Running Campaigns: Improvising vs Planning
Finding the Balance
Running a campaign is an incredible experience. It can be rewarding for your creativity, your social life, and sating your itch to see a puzzle fit together. When it comes to running one, there are a few schools of thought: some say you should plan out every session for 1-3 hours or even more in advance of playing and some say you should just wing it. Personally, I believe that there’s merit to both mindsets, and the real answer is somewhere in the goldilocks zone in between.
Plan the Campaign at a High Level
Regardless of whether you prep each nitty-gritty session, you should certainly plan out your campaign from a high level perspective. I believe it’s critical to have three main points planned out, either explicitly written down somewhere or in the back of your head: the beginning, the end, and at least one milestone on the way to the end. The beginning is really important to have planned out pretty thoroughly. Know what beats you want to hit in that first session, like how you’ll introduce the players’ characters to one another (if they don’t know each other already), how they’ll decide to group up, and how the main plot will be introduced to the players. When I say you should plan the ending, what I don’t mean (necessarily) is that you need to have the exact nature of the ending, who’s gonna win or lose or live or die, or anything like that planned. What I mean is much broader, like having a few general options you would like to get the party to pick from, like killing the primary villain, subduing the villain and bringing them to justice, or even siding with the villain with a general idea of what each of those endings looks like. Then comes milestones. You can have as few as one major milestone, up to a dozen or more smaller milestones, and they can include reaching a certain location, defeating a particular enemy, learning a secret, and much more. At the end of the pre-campaign prep you should have your major points plotted out, so that you can plot your party’s path from start to finish like a graph. It doesn’t have to be a straight line from start to finish, but that’s what the milestones are for; to guide your party back on track for the central plot when they inevitably derail the plan, leaving you with a plotline that looks more like a heart rate monitor than a linear chart.
When to Prepare a Session
The argument for prepping each session is fairly straight-forward: the more you prepare for a session, the less often you’ll get caught with your pants down when your players ask you questions or start doing things. At least, that’s the way that it’s supposed to be. Often, prepping will feel good for the first 10-30 minutes of a session, and then you’ll realize that the players have gone off-script somewhere along the way and you have to pull them back to the right path. I find the best use case for session prep is when you know that the players are eminently approaching an encounter with 95% certainty or more. This can be a combat encounter, a social encounter, a dungeon, or anything really, but when you are sure that the players are going to do a thing, that’s when I recommend prep. That way you’ll feel much more rewarded for the prep, and your players won’t have to sit there with their phones out waiting for you to figure out the stats of the enemy they’ve just happened upon or some similarly awkward situation.
Learning to Improvise
The argument for improvising is two-fold: you get to save the time that you would’ve otherwise spent prepping the session and you also get to flex the creativity muscles in your brain. The latter positive aspect is both thrilling and terrifying, especially if you’re a new GM. Running a campaign session when you don’t have any idea what your players are going to ask of you or how to execute on it puts your brain into fight or flight quickly. Always try to be thinking of what your players’ next moves will be, try to anticipate, because that will give you a lot more room to breathe when trying to play out on-the-fly conversations or sudden combat encounters sprung upon you by the hot-tempered barbarian. Growing your experience with and ability to improvise is imperative to providing a quality tabletop experience.
Combine Both Styles
The reality, as mentioned above, is that your best bet is to combine the two styles for your own and your players’ benefit. Each style is its own tool; there will be an endless array of things your players say or do that you just could never have expected which demand you improvise and there will be an endless array of moments that you want to be “just right” and for those, it’s best to sit down and do the prep. Make sure to account for the wants and needs of everyone involved when doing either, because at the end of the day, this hobby of ours is one which thrives on its collaborative nature. Try to accommodate backstories when prepping social encounters, try to take into account character quirks when improvising dialog, and pivot from one style to the next to stay flexible and make things work.