Author: JennyDetroit (Page 1 of 50)

What to do when you don’t know what to do (RPG edition)

February 8, 2026 / / 0 Comments

In my monthly DCC RPG game recently, the players decided NOT to go to the Caverns of Thracia for their usual dungeon crawl of doom. Instead, they noticed a set of smaller ruins off the beaten path between their village and the Caverns (ruins that were created by Goodman Games for their Backerkit hexcrawl of the island of Thracia that I’ve been using as my overland map for the game).

Unfortunately, the entry in Goodman Games’s hexcrawl book doesn’t have much to say about these ruins: the villagers from the Hamlet avoid them, and there might be a tunnel/series of tunnels connecting this ruined village to another ruined village several miles to the west.

That’s it. That’s all I had to go on and use on the fly for this detour by my players.

I probably should have told the group that I wasn’t prepared for a trip to these little ruins and maybe we could just move on to exploring the Caverns, per usual.

But I didn’t want to take away player agency, so I figured I could improvise something using the details from the hexcrawl supplement. There are tunnels/a tunnel connecting two sets of ruins. Maybe something is in the tunnel(s)? Maybe they’ll find treasure in the other set of ruins?

My first mistake was trying to make all this up on the spot. I should have asked for a ten minute break to plan *something* instead of ad-libbing everything and ending up with a rather lame location and confusing encounter with a ghost.

I didn’t act prudently at all, and so what resulted was almost two hours of a weird, rather stupidly long tunnel that connected the two sets of ruins, a ghost with a missing hand who was full of hate but couldn’t actually do much damage to the players (DCC RPG’s ghost entry in the Monster section is pretty weak, and I didn’t know that before I decided to have a ghost be waiting in the tunnel… the ghost doesn’t do any damage just has these special abilities, and a lot of them didn’t make sense for what I had narrated already, so I ended up with a ghost who can show players a vision of their own deaths and not much else).

By the end of the encounter, the group had found the other set of ruins and I put a box with some treasure there so they didn’t feel it was a total waste of time, but honestly, it was a total waste of time. Not a very fun encounter, not a very interesting location, and all of it ended up confusing them instead of entertaining them.

Ugh.

Again, I should have simply asked them to go to the Caverns, promising to develop other locations and hexes for next time if they wanted to do more exploration.

But I didn’t, and we ended up with a weird and wasteful two hours of game time.

Instead of totally improvising and ending up with a mess, what if I had a ready-to-go toolkit for improvising locations and encounters on the fly? What if I could let the players explore things without asking them to wait until next session?

Hours after our game session ended, I realized I DO have a ready-to-go toolkit for improvising locations and encounters. I just didn’t bring it to the session. I didn’t even THINK to bring it the session, and that was a mistake.

I have Bob World-Builder’s Skrym zine, a toolkit for creating wilderness sites, encounters, and treasure (compatible with DCC RPG!) and I could have rolled up something in five minutes if I’d had it with me at the disastrous session.

There’s some ruins, eh? A ruined village, according to the Goodman Games supplement.

Okay, so roll for encounter in some ruins (2d6)… I got berserker.

I also rolled to see if maybe there was anything else near the ruins and I rolled again (2d6) and ended up with a cave. So maybe a little bit off the borders of the ruined village is a cave (and maybe this cave is where the tunnel is to the other ruined village miles away).

Random encounter for the cave… a giant spider.

Then I rolled four dice for a “small location” (the toolkit says roll 5d6, but I only had four dice at hand). Where those dice landed on my notebook page is where buildings are intact, ready to be explored. The number facing up on each die determines what’s in that location, so I ended up with a chest (6), two minion locations (4), and one hazard (3).

I decided the berserker was in one of the buildings with some minions. The berserker description in the toolkit mentions that its a dirty, cannibalistic human, so I figured the minions might be some giant rats he’s befriended.

I rolled for the hazard and ended up rolling “collapsing,” so that means maybe the wall of the building is unstable and will collapse if any rubble near it is moved, 1d6 damage or half if a Reflex save is successful.

Then I rolled for loot to see what was in the chest (maybe these were things the cannibal had collected after killing his victims?). Rolled up a hexarone handaxe (a kind of dwarven metal with special properties), a cask of mead, and a leg of turkey (maybe the players don’t know what kind of meat it is… fearing it may be human).

