Let’s give this another f$&%ing try. Because I’m never going to get around to telling you how to pull off an open-world game like me at this rate. An Angry’s Open World Game — or AOWG — of your very own.

It’s not that I don’t think that last article was really f$&%ing important. It was. Some of you are killing yourself with your ridiculously high standards. Some of you even made it clear that you blame me for that s$&%. Which I’ll address at some point. But not today. Today, I’m coming at this s$&% from a different angle. A less wordy angle that just gets to the f$%&ing point.

The thing is, after that whole debacle of trying to figure out what I’m actually doing with AOWG and how to explain it and dealing with all your f$&%ing depressed, defeated, miserable emotions, I raced to get my thoughts down as quickly as I could. Which is how I ended up writing that overly long screed about how your brain is your biggest problem. But if I try to lay out everything about running AOWG that way, it’ll take me forever to tell you anything useful.

So, I sat my a$& down and figured out exactly what the hell you’d need to know to get your own version of AOWG off the ground. If that’s what you want. And ultimately, I ended up with three or four big topics that I definitely have to cover. So, I’m going to fracture this AOWG s$&% off into its own series and bang out a topic every other week. After that, I can come back and add new articles whenever some fresh disaster crops up at my table that requires me to figure out some new trick.

Consider this a fresh start. Don’t ignore anything I’ve said previously, though. It was all good. But today, I’m going to burn through three ideas that I was originally going to explore in three, separate, 5000-word behemoth articles. The three core principles I hold in my brilliant, Angry brain that enable me to run AOWG. The ones that make you think you can’t run your own AOWG. Except you can.

So, You Want to Run an Open World Game Like Angry’s

We’re starting over. The Long, Rambling Introduction™ above the header has the explanation, but if you skipped it, you probably don’t care. You just want the meat.

Remember the article I wrote about my open-world campaign? Angry’s Open World Game? AOWG? The one where I spent half the word count pissing and moaning about having to write an instruction manual for my players and the other half writing the said manual? The one that got you all wanting to know how to run your own version of AOWG? The one that maybe convinced you that you couldn’t possibly run a game like AOWG yourself?

Well, this article and the three that follow every other week thereafter are going to tell you what you need to know to start running it for yourself. Or maybe just give you some damned good advice to help you run a better version of whatever game you’re actually running.

I can’t promise these four articles will tell you everything you need to know to run a game like AOWG forever. It’s just a start. I’ll probably discover all sorts of other things you need to know as I keep running AOWG myself. But at least, this will give you a start. Enough to prove to yourself that you can actually do this. Even if you think you can’t.

And to prove I actually have a plan this time that’s worth starting over for, here’s the syllabus.

Lesson 1: The Three Pillars that Hold Up Angry’s Open-World Brain
Lesson 2: Maps, Lists, Tables, and Other Tools to Use at the Table
Lesson 3: How to Present a World of Opportunity to Oblivious Players
Lesson 4: Prepping After the Fact

Now, as I said, those four lessons won’t be everything I have to say about AOWG. I’m still running the thing and I’m constantly figuring out new tricks. I’ll share them periodically. But I’ve also got an article coming out sometime this month called Let’s Make a Simple Dungeon. It’ll mostly help newbie GMs make their first-ever adventure with the goal of just getting something “good enough,” but it’ll also provide a great tool for open-worlders to fill a single session with fun dungeon adventure.

How does all that sound? Good? Great. Let’s get this f$%&ing party started.

The Angry Brain

Last week, I ripped into all y’all for not only running games wrong but also for thinking wrong. Basically, you’ve been f$%&ing up your own creative brain by holding yourself to ridiculous standards instead of just having fun. And that’s just one of the three things wrong with your brain that keep you from being able to do what I’m doing with AOWG. Or just being able to run a game and have some fun. So, buckle up for two more long-a$& rants about how awful you are and how bad you should feel before I start telling you useful s$&% like how to trick the players into discovering adventure hooks or how to draw a map that the players want to explore or how to never run out of fun s$&% to do.

