A few weeks ago, I was running my Blades in the Dark campaign, in the Free Play stage, waiting for the players to finish gathering information to kick off their score. I figured they needed to get a few details uncovered to be ready. I had even given them a few hints in the narrative prelude, which I released the day before the session. Roll after roll, and question after question followed, and I started to realize that the players were not even close to what I had prepped for the evening, and had chosen an unexpected chain of actions. The interesting part was that through these actions, they were going to reach the same end scene that I had prepped for in the score, that is, to encounter a powerful Faction that could help them, if they were willing to make a deal. I decided then that we did not have to keep with the prep or even the normal structure that Blades recommends, and rather, just let the session, in its organic way, play out. 

Sometimes, play deviates pretty far from prep. 

And that is ok. 

All Play Deviates From Prep

On some level, all play deviates from prep. No GM can ever prep for everything players could do and for every outcome of the randomizer of the game. When we prep our own material, what we tend to prep is the most probable actions and outcomes. We put a room of Orcs in the dungeon, we prep it for a combat scene, but the players might use stealth or negotiation. When play deviates from prep, the GM needs to improvise what happens, often engaging the rules of the game and their own story skills to come up with how that scene is handled and how it flows into the rest of the story. 

Today, I am much more into the philosophy of prepping situations but not solutions. The players will come up with a solution, and the rules of the game will determine the outcome of their solution. As long as I understand the general story, the setting, and its characters, I can determine how the story incorporates the outcome. Today, I consider a good session one where the players surprise me with their choice of solution or how the outcome of their choices plays out. 

This is not to say that “play to discover” is the one true way. I don’t believe in one true way to GM. I am saying that it’s the way that creates my current enjoyment of the game. Before this, when I ran games prepped tight to the expected actions of the players, I enjoyed plenty of those games, and so did my players. Find your enjoyment in this hobby however you like (within the limits of Safety). 

Small Deviations vs. Large Ones

All that said, there are small deviations from prep, and there are large ones. Small deviations typically resolve themselves within the same scene or in a scene or two. You might have to move a few things around in your prep to make that happen. For example, the detectives (characters) decide not to interview the bartender, and miss the opportunity for a specific clue, and you decide to move that clue to another NPC, later in the session. 

Large deviations in prep are the kinds of things that take a sharp turn from what you expected to happen in the story or session. They may not resolve themselves within the session or story, or open up an entirely other storyline that was not expected. For example, your prep for the night includes the detectives (characters) working the murder at the nightclub, but after getting started on that case, they put it on hold to reopen a case they recently closed, to chase a clue they had left unresolved. 

This is A Feature, Not a Bug

While RPGs have similarities to other media (i.e., movies, streaming, or books), they are by their very nature an improvisational form of entertainment. In other media, you may not know what is going on while you are observing it, but the writers locked in the events of the story through the creation of the media. RPGs are not like that; we are both the writers and consumers of the media at the same time. 

Play in RPGs is erratic and sometimes downright strange. Players come up with all sorts of ideas, sometimes based in the game world and sometimes in the real world. They bleed their own emotions into the game, making sometimes irrational decisions for their characters. Dice do not follow “the script,” and key rolls are blown. But it’s supposed to be this way. It is what makes this hobby so much fun. 

Dealing with Deviations

As a GM, the sooner you get comfortable with handling small and large deviations, the better your games will be. You will never prep the deviations away, so lean into them and get good at handling them. 

Here are a few simple tips on handling deviations, but this list can’t do this skill justice. If you are new to GMing, use this as a starting place; if you are a more experienced GM, you likely have done most of these things.

Don’t Prep Solutions

Going back to Dogs in the Vineyard, prep situations and not solutions. Learn to let go of what the “correct” or “optimal” solution is for a given situation, and just create the situation. You can’t deviate from the prep if there is no prep. You may want to, for the sake of efficiency, cover a few bases, but don’t lock anything in as being the only way to conclude the scene. For example, prep some stat blocks for the Orcs, since combat is a possibility, and you don’t want to break out your Monster Manual should the players draw swords.