For the giant spider in the cave, I figured she had four victims in her web so I rolled up four more pieces of loot and ended up with a special longbow, special armor, 10 feet of chain, and some regular chainmail.

All of this random rolling took me roughly five minutes. I could have done it while the group was setting up their marching order and making some Sneak Silently rolls or whatever. I could have also done it as they went from room to room in the ruins. IF I’d had the Skrym zine with me.

Lesson learned. From now on, I bring this zine and if players ever go “off-book” into something I haven’t prepared for, all I need to do is spend a couple of minutes rolling on these tables and I’ll have a ready-to-go site and encounter for them to explore.

I feel stupid, of course, for having this awesome resource and not using it in my last session. And for someone else’s game, Skrym might not be the right tool. But I think it behooves any game master to have something like Skrym at the ready: a short, easy to use, on-the-fly toolkit for generating locations and encounters.

The Skrym zine is only about twenty-five pages; I printed it at home and stapled it, making a half-page booklet. Instead of trying to roll on random tables in a larger rulebook (like Shadowdark RPG or OSE) where some of this stuff is on different pages, Skrym has everything within a couple of pages; easy to flip through and fast to use. So whatever resource a GM uses, I would suggest it be short and sweet, something zine-like or even a single page maybe, that can be used quickly at the table without downtime or having to pause the action.

I feel foolish for my blunders in our last session, but going forward, I know I won’t make the same mistake again. And I won’t run a session of DCC RPG without bringing Skrym along to help me.

Juggling is lesson in art

January 25, 2026 / / 0 Comments

With juggling, you drop a lot of balls. You drop so many, so often, that it stops mattering. You are so bad for so long that your ego dies completely, leaving you free to keep going.

An art practice is a way of moving through life (hat tip: Andy J. Pizza). A juggling practice teaches you that this movement is full of failures, drops, frustrations, and that the only way to get past these failures is to pick up the balls and try again.

Again, and again, and again: This is the lesson of juggling, and the lesson of art-making. Even though I can juggle now without dropping the balls–can juggle one-handed, can switch between one-handed and two-handed, can juggle without stopping for a long time–I still need to practice. I still need to keep going, and I still drop balls every once in awhile. I sometimes have a false start. I sometimes throw too high or too erratically. Sometimes lose the rhythm.

But to juggle means to pick up the balls and try again.

Making art is not a one-and-done. It’s an attempt at continual motion that often involves losing the rhythm, dropping the balls, throwing too high. But the only way to make art is to try again. Moving through life means life happens: failures and frustrations. At some point, we drop the ball so many times, we either give up or die to self, realizing that failure is forward motion, that letting go of our ego (“I’m so bad at this!”) is the only way to keep going.

Yeah, you’re bad at this. This is what juggling teaches when we first begin. You’re bad at this, and yet you keep trying anyway. You WILL fail. The humility that comes from facing this truth and persevering anyway is the engine that drives the juggler and the artist. At some point, we laugh at all of our drops. Even now, when I can juggle without much difficulty, I still sometimes drop a ball. And I laugh it off. I shrug because of course. Of course I dropped a ball. That’s the way it goes.

Those of us who make art would be well-served by this attitude. Of course. Of course I wrote a clunker of a story. Of course I lost the thread in that essay. Of course I couldn’t find the right word and used an almost-right one instead. Of course no one liked that Substack post. Of course I got another rejection letter from that magazine.

Of course. That’s the way it goes.

And the juggler knows you simply bend down, pick up the balls, and start again. Drops happen to everyone. They are as much a part of juggling as keeping all the balls in the air.

The same goes for art.

On Keeping and Not Keeping My Pact

December 2, 2025 / / 0 Comments

In the spirit of Stephen King’s advice to finish a draft in the “length of a season,” I’m trying to finish my children’s adventure fantasy, Shards of Stolen Breath, before January 1, 2026. As such, I made a pact with myself last week to write for seven days, an hour-long chunk each day, to see what I could get accomplished.

I followed several procedures, namely, keeping the writing time flexible (to account for my unpredictable schedules), counting down the hour in twenty-minute chunks (to keep myself more accountable and not get lost in the weeds of distraction), and using the “skeleton scene” method of writing down scene ideas on note cards immediately before writing the draft. I also made a commitment to not focus on the number of words written but on the time spent in the chair.

It’s been seven days (the length of my pact to myself), and I’ve learned a few things about myself, my abilities, my inabilities, and what I need to work on going forward.

First, what worked.

