Welcome back to the Joy of Homebrew, starring everyone’s favorite Internet gamer degenerate: The Angry GM.

But seriously, we’re doing this new instructional series on how to write your own adventure, right? One that’s better than the one I did before because it’s actually, you know, practical and instructional. It’s not just a bunch of concepts. And once we’ve made our way into it a bit, we’ll also have a series of articles demonstrating what we’re talking about. In the last article in this series, I spent a lot of time explaining that, when you set out to write an adventure, you shouldn’t imitate the things you see professional game designers and big companies doing. After all, if Chris Perkins jumped off a bridge or Jason Bulmhan swallowed a laundry detergent pod while Rob Schwalb dumped a bucket of ice water over his head, would you do that stuff too?

The point is, there’s certain elements that every adventure needs. Elements like Backstory, Motivation, Goals, Hooks, Structure, Scenes, and so on. And the first step in designing an adventure is defining some of those elements. And I’d love to go through a list of those elements right now and describe them and talk about how to think about those choices. But I can’t. Because you – who have never written an adventure before and who shouldn’t try to emulate existing adventures – you don’t even know how to plan out stuff for your game. You don’t know what to write down and what to keep in your head. And you don’t know the difference between the different types of planning. And, thanks to other stupid GMs who write blogs, you might have some really dumb ideas in your brain about improvisation, planning, railroading, sandboxes, and crap like that.

So, before we talk about planning an adventure, we need to talk about how to plan anything for your game. That’s what this article is all about. How to Work Hard, how to Work Smart, and how to Plan Hard and Soft. And when to Not Plan at all.

Working Hard AND Working Smart

The thing about writing your own adventures is that it’s hard work. It’s not easy. And a certain amount of that work is boring, tedious work. That’s unavoidable. There are GMs out there who think they know how to avoid hard, boring, tedious work and their blogs suck. Because all of their advice is basically about how you should never prepare anything and how you should run your game in a permanent state of panicked improvisation because, hey, at least you didn’t have to write a stat block down. Me? I prefer homebrew adventures that aren’t crap and I prefer not to have to make up absolutely everything on the spot. And hopefully, you do too. If you prefer to suck at this, there’s a thousand other blogs you could read instead.

So, you have to accept the fact that writing your adventure involves some work, and that some of the work is boring and tedious. But just because you accept something doesn’t mean you have to embrace it either. See, there are other GMs out there who spend hours and hours carefully crafting their adventures so that, by the time they get to the table, they are too exhausted to run their adventures and they eventually burn themselves out. And they have to throw out half their work anyway because the retarded lemmings that are the players end up staggering in all the wrong directions and don’t see half the content. That’s no good either.

The point is, to work smart – to minimize the amount of the work you have to do – but to also work hard – to accept that a good adventure takes some amount of hard work and the more work you put in, the better the adventure will go. Now, here’s the problem: everyone’s smartness and hardness quotients are a little different. And everyone has different needs at the table. I don’t plan detailed maps for my combat encounters anymore. I can improvise dynamic battlefields on the fly. My dungeon maps – the ones I actually use – are little more than just bubbles and sticks like a flowchart. And I keep a lot of my backstory in my head. But I also make lots of custom monsters for my adventures. So, I spend a lot of time making stat blocks. And because I tend to maintain a pile of recurring NPCs and I never know what they’re going to do next, I stat up a lot of NPCs even though I don’t need those stats. That’s just how I roll.

I can’t tell you when to work smart and when to work hard. That’s on you. You need to decide that on your own. Or rather, you need to learn it. And that takes time. Over time, the amount of work you put into game prep tends to decrease. Partly because you get bored of that shit and partly because you learn what you need to do and what you don’t need to do. You learn what you need to spell out and write down and what you can just keep in your head.

To make this series as useful as possible, I’m going to assume that everyone needs to spell out and write down everything. But if there’s something in here that you can keep in your head, by all means, do it. Don’t waste time writing it down. And if there’s something you feel you can invent on the fly at the table, do that too.

That said, I’m going to assume everyone wants to do as little work as possible. So, I’m going to restrict myself to the minimums whenever I can. Yes, most adventures NEED a backstory. But how much backstory? That varies from adventure to adventure. And you never want to figure out more backstory than you actually need. That said, some GMs like to give themselves more to go on. They like to work harder. It makes them feel more secure. More prepared to run the thing. So, don’t limit yourselves to JUST the stuff I tell you if you want to do more. Okay, got it?

Now, before I jump into the real point of this article: the ingredients every adventure must have before it’s runnable, I also want to discuss the different types of planning.

Planning Hard, Planning Soft, and Not Planning at All

The “Working Hard vs. Working Smart” thing is MOSTLY about what to write down and what to keep in your head. It’s about what you can manage at the table without any notes. It’s not actually the same as what you can invent at the table. But they are closely related. They are hard to separate. So, let’s define things a little more clearly.