Move Elements Around

For smaller deviations, you can always move some elements around. If the key was supposed to be found in room three after the combat, and the players stealthed through room three and never searched it, move that key to another room. Or do away with the lock the key was intended for. As mentioned earlier, this is good for small deviations. 

Soft Corrections

Sometimes you can nudge the players with a hint, a comment from an NPC, or a skill check that gives the characters some information. For instance, the players start to theorize that the blue plasma could be the cause of the ship explosion, which would take them completely off the mystery, so you call for a science check, and when successful, you tell the players that their character knows that blue plasma is ionizing and could not cause an explosion. I like this technique when the characters may know something that the players don’t, and giving them that info helps the game progress more smoothly. 

Hard Correction

Other times, you have to take more of a direct intervention and speak to the table, GM to players. I reserve this for larger deviations, where the players are going to do something that is going to take us right out of the story that was planned for and into something new. At this point, I will pause play and tell the players what is going on, and offer the choice to continue their new course of action or help to work the game back to the prepped story. 

As a caveat, I am comfortable enough as a GM to allow for either of those situations to occur, but you might not be, or you might be playing something published and don’t have anything else to work from, so you may only want to offer how to get back onto the prepped material. That choice is up to you based on your comfort with your game and your table. 

Toss The Notes

Lastly, you can just let the deviation happen. You don’t have to correct it; you can just play the ball where it lies. See what happens and play from there. This is going to require that you be comfortable improvising the game from this point on. If you are, and you are curious about how this deviation could play out, then put your prep away and keep playing. 

Hold Your Prep Securely, But With A Loose Hand

Prep is a great tool to help you organize your game and minimize the “dead air” of having to look things up or try to think of what to do next. Prep is what we think could happen in the game. Players are a wily lot, and sometimes they don’t do what we think they will. At that moment, we have a choice to make. Do we try to fix the deviation, or do we let the deviation drive the game? There is no right answer. It is a decision that you make as the GM, based on your expectations and comfort levels. In the tenure of my decades of GMing, I have done both and have had both work and fail at different times. 

In the case of my recent Blades game, the players were quite satisfied with the outcome of the session, although we never ran the score, but rather Free Played into a solution. When I commented to them about the deviation after the session, they didn’t care. They thought the session was just fine. Next session, I suspect we will go back to a good old score again, but we all had fun playing. The players got the outcome they wanted, and I was entertained by how it came about. 

Deviations from prep are an integral part of the game, and the sooner you are comfortable with that, the more relaxed you will be running your games. There are techniques to minimize deviations, correct them, and embrace them. Like all things, these techniques are tools in a toolbox; you use the right one at the right time. That is the real skill, to know which one to employ when. 

How do you handle deviations from prep during your sessions? Are you a play-to-discover kind of GM, or are you more ‘stick to the script’? What are your favorite techniques for dealing with deviations? 

For the most part, I pick the games I am going to run by, as the kids today say, vibes. It has always been instinctual. I hear about a game, the right ones set off my Spidey Sense, and I am hooked. That has been my method for the last 43 years. At different points during those years, I have thought to myself, “perhaps there are no more interesting games to play”, only to find time and time again something that I was excited to bring to the table.  

Last week, I thought I had hit rock bottom. For the first time in 43 years, I struggled to find a game to bring to the table. One of my game groups reorganized, and I lost a few players, so I was looking for a game to offer up, and my list was empty; the well was dry. I spent several nights wandering my PDF collection and scrolling through DriveThruRPG looking for something that would vibe, that would create that spark. Nothing. I started to worry that perhaps this was the end, no more games to interest me. 

I then did what I often do when I get stuck on a problem, and started to break the problem down into parts I could name, so that I could try to get some kind of control over what was going on. I learned some things about that “vibe”.. Oh, and I found a game too. 

What was I vibing on? 

My attraction to certain games had to be a combination of different factors. When it comes to understanding the larger parts of what makes up a game, I think that Jason Pitre did best with their Four Structures. Read the article for details, but in a nutshell, the four structures are: 

• Setting – the world that the characters inhabit.
• System – the rules of the game.
• Situation – the things the characters do when you play. 
• Subtext – the hidden message or theme of the game. 

