Thank you so much!

I think that you are well on your way to making your games less rigid and able to adapt to the play at the table.
Keep up the good work!

I’ve really only made this realisation not too long ago, but the first steps I’m doing to practice what I preach is to give the locations in the player’s vicinity just enough depth. Additionally, I’ve started making sure that all NPCs they come across have different motives that drive their actions, instead of simply reacting to and revolving around the PCs.

I’d love to hear what you think in response to my comment!

Thanks, Phil – I think I approached that idea from a too abstract or absolute point of view when deciding to only prepare a situation and not (in the slightest!) a possible solution.

This is a good reminder to prepare helpful information or to be cooperative when creating them with the players (when playing more a “play to find out” kind of game)!

You touch on a great point here. What if they don’t?

So, something I did not say in the article is that for the Prep Situations, Not Solutions to work, it helps if the players are proactive and inclined to come up with solutions on their own. That is not true for all groups. Many groups are used to having the solution pointed out and then playing through the solution to see what happens.

Then, of course, even proactive players can run out of ideas or, through misunderstanding, may think they don’t have an action they can take.

The rubric I use at my table, which comes out of Night’s Black Agents, is: Gather information and then act on that information. So if players don’t know what action to take, then they likely don’t have enough (or the correct information). When this happens at my table, I can remind the players of this, which nudges them into getting more information, be it skill checks, NPCs, or even just reviewing what info they have. That can then lead them to an action.

That typically gets my players moving again.

It can also be reverse-engineered, in that if they want to take a specific action but don’t feel like they can or are ready, then they can gather some info to feel more secure in taking that action.

I hope that helps.

You’re welcome. I think divorcing world building and the things that live in it is always limiting. The more intertwined, the better.

Thanks for the article.

I expand on this setup a bit more in the book I based off of it – Items and Armaments Unlocked – but you can keep things pretty much the same as raw D&D for quests, etc.

The nice thing about the Silver Standard concept here, and something I do in my games, is you can fudge things and say 1 silver is about 1 dollar (CAD, or euro, etc. tweaks may need made for different currencies), and then apply real world estimations. So, if you fudge things like that and a noble hires the group to do something for 10,000 silver, that’s going to kind of be like getting $10,000 dollars. The modular weapons system I built in conjunction with this (https://gnomestew.com/a-modular-and-upgradable-weapon-and-armor-system-for-dd-5e/) works really well with that idea.

The thing I really like about this is that you can make more realistic estimations on how things would work. Is there a healing potion in this world? What would an expensive medicine cost? Is that a moderate or expensive apothecary item? In this village is it expensive where it might be more moderate in a bigger / more magical city. You can move up and down from there and play with how expensive you want that item to feel in the context of whatever is happening.

Same thing for payouts / hordes / rewards. Find a horde that should be medium sized, guesstimate it to real world concepts and say everything there is worth about 280k silver. Party of 4, that splits up to 70k silver a piece. That would be a pretty decent salary for a year in most places IRL if it were in USD.