Working Hard is writing shit down, okay? It’s spelling things out in detail. Writing out text descriptions, making stat blocks, drawing maps, developing mechanics, all that crap that involves physically recording the different aspects of the adventure. And, by the way, what I mean by developing mechanics is, for example, when you come up with a way to resolve a chase scene that’s part of your adventure. You know, what actions the characters can take, how those actions get resolved, how to keep score, all of that crap I once called “the structural elements of an encounter.”

Working Smart is recognizing that you can head to the table without needing to write something down because you can remember everything you need to remember. It’s stuff you can keep in your head. It’s still planned out. You still know what the map has to look like or how the chase scene has to run. You know the backstory of the adventure or you know the NPC’s personality traits. You just keep them in your head. Got it? Working Hard is writing stuff down. Working Smart is remembering stuff. Both involve planning ahead.

But there’s different ways to plan out the elements of an adventure. First, there’s Hard Planning. That’s where you figure out absolutely everything you can before you sit down to run the adventure. If you plan out a scene with some goblins and the different ways it can go and draw a map and stat up the goblins and figure out how it fits into the adventure, that’s Hard Planning.

Second, there’s No Planning. That’s where you basically have a missing element – a hole in your adventure – and you plan to fill it in at the table, when and if you need to. If you have a blank room in your dungeon and figure you can just come up with something neat to stick in there if and when the party wanders that way, that’s No Planning.

Now, by default, adventures already include a bunch of Hard Planning and a bunch of No Planning. Let’s use a simple dungeon adventure to explain that. Let’s say that in the heart of a haunted forest, there’s an ancient castle. It’s cursed. That’s why the forest is haunted. And the heroes are tasked with going to the castle and lifting the curse. So, you plan a couple of encounters in the forest, map out the castle, fill it with monsters and treasure, determine what the curse is and how it can be lifted, and plant the clues the players need to figure all of that out somewhere in the castle. That’s all the Hard Planning. The No Planning is, basically, everything else in the world. The players might decide to wander the forest for a while, picking flowers and killing forest ghosts. They might decide to return to town halfway through the adventure to do “research” about the curse, whatever that means.

As a GM, you have to be able to handle both Hard Planning and No Planning. That’s just the way it is. Otherwise, the game isn’t open-ended, and the players have no agency and the game ceases to be an RPG. Which sucks. But you can also voluntarily choose, at any time, to leave a bunch of No Planning. In fact, there’s a good reason for it. A blank room in the middle of a dungeon gives you an important tool where you can fill in what you need to adjust the difficulty or the pacing or whatever. If the PCs are stressed and overwhelmed by the adventure, you can make that blank room a safe room where they can rest and recover their resources. If they feel alone and isolated, you can add a friendly NPC in that room. If things have been going easily for the players or they haven’t had a lot of action, you can drop a fight in the room.

That said, No Planning can be very hard for some GMs to deal with. It requires a lot of improvisational chops. Call it an advanced skill. I won’t say you shouldn’t use it if you’re not good at it, though. Because, eventually, you need to get good at it. Sorry. GMing is one of those things that you have to GIT GUD at. There’s no easy mode. But if it’s hard for you to deal with No Planning, you should minimize it at first. After all, the players will give you plenty of practice at it eventually.

Now, there is something between Hard Planning and No Planning. It’s called Soft Planning. At least, that’s what I call it. Soft Planning is basically leaving something incomplete. It’s about starting the work of planning something and filling in the details at the table. Now, there’s one great example of Soft Planning that’s actually pretty common in RPGs: random encounters. A random encounter table is just a list of monsters that the party might stumble on. Or that might stumble on the party. It’s basically just a set of stat blocks with nothing else around it. There might not be an encounter map unless the encounter is happening in a dungeon that already has a detailed map. But the other trappings of an encounter are missing. Things like the dramatic question and the decision points. Remember those things? I went on about those in detail once too.

But there’s lots of examples of Soft Planning that might find their way into your adventure prep. You might know that a chase scene is going to happen, for example, but you also know you’re good enough at running complex encounters that you don’t need to come up with the mechanics ahead of time. You might have an NPC ready to go in case you need one, but not actually put them in any specific place. They are something you can just pull out. You might have a list of clues about the mysterious curse the players have to break, but you’ll just dole them throughout the game as events warrant.

Soft Planning can also be a great tool you can shove up your GMing arsenal. For example, consider that “list of clues” thing. There’s a curse. There’s a bunch of clues that, together, explain why the curse happened and how to break it. And the clues become more specific and more detailed, right? The first clues the party gets are vague and general. The later clues are more specific and provide more details. That’s a good way to structure a mystery. But if the clues are scattered around an open environment that the players can freely explore, like a town or a dungeon, there’s no way for the GM to determine the order in which the players will discover the clues. Or even that they will find all the clues they need. So, you can Soft Plan by coming up with the list of clues and then doling them out in the proper order as the players explore. They always find clue 1 first and clue 2 second and so on, even if they might go to the Old Mill before they go to the Festhall.