When I looked back at past games I have been excited about, I can identify which structures excited me the most. Some games may be just one thing, and others may be multiples, with the best fits being all four structures. When I think about Forbidden Lands, my initial attraction was through the System, because of its rules for travel. For Night’s Black Agents, it was a combination of System (Gumshoe) and Setting (Jason Bourne vs Vampires). For Blades in the Dark, it was the Situation (doing jobs), more than the setting or system. While initially, I liked Underground’s Setting, what really got me was the Subtext of when all you have been trained for is war, how else can you solve any problems? 

Those are broad categories. It is entirely possible to like things in a more granular way. My interest in Forbidden Lands was for just one subsystem, not the entire mechanics of the game. There is a point of diminishing returns in granularity; it would be hard for me to be excited to get a game to the table just because I think one character class is interesting. For me, there needs to be a preponderance of interest in one of the Structures for me to connect. 

Another thing I observed upon reflection was that the more I connected with one Structure, the less I needed to for the others. I really don’t love the setting of Blades in the Dark, it’s ok. But I really like the Situation of a gang doing jobs to raise their status in the underworld. 

Also, if one structure supports another, that is a multiplier for me. In the case of Night’s Black Agents, the Setting and Situation are superbly supported by the System. That is to say, there are rules for all the parts of the Setting and Situation (investigations, combat, chases, vampires, etc). Specifically, I want the System to reinforce the Setting, Situation, Subtext, or all of them. I find that when the System is not tightly coupled to the other structures, it makes it less appealing to me. 

Novelty and Predictability 

Thinking about the four structures and games I enjoyed in the past gave me a framework for looking at games and trying to understand why I was not finding anything I vibed with. While scrolling through lists of games, I now found myself saying things like, “I have played that system before”, “I don’t like to run fantasy”, “What do the characters do in this game?” It made looking at games more ordered, less vibes, and now more formulaic. 

During this exploration, I began to uncover two other factors in play. I love to run things I have not run before. I love the novelty of things. I rarely play the same game twice; I would rather play something totally new than run something I have played before. At the same time, I do have favorite game systems, because they are predictable. I like the feel of a PbtA system, and I have recently grown more comfortable with Forged in the Dark games. 

As I thought about these two factors in conjunction with the four structures, I realized that there was some nuance. Not every structure had to be novel, but they could not all be predictable. At least one structure had to be novel. Also, I found I get hesitant if everything is novel, meaning I like something to be predictable. For instance, a system could be totally novel if the setting (or genre – a component of setting) were predictable. 

Just what was I looking for? 

This added information about novelty and predictability provided some nuance to my searches, but more importantly, I was finally able to articulate what I was looking for, for this group for this game.

I wanted a predictable system. Where I am right now, I did not want to take on learning a new system. But I need some novelty, which eliminates replaying any past games. The game I was looking for was going to be a system I am comfortable with, but a setting and/or situation that was novel. 

This made searching much more efficient. I was now able to eliminate systems I was not comfortable with and games I had played in the systems with which I was familiar. Quickly, a short list of candidates popped up, and within a day, I settled on the game I wanted to try: 

Transit by Fiddleback Productions.

Transit is a PbtA game. Very predictable for me. I knew I would have no problem learning the System and being comfortable running it. The general Setting is SciFi, which is also familiar to me, but the characters take the form of AIs embedded into spaceships; a novel Situation! This was a solid combination for me. A System that I was comfortable running, in a general Setting that I am comfortable running and am well versed in its tropes, but a very novel kind of story to tell. I have not, in my 43 years, run a game where the characters were spaceships. 

Just like that, I was excited to get this game to the table. The drought was ended, and the age-old question of “are there no more games I am interested in?” was staved off for another day. 

Use the Force, Luke

The alchemy of why we like games is complex and contains many factors. By giving some of those factors names, we are able to create language for why we are intrigued by and turned off by games. In that naming, we give ourselves the power to move from instinct to rationalization. We no longer have to wander, hoping something will fall in our laps, but rather we can create a set of search parameters and hone in on candidates.

