In Between Sessions
After you've finished a session, this is your chance to reflect on what happened and prepare for your next session. After your first session, you will be working to further the plot with your characters and may have a better idea of the character and player dynamics and how they will affect the story. As gameplay continues, you will be able to hone your skills and tailor your adventure based on what the players seem to engage with the most. Below are some tips on reflecting on your session and using it to make adjustments for further sessions.
Identify When the Players are Most Engaged
As you think back over your last session, try to identify when your players seemed to be having the most fun. Was it while fighting monsters or while solving a puzzle? Was it while communicating with NPCs or while overcoming a particularly difficult obstacle? If you can identify those moments that the player enjoyed the most, you can attempt to manufacture those types of scenarios and situations more in the future. While you want to vary gameplay to keep things interesting and keep the pacing fresh, it makes sense to include more of the types of encounters that players enjoy the most. If you're not sure, don't be afraid to ask players for their feedback. Asking "what was your favorite part of the adventure so far," will help you to better customize the adventure for them in the future.
Determine How PC Decisions Will Impact the Story
What decisions did the PCs make during the session? Did they choose one particular path over another? Did they take a course that you didn't expect? Think about each point where the PCs made a decision and determine how that will impact the story. If the PCs let an opponent escape, how does that affect the villain's plans? Likewise, if the PCs decide not to give artifact to the grand wizard, how will the NPC react? If you had a fork or split in your story line that depended on the PCs choice, now is your chance to develop the plotline that the PCs choose. Alternatively, if PCs end up making a decision that you didn't expect, you may need to make adjustments to your plot to accommodate it.
Prepare for the Next Session
Once you have had sufficient time to reflect on the last session and make adjustments to the story as necessary, you can begin to prepare for the next session. This involves determining the scenes that you will be running next and designing any content for those scenes (i.e. combat encounters, NPCs, puzzles, hazards, etc). You may need to rewrite or make adjustments to scenes that you've previously prepared based on what you learned in the last session (i.e. the impact of PC decisions, changing scene types to be more in line with player engagement, etc). If you haven't done so already, you may want to begin developing Destinies for each character that can be woven into the story. Some Gamemasters may plan out most of their scenes well in advance of the first session, but make sure to leave yourself time to make adjustments as necessary.
Sometimes you will choose to take care of "book-keeping" items outside of game time, such as generating treasure, taking care of PC shopping trips, communicating with a player about his PC background or destiny, etc. During game, taking care of these types of tasks may be time consuming and drag down the pacing. In between sessions is a great time to take care of gameplay aspects that are not particularly important to the story or that only affect a single character. These kind of communications are typically done through email or over the phone, but really whatever way works best for your and your players is ideal.
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