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Two Goals for Improving Your Game

by Mike on 11 November 2024

For those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about improving our games, our minds often dive into the details. How can we speed up combat? How can we draw the characters deeper into the story? How can we offer more meaningful choices? How can we prep enough to fill out the world?

These questions are useful but there's the larger question of why. When we're considering a new approach to our game, or a new tool or accessory we want to use at the table, or a new feature of a VTT – why do we pick the ones we pick and omit the ones we don't?

In Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master I focus on getting more out of your RPGs by preparing less. We can break down this goal into two parts:

Make RPGs easier to prepare and run.
Make RPGs more fun for us and our players.

There's a careful balance between these two goals. Sometimes, however, the techniques that make our games easier to prepare and run also make our games more fun for us and our players. Here are some examples:

If we prepare less, we might be able to run more games. More games = more fun.
If we prepare less, we're less likely to railroad our players down a big complicated story we built ahead of time.
If we prepare less, our players have more agency to follow different paths and build out elements of the world we haven't built ourselves yet.
The less we have prepared, the more we're likely to listen to our players and focus on the game as it plays out instead of focusing on what we prepared ahead of time.
The less we prepare, the less stress we have to stay true to our material and the more we're willing to watch the game unfold.

Sometimes, it's worth extra time to prepare the elements of the game that really matter – the things that bring the most fun to the game. Here are some examples:

The more time we spend thinking about the characters and their stories, the more we can integrate them into the adventure or campaign.
The more solid the world around the characters, the more players feel like it's real.
The more lore we know about the world, the more interesting flavor the characters can discover as they explore it and the easier it is for us to drop in this lore during the game.
The better we understand a location and its inhabitants, the more we can improvise what happens there as the characters traverse it.
The better our tools for combat encounter building and the better our understanding of the characters' capabilities in combat, the more fun, heroic, and nail-bity combats we can run.
The more we spend thinking about treasure, the better that treasure can fit the desires of the characters.
The more time we spend on a solid strong start, the easier it is to get the players and their characters into the adventure.

The eight steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master are my thoughts about where we can spend our time to bring out the most fun in our games. Other GMs and other groups have their own lists of most beneficial activities to prepare and run their games.

Think about where you spend your time on your prep and ask yourself if that activity makes it easier to prepare and run your game or truly makes the game more fun for your players.

If your approach makes it both easier to run your game and more fun, that's awesome. If your approach does one or the other, that's fine too.

If your activity isn't making your game easier to prep or run, and isn't bringing more fun to the table, why do it?

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week I posted a couple of YouTube videos on Is Shadowdark the Best Intro to D&D? and The Ghost Walkers – Dragon Empire Prep Session 1.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video:

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers:

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

Aim for four players.
Get into the head of your NPCs. What do they want? What do they fear? What do they have to offer?
Choose monsters based on the situation even if they’re really easy.
Keep track of the magic items each character has. Review this list when planning treasure for future adventures.
Keep a treasure parcel in your prep notes. Reward it, or pieces of it, when it makes sense.
Require exotic materials for crafting particular magic items. Now the exotic material becomes the reward.
Prepare for single big monsters to be banished or otherwise completely incapacitated when the characters reach 7th level or above.