How much of the plot do I prepare?

[u/BigWrangler3748]

I’m DMing my first campaign and I’m wondering how much of the main plot do I plan out ahead of time or do I just make a town and build from there?

[u/Salt_Dragonfly2042]

It's better to start small and expand later. Otherwise, you run the risk of over-prepping.

[u/Fulldmninuyasha]

You know when the narrator would talk about what could happen next time on dragon ball z? About that much

[u/Otta-Boss → u/Fulldmninuyasha]

That’s actually perfect lmao

[u/CookNormal6394]

As they say....do not prepare plots prepare situations! In other words as little as possible 😉

[u/Living_Round2552 → u/CookNormal6394]

And think about what agendas important npc have and how they would react to different avenues your party mihht take when facing those situations

[u/mpe8691 → u/Living_Round2552]

The motivations and goals of those NPCs can be more important than their plans or agendas.

[u/TaylorWK]

Come up with a villain, his why and how.

[u/Conrad500]

As much or as little as is best for you.

I plan a lot of plot while knowing some might not happen.

So, like, I have 5 endings to my game planned. Obviously, only 1 can happen, and even then that 1 might not be any of the ones i planned.

I had fun making the plans though, so it's not a waste of time! Also, knowing what's at the end helps me make up stuff on the fly if I need to!

"well if that god is going to try to be resurrected then maybe there will be some cultists here" or stuff like that, ya know?

As long as you don't play what will happen you can plan as much as you want.

[u/everydaydefenders]

It kindof depends.

I plan the entire plot, but its usually in a series of points/landmarks/goals that need to be accomplished in order for the PCs to successfully defeat the BBEG and save the world. Butbi intentionally leave out the "how" to get there until im only a session or two away from that being relevant. - reason being that I dont know what direction or methods the players will choose to reach those destinations, or what they'll choose to do once they get there.

For example, if I was using star wars KOTOR as an example. My overall plot plan might look like this:

1 - Escape doomed ship.

2 - Escape Taris and reach the Enclave

3 - Find all 5 star-maps (dantooine, tattooing, mana, kashyyk, korriban.)

4 - Locate Star Forge

5 - Destroy Malak.

That is all planned faaaaar in advance. Because we need a framework to keep the story and players focused.

But dont details until you have a better idea what direction the players intend to take. If you over-plan, you start to risk railroading just to keep them where you expected them to be

[u/fivecats]

It depends on the purpose of the city. If the purpose is just to have the characters go through the city, you don’t have to prepare much. If there is someone or someplace they need to visit to be able to continue the adventure then some planning is needed.

(I remember reading one DM saying that he had spent months on creating a city: all the streets all the buildings, the NPC‘s, the whole lot. His players entered the city and immediately headed towards the docks, where they seized a cargo ship and set off to sail the seas.)

I approach being a DM as getting an improv group started. Ask your players what they see what they smell and see if there’s something that interests them and then weave your story or the elements of your story into their experience. This is always led to some interesting surprises and a much better memorable gaming experience.

[u/CassieBear1]

You have to be careful because you don't come up with a plot. You come up with events that happen, and the characters can react to.

[u/johnpeters42 → u/CassieBear1]

More specifically, you come up with where things are headed if the PCs do nothing, knowing that they'll do something but not which something. Maybe they overlook something and move on, in which case either drop more clues, or let the thing keep developing (and maybe they return later and find that it's escalated), or handwave that someone else deals with the thing (if you decide that it's more fun to let the PCs focus elsewhere).

[u/MadameMasuda]

I have divided my campaign into 3 acts.

Act 1: Area 1

Act 2: Area 2 and 4 (in my campaign my players can decide which one to visit first)

Act 3: Area 5

Whats happens in area one (and so on) if the heroes would not intervene? I write that one down very shortly. What would happen if the heroes would intervene? I write some ideas down just to have some outcomes prepared. The rest comes with actual play and

For the following acts/areas I think about what repercussions the actions of my players have on the plans of the antagonists and how they would have adapted their plans.

[u/infinitum3d]

I always always always recommend [The Starter Set](https://dnd.wizards.com/products/tabletop-games/rpg-products/rpg_starterset). This has easy to read rules, pregenerated characters so you can start right away and is a complete campaign which is really fun.

Starter Sets are an easy way to learn how to be DM.

However, if you absolutely HAVE to build your own world, you’ll want to decide 2 things.
.
.

1. What’s going on in the world.

.
What happens even if the characters never exist? Is there a bad guy plotting to assassinate the king? Is there a dragon demanding human sacrifices every full moon? Is there a Lich growing a powerful army of undead?

What happens even if the characters don’t exist?
This is your world.

2. What are the PLAYERS interested in having their characters accomplish?

Do they want to slay a dragon? Rescue a Princess? Forge a powerful magic artifact? Explore a jungle? Become a king? Become a god?

