While any good DM spends plenty of time preparing for each game session and figuring out what they’re going to throw at their players this week, but players will be players and there are times when even the best plans are for naught. So what do you do when nothing goes as expected and you find yourself ill-prepared for what is happening? Improvise. That’s the topic of today’s Save My Game article, or more specifically, how to be ready to improvise so that things run smoothly in the game session and your players don’t even notice the difference.
It starts with reappropriating ideas for new campaigns into ideas for developing your current one. Even if the idea was for an Eberron campaign and your current one is in FR, that doesn’t mean that you can’t reappropriate it. The setting is there to serve your campaign, not the other way around. Ideas that would make good campaigns will make good campaigns in all settings. Think creatively and you might be surprised by what happens.
Beyond that, Stephen goes into some details on how you can implement this philosophy; most of which boils down to keeping a good encounter notebook. See and encounter that just screams for you to run it? Put it in the encounter notebook so that you can steal it when your players run off the rails and you need an off the cuff encounter. Add to that the ability to recognize loose ends in your prep work, and plans for which encounters to pull from the notebook should players start to pull on that loose end, and you’re players will never know when you aren’t prepared for what they do.
From the mailbag, Stephen addresses a question about handling variable groups and one which is a follow-up to his advice about keeping a campaign wiki.
This article is full of good advice, but is mostly “theory.” Even the personal anecdote doesn’t really give the reader much in the form of an example to follow. More details would help and maybe even a worked example: something like a twitter feed with regular updates through the prep and then play of a session that had to be improvised. Still, the article is defiantly worth the read.



