Doesn’t that sound like a f$&%ing hoot?

Look, I don’t want to do that s$&% either. So, I’ll make you a deal. If you promise to actually listen to what I’m saying and to actually reflect on it and to maybe, actually, even try some things out and give them a real f$&%ing chance, even if they sound counterintuitive or weird or wrong, then I’ll take everything I was going to say in those three articles and condense it down to one. Okay? I mean, I really don’t understand why I always have to beg you to listen to me. To trust me. I mean, you’re here because you think there’s something wrong with the game you’re running. Or, at least, because you think there’s something you can do better. Hell, some of you are even paying me to keep this s$&% coming. So why the hell is everything a f$&%ing fight with you people?

But we’ll give this a try. I’m going to tell you the three principles that actually underlie not just how I’m running AOWG, but how I’ve run all my best, happiest games. They don’t invalidate anything else I’ve ever told you. All my rules hacks and ideas about narrative structure and game design? That s$&% still holds. But these principles will let you use all that other stuff without driving yourself bonkers in the process. Or to not use it and still be happy.

And before you read any further, there’s something I want you to know: everything you’re about to read is something you are absolutely, totally capable of doing. Nothing here is impossible. Nothing here requires any skill or mastery. Nothing here is unique to any particular kind of GM or any particular kind of brain. Some of the s$&% below requires some practice to do well, but there’s nothing you can’t just start doing today. The only obstructions are the ones you invent in your own brain. And those are your problem.

If I didn’t seriously believe that you — and every other average, normal GM out there in the world — if I didn’t believe you could do this s$&%, I wouldn’t bother writing it. It’d be a waste of my f$&%ing time.

And even if you’re not running an open-world game like mine, you still want to take this s$&% seriously. Because there is no kind of game and no kind of GM that can’t benefit from what I’m trying to crowbar into your cranium today.

The First Principle: Whatever Happens is Okay¹

Sometimes, when I start running a session, I have these huge, epic plans for how it’ll go down. I have setpiece encounters ready and a perfect climax planned to cap off the session. I have brilliant social encounters statted-up for my socially inept players to fail. All that crap. Other times, I’ve got nothing but a napkin that I scrawled some indecipherable bulls$&% on while I was half-drunk and half-asleep two weeks ago. Seriously. I once ran an entire session with a single sticky note that read “gbolin c.s. 3 but w/o bb; stolen ruby is dmn bx 2; DC 20+” And it had a drawing of what looked like a bovine digestive tract on it that I think was supposed to be a map of some caves or something.

Whatever I have in front of me, though, the one thing I don’t have is any idea what the f$&% is actually going to happen once the game gets going. And I’m okay with that. The players might utterly demolish my spider demon before she can even take an action. They might dawdle so long that the cool-a$& shadow-statue monster climax for the session ends up coming halfway through the next session. The wizard might decide to recklessly end the scene with a charm spell that totally fails, convincing the captain the party isn’t negotiating in good faith and leading to a throwdown with an entire mercenary company. The little girl might get eaten by a lanmola. Or a moldorm. I can never remember which is which. On the eve of the dracolich’s rebirth, the Orb of Wyrmkynd might fall into the volcano with the idiot rogue who tanked his Acrobatics check. Or I might throw the session into chaos when I suddenly decide there’s stolen silver hidden in the antique armoire and the party starts fighting over what to do with it.

Those aren’t hypotheticals. Absolutely every one of those things has happened at one of my games. And that’s just, like, the last three years. Every one of them has caught me totally off guard. And every single one of them resulted in an interesting, fun game. At least, not a single one of them wrecked an otherwise interesting, fun game.

There’s lots of GMs who like to roll dice for everything because — and I quote — “they like to be surprised as much as their players.” And I cannot figure out what the hell they’re doing at their tables. Because my game is a constant f$&%ing surprise. Even when I know exactly what I’m going to do next, the chuckleheads playing my game manage to f$&% it up.