What structures attract you to games? What roles do novelty and predictability play for you? Do you like them in certain structures or not in others? 

One of the things I love about Blades in the Dark is that it has a mechanism for creating background events for your campaign. During Downtime (though I do this after a session), you roll to see how various factions make progress (or not) on their goals. Mechanically, this is a series of Fortune rolls that advance various project clocks for each faction. The result of this is that while the characters are off doing their own things, the factions in the city also progress with their agendas and goals. Mechanisms like this give a campaign a life of its own. So let’s talk about it. 

Background Events

Let’s start with a definition: a background event is a narrative element that occurs without the direct intervention of the PCs. It can take many forms, such as actions of individual NPCs, groups, or even natural events. Background events can take place in one-shots and campaigns, and they can take place during stories or between stories. 

Background Events have a few effects in the game: 

• They create a sense of a dynamic background to the game. Having NPCs, groups, and natural events occur gives players the feeling that the campaign world is alive and breathing around them, and not just a static background that freezes when the characters change locations. 
• They create potential stories. The players may take an interest in the background events and may want to intervene, giving you and your table a new story to play. 
• They can create tension and drama. Having a main story and several concurrent background stories will create decision points in the game. Do the characters stay on the main story, or should they take a session and help the baker who is about to lose their bakery because of the lost shipment of flour? Which decision will they make, and what consequence will come of it? 

Several games have this built into their mechanics. Dungeon World uses Signs & Portents, and the Forged in the Dark games have the Faction Downtime actions. Even if a game does not have specific mechanics for it, they can be done narratively in any game, by just making up some news and events and conveying them to the players. 

A Framework for Good Background Events

Here is a model for a mechanized version of background events, if your game does not have a mechanism for this. This draws heavily upon both Dungeon World and Forged in the Dark: 

First, come up with some groups or individuals that are up to something. 

Second, for each group or individual, give them a goal and some arbitrary steps they would take to accomplish that goal. Here we are building a clock.

Third, decide what interval you want to update these clocks. A good starting interval is between stories. 

Fourth, at the specified interval, decide if the clock advances and how much. You can just decide this for yourself, or you can assign some dice to determine this effect. Perhaps roll a d6 and advance the clock that many ticks. 

Fifth, convey the outcomes of some or all of the clocks to the characters during the session. 

Conveying The Information

Regardless of whether you arbitrarily create background events or use a mechanism for creating them, the most important part is that you convey their progress to the characters. Like character backgrounds that are written down and not discussed at the table, creating background events and keeping them to yourself does nothing to enhance your game. The events you create have to reach the characters to create the effects above. 

For your game, you need to think of how news and information are conveyed. If you are playing a modern supers game, information and news are nearly instantaneous. It will be livestreamed or posted to social media before traditional news can report it. If you are playing a SciFi game where news has to travel great distances but is limited to the speed of light, then perhaps couriers jump from system to system in their FTL ships with news. News is dependent on the arrival of couriers. This will change how the news reaches the players; there could be delays or bundles of news. 

Give thought to how news travels in your setting and what constraints or features will be created in your game. The most important consideration is timing. If you want the characters to potentially act on some background events, then the information needs to arrive at them with time to react; otherwise, they will receive the news of the event and write it off because it will take too long to intervene. 

How To Present The Information

Once you work out how the information of the background events reaches the characters, take a moment and think of how narratively you can present the information. The least interesting way to do this is a GM to player data dump, where the GM just tells the players several events going on, “From around town you hear the following… blah, blah, blah”. 

The more interesting approach is to present the information in the context of how the characters would receive it. This can be solely narrative (the GM just saying things) or it could be a post or handout (for the more creative types). In a modern game, you might put the information in the form of social media posts. In a Roaring 20s game, this could be done as a radio broadcast or a newspaper front page. If you have an NPC that could present the events, they could come in and do it in character. 

In my Blades in the Dark game, the crew has an information network of newsies who gather rumors and events while selling newspapers throughout the city. The head of the newsies, Red, comes to the crew’s HQ and presents a briefing to the players. For this, I write out the events in Red’s voice, and during the Free Play phase of the game, we do a scene where Red is reporting to the crew.

