Short post today as well, been reading So You Want to Be a Gamemaster and I am very excited to share thoughts I have [go buy the book!]. But this is just a random musing.
I get why recaps are good for players—and I get even more why it is suggested the players do the recap—but something to consider is doing a recap for yourself prior to prep'ing the next session.
Take a moment to try and write a recap as if you were a player in your game. What would the players find important and likely to remember. Then you can use that as a baseline on how to structure the start of session.
This can also be helpful for you to anticipate gaps you can fill in when your players recap the previous session. Doubt your players remember a critical NPC name? Don't let them get to the part where they all say "I don't remember." Mention them casually during the recap or presession talk. Typing up the recap to yourself could also cause you to see points of confusion that need to be addressed.
Finally it serves as a great reminder to prep for what is important. What is necessary for the session? Things that spin off of what happened last session! Overprepping has seemed to get a lot of pushback in online communities in more recent times, and for good reason, so having a check against that is helpful.
Last tangent—as a caveat in favor of overprepping—if that is the fun part of DM'ing for you, then by all means do it. One of my friends over prepares like crazy. He seriously will spend an ungodly amount of hours for stuff that will never be used, will be written over by next weeks prep, and ultimately disregarded. But he loves it. So he continues to do it because it isn't done for his players—it's for him.
I'll post and discuss my standard prep sheet soon. I think I've gotten it really nicely to where I can ease myself into the game, similar to how a recap is good to ease the players back into the ttrpg mindset.
If your players allow for it, recording the session and listening to it beforehand I found is an excellent way to anticipate things that are important for them that might be missed.
ReplyDeleteIf you take notes on the session during or after the session, you should review them! Maybe even go back a session or two and read those. The act of writing stuff down is powerful, but reinforcement is the ticket to making the connections that make your campaign feel alive.
I think overprepping is definitely a thing. If the players are in one region of your world, and they have no chance of visiting another, you might want to prioritize working on that one region and what the players have a chance of encountering there. If you have finished off what you need to prep for the next session, then you are free to write in any direction you want.
ReplyDeleteI think it is generally good advice to only plan for the next session by looking at the previous session. It's all you need to have a successful campaign, especially if you don't have a lot of time to plan for much else. The secret sauce though I think is taking elements in your world that matter to your players, that they have encountered before in previous sessions and linking them to the upcoming session or future sessions. One way to think about this is playing "fetch" with your players and/or yourself. The ball thrown is some piece of content or an action. Retrieving it means bringing it back into the spotlight. The players robbed the richest man in town. There are suddenly thugs who appear a session or two later who try and take back what was stolen. There is a horrible ship engine accident in one port. Suddenly a session or two later, it has spread to other ships and all ships are being recalled or scuttled, including the one the players are traveling on.