Skeleton scenes were excellent. They gave me a road map but a loose one. When I started each writing session, I had a few previous cards to look at and gather ideas from, but I also had the option to sketch new scene ideas on new cards. Both sets of cards–previous ideas and new ideas–put me at ease and let me know that when the timer starts, I’m not committed to furiously rushing into the manuscript. Instead, I can think a bit, daydream a bit, let my imagination awaken, before writing. Even though I wasn’t focused on word counts, I ended up writing about 1,000 words per hour. This is a great pace for me, and it was almost effortless, which is what I want.

Storytelling should be a flow-state activity, and using the skeleton scenes to spur my imagination put me into that flow state.

The other thing that worked was the twenty-twenty-twenty timer regime. There were a few times when I got off track in my twenty-minute chunks, but the buzzing of the timer reminded me of what I should be doing, and thus, I refocused for the next twenty minutes.

Finally, I think focusing on time and not words helped me feel less anxious. It reduced the pressure and made my writing time feel more like leisure and less like work.

However, the caveat to this is that I couldn’t quite manage to ignore the pressure of writing more words. With a deadline of January 1–and an ability to do basic math–I know how many words I should be writing each week, and the fact that I did NOT manage to hit those words means I’m in danger of not achieving my “length of a season” goal.

Maybe the problem is in setting such a goal in the first place, but I wanted to experiment with writing more urgently (with a little more fire in the belly, so to speak), and the six-week time frame felt appropriately pressured without being too much.

But now, on the other side of seven days, I’m wondering if it is too much. I like the idea of finishing this novel by the end of midwinter, but maybe that’s not possible.

What is the “length of a season” anyway? If I’m following a four-season year, then that’s roughly three months per season. I’ve already written about 10,000 words of Shards, but I have many more words to go. Perhaps I should give myself two months to finish instead of one and some change?

This seven-day pact has definitely taught me that I can comfortably get about 500-600 words written each day–without limiting or straining my other responsibilities–so perhaps my season for Shards needs to extend into January. Even if I were to finish mid-February, that’s still setting me up to begin a new project in the spring and finish it before June.

But in order to do that, I’ll need to bump my words up from 500-600 per day to closer to 1,000.

The other lesson I learned from my pact is that I tend to stall out after 500 words. I never quite made my one-hour chunk any of the days. I’m curious to know why that is and what I might do about it. Is it a matter of needing a break? Splitting up the writing time into two different sessions? Or do I need to find a new tactic to get my spark back and finish the session?

Skeleton scenes worked well for getting me started, but perhaps there is another tactic for pushing me into my second set of 500 words.

Or maybe I need to recommit to focusing on my time in the chair and not bother about words at all.

Or maybe I need to use that second half of BIC (“butt in chair”) time to do other creative work. Maybe it’s time to do a writing exercise or creative daydreaming.

These are questions and experiments for another day (another seven-day pact?).

Now for what didn’t work.

I was not able to keep my pact for two of the seven days. Both Wednesday and Friday were traveling days (to see family for Thanksgiving), and I found myself completely unable to get anything done other than morning pages on those two days. I don’t know if it would’ve helped to schedule my writing time in the morning before departing, but the mornings were busy with packing, so I don’t think so.

Trying to write in the evening after a long day of travel proved too much. I’m not very happy about my failure here, but I did learn that perhaps I’m just not able to do much on a travel day. The stress of traveling is too heavy for creative work.

Going forward, on these kinds of days, I should be content with writer’s notebook time in the morning and focus on other ways to connect with my creativity later in the day. On both traveling days, for instance, we listened to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire while we drove, and that was a good way for me to stay connected to fantasy fiction and be inspired. Perhaps on these sorts of days, that’s all I can ask of myself.

In some ways, despite failing to stick to the pact for all seven days, I’m glad that I had those two “missed” days because they allowed me to see that my creative work is never going to fit perfectly into each day; instead, I can enjoy the creative, imaginative moments that do crop up without worrying too much about perfect adherence to the “plan.”

I certainly wrote a lot this past week, and that’s mostly because of my tactics and commitment to the pact. I also learned about what works and doesn’t work for my creative life, and I’ve got new questions to explore, new experiments to try. (Namely, how to keep my energy and focus going for the full hour.)

