I have a colleague who chases storms. When he’s not busy with his litigation practice, he flies out to Tornado Alley, climbs into an SUV with five other people and his camera, and waits for the wrath of God to strike. They have weather data to guide them, but they have no idea where a tornado will hit even once they see the thunderhead building over the prairie. Only when the clouds begin to spin do they know for sure that they’re in the right place. That’s when the driver hits the gas and they speed off towards the middle of the monster, lightning arcing across the sky above them.

To see that, he says, is to know why people believed in dragons.

I think of him sometimes when I am preparing for my sessions. A game of Dungeons and Dragons is an exercise in controlled chaos. Like the photographers waiting for a tornado, you never know what your players are going to do until it’s happening. Once the chaos starts, it’s your job, as dungeon master, to ride the lightning and direct the action where you want it to go. At the same time, Dungeons and Dragons is a collaborative story-telling game, and you don’t want your players to feel unnecessarily corralled. It’s a fine line to walk, one that is best done by creating a world that is comfortable for you and your players to inhabit while crafting a story that is compelling yet adaptable. I hope to save you from extraneous effort by diving into what I think is important to prepare for a given session.

Know What Happens Next (and Only What Happens Next)

A dungeon master who doesn’t prepare at all for their sessions is a cruel joke. It is disrespectful of the players’ time to come in with absolutely nothing ready and think that you can muscle your way into an engaging story through force of will. Whether your games are driven by setting, by story, or somewhere in between, your players need some kind of hook to hang their hat on, and you simply will not be able to provide that if you come in empty-handed.

That said, there is such a thing as over-preparation. You may have a clear picture in your head of the story that you want to tell in your campaign, but you must always remember that your players have just as much stake in the direction of the story as you do. They will inevitably act in ways that will surprise, delight, and frustrate you. That is the beauty and the challenge of the game. Nothing will turn players off faster than the feeling that their actions have no bearing on the outcome of the campaign.

Balancing preparation with flexibility can be delicate. The best strategy I’ve found is to plan out the next step in the players’ journey thoroughly, but have no more than the sketchiest idea of where the story goes beyond that point. For example, if your players are delving into the lair of a dragon, make sure you know as much as possible about said lair, including possible traps and encounters. Decide if the dragon is home, and if he’s keen on visitors. Know what interesting items are hidden in their hoard. You can even write out some pithy lines of dragon dialog to get a better sense of their character.

And once you’ve done all of that, stop.

This might be your world, but the players live in it. They’re going to decide how to infiltrate the dragon’s lair, not you. And if they haven’t even decided to enter said lair in the first place, then you had better have some alternatives plotted out, which brings me to my next point:

Have a Plan B

Your players are going to do things that you don’t want them to. It’s as inevitable as the rising sun. When you present your players with a quest or a plot hook, it’s entirely possible that they will turn you down. As a dungeon master, you can guide your players in a given direction from time to time, but you should never push them. Your challenge is to make these choice points enticing without sacrificing player freedom. If you do this right, your world will feel alive, a place to explore rather than just set dressing for your story.

To give an example from my own game, we had a session where one of my players died while fighting a Draegloth , and the party’s healer was completely out of spells. Instead of burying him and moving on, the players announced at the end of the session that they wanted to carry his body to the closest city and find a way to resurrect him. Between sessions, I decided that there were two paths open to them: they could bring the corpse to the temple of the Raven Queen and beg for help from the High Priestess, or they could seek out a tiefling of questionable intentions named Lorden who would charge them a high fee for a “resurrection consultation. ” Either option would, so long as the players played their cards right, lead to a resurrection ritual, but how they got there would be quite different depending on the path they chose. I suspected that the party would try the temple first, but as a group of distinctly uncharismatic individuals, I was fully prepared for the social encounter at the temple to go very poorly. As it turns out, a couple of well-timed critical successes got them everything they needed from the Raven Queen, and they never even met Lorden the tiefling.

Preparing alternatives may be easier said than done. After all, every event and encounter you plan takes time, and it doesn’t feel great when your cool ideas go unused. This brings me to my last point:

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

I have a friend and fellow dungeon master who spends ten hours or more preparing for each session of his main game. He runs a homebrew setting that has its own internal calendar and a persistent timeline, with events happening in multiple locations at once. If there’s a festival during a lunar eclipse, but the players don’t go, then they will never see any version of that festival in the game until the next lunar eclipse. As a result, he throws out more content than most people create. I admire his dedication to narrative cohesion across his setting.

It’s also devastatingly inefficient.

The inequality of information in Dungeons and Dragons works to the dungeon master’s advantage. Your players will never know how much you’ve actually prepared for a given session. There may be plot points, locations, and characters that go completely unused. You may feel tempted to share these unseen ideas with your players after the session: “Oh, man! If only you’d gone into the woods to find the Sword of Dawn. There was a hag in there who you could have made a deal with.” It’s tempting to give your players a look at your process, to give them an occasional peek behind the curtain.

Do yourself a favor: Don’t.

When you’ve prepared something for a session that your players don’t see, it’s a gift. Much as I might be loath to admit it for myself, we are all human beings with a finite amount of time on our hands to prepare for our sessions. If you have extra material from past sessions, find an interesting way to work it into a future session. Throwing away encounters and NPCs just because the players “missed their chance” to see it the first time serves no purpose other than to create more work for yourself.

To continue the same example from earlier, after my players resurrected their dead companion at the Temple of the Raven Queen, I had an entire encounter with Lorden the tiefling that I didn’t need. I had spent enough time sketching him out, along with his offices at the top of a burned-out tenement, that I wanted to find a place to use him if possible, so I never mentioned him to my players at all, sticking him in my back pocket. A few sessions later, as it so happened, the party needed to get out of town, and fast. Sneaking out by foot or escaping by boat would be possible, but very difficult, and one of the NPCs mentioned that they knew someone who might be able to get them out quickly and quietly for a fee. Soon thereafter, the party was at Lorden’s burned-out tenement. Instead of a dubious cleric, he was now a dubious wizard who charged the party for use of a teleportation circle, but everything else about him that I had already planned weeks before was identical. My players enjoyed meeting him, I liked playing him, and the entire encounter took me about five minutes to review and tweak before the session.

Hopefully these three points will help you feel confident enough in your story and your world to guide your players while still affording you the flexibility to “fill in the gaps” on the fly. Always remember that planning for Dungeons and Dragons is not like writing a novel; if the content doesn’t make it to the table in a session, it essentially doesn’t exist. You’re not an author; you’re a storm chaser, trying to stay ahead of your players’ cyclones as they barrel across your landscape in the name of fun. And much like a weather photographer, your goal is not to create perfection, but to capture emotional moments. Emotional weight only comes when your players feel like they are in control of the story, when they have agency and a stake in the potential outcomes. For a dungeon master, that means surrendering a little bit of control.

Know your story. Know your world. And prepare to ride the lightning.

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