Dungeon World — and probably the original Apocalypse World too, but I can’t give a s$&% — Dungeon World puts it best. You play the game to find out what happens. If you want to already know what happens, write a novel. Or design a video game. Or TikTok a YouTube on Instagram. Role-playing games are what happens when idiot players meet a crazy situation. And about all the crazy situations that butterfly effect their way out of what happens.

I talk a lot about structure and planning and all the s$&% that makes good narratives and good games. And I stand by it all. But RPGs aren’t just good narratives and they aren’t just good games. You want a good narrative? Read a book. Want a good game? Play a board game. An RPG is different. It’s more. A totally unique experience. When you sit down to play or run an RPG session, you’re about to experience something absolutely no one else can ever or will ever experience. The session will be totally unique to you. Your players. Your GM. Your choices. That’s part of the magic of it all.

But you’ve got to surrender to that magic. It’s like the Force. Let go. Let it flow through you.

An RPG session is an adventure. It’s not a game about an adventure. It’s literally an adventure. You sit down at the table, you start playing, and — despite any plans you might have had — you have no idea where it’s going to take you. But it’ll almost always take you somewhere interesting and fun. And if you don’t end up somewhere interesting and fun, you’ll move on soon enough. Or you can start a new adventure. Like, maybe the uninteresting, unfun place is that all the characters died. Just start a new adventure with new characters. Or let the new characters continue the old adventure. Or let the old characters continue their old adventure. In the Nine Hells.

So why worry then about all that game design and narrative crap? Because you — the GM — you do actually have some control. You start each session. Which means you can point things in a particular direction. And as the game plays out, you’ve got to make choices. There’s an infinity of possible directions the game can go at any given moment. Some of them will lead to better play experiences than others. The more you know about game design and narrative structure, the more easily you’ll be able to tell the good directions from the bad. And thus, you can keep steering your ship vaguely in the direction of Port Satisfying Gameplay and Narrative Experience.

Interesting and fun will show up. They almost always do. And they’re great. They keep everyone happy from moment to moment. But they aren’t everything. It’s the satisfying narrative and gameplay experience — the long-term RPG experience — that keeps people coming back. Those are what keep up the excitement throughout the dark, dreary work week that separates each game session from the next. They’re the things that induce the players to chatter about the game before the next session starts. To concoct cunning plans and crazy capers. And the things that energize you so you’ll put in all the work you have to put in to make that next session happen.

So, you do your best to start the ship of your game on a good course. And whenever you can get a hand on the wheel, you try to steer it back onto a good course. But you have to accept that the winds and the currents and the monkeys crewing your ship make it impossible to keep a steady course or end up in a proper destination. Not just accept it. You have to f$&%ing delight in it. It has to be the best thing about the game.

Angry’s Open World Game – like all open-world games — AOWG lurches around a lot. I spend a lot of time staggering across the deck just trying to get close enough to the wheel to make course corrections. And when I do get close to the wheel, the best I can manage is to yank it hard in what I hope is the right direction before a wave crashes over the deck and throws me into the mizzenmast. And meanwhile, the monkeys are up in the riggings, ignoring the lightning, and flinging poo at each other.

This is half the reason I told you to stop stifling your creativity with standards. Being okay with whatever happens means being okay with whatever you come up with. Either on the fly or during your weekly hours of prep. Because it’s the journey that’s the fun part. Not the course. Not the destination. Fun and interesting show up as long as you let them. Satisfaction relies more heavily on how you steer your game, but it’s more about yanking the wheel whenever you can and less about trying to hold to a precise course.

I’ll probably come back to that idea in more detail someday.

