Hi, I’m Brent P. Newhall, and I feel bad about this post. I originally promised Chatty a post aimed at newbie DMs, describing the absolute minimum prep needed for a D&D 4th Edition session. And while I’ll cover that, I realized there’s a bigger issue that needs to be addressed.
The amount of preparation required for a session is directly related to how much the DM reacts to the players’ behavior from the previous session.
First, prep. You really only need a ridiculously small amount of actual data for each 4E session. In fact, you only need to worry about two things: people to talk to and monsters to kill.
When it comes to the people, each NPC needs (again, at an absolute minimum) two things: a personality and a goal. The personality should center on behavior–how you will physically act when playing the character. What does the character’s voice sound like? What about body language, like hand gestures? Or posture? Get a grip on one or two things that make this character unique compared to other characters.
That’s not quite enough, though. Ever had an NPC conversation fall flat? Or just not go anywhere? Every major NPC needs a goal. By knowing what your NPC wants, you can direct the conversation in that direction. You’ll always have that to return to, and you’ll know when to end the conversation (when that goal has been addressed as much as it can).
Monsters are pretty easy in 4E, too. You need to know:
- How many monsters are in the encounter
- Their HP, AC, Fortitude, Reflex, and Will
- Their powers (+X vs. Y, dealing Z damage, plus effects)
Seriously, that’s it. More is better, especially in 4E, but you can run a combat encounter with just this.
But as I mentioned at the beginning, this isn’t the big issue. I’m sure some of you are wondering, “But how do I know what NPCs to think up? How do I decide on which monsters to use, and how powerful they should be?”
Simple: After every session, think about what your players did.
Who did they talk to? Where did they go? Were the encounters difficult or easy?
That will tell you what to plan for next session. If the players are asking a lot of questions, create more NPCs for them to ask questions of. If the players are really interested in that abandoned mine north of town, create a few encounters centered in that mine. If the players are eager to talk to that dwarf, work out the dwarf’s personality and his relationships.
This may sound like an anemic amount of work. Is there more you can do? Absolutely! Create lots of encounters and towns and NPCs and weather formations. Draw up detailed family trees and city maps. Making your world a more detailed place is a Good Thing.
But, please, listen to your players. That will tell you what you need to do.
Thumbs-up to this!
Another thing worthy of mention is how to handle monster prep. If you know your players are going into dungeon X, then you know exactly the sort of monsters and encounters to plan out. If you don’t know directly where your players are going, stat out a couple of varied encounters–a wilderness encounter, a rural encounter, a city encounter, and one or two additional encounters that could happen anywhere. (Temper these setting to your particular system/campaign/genre.) You should have at least one or two encounters out of the batch that you can use in a pinch. If things are going really far astray, you can “re-skin” those other encounters to make them fit into the situation. (I once turned scorpions into rogues with poisoned blades–they ended up becoming a special order of assassins in future adventures.)
Of course, some GMs are of the sort that can crack open the MM and run encounters right out of the book. (I need my stat cards and fiddly bits in front of me, but more power to them!)
.-= DeadGod´s last blog ..Trek technobabble inspiration =-.
Thanks for the thumbs-up!
Definitely agreed about knowing what sort of monsters to use. I’ve been copy-and-pasting suitable monster stat blocks from my Monster Manual PDF onto blank pages and printing them out, about three monsters per page, so I can easily flip to them during a game and run them.
Hear hear! People are often so daunted by their first session and how they have ambitions to have some huge worlds-shattering quest that they immediately fold or build a railroad.
Sometimes, if you just plan session by session, the story resolves itself someone where else down the line. Just have fun.
.-= Katana Geldar´s last blog ..A big galaxy far, far away…(Part 2) =-.
I can’t agree more. I love how easy it is to prep for a session of 4th Edition. Start small, just have an idea in your head of the starting area and some points of interest, and a couple of options for your players to pursue that tie into your story arch.
It’s good to at least think ahead, even if you can’t plan ahead to consider how the story is going to unfold, however, you may find yourself pleasently surprised when the actions of your heroes may assist you in coming up with new twists and turns you hadn’t even planned on, that you can jump on and take advantage of. The current campaign I’m running has already changed several times from what I had originally outlined, and I LOVE it! 😀
I can’t wait to see where the party takes it!