I’m not sure how useful this information is to others, but perhaps some of these tactics could help a writer who struggles with critical voice and distractions. Maybe skeleton scenes or the twenty-twenty-twenty timer method could help. Maybe the focus on time in the chair instead of words written could help. Maybe the flexible scheduling (doing it day-of and being open to changing it once the day gets going) could help. In a lot of ways, all of my tactics were designed to take the pressure off. If I feel pressured–if the writing feels like a “job” or an “obligation”–then I shut down. My tactics for this experiment allowed me to feel at ease without sacrificing my commitment to my art and getting the novel written.

I know that I’ll continue to experiment and tweak these tactics as I go. I’m thinking for my next experiment, I’ll do a second seven-day pact but try to address that 500-word lull spot I always run into. Maybe the answer is to try a writing exercise. Step out of the manuscript for a bit and see where it goes. I can always add it into the draft later (if it works out).

Artists need to balance flexibility with commitment and habits. I’m learning every day how I work best, while remaining open to change and flux. Ultimately, the storytelling I did last week was fun, fruitful, and energizing. Couldn’t ask for more from this seven-day commitment!

Pact and Procedures: Shards of Stolen Breath

November 29, 2025 / / 0 Comments

The Pact: For the next seven days, I will work on Shards of Stolen Breath (working title), a fantasy novel for children.

The Procedure: Schedule a one-hour chunk each day and write during that time.

(I’m not going to specify a particular time until the day-of. My schedule varies too much to commit to the same time each day. For instance, on Mondays, when we have dinner with my parents, writing after dinner won’t work. Also, on Tuesday of this week I played in an online game of Castles and Crusades after dinner, so that also didn’t work. Wednesday through Friday, due to the holiday and traveling, were not predictable either in the time or the energy department. Etc. etc.

Basically, picking the One True Time each day is hard and ends in failure more often than not. For this experiment, I’m trying the day-of approach to see if that works better.)

More Procedure: Use note cards to write “skeleton scenes” before actually writing.

The idea here (and I can’t remember where I first heard the term “skeleton scene”… this might necessitate a trip to my archives…) is that by sketching out quick impressions or possible details for the scene, I won’t have to stop too long to think them up as I’m writing.

This is, perhaps, a form of “outlining,” but since it’s right before I start adding words to my manuscript, and it’s very much a whatever-comes-to-mind exercise in free association, and it’s not using any parts of my critical voice, therefore it feels much more “creative voice” than not. I don’t have to write the skeleton scenes either. I can simply reread what I wrote yesterday and jump right in.

But skeleton scenes allow a gentler “on-boarding” where I don’t have to feel like the words “matter” yet. I can let ideas come to me (without editorializing) and that makes the first words I type into the manuscript less “precious.” Basically, the fear and resistance is broken down. Skeleton scenes are like stretches before a run.

More Procedure: Set the time for twenty minutes (when I really plan to write for sixty).

Twenty minutes is doable. I can write quite a bit in twenty minutes and it doesn’t seem overwhelming at the start. Also, after twenty minutes, the bell goes off on my Time Timer and I can check in with myself: Have I really been writing, or have I only been “gearing up” to write?

If I’ve only been gearing up, I can get down to brass tacks in the next twenty-minute session and “open the document and stay in the document.”

And after that session, I know I only have to push through one more twenty-minuter and I’ll have met my pact agreement for the day.

If I set the timer for sixty minutes, and I start with some journaling, skeleton scenes (or blogging… heh), the time might quickly get away from me. I’ll feel like I’m writing fiction and adding to the story, but I’m really not.

Twenty-twenty-twenty means I get a little audible check-in every twenty minutes to make sure I’m doing what I want to be doing, which is writing fiction.

More Procedure: Do not, repeat, do not focus on words written (but keep track anyway). I’m not setting a words-per-day quota. This is a time-based pact only.

But I do want to see how many words I can get written in these twenty-minute segments because I’m somewhat hopeful that my procedures here will actually engender MORE words-per-minute than I usually achieve. I don’t know why I think that, but I’m partly doing this experiment to see if my hypothesis is right.

If it is, then perhaps the secret to writing faster and getting into flow-state is buried somewhere within these procedures.

I’ll have more to report when the pact is complete.

“The Length of a Season”

November 24, 2025 / / 1 Comment

So Stephen King said about how long it should take to write a rough draft for a novel.

I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve failed at this. I always take too long.

Before anyone starts in and says, “The story takes as long as it needs to take,” let me explain that while this may be a helpful maxim for other people, it is not for me.