¹ Obviously, I don’t mean this literally. You don’t have to be okay with literally anything that ever happens. You have to run a game you like running. There’s plenty of s$&% I am not okay with. I wouldn’t be okay with my players quitting their adventures to run a noodle shop. I wouldn’t be okay if my players decided to slaughter their way through the innocents of my world. I wouldn’t be okay if their wacky antics made it impossible for me to take my world and my game seriously. That s$&%, I’d put a stop to. To mutilate one of Peterson’s brilliant 12 Rules for Life, “don’t let your players do anything that makes you dislike them. Or their characters. Or your game.” Consider that a corollary to Whatever Happens is Okay.

The Second Principle: Mechanics Don’t Make the Game
(And Sometimes They Make the Game Worse)

In that first article about Angry’s Open World Game, I mentioned the fourth player. He joined my group just as we were starting up AOWG. And he was really excited, he told me, to see some of my awesomely designed mechanics in play. His words, not mine. More or less.

Not that he was wrong. My mechanics are awesomely designed.

Anyway, he specifically said he was looking forward to playing alongside some of my Angry Companion NPCs and trying his hand at some Angry Social InterACTION! Encounters. And man was that a long, awkward silence. Because I don’t use any of that crap in my own games.

Anyway, first session. The PCs made their first friend. She was this naïve little traveling minstrel who had run away from her former life and was basically doing the fantasy adventure equivalent of busking across Europe. When the party agreed to help a merchant who’d gotten robbed on the road and clear a ruin of some giant spiders, she practically tripped over her motley to latch on to them.

Now the minstrel, Merilla, she’s a non-combatant. She ain’t a bard, just an amateur musician who wants to see the world. So, she hung back while the party dealt with the first hostile encounter of the campaign. And the party’s resident antisocial rogue didn’t take kindly to that. When Merilla told the party how great they’d handled the fight, he laid into her for being useless. She snapped back and made a frankly cruel remark about an unhealed, physical deformity the rogue suffered from. Silence hung. Everyone was a little shocked. She realized she’d gone too far. It was awkward.

And then they found the guard. See, when the merchant had gotten attacked by giant spiders, his bodyguard covered his escape. And the merchant ran his a$& off. But, it turns out the guard and the merchant were long-time traveling companions. Friends. When they found the guard’s mutilated body, the merchant felt just f$&%ing awful. Survivor’s guilt. You know.

It was all a bit too much for the naïve little minstrel who’d just wanted a fun adventure. She volunteered to escort the depressed merchant back home while the party did the real work of hunting down the rest of the spiders.

If you know my companion rules, you can probably see the way this all played out mechanically. She’s an inexperienced non-combatant who just met the party, so her Loyalty was pretty low to begin with. When the rogue laid into her, it tanked her Loyalty and triggered the low loyalty variant of her Knows What to Say to Hurt You quirk where, under stress, she Tells You How She Really Feels. And then, when the party found the corpse, she failed her Morale Save and quit the party.

Except that’s not what happened at all. Because I didn’t even have a stat block for Merilla. She’s just a stock character. Naïve Exposition Minstrel is an NPC I introduce at the start of some campaigns. She’s got enough book knowledge to help the players find their footing in the world, but she has no useful skills. She had no backstory beyond “busking across Europe.”

And because most parties get along pretty well with Naïve Exposition Minstrel — I purposely play him, her, or it as likable and a little ingratiating — if I had statted her up, I never would have statted her up like that. Because no one has ever laid into her like that.

A few sessions later, back in town, the party sought Merilla out and asked her for a favor. But she’d fallen in with a jerk-a$& mentor with a little too much ego. He’s not exactly abusive, but he doesn’t believe in the whole mutual respect, mentor-protégé thing. The party wizard — who, until this point had not actually given a s$&% about the minstrel or really about anyone — ended up in an honest-to-goodness social combat with the mentor over his treatment of Merilla. And she did not win the combat. She took a lot of social damage. Merilla agreed to help the party, but the party lost her esteem and the mentor’s got a tighter grip on her now. And while you could probably imagine, if you were watching, that I’d been using some brilliant social encounter system, well, I wasn’t. Because, at that point, I didn’t expect the party — especially the wizard who’d expressed outright disdain for her presence — to give a crap about Merilla’s situation. So it’s not like I was ready for the fight.

