanted to check out the tower, so in the week between our sessions, I mapped and keyed out the tower and threw some other hooks in the tower: a gaggle of gnomes who had lost one of their number to a carrion crawler in the cellars beneath the tower, an animated suit of armor who was the servant of the wizard who owned the tower a hundred years ago, a dwarf frozen in magic ice from a far-off land, a former apprentice of the wizard's, cursed to take the shape of a mountain lion and chained to the central staircase... one thing I love about this method is that I can truly go wild with my adventure hooks, because it doesn't matter if I come up with one or seven - the work load on me from week to week doesn't change! My players ended up exploring the tower and taking a special interest in the gnomes, so when they told me at the end of THAT session that they wanted to help rescue the gnomes' friend, I spent the week between mapping out the cellars of the tower.
I hope that you find this principle useful, and can use it in your games.
You're right - it makes session prep incredibly simple. I'm not afraid to provide a (partial) list of hanging plot hooks if the players aren't forthcoming.
ReplyDeleteFor that crucial first session, I make use of a solid rumor table with each PC getting at least one roll on it.