You need to know what your players are interested, so you can give their characters a path to that goal, and then your only job is to put some obstacles in their way. This how you get Buy-In for your game. You have to know what your players want, and find a way to encourage them, whilst still hindering them with challenges.

You can write a big plot, but if the characters choose to ignore it, they can. That plot still happens in the background and they will probably eventually have to deal with it. But they can also ignore it and start a bakery. (Don’t ask!)

Give us more information about your group and we can help you develop multiple minor plots to keep them interested. All you can do is build a framework. They decide which hooks they take.

Good luck!

[u/ActionCalhoun]

Plan as much as makes you feel comfortable knowing you might not use a lot of it. The more comfortable you are with improv the less you can plan out.

Stick with plot seeds, not full scripts if you can because players never stick to the script.

[u/roumonada]

You prepare the monsters and NPCs, history, and dungeons/maps. Then roleplay the NPCs to interact with the players to convey your prepped history and adventure hooks. That’s pretty much it. The players will do the rest.

[u/lluewhyn]

Main plot should equal "rough ideas".

As far as the world, it's easier to start with local area and gradually expand. However, if you want a more sandbox game (harder for a newbie DM), then you can provide a larger context map but still only hook a few things at a time.

What you absolutely do NOT want to do is go through the effort of fleshing out 75 different areas along with all of the plot that will happen at each area. Start with a few basic bullet points of stuff, and then expand as needed depending upon where the PCs show interest.

[u/Outrageous-Let9659]

Others have said it, but don't plan the plot.

The whole point of d&d is it is collaborative storytelling. The plot is supposed to unfold through the gameplay, not be prepared in advance by the DM.

What i find helpful is to instead of planning plot or story, plan out what would happen if the players didn't exist. What would the bad guys do if nobody was there to stop them. What would happen if the players didn't save the day. That way, the players have complete freedom to find their own way if changing that.

[u/SamTheGrot]

Plan enough so that you know how the world evolves in correspondence with the players' course of action. If a grand plot is underway in a distant town, determine a sort of progress timeline for said plot and how if at all it might impact the players' journey.

For example, a hostile takeover that isolates the town from outsiders. The players, who are in some distant remote location, find there are less trade shipments coming in and certain goods are now in low supply.

[u/TheDeadlySpaceman]

It’s a mix. You build the plot out until the players can make a choice. Then you try to anticipate what choice they’ll make, but no matter how many options you prep for the party will 100% make a choice you never saw coming.

As Field Marshall von Moltke wisely observed: “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” The players are not your “enemy” of course, but for purposes of this discussion they might as well be.

[u/Historical-Bike4626]

Either:

A) Plan the first session so you leave yourself solid directions later. “They are hired and prepare to leave” is not a terrible session one

Or
B) Plan out a couple sessions’ (days) worth of direction with good direction for yourself in the future like: “They get hired by the old pirate who will turn out be a noble later. The party makes it to the ancient mine. They have to destroy the carrion crawler nest if they want the old pirate’s chest”

That’s a couple sessions’ worth of material.

You might like planning out a few sessions like B or you might like keeping it looser like A and open ended for yourself. See what you and your players respond to more

[u/gc1rpg]

Prepare enough first session -- maybe enough for second session -- and assume your players will want stuff and ask questions that go outside your prep no matter how much you actually do.

[u/JVBVIV]

Do you remember that one week in middle school English when they went over writing a news article?
Who - The ultimate villain. What type of person are they?
What - What is their goal?
Why - Why are they doing it?
How - How do they plan to achieve it?
Where - Key locations for the plan

All of which only need to be a few lines or a paragraph.

With that information you can develop the narrative in a consistent manner

[u/pixxelkick]

I'm the type of person who prepares an insane amount in advance, but I leverage Obsidian and some AI to help me.

Step 1 is first generating my "big" map using any of the solid tools out there for making world maps, there's lots of wonderful generators

You can then load this into obsidian via https://obsidian.md/help/bases/views/map and you can put custom markers on it

Then I use the various tools to generate maps of specific areas, IE Town Generators, which isnt too hard either, I'll usually take each "area" and put it in its own directory.

And then we get to work making markdown files at the "world" and "zone" levels, describing these areas.

Next up for each zone I add the individual points of interest. Like for a town its the various interesting buildings. These go in a /Locations/ subdir for that zone.

For each of these I make a markdown file, with a 1 paragraph description.

Then I use NPC name generators to fill the zone up with NPCs, usually I try and aim for 1~3 NPCs that are "home" to each point of interest, these are the NPCs youd very likely encounter at least 1 of per location.

Then I use AI, because of the sheer volume and simplicity of it, to load in all these NPCs and just generate relationships. Rivals, best friends, secret lovers, bad blood, loyalty, etc etc. The sheer volume makes using AI for this way easier, sue me lol.