That’s not to say dice weren’t rolled though. Dice were rolled. At least, I rolled dice. Behind the screen. I rolled checks for Merilla, checks for Hathuin Halfelven, and checks for Vestra the wizard. And I used the results to determine who’d respond to what how and how who would take what was said. You know, the proper way to run a social interaction scene. I just didn’t stop the scene to call for die rolls every third sentence. Because that s$&% sucks all the flow out of a conversation. And it’d have killed the emotional weight of the scene we were playing out. And there weren’t any more mechanics than that. All I did was resolve actions, one after the other, until I’d resolved enough to know who won.

GMs waste a lot of time and brainpower on mechanics. They’re always trying to figure out how to run things. How to express things mechanically. How to design this encounter. What system to use for that. How to represent naval combat. Warfare. Stealth scenes. Social interactions. All that s$&%. But everything at the table’s always going to play out the same. A situation happens, the players make choices, those choices get resolved. Which means, if you can resolve one action at a time, you can handle literally anything that happens at your game table. You don’t need more than that.

Moreover, none of that mechanical s$&% actually makes the game any better. Some of it makes it easier to run. Some of that s$&% lets you put your GMing brain on autopilot and let the mechanics handle the heavy thinking. Some of it lets the players just push buttons instead of thinking through the situation in the game world. But all of that s$&% comes at a cost. A heavy cost.

If I had designed Merilla as a companion, I’d never have expected the situations that came up. So whatever stats I did give her, they wouldn’t have led to that outcome. But so what, right? They would have led to something interesting. That’s the First Principle. Maybe. Except that I also wouldn’t have been thinking so hard about running Merilla. She’d have her Quirk and her Loyalty and her Morale and that’d be enough. So, when some unexpected situation did arise — one with some potentially awesome direction in which to spin Merilla off — I’d probably have ignored it because it didn’t fit the stat block. When you make something a game element and assign it specific triggers and specific effects and specific mechanics, you’re automating it. So you don’t have to think so hard about it. But the downside is, you won’t think so hard about it.

But isn’t that okay? Like, a GM’s brain can only keep so many plates spinning. Bringing along a plate-spinning robot to help lets you handle more stuff than you could, doesn’t it?

Well, no. It really doesn’t.

See, no matter how much you think you’re doing at the table, the game still comes down to a series of moments. A series of actions and resolutions. At any given moment, you’ve got just one thing to handle. How does this one action play out? That’s it. That’s all you ever have to worry about. And if you’ve got no choice but to make a ruling, you’ll make a ruling. And you’ll usually make a good ruling. You just have to trust yourself. And the more moments you handle, the better you get at handling each one.

Worse, though, if you rely on automation to handle s$&% you can’t handle without a robot, you’ll never learn how to handle it. You’ll never get good at it. Which means, if the plate-spinning robot ever drops a plate, you can’t catch it. And whichever plate the robot’s spinning for you, you’ll never be able to spin that plate on your own if you ever want to. If you only ever run companions using my companion system, you’ll never be able to run a better companion than my system lets you build. If you never try to run a battle without someone’s mass combat rules, you won’t be able to run a different kind of battle from the one those rules allow.

Letting mechanics do your thinking doesn’t let you run a better game. It just lets you fake it better. So why do I write all those mechanical hacks if I don’t use them and I think they keep you from running your best game? That’s a tricky question. And one I can’t answer here.

By the way, all this s$&% goes for the rules in the book too. Including all the rules for mechanical balance. If you trust the game to tell you what a balanced encounter is and you use formulas to build your encounters, you’ll never find out what else you can do. And if your players trust that every encounter is fair and balanced to the point where they really can’t lose, they’ll never push themselves to find out what they can do. They’ll handle everything with skill checks and attack rolls because skill checks and attack rolls will never fail them.²

I don’t waste a lot of time these days prepping game mechanics or designing mechanical encounters. Instead, I trust myself to handle the game from one moment to the next. Sometimes, I end up in over my head. Sometimes, I end up with a crappy call. Sometimes, it’s a little stressful. But all that s$&% only lasts a moment. There’s always another moment coming.