Did You Hear? 

Background events are a great way to make a campaign feel more alive and can foreshadow events or create dramatic decisions for the characters. You can create these arbitrarily or using a mechanical approach. If you do use background events, give thought to how the information reaches your players, and when you do present it, think of a creative way to deliver the news. 

Do you use background events in your games? How do you create and track them? What’s the most challenging way information has had to reach your players? What is your favorite method to present the information? 

In my current Blades in the Dark game, I started to post preludes in our Slack channel a few days before the game. These preludes are short narrative pieces, centered on one of the characters, and convey some information to the players about the upcoming session. It is not the first time I have employed this technique, but I have not done it in a while. So I thought I would talk about it today.

The Prelude

By definition, a prelude is: an action or event that serves as an introduction to something more significant. In RPG terms, it is a small scene that acts as the introduction to the session. Typically, the scene is a short narrative piece that the players read; however, there may be cases where this is an actual playable scene between the GM and one or two players. For simplicity, let’s stick to a short narrative piece. 

What Does a Prelude Do? 

There are a few things that a prelude will do in your game. The first, and most obvious, is that it introduces the coming session. The second is that it can convey information. Third, it is a form of metagame (the game outside of the game), which is a tool for creating emotional investment. Fourth, it helps to get the game started. 

Let’s talk about each of these in more detail:  

Introduction of the Coming Session

The prelude introduces the coming session. It is a free scene to frame out the coming adventure. It helps set the tone, set up the first scenes at the table, and foreshadow things to come in the game. 

Conveying Information

The prelude is a place where you can infodump useful information for the session. You can name NPCs, provide facts that might be commonly known, etc. By including information here, the players arrive at the game with that information, without you having to do it at the table.

The Metagame

Preludes are playing the game outside of the session, which is a great way to build engagement in the game between sessions. If you release your prelude days before your session, then your players are engaging with it and thinking about the game before the game starts. It can often be a struggle to get players to think about the game outside of the session; the prelude is a way to jump-start that process.

Getting the Game Started

You can use the prelude to get out of the way of slower narrative parts, and let you start the game closer to the action. You can have a prelude that describes the characters facing down their enemy as the enemy monologues (infodump), and then when you start your session, you can go in media res, and jump right into an initiative roll for combat, which will make the start of your game far more exciting. This also works great for things like missions and heists, where the prelude can infodump some of the more common facts, allowing the game to start closer to beginning the mission or heist. This is how I use it for Blades.

Creating A Prelude

Now that we have discussed what goes into a prelude, we can look at how to create one. My personal favorite for this is a small piece of flash fiction, just a few paragraphs long. I like this form for a few reasons. One, it’s not too much work to prep, and you can make them entertaining. I will always work as much information as I can into the prelude so that I don’t have to find ways to inject that information into the session. 

Once you have your prelude set, you need to get it to your players. In this day and age, you most likely have an electronic forum where you can share this — Discord, Slack, Group Chat, etc. Drop it into that. The more important consideration is when.

You want to do it a few days before your session, so that people who do not check the Discord all the time will have time to check it before the game. At the same time, you do not want to do it so early that everyone sees it, and then enough time passes to forget what was written…that will undo all the benefits of the prelude. 

I find two days before the session is nice. It is within the window where people start checking the group chat heading into the game, far enough out from the game that if someone were to post a question about the prelude, I would have time to answer it, and close enough to the session that people will remember it. 

Prelude vs. Recap

These two things are different. The prelude is the introduction to the coming session, while the recap is an infodump about what happened last time. It is possible to do both of these online, but it’s more work for you. If you want to use both a recap and a prelude, I would do your prelude online, because it builds engagement, and do your recap while people are setting up for the session and getting settled in.

Recaps are good to do in person because if there are questions or discrepancies, the group can address them in real time. 

The Man Stepped out of the Shadows…

The prelude is a simple tool that can help start your sessions. It is a bit of extra work to create, but it has a number of benefits for your session and your campaign. It is not something you need to use every game, but like any good spice, its occasional use spices up your upcoming session. 

Do you employ a prelude for your game? What form does it take? How often do you use them?