Ravings of a Textual Deviant

A common complaint that GMs hear is that they’re unprepared. Another common complaint GMs hear is that they’ve overprepared. How’s a GM to know when she’s hit that sweet spot, and the level of preparation is Just Right?

Personally, I feel as though I tend to overprepare, but I also tend to run complex games with lots of twisty subplots. A lot of those twists and turns come from having a well-developed and detailed sense of what’s going on in the game world. I spent one afternoon working out the family tree of a royal family in a location that I knew the players would visit (because it was a stop on an Ellipse). That seemed kind of like overkill at the time, but a) I’d like to use that particular game world again, and b) it ended up solving a plot problem that I’d put off solving until the right idea came along.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 27th, 2005 at 7:15 am and is filed under Games & Gaming, Lunchtime Polls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.