Pretty sure it happened to everyone, you lacked time to prep tonight session, and now the first player just arrived
Bonus point if you explain how to do it when tired.
My players stumble upon an abandoned version of one of my Dwarf Fortress cities.
I already know the whole layout backwards and forwards without needing to work with a map, and it has traps, epic architecture, purpose to every room, little random stuff scattered through, and I can usually come up with some kind of theme or ending to the dungeon for if they get that far into it. Easy peasy.
Exactly this, but for my world building hobby. I’ve been setting on a fully formed civilization with clashing cultures, centuries of history, historical figures, folklore, and recipes for more than a decade now. If I don’t have a mission lined up in game I can just slot in my own lore.
Yeah. Or video game levels you love, or fiction, or anything. As long as it’s something you thought was badass when you were dealing with it, then you’ll probably have it fleshed out already in your mind so you can put your main focus into making it badass when your players are going through it, not just fumbling around with encounter tables or whatever.
My favorite go to, one I’ve used twice in the same campaign and no one was the wiser, is to throw some ridiculous fight at the party out of nowhere, let them sweat it out for a round or two, and start dropping hints it isn’t what it seems.
I had them stumble across a black dragon in a cave as a lvl 1 party once. After scaring the shit out of them, for a round or two, someone “finally noticed” that the wings seemed to be made of tar covered cloth. Druid did a nature check and realized that’s not what a black dragon roar sounds like at all. Literally 5 kobolds in a dragon coat.
One time, I thought we had canceled but everyone pinged me about why I wasn’t logged in to roll20 yet (got my weeks mixed up). Luckily one other person did too, so I told the party I was going to puppet their character so they would level up too. I had that character betray the party by leading them to a trap. They defeated the player character (I used their actual character sheet to fight the party), for them to discover it was a doppelganger, and the trap was the diopleganger’s lair. they solved through a bunch of traps and random creatures from the diopleganger’s managerie of tortured -to-the-point-of-insanity minor monsters until they found the actual player character that (as they discovered) had been kidnapped the night before.
One other time l, over lockdowns, I had a friend miss a few months of sessions due to some serious and very depressing circumstances. He still wanted to continue once life had calmed down. We were doing an Avernus campaign, and I had been NPCing his character, but I told him to fast forward to his character to the current party level (about 6 levels) and not tell anyone he was going to rejoin the play sessions or log into roll20 until I gave him the go ahead. About 15 minutes in, the party is sailing down the river Styx when they see a damaged flying fortress crash landing, streaking by overhead. They hear a hellish scream and see a buck naked tiefling jumping out of the ship directly for their raft. At this point my friend logs into discord and yells “I WANT MY SHIT BACK YOU IMPOSTER BASTARD!”. combat began immediately whereupon he fought himself and regained all the loot the imposter had been carrying. The party had a hell of a good time that night, and he never did explain (in character) what hell actually happened to him.
A shopping trip can kill half a session if it’s been a while. Then maybe one of the shopkeepers has a problem that would be worth one of the nicer items in their shop if it were taken care of for them.
A shopping trip can kill half a session if it’s been a while.
Do you really have fun running a session like that? Me and my players would die of boredom.
I think a lot of it is the dopamine of getting to upgrade your character.
Also, I have observed that people LOVE getting everything together to get kitted out for a mission. If there’s some special equipment they’re going to need to go into the temple, and they’re trying to think what they would need once they get there and running around town putting it all together, they just get super excited and it gets them amped up for the adventure. It is fun in my experience, although yes YMMV.
I stufferd a store in for my players to shop (Foundry) because it had been a while, and just grabbed a pre-built one and tossed it in…
they spent the night planning and implementing a massive heist because one item cost too much for them to afford and they wanted it… I had NOTHING for this (half the players beliefs on the shopkeeper, how they worked and how they could be robbed was based on some crappy random generated name and they had made “assumptions”…)
Found out later they thought I planned it all
In their defence, Blades in the Dark, set a trend of having a formal downtime phase which is about upgrading team, healing physical and mental wound, and advancing your side project, and I heard player telling me that they’ve spend 2 (short) sessions on it.
Even on more classic games, having the player looking what to buy in the books, then finding a shop having it, negotiation with the shopkeeper and so on, can take a lot of time.
s a DM, I’ve always found it boring as hell. 👍Maximum Derek👍 English4•
I don’t really like running them, but my players enjoy it from time to time and it always seems to take half a session.
While my players will easily kill 30 minutes collaborating on what to buy, a session like this is definitely more fun if there are NPC’s involved.
We had a memorable session when the PC’s found the Emporium of Evil, where they tried to find the magic items that weren’t TOO cursed, speaking to all manner of morally questionable merchant. (They bought a lot, actually.)
You can also brainstorm the next quest this way. Whether or not the party wants to take a quest from a one of these merchants, they can certainly hear rumors. You can see what they take interest in, and build your next plot arc off of that base.
Some trouble can always pop up when the shopping is winding down, requiring decisive action by the party.
Assuming a D&D 5e game, I load Kobold Fight Club and click until I find monsters I can build a little story around.
A while back (including enemies from Tome of Beasts) I got Spawn of Akyishigal and Giant Ants, and after a few overland battles they found a beleaguered anthill.
By the next session I had my dungeon made and some lore surrounding it.
The giant anthill had carved its way into an ancient tomb of an orcish warlord who had managed to seal the Demon Lord of Cockroaches with her in an attempt at everlasting life. The actions the players take can result in her rising as a Mummy Lord or in Akyishigal being freed.
All from going “Hey, these enemies work well together.”
Here’s a link to it:
If I have absolutely nothing prepared, like I don’t even know anything about the world or the situation the players are in, then I reschedule session 1 ;)
You almost never have nothing prepared. If I didn’t prepare for a session, it just means whatever was there gets built upon in a more rudimentary way, areas have less detail, characters are more rough, no nice maps, but otherwise everything is exactly the same. The stuff you do in preparation just means that the session will be better. If you don’t prepare, you’ll essentially just do “preparation” on the fly and it’s called improvisation. You don’t do drafts and discard them for something better, you just always go for the first thing that comes to mind.
So idk, for me, not preparing for a session is pretty simple, I just do everything the same just in less time.