One of the most daunting tasks for new DMs is figure out how much freedom to give the players. Campaigns operate roughly on a scale from “railroad”, where the DM confines the players to rails and sends them through a plotline with limited opportunity for choice, and “sandbox”, where the DM lets the players do whatever they want with little to no guidance. Usually the best way lies somewhere in between, where the DM decides some aspects of the campaign and determines the rest with the party during actual play.
But there’s a reason DMs have a tendency to railroad: planning is hard. If your players can visit an elven, dwarven, or orcish castle in the next session, that’s three different places to explore, three sets of NPCs to meet, and three potential sets of plotlines. If they can skip the castles entirely and go dungeon-diving or shopping, that’s even more content for you to prepare. Once the players hit a certain threshold of freedom it’s impossible to plan for everything they could do. Improvisational DMs can run a session with little or no notice, but most DMs need to know what they’re doing if for no other reason than they’re using the wonderful Live GameScreen and need all their NPCs to have portraits.
Here’s the thing, though: no matter what the players choose, you only need to plan one or two sessions. That is, no matter whether the players go to the mountains or the farms or the enemy base, they’ll meet a gruff NPC who helps them if they can prove they’re worth her trouble and they’ll be harried by the enemy archers. The specifics can change (the NPC can be a miner, farmer, or scout, and the archers can use the elevation to their advantage, set fire to crops from afar, or man enemy watchtowers) but the work you do planning the session does not triple just because the players have three options. If you create something sufficiently generic you can slot it in no matter where the players go.
That’s the basic concept behind loose session design: plan such that you don’t have to plan more. It requires a bit of making things up as you go, but you have enough of a structure that you only need to fill in the details live. For NPCs, pick a personality or motivation or occupation and leave the rest to become whatever fits the party’s situation. For monsters, build a stat block without any of the descriptive words; you know this creature has a +9 to attack and deals 2d6+5 damage, but you don’t have to know whether it attacks with a bite, a slam, or horns just yet. For maps, make something with labels but no descriptions so you can decide whether the manor’s parlor is “tasteful but old-fashioned” or “opulent and gaudy” based on whether the party visited the elderly noble or his prodigal grandson. You’re leaving intentional question marks in your session design and filling them in when you need them. Loose session design saves you time by only requiring the amount you strictly need to prepare for a session, and it doesn’t force you to improvise more than you can handle because you decide how many question marks to leave.
See, players have no idea what you’re actually doing (and, often, vice-versa). They don’t know you’re going to give them a gruff NPC anywhere they go, as long as you don’t do it everywhere they go. If your notes just say “Session 1: gruff. Session 2: helpful but ineffectual. Session 3: super racist.” they’ll meet three very different people, but you don’t have to build full stat blocks for all three of them right this second. Their actions determine whether the helpful NPC is a town guard, a lovable ruffian, or a traveling merchant. It’s the same with monsters, or maps, or even rules-intense things like magic items and rules-light things like plot threads. If you want to have an NPC task the players with stealing back an heirloom from a wizard and have him give the players a weapon in return, you can decide the wizard is a duergar and the item is an axe once the players tell you they’re heading to dwarven lands.
This works best when you design your next session with the players’ decision in mind and show them the results of their choice. You don’t want to give players the illusion of choice, you want to give them actual choice by letting their decisions have meaning. If they went to the mountains, they cut off the enemy’s supply chain for weapons and armor but the enemies at the farm might scorch the land out of spite. If they stormed the enemy castle, the enemy is in disarray but the remaining camps have time to shore up their own defenses. This isn’t about creating several branching paths or about creating a single path with a couple of mutable details, it’s about letting the players do something and deciding how the world reacts. Unlike railroading, where there’s only one path because the DM declared it, the players are guiding the story every step of the way, and unlike a sandbox campaign you’re only preparing things session-by-session instead of taking on way too much work at once.
Loose session design generally requires only two things: some item that has question marks and some resource to fill in those question marks. It’s easiest when each of these is self-contained; you decide an NPC’s personality but don’t decide their class or build, then when you decide what class they are during play you use a stat block from a book, website, or existing NPC. You can also use part of a stat block, like knowing the villain is a wizard but not filling his spellbook until you know whether he’s commanding the lizardfolk in the swamp or animating undead in the sewers. Maps with blank or incomplete keys work great, and the Internet is full of random generators that will give you names or descriptions at the drop of a hat.
This is applicable even in preparation-heavy campaigns. Consider the Zelda campaign I’m running, where most things are pretty solidly defined. NPCs have names and portraits far before they appear because I have to understand how they fit into the various quests the players can do. I have to have all my maps done ahead of time, including knowing where every treasure and puzzle is, because I have to have them ready to hand to the players when they come across the map and compass. I have to know what my monsters are doing, how they fit into the dungeon theme, how they complement or work against each other, and what their stats are so I can put them into Live GameScreen. Pretty much everything I listed above is already pretty rigid.
But I don’t have to decide what personalities or affectations my NPCs have until my players meet them. I don’t write room descriptions ahead of time so I can be as vague or specific as my players have patience for when they arrive. I don’t have to decide how many enemies are in each room, or of what types, until the players enter that room and I know how long we’ve spent on the dungeon up to then and what resources they have left. Even with all the planning I’m doing, I could be doing more, and I feel I’m better off leaving those bits until I need them. This will make things a little harder for anybody who wants to take my notes and run the campaign after me, but that’s not really my problem right now.