I know because I’ve let novels take longer than the length of a season and always–always–it has hurt the project. I lose the heat. I lose the thread. I’m at a different place as a writer and my voice has subtly shifted.

Speaking with one of my students today, she had the exact same experience. She started a draft a few months ago but never wrote a proper ending. She added the ending recently, and she and I both agreed it lacked that certain oomph the earlier portions had. It didn’t have the same voice, the same energy. She’d taken “longer than a season.”

This happens to me constantly. I’m not saying this happens to everyone, nor that it necessarily happens to me all the time (I’ve had a few short stories where the break/pause ended up helping me work out something that was missing). But it happens to me often enough that I’ve got to actively fight against the fear and blockage that keeps me from riding the momentum of a project to its completion. Especially for novels. Both my interest and my ability to conceptualize the story dissipate the longer it takes me.

I want to get better at riding the wave. I have too many stories I want to write for things to linger on like this.

And thus my pact. My commitment. I will finish my next book in a season.

The Backstory:

I started writing a novel for my children earlier in the spring. They had brought home a book about dragons from the Scholastic book fair and it left me cold. Generic. Trite. Also, a bit too mature for my first and second graders.

I sprung into action and started writing a dragon fantasy novel using some of their ideas. I wanted it to be more in the tradition of books I remember loving as a kid. Something similar to the Prydain Chronicles, or Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.

This, remember, was in the spring. And now it’s late autumn and I’m on chapter seven. About ten thousand words in. Not very far. And much longer than King’s “season.”

Nevertheless, I will persist, and in the spirit of King’s advice (and my own inkling about how my creative process works), I intend to finish the novel before the end of this season (this season meaning November/December).

To do so means writing 50-60k in a month (so, sorta like the NaNoWriMos of old), which comes to roughly 1600 words per day. I’m not going to hold myself to a strict word count quota (another quirk of my creative process: as soon as word counts come into view, I get the hives); instead, I’m setting a time quota: sixty minutes per day in the writing studio. A bit more on weekends to make up for slow days.

I’ve already built up a tiny bit of momentum because I’ve been working on the book for the past week or so, but I need a more formal commitment to really push myself and write with more urgency and gusto. Not urgency in the panicked sense, but urgency in the sense that this story will be best served if I get it out into the world without delay. In delay there is doubt. There is that changing of voice and squandering of energy. Like my student realized: taking “time off” from the writing didn’t help it; it just made it flatten, like a tire leaking air.

Why do we take that time off? Is it really to make the piece “better”? Or is it fear, resistance, tension, doubt? It’s worry and perfectionism. It’s a defense mechanism. If we keep going, we might end up somewhere “bad.” We might flub it. We might not know where to go next and make a “wrong turn.”

But I would say the more harmful thing, from an emotional and intellectual standpoint, is to let a story idea taper off, to let a novel die on the vine, to never finish the piece. Losing the energy, wiping out from the wave: these are the bigger troubles. A tough, wild wave is easier to ride if you don’t intentionally jump out of it. Better to stay on and ride it out than to jump off and tread water, hoping for a new wave to come along.

I’m going to keep riding the wave. I’m excited, in fact. There’s a thrill here. A high-wire act (okay, now I’m mixing metaphors). But the idea that I can build my own momentum, that I can accelerate myself to the end of a novel: it’s exhilarating. It’s fun to think that in six weeks’ time I’ll have a rough draft novel to share with my children. I’m hoping this experiment shows me a new way of working, of approaching my creative projects. In the length of a season, I’ll have something new and complete.

Solo RPGing vs. RPG Prep

November 2, 2025 / / 0 Comments

There are differences, of course. The end goal, for one. Solo role-playing is (often) not for any other purpose than to play the game, whereas prep is intended to facilitate a better group gaming experience at some future point. Unless the GM is going to make everything up on the spot by using improvisation and random tables, some prep is in order. Solo play is an end unto itself, but game prep is intended for future use at the group gaming table.

But on another level, these two RPG activities can be more similar than maybe we realize. Playing solo as a way to prep for a group game is somewhat more interesting and more ludic than what we’d categorize as “prep.” Prepping (i.e.: preparing) isn’t “playing;” it’s the antecedent to playing. Whereas solo play is just that: play. But it can help prepare a GM for the group game in an even deeper way than simple prep can. Solo play–because it involves participating in the game itself, as a PC, and interacting with the game world not just taking notes on it–creates a mental map and deeper immersion into the game world for the GM.

