How do *you* do session prep?

[MaxSupernova]

Okay, I'm getting the actual mechanics of the program down, and now I'm looking at how to implement the program in the practical sense.

To prepare for a session, I usually generate descriptions and text for a number of possible encounters, and make some general notes about what's going to be happening. These are usually 2 or 3 pages of text per session. I end up using about half of it, depending on what my players decide to do.

Here are the options I've contemplated, but I haven't decided on one yet:

1) My first thought was just to make each encounter or note a plot point on the storyboard.

The issue I find is that there isn't really a good way to use larger amounts of text on the storyboard. The only way to see the text is in the mouse-over popup, which isn't that great for 3 or 4 paragraphs of text. I could go in and edit each one to see the text, but that means using the tiny little 5-lines edit box.

2) Another thought I had would be to create an "Event" for each encounter and tie the plot point to the event. This would soon result on a very large number of events in my almanac. I'd rather not put these in the almanac because they aren't "canon" (they haven't happened), they are just my prep notes for the encounter (that may not even occur).

3) I could also use "User Notes" to generate encounters. These notes have unlimited snippets of all formats and are all cross-referenced with "content links" in the right hand pane, so they'll be useful. I really like this because it keeps my notes separate from the actual almanac of the realm, but the **HUGE** downside is that you can't link a plot point in the storyboard to a user note.

I'm thinking I'll probably just go with #2, and find some naming/tagging scheme to keep the planned/actual differences straight, and to keep encounters from a particular session together.

How does everyone else write up session prep material? Any other suggestions?

[H2Os]

I am interested in seeing people's responses on this as well.

[Erdrix]

I would also like to see how people use it during actual play. I've been messing around with it today just see try to get a handle on how to use it to run a game.

[Farling]

There are Story Idea snippets which you can use too. These can collect your idle ramblings until they are needed, or get fleshed out into more detail.

[mirtos]

My gameplay is what someone might consider more open-ended and player controlled as opposed to session prep.

I use it more during gameplay than session prep. My world has been 30 years in the making. (we wont talk about ages) so its going to take me a while to it into the DB, but much of it i know backwards/forward/sideways. what I have a hard time remembering is what NPCs people have come across, what places they've gone to. So I write quick snippets during the game.

"PCs have discovered the original university of The Red Hand", and then at home, I expand on it, so next session, or when the player accounts become handy, the players can reread what they've discovered, but more important, when they go back there, i know.

I find myself using it less for preparation, but in game notes (previously I was doing it all in google docs, which was a pain).

I will populate treasure hoards with items so that way I know what items PCs have. That is done in session planning.

I guess I do a little bit of both, now that I think of it.

[Viral Platypus]

The Idea is to go into the Story Almanac and create all the locations, people, items, events, and whatnot that the players will encounter during play. Then go into the storyboard, create a plotpoint and give it a basic description and link it back to the almanac. For example:

Almanac

Silverflame Mountains
   King Almond
   Princess Peanutbutter
   Sorceror Salmon
   Sacrificial Knife of Nutella
   Dreaded Valley
      Worgs
      Dungeon Door
      Dungeon Foyer
        Spiders
        Dead Adventurers
          Loot
      Northern Chamber
       ...
      Southern Chamber
      ...

Storyboard

Introduction - [King Almond] hires you to rescue [Princess Peanutbutter]
Travel to [Dreaded Valley]
Encounter the [Worgs]
Break into the Dungeon - [Dungeon Door]
Encounter the [Spiders] in the [Dungeon Foyer]
Finding the [Loot] on the [Dead Adventurers]
     [Northern Chamber]
or 
     [Southern Chamber]
etc

All the details go into the Almanac entries. The storyboard is just for quick reference. It's for extra story elements that aren't specific to just the room or person; or for elements that you want to highlight from the almanac entry so you remember to mention them or reveal them to the players. Although with the way the almanac entries work, you can easily split off snipits of information to reveal in each of them.

[MaxSupernova]

I have my world well fleshed out and entered, but my "encounters" are more complicated than "monster or room here".

My notes will have descriptions of various rooms they might see (which will likely never be seen again and therefore aren't worthy of almanac entries), random encounter charts for the various areas they will be in, notes of which way a certain NPC will play a conversation depending on what the PCs are doing, some text to read to players at certain times, notes on a half dozen possible ways the situation might turn out.