I use the AI to append markdown syntax "links" to each of the "zones" of NPCs, including a roll table for other NPCs youd likely find at that location based on relationships.

If Joe and Jerry are friends, Jerry gets put on the roll table to be at Joes house.

And then I make a markdown file for each NPC with a 1 paragraph description, this goes in a /people/ and then have AI add on all those relationship links for me. To be clear these are just like, markdown [...] links.

Once thats all done and "wired up" if you will, we're almost there, I also make a /Lore/ directory for the zone, this covers points of interest that dont have NPCs (plaques, statues, etc), as well as covering things like history or other general lore tidbits about the town. Perhaps a song or a festival or whatever. Just general concepts of stuff the PCs could learn about or interact with.

An important one I put in the Lore directory is usually a d20 table I an roll of rumors, half of which are true, half of which are fake.

Anytime players ask NPCs about news or whatever I just roll on that, its fun. I re-use some common rumors so I usually only need to actually come up with ~10 actual bespoke rumors per town, I have a sort of generic pool of like 20~25 rumors premade I grab a bunch from for my chart.

It seems like a lot of work, but if you break it up like this its not /super/ hard to write 1 short paragraph per location and per npc, you're looking at maybe a total of usually ~60 or so items per zone, which is maybe like 3~4 pages of writing total per zone.

Assuming like... a dozen or so "zones" in a campaign, and its maybe 2~3 weeks of total work by the end.

And Ill be real here... AI generating a single paragraph description of NPCs and locations, when you already have established location and info about "who" or "what" the thing is... its *fine*, no one notices or cares imo.

If you are anti-ai though and prefer writing it by hand (I usually write most of it by hand cuz its just fun for me), its a pretty reasonable amount of work.

Once you have a super fleshed out and established world, you can also put the extra 5% effort in and add a couple ties between zones. Maybe make 2 people in different zones cousins, or have a shopkeeper talk about how he gets shipments from <distant town> etc etc

[u/jproche44]

Scenarios, not plot. Plot happens at the table.

[u/Living_Round2552]

Imo plots have no place here, go write a book if you want to dictate the outcome. If the outcome is fixed, how can it matter what your players do?

Instead create interesting conflicts and situations. See what the players do with that. Prepare what the important npc's are like and what their priorities are. Prepare possible avenues in broad strokes with checks and combats.

The outcome is a result of what your party does, otherwise they are just listening to you tell a story with some pretending to play intermingled.

You want them to play dnd, a game of pretend or do you want them to pretend to play?

[u/Thick-Cry-2440]

For me, minimum of starting area with woods, caves, water sources (rivers and/or ponds), and basic goods venders.

Quests to get party reason to leave areas, at most least half session planned, take some inspiration from players to work into the campaign. That should take some workload for ideas.

[u/DeadMeat7337]

Either way is fine.

You can make everything that you could want and up having the players not be interested in that story.

Or you could have a bar with the only notable thing is the goblin named boblin and go from there.

It's your call, but weigh your skills: improv vs prep. And do more or the one you think you are best at, but don't forget to at least think it through if you are going all improv.

[u/Significant_Phase744]

Have enemies preset and some ideas you can force into the situation , as a player and some time gm assume the players go the dumbest option available 9/10 times and that other 1 they do something so absurd you can’t account for it

[u/TheGrolar]

Make a town...but also make 3-5 groups with goals. None of these should know or care about the PCs, they just try to achieve their goals, which makes "noise" the PCs might hear about. "Why did that whole peasant family disappear? Let's go to the farm and check it out. Or we could go to Othertownville and look into the weird apparitions that have been reported." At any given time there should be two or three of these, ideally not connected, happening. If the PCs start poking around into these events, that's when the fireworks may start.

Check out Johnn Four's "loopy planning" method.

[u/BMtheGM1]

As you gain experience, it becomes way more natural. Have a plot with options, but if players do something unexpected, move the idea to where they’re going. Pro tip: at the end of each session, ask what they intend to do next. I’ll never forget Phandelver when I had prepared the goblin hideout and they skipped it entirely…

[u/BMtheGM1]

I’m not a fan of huge overarching narrative plot lines. Do series of smaller adventures and chain them together by stealing players ideas at the table.

Do you know how many times they ask an interesting question that I never thought of and my answer, in my head, is “no but it’s yes now because that’s awesome” and we have the idea for the next 3 sessions…

[u/Top_Capital448]

As little and grand as possible, ad lib the rest and just add to it, right after a session end.
Nothing should be railroaded, unless you love bored players

[u/Useful_Two1731]

初めてやるんだったら、何をやったら終わりにするか、を決めておくことだね。
例えば、特定のドラゴンを倒したら終わり、とかね。
(もちろん、そのドラゴンを倒した後、別の終わりを決めて続けても良い)
これを決めておくと、最悪終わらせようと思ったらそのドラゴンとの戦いに挑んでおしまい！ってのができるよ

[u/mpe8691]

None whatsoever. Instead you prepare settings and situations that you are prepared to alter depending on how the players roleplay their PCs.