Put another way, if there’s a rule in the book for it and I remember the rule, I’ll use it. Otherwise, I trust myself to just figure it out as I go.³

² Obviously, you can’t completely dismiss the concept of game balance. I’m not an idiot. I won’t lock a bunch of 1st-level PCs in a room with three beholders. That’s just slaughtering PCs. And it’s not even the fun kind of slaughtering PCs. But I also don’t take a lot of time to figure out what’s a fair challenge for who and I’m not shy about throwing something I know is reasonably unfair at my players. A horde of twenty zombies is too many zombies for a party of 2nd-levels PCs to beat in a fair fight, but it’s up to my players to figure out how to make it an unfair fight. Unfair in their favor, obviously. And if they can’t, they’ll have to run. Or die. Where’s the line? Wherever I say it is. I don’t know where the line is. Or where it should be. What I do know is that players can actually pull off some pretty amazing s$&% when they’re desperate.

³ Obviously, I don’t run my games under the strict assumption that the only rules that matter are the ones I remember. If I see a situation coming — like a dungeon that has a bunch of flooded underwater parts — I’m smart enough to review the rules that exist before the game. And to take a few notes to bring to the table. But if the situation doesn’t have firm rules already written down in the book, it probably doesn’t need them. And I’m sure as hell not equipped to invent any until I’ve run the situation at the table without the rules first so I know what the rules should look like.

And yes, I’m fully aware that “the only things that need rules are the things you can do without rules” does sound like a crazy-a$& thing to say. But there’s a difference between crazy and wrong.

The Third Principle: The Minimum Amount of Prep Time Needed for a Good Session is Zero Minutes

Pop quiz, hotshot: how long can you keep your game going without anything prepared in advance? And, when I say, “keep a game going,” I mean “run an actual game that’s actually good.” No stalling. No confining or constraining the action until you can prepare what you really need. And also, when I say “nothing prepared,” I mean “nothing at all.” Not even in reserve. No pile of generic encounters you prepared for the day that you had nothing else prepared. No backup pile of unused game content your players skipped in sessions past. Nothing means nothing.

Imagine you were kidnapped and you woke up strapped to a chair at someone else’s game table. And they told you that the party was just about to start a dungeon crawl or murder investigation or political intrigue game or wilderness exploration expedition. And then the players showed up. And you had to start running and you couldn’t stop until the timer hit zero. If it helps, you can imagine it’s that clown guy from Saw and there’s some ridiculous contrivance that’ll drive d4s into the soles of your feet if the game ever stalls or sucks.

The correct answer to this question — there is a correct answer — is one session. However long a session is for you, that’s how long you should be able to run a game with nothing prepared. And no, you are not allowed to cut the session short either. You don’t even get a bathroom break. Every GM should be able to fill an entire session with a good game with nothing prepared. Why? Because if something unexpected happens in the first minute of the session and your game suddenly goes careening off in some crazy direction, then one session is how much time you’ve got before you can scurry away to the safety of your GMing lab and scribble down a plan. Before that, you’re trapped like a rat in an overplayed horror franchise that’s become more about the spectacle than the psychology that made the first movie great.

Now, you might not think you can do it. You might not think you can run an actual, real game of D&D without any preparation at all. Without any notes you’ve written, maps you’ve drawn, stats you’ve built, or anything else. But you can. You’ve just never had to. Which is a shame. Because it’s really good practice. As a GM, if you want to be a good GM, you should just not prep for a game every once in a while. Just to challenge yourself. Even if it’s something you don’t like doing. Even if it’s really hard. Even if it makes you really nervous. Even if it doesn’t result in you running your BEST GAME EVAR!!!