None of those really need to be full-blown almanac entries. They are just notes for a single adventure that will never be referenced again.

User Notes would be perfect if they could be referenced via plot points.

I think for now I will create a "Events" -> "Incidents" called "Session 5" and place Incidents under that (using Session 5 as a container) with notes and ideas that I can pin to plot points. For each session I'll just create a new high level container. Then I can remove them later if there's nothing worth keeping, and I have my notes in containers by session.

-------

I guess, larger-scale I was wondering how Realm Works is used as a planning tool rather than just an encyclopedia. It's a fantastic encyclopedia, but there are some unclear bits to me about using it for planning anything other than room-based or monster-based dungeon crawls.

[rob]

One of the core design philosophies is that everything is woven together. It really should NOT matter what basic approach you take to using the product. You can start out with the storyboard. You can start out with lots of empty topics to fill in later. You can start with a nucleus of topics and expand outward. It doesn't matter. Ultimately, everything will become interwoven.

There are a number of aspects of Realm Works that are intended for visualization. Visualizing things makes everything SO much easier for a large percentage of people. However, the core mechanism at the heart of Realm Works is topics. They are the engine that everything revolves around.

With that in mind, let's take a look at the approaches that were initially proposed.

Starting with the storyboard is an excellent way to see how everything flows and interconnects at a high level. However, as you quickly discerned, plot points don't provide a good way to flesh out the details. That's not their purpose. That's where topics come into play. Every plot point can be associated with a topic. Our design assumption is that, in general, the vast majority of plot points will be associated with a Scene topic. That's where you would expound upon the details.

Many scenes will be typical "encounters" in an adventure. Another example might be the Grand Ball, where the PCs have the opportunity to meet important society figures and advance the story in critical ways. Yet another might be the PCs stumbling across a sunken ship where an important clue can be found. And another might be meeting passing a beggar on the road that merely establishes important foreshadowing for the adventure ahead. A Scene topic is merely a convenient place to delve into the details of a plot point, and the snippets of the scene will often have links to various other topics (NPCs, places, events, etc.) that are involved in some way with the scene.

It's also quite possible that a plot point is more than just one scene. If so, then that plot point really represents its own small sub-plot. At that point, you should then create the sub-plot as an entirely separate plot. Once created, you can now associate the sub-plot with the plot point in the larger plot. Within the sub-plot, you can now associate individual plot points to the corresponding scenes.

You could just as easily ignore the storyboard and simply leverage a large collection of scenes. If you went with this approach, you'd probably also want to leverage Quest topics, since you mentioned having essentially mini-quests that involve the PCs going through a number of possible stages to resolve. These mini-quests would weave together the individual scenes that comprise them.

Of course, you could just as easily use quests AND the storyboard together. Both provides different benefits and can be leveraged in different ways. It really depends on what works best for YOU.

Utilizing User Notes is definitely a poor approach, as you concluded. The purpose of notes is for jotting down lots of rough ideas that you'll come back to later and weave into the story as plots and/or topics at a later point in time. The notes will link back to important NPCs and locations for easy reference later, but your story does NOT link to notes. That's intentional, since you have your notes and players will have their completely independent notes as well. In addition, notes are assumed to be transient, as you'll delete them once you've acted upon them to weave them properly into the story. So notes must tie to references in the story, but it would be inappropriate to have the story tie directly to notes.

We highly recommend leveraging tags to identify topics that are related. For example, all the various scenes/encounters/rooms within the Temple of Doom should ideally have a tag that identifies them being part of the Temple of Doom. Then you can easily use a filter to see everything from that location.

If you are setting up an entire region at one time, then you can also leverage auto-tagging. This allows you to setup a tag (or tags) and designate them for automatic assignment to all new topics you create. Instead of having to manually assign the tag to every room of the Temple of Doom, you simply setup the auto-tag and start creating all the rooms. They automatically get the tag. When you're done, turn off auto-tagging.

Hopefully, the above proves helpful. In addition to the above, I strongly recommend you watch the tutorial video entitled "Approaching Content Creation". It outlines a variety of approaches that you can leverage. Most likely, one of them will feel "right" to you as a good starting place and then you can evolve your own style from there.

[MaxSupernova]

Thanks, Rob. You've invested a lot of time into making me see the light on this...

[rob]

No problem. Hopefully, you'll be able to pass the insights on to someone else down the line.