At least, that’s how it works for me. I find that I’m often more comfortable running a game for a module I’ve played through solo, or a hexcrawl I’ve interacted with in solo play, than I am with only prepping the adventure. This is the attraction of actual-play podcasts and youtube videos, I think. Not the Critical Role entertainment ones, but the normal groups and gamers playing a normal adventure without much editing or theatrics. We get to “play” the game alongside them and thus become better able to run the same adventure later for our own groups.

Admittedly, solo play is not the most efficient way to prep for a group gaming session. The players might not follow the same path as the GM did when playing solo. Solo play–through a module or hexcrawl or dungeon crawl–takes MUCH more time than simple “prepping” does. Traditionally, prepping for a game means reading the module or designing the dungeon or overland map (or both), coming up with encounters and NPCs, etc. It’s note-taking, essentially.

But solo play, while it involves bookkeeping and taking notes, is not a simple collating of material for the game to come. It IS the game. This takes more time, obviously. This involves rolling dice, having combats, imagining encounters, keeping track of character inventories and stats, etc. All of this may help prep for a future game, but it’s not efficient.

It is fun, though.

I sometimes struggle with prepping for games because the prep feels like homework. There’s a dutifulness to it that makes it the opposite of “play.” Play is exploratory; it’s done for its own sake; it doesn’t have any obligation attached.

Is there a way to meld solo play and game prep together? Can I find a way to “play” solo and prep at the same time, melding the immersion and fun of solo play with the more-efficient methods of game prep?

The biggest impediment is time. Solo play is simply not as efficient as game prep. I don’t have the time available to solo play every module or adventure I’m planning to run. And to fully prepare, especially if it’s a megadungeon, I would need to run multiple solo adventures, each time exploring a different section of the dungeon to make sure I’m ready for what my players might do when I run it for them. This is a massive time commitment. I’d be playing solo RPGs every night of my life for some of my games. Maybe that’s what I should do–maybe I’d even find it immensely fun–but I have a day job and a writing vocation and a family and a house to take care of. I don’t have time to devote that many hours to my RPG hobby without sacrificing other things that matter more.

Still. I’m curious to see if some compromise between play and prep might work. I often procrastinate game prep because it feels a little too work-like. A shift to something more playful might make it something to look forward to, something done for relaxation and enjoyment, not obligation.

How that shift might work is the tricky part, but perhaps I could vacillate between the two activities. Basically, game prep as usual until I get to a part that seems interesting or that I need to understand better, and then begin playing it out with my characters. Play out NPC encounters not as a way to predict what might happen with my group later, but as a way to better understand how the NPC would react in general, to get a better sense of their personality and goals. Play out combats to get a feel for how a monster might really react to hostilities and use its powers to survive. And solo play through a dungeon or level not as my only means of “prep,” but as a way to get an organic feel for the locations and how players might interact with the world.

Might is an important word here. Obviously, my choices as a solo player will not be the same as the choices of my gaming group. My solo play is only ONE possible path for the adventure to go.

But by running through one path, I’ll hopefully open up my imagination to other paths, and when the time comes to run it with other players, I’ll have a better imaginative landscape to call upon in adjudicating and describing what’s happening to their characters.

I’m not sure that solo play as a form of prep is the right call for every GM, but I do think it might work for me. When I ran Winter’s Daughter as a solo game, I felt much more connected to the setting and encounters. I understood how these rooms and encounters COULD go, and when I do eventually run the game for a group, even if they act in different ways than my characters, I’ll still have a deeper sense of how those actions should affect the game world. I’ll be able to describe the world to them in a more authentic way.

I don’t have to prep the whole adventure like this, obviously. I can dip into certain rooms or encounters that are complicated or more impactful to the module and play those out with my solo PCs. I can take notes and prep in my traditional way for other things. This will obviously take more time than just normal prepping, but what I’m hoping for is that I’ll be more eager to “prep” if I know that I’ll really be PLAYING as I go.

Just as players often enjoy making characters in their downtime between games, game masters enjoy playing out the adventures in their minds. Solo play is a way to formalize that process and familiarize oneself with game mechanics at the same time. These are games, after all. Playing is the whole point. Enjoyment, not obligation or work, is what matters.

Solo play as a form of prep may be the key to making the game-mastering experience a more playful and fulfilling one.

At least for me.

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