Why? Because however hard you try and however prepared you are, eventually, you’re going to have to wing it. Maybe not for an entire session, maybe just for two hours or one hour or fifteen minutes or one stupid encounter, but it’s going to happen. And if you know — KNOW — that you can last an entire session if you have to without a single note, it’ll never, ever phase you. And you can. YOU. CAN.

The thing is, most of what you do as a GM is just responding to the s$&% the players do as players. So, once you get a session started — or an adventure or a scene or a whatever — that s$&% becomes pretty self-sustaining. And then, the only question you’ve ever got to answer is, “okay, so what happens next?” A game session is just an endless string of what-happens-nexts.

This is where it’s vitally important for you to be okay with whatever happens. I know you think it’s really hard to come up with good ideas. And sometimes — when a scene ends, for instance, or the players move to the next room in the dungeon — sometimes what happens next doesn’t follow from what just happened. So sometimes, what happens next hinges on pulling an idea from nothing. And if you’re in the habit of holding your ideas to high standards, then you’re going to struggle. But, if you firmly believe that you can get something perfectly fine out of any idea, then whatever you blurt out will, ipso-f$&%ing-facto, be perfectly fine.

But I’ll let you in on a secret. You actually never have nothing. You are never, ever sitting at the table with nothing. You have an entire book filled with monsters. You have another one filled with traps and magical items and random treasure tables. That one even has maps in the back. All those overpriced, overwrought books you paid a hundred and fifty bucks for the privilege of never actually reading? They’re chock full of all the bits and pieces of a game that you can’t just invent on the fly. Like stats.

Problem is, most GMs are absolute, sneering snobs. Most GMs turn their noses up at the perfectly normal stats in the Monster Manual and think handing out random treasure is “beneath them.” Well, it’s a piss-poor GM who blames their tools. A good GM takes whatever they have at hand and makes something happen. Anything. So that fun and interesting show up.

Will you get art out of the generic s$&% in the rulebooks? Actually, yes. You will. Didn’t expect me to say that did you? The monster stats in the book are like paint. Sure, you can mix your own custom paint and get exactly the perfect color you want, but it ain’t the paint that makes the painting. And if you spend all your time mixing custom paint and thinking that’s what makes you an artist, well, you’ll eventually be great at mixing paint and you’ll forget how to paint a portrait.

If you want to run an open-world game, you’ve got to be able to improvise. You’ve got to be able to wing it. And you’ve got to be able to wing it for as long as you have to wing it. But the thing is, you already can. Anyone can pull four hours of D&D out of their a$& with the resources in the core rulebooks. Any f$&%ing one of you. Come on. When’s the last time I actually believed in you? I believe you can do this. But, and this is a big-a$& but, you have to believe you can do it. Otherwise, you’ll freeze up when you have to do it. Which will prove to you that you can’t do it.

So, try it. I’m serious. Risk breaking your entire game and disappointing all your players and do it. Show up at your next session with nothing. It’s just one session. And once you get to the end, you’re safe. After that, you can figure out where to go with whatever you did. You pulled a random, ruined temple with a crumbled tower of your a$&, huh? And the players only had time to scope out the courtyard the antechamber? Well, now you’ve got time to fill out the rest of the map and decide who built the temple and where the demon spiders go. The players are trying to figure out why Jotho was murdered and they got far enough to suspect the Red-Headed League called in the hit? Now you’ve got time to figure out what the f$&% the Red-Headed League is and why they wanted Jotho dead. Whoever the hell he is. Was.

Fortunately, now that the session’s over, you’ve got all the time in the world. Well, you’ve got a week. That should be plenty.

And if it’s not? Well, now you know you can get an entire session out of nothing. Just do it again next week.

⁴ Obviously, I’m not claiming that you shouldn’t bother prepping games or designing custom content. Nor am I suggesting the games you pull out of your a$& will be better than the games you figure out in advance. And frankly, at this point, I really hope I don’t have to tell you what I’m not saying. But you’re gonna hear whatever you want anyway. So I don’t know why I bother.