I think that’s the biggest argument against loose design. When you make things up on the fly it’s hard to remember what you said to the players and what you just thought about. It’s why a key NPC in this campaign changed names (twice) and why another failed to appear nearly as often as I’d intended. When my players ask a question, one of my common responses is “What did I say?”, which is equal parts “Did you listen to what I told you, or are you making up for your inattention by slowing down the game?” and “No, seriously, remind me what I said out loud because I don’t remember how I reskinned this puzzle last week.” It’s a problem that can be solved with copious note-taking, but that gets harder the longer the campaign goes and it’s never been my strong suit anyway. If you have time to make notes at the end of the session, do that. If you don’t, your players will set you straight.
Like any muscle, the more you use half-prepared, half-spontaneous session design, the better you get with it. In fact, you’re probably already doing it no matter what style you like. It’s one of the system’s assumptions, that a DM will prepare key information like NPCs and encounters but go freeform during the turn-by-turn combat and interaction. This is just taking that idea and extending it, but not so far that you reach “use the stats of a bear for every monster” levels. The point is to save DMs time and frustration while making the campaign more about and accessible to the players. The fact that it makes a DM look like a genius because like he’s sufficiently prepared for anything and everything is a side benefit.
On Pathfinder
I told you that story to tell you this one: I’m starting to wonder if I’m done with Pathfinder.
The more I read about Pathfinder and the more I understand the designers’ intentions and the way players use it, the more I see how at odds I am with it. I started with Pathfinder expecting it to be like a fixed D&D 3E, and as I understand it that was the explicit intention and marketing pitch. For me this meant a simulationist game where everything worked using a similar set of rules and thus everything was comparable, but where magic was no longer the be-all and end-all skill that invalidated any other option. It meant removing or repairing the most frustrating parts of the rules and leaving the core intact. It meant getting back to the idea of “storytelling with conflict resolution, which we admit is primarily but not exclusively through combat” and away from the “make numbers go up so you can feel good about yourself” style. I get the latter enough in my online games, thank you very much.
But from what I see in releases, the community, official forums, etc., that’s not what Pathfinder actually is. Instead it’s all about optimized, magic-heavy, power-and-control play. It’s exactly what I’ve been telling people D&D is not for the better part of ten years. It’s not unlike finding out a poem doesn’t mean what you thought it meant, in that there’s a whole body based on the alternative interpretation while you’re a quiet little voice offering an alternative to which nobody feels the need to listen.
I’ve gone back and forth for a while on whether this is something that’s actually happening or it’s just a story I’ve made up based on limited exposure. But I see it in the official designs, too. For example, consider healing. In D&D it’s a benchmark skill, required at all levels of play. But in Pathfinder, healing isn’t even a thing. The only point of a healer is to provide emergency supplication so the players can survive long enough to repair themselves between battles with wands of cure light wounds. Instead, a healer is best played as a striker, because it’s more mathematically viable to kill a monster and thus prevent it from dealing damage than it is to heal a character a half-hit from death. Because in a world where characters are expected to either win the battle in the first two turns, deal (level * 10) damage per round every round, or rebuild the character until they do, mathematical viability is all that matters.
It’s this world into which Paizo has released its last few books. Consider Pathfinder Unchained, the Advanced Class Guide, and Occult Adventures. Among them they introduced twenty classes. Of those, only one is capable of being a full healer. A second can spoof it with archetypes at the expense of most of its other class features. But almost all of them are designed to do absurd amounts of damage. This is our meta.
The community even has its own language for how the system now works. “Traps” are feats, class features, and other options that seem neat but aren’t optimized enough to keep up with the most powerful choices in each category; Vital Strike is a trap because you can do more damage attacking twice than attacking once with a damage bonus, and non-spellcaster characters are expected to use full attack actions every round to maximize damage. “Rocket tag” is the style of play where high-level characters hurl catastrophically powerful abilities, usually spells, at each other, and the first to make one connect essentially wins the fight; this is ostensibly a gaming style to be avoided but it’s also the only way anybody seems to know how to play above L10. “MAD” is “multiple ability dependent”, a class or feature based on more than one ability score; this is a detriment because SAD (“single ability dependent”) classes can boost one ability score, like Intelligence, to the stratosphere and build their entire character around it by ignoring everything else that goes into a person.
It’s the same language I hear when people discuss competitive games like Magic: the Gathering. But Pathfinder isn’t supposed to be competitive. Players aren’t supposed to be doing everything they can to break the game wide open and assert dominance over an opponent. It’s supposed to be cooperative, where you work with people to achieve a goal. It’s literally in the first paragraph of the first chapter of the Core Rulebook:
Competitive, high-powered play only works if everybody is equally in on it. If this isn’t what you want, the community’s message is clear: you’re either playing the game wrong or you’re playing the wrong game. And hearing that message, time and time again, from every direction including the designers, is exhausting. I don’t need my pastimes to exhaust me.
This isn’t to say I want to abandon Pathfinder completely. I still like the core ruleset, and it still gives me that dungeonpunk feel I want out of a game. But it means I’ll spend my time on other systems, and when I do run Pathfinder it won’t be as she is intended. I need a game where instant-death spells are discouraged, where clever tactics are rewarded more than the best builds Reddit can come up with, where there’s more focus on character stories and growth and a logical world than on gathering a handful of dice and eying the DM threateningly. Mechanically I’ll use our alternate system for save-or-dies, using them more as dramatic finishing moves than turn-one dominance tactics, and I’ll keep working on themes, intended to bring “character” back into “character design”. The lyrics stay the same, but the rhythm changes.
But this means I’m essentially leaving the Pathfinder community, because they want something I don’t and vice versa. I’m not sure how big a loss this is; certainly Pathfinder won’t notice my absence, and I’ve been so put off by the Pathfinder community from the moment I encountered it that I’m not losing any significant emotional investment. It still hurts, though, to work in something for so long only to find out it was never for you in the first place.