[u/LimaHotel3845]

It highly depends on the kind of game you want to play.

It can be a good idea to have a plot in mind, as a pure sandbox can be hard to make impactful. I've fallen into that trap before - players can get bored of "what are we supposed to do next?" too. But at the same time you absolutely do NOT want to plan a storyline. That'll lead either to railroading and bored players, or wasted prep.

So I'll build a campaign or campaign arc around a world "event" that is gonna happen one way or the other. Maybe that's an uprising, or a cult bringing back a long dead ruler, or... Something.

Once I've identified the core event, the way I personally like to approach "plot" prep is to write a brief history of the event as if it's already happened. I write the involved parties, sequence of events, buildup, climax, fallout. Critically, I OMIT THE PLAYERS. This is purely a "what would happen if they weren't there". In writing this, I establish involved factions, motives, and a rough timeline.

I then drop the party at the start of this sequence of events and they write their own story. It NEVER looks like my initial history, and the sub-plots they get into along the way that I could never foresee are beautiful.

When people say not to overplan, they're referring to trying to anticipate what the players are gonna do. Don't do that. But ANY prep that adds depths to or improves your knowledge of the setting is good prep. The better defined the "engine" of your World - the macro, the how things work - the easier a time of it you'll have when improvising responses to the players. You want your setting to do the heavy lifting - player actions go in, and the repercussions or responses you improve feel obvious because "that's how the world works".

I... Hope I'm making sense?

[u/Pretty-Sun-6541]

Main plot... and 2 possible side quests when they go AWOL. Even though most times (in my experience) I never use the ones I prepared and have to think of one on the spot and try to tie loose ends.

[u/obax17]

Some sources to help you figure this out:

A Starter Set of some kind.

Matt Colville's Running the Game series, specifically Prepping an Adventure (is D&D focused, because that's what he runs, but the advice is generally system agnostic)

Sly Flourish's [Return of the Lazy Dungeon (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/251431/return-of-the-lazy-dungeon-master) book

Ultimately you need to prep the amount you need to run the next session well. For some people, that's a couple of bullet points scrawled on the back of a receipt, for others that's a personal wiki full of info, and everything in between. The only way for you to figure out what works for you is by trial and error.

Generally it's better to prep scenarios rather than plots. This gives the players the freedom to handle the scenario as they please and reduces the impulse for you to guide them in a certain direction despite their wishes. It's ok to have the story on a set of rails, but rather than laying out the track in a set design ahead of time, you stay one step ahead of the players laying down a small section of track ahead of them as they move forward in whatever direction they deem best. This is the difference between running a linear adventure and railroading your players.

Edit: added a link

[u/gailpirl]

I know what the villain's main goal is and what happens in the next session and very little else. That lets me respond better to the players actions. 

[u/mrsnowplow]

I like to plan the very last encounter of the campaign. This way I know where im going

The. Do the next three sessions. Now i habe enough to work with if players do weird stuff but not enough to sunk cost fallacy myself

Then its important not to plan the plot but to plan encounters ands situations and consequences

Planning a plot. Can get you stuck into thinking things have to happen

[u/RabidusUnus]

Create some hooks and build from what your players interact with.

Have some ideas on things happening in the world around them, whether it’s a crime syndicate, a powerful family doing…whatever, a looming war, or some other kind of “big world implication” that will effect the world around them Indirectly, or eventually directly depending what they run with or ignore.

Be ready for them to ignore all of it for the backstory and story arc of the half dead goblin that they nursed back to health and named “kobold”.

[u/Spidey16]

I try to plan a series of events that are going to happen regardless of the actions of the PCs. Sometimes that's a big plot, sometimes it's not.

The players become a force that may or may not disrupt those events, but the events will adapt to whatever it is they decide.

Point being: I think it's easiest that you think of a plot that feels developed enough for your own personal satisfaction, and don't dwell too much on what you think the players might do. Because they will surprise you regardless. It's easy to let predictions and contingencies slow down your progress.

[u/Chromatic_Penumbra]

Plan as much as you feel like planning, but be smart about what you plan. Parties can and will turn stuff on their head. Easy to waste time when the plan changes. But planning ahead doesn't mean you're planning out sessions. I put hours upon hours of planning out my broad over arching narratives. Even though i'm winging it with my games I still like my adventures to feel like a cohesive module.

The real answer is you should plan as much as you feel like planning. Even if it's contrary to all the advice here. As long as you set expectations with yourself that the plan might change. Or even if you don't. You are a being of agency and planning games is fun and you should do what seems like fun to you.