Soft Planning also includes all of those little improvisational elements GMs keep around that help them appear to be ready for anything. Like the list of a thousand NPC names or inn names or the random table of dungeon dressings.

So, Hard Planning means knowing everything you need to know in advance to pull something off at the game table. Soft Planning means figuring out some stuff in advance but leaving other stuff open. No Planning means deliberately leaving a blank space in the adventure that you may have to fill in during gameplay. And, of course, by default, anything you didn’t plan that exists or may exist in the entire world around your adventure is an example of No Planning. But deliberate No Planning is purposely choosing to leave blanks in your adventure that you know you will likely HAVE TO fill in.

Got it? Good.

To Plan or to No Plan

Just as with Working Hard and Working Smart, to some extent, the choice between Hard Planning, Soft Planning, and No Planning is a personal one. You have to play to your strengths. And you have to actually figure out what the Hell those actually are. What ARE your strengths? But unlike Working Hard and Working Smart, there’s more to consider than just what you’re good at. And this is why GMing bloggers who tell you to lean heavily one way or the other are wrong. And stupid. And should feel bad. Each of the three types of planning has its own strengths and weaknesses. And they work better in different situations and for different adventure types. And as I talk more about how to design your own homebrew adventure, I’m going to talk a lot about the different types of planning to call out when they are most useful. But I want to lay that groundwork now.

Just know that if I use a term here and now that doesn’t make a lot of sense because I haven’t talked about some aspect of adventure building, I will EVENTUALLY explain it. You have to trust me on that. Until then, just accept what I say and keep it in the back of your head.

Hard Planning: The Good, The Bad, and the Wasted

First, let’s talk about the good and the bad of Hard Planning. Hard Planning pretty much always leads to the strongest game experience. Seriously. There’s just no way around that. The more prepared you are in advance, the better you will run any given scene, encounter, adventure, or campaign. And yes, that includes ones where the players go off the rails. Suppose, for example, you have this very well-detailed plan for a battle with a bunch of goblins. You understand their motives. Their strategies. You have a very nice, detailed map. All Hard Planned. And then the players decide to do something really crazy, like talk to the freaking things. Or try to sneak past them. Or try to blow them all up with the powder kegs from the other room that you didn’t expect them to find until much later in the adventure. Whatever.

Well, because you know the goblins motives, you can handle the conversation. You know how they’ll react to the players reasoning with them. You don’t have to make that crap up on the fly. And because you know where the goblins are and how the room is laid out, you can resolve the scene of the party sneaking past them. And you know how many hit points they have and where they all are, so you can figure out how badly the powder kegs are going to wreck them and if any of them might survive.

There are some idiots out there who will tell you that Hard Planning leads the GM to be rigid and inflexible and denying the players their agency. That’s not inherently true of Hard Planning. That’s a mistake some GMs make that is separate from Hard Planning. That comes from being unwilling to change the plan when the players do something unexpected. That’s a GM doing their job wrong. And it sucks.

Hard Planning makes it very easy to run the game, even when the game doesn’t go according to plan. And it also ensures a high level of consistency. Everything that is Hard Planned fits together with everything else that has been Hard Planned. Assuming the GM isn’t a moron who writes inconsistent gibberish. And Hard Planning also allows a GM to include more detail. No matter how creative you are, it’s always easier to come up with details at your leisure than under pressure. And to decide what those details mean. Hard Planning, because it allows for the inclusion of more complex detail, usually leads to a world and a setting and story that feels more alive. It feels more real. Because of all the extra detail.

The problem with Hard Planning is that it’s either a lot of work or it involves a heavy cognitive load. If you’re Working Hard, Hard Planning involves a lot of writing and mapping and mecahnicsing – it’s a word – and all that crap. If you’re Working Smart, Hard Planning requires you to memorize a lot of crap. You have to be able to keep all of those details in your head. And everyone’s brain has a limit. Even mine. Sure, my brain seems limitless, but it does have some limits. Somewhere. I’m sure of it. I just haven’t run into them yet.

Beyond that, Hard Planning can be inflexible. Just not in the way that most people complain about. As I said, a GM with a good, Hard Plan can still adjust based on the character’s actions. But, once you cross a certain point, once you adjust things too much, well, you really aren’t benefitting from the Hard Plan at all. Yes, you can adjust the goblin encounter to account for some crazy-ass approach the players dreamed up, but if the players never encounter the goblins and simply decide to somehow flood the entire dungeon to drive everything out of it, well, all your Hard Planning is useless.

Thus, to some extent, Hard Planning has to include some amount of contingency planning if it’s going to remain useful Hard Planning. The reason that monster stat blocks include ability scores and skills is, basically, a matter of contingency planning. Most monsters only need their stat blocks because the players are going to fight them. And thus, most stat blocks could get by with just attacks, defenses, and combat options. But sometimes the players will do unexpected crap. And knowing how to resolve that crap involves having noncombat stats available.

The point is, to benefit from Hard Planning, you need to ensure things don’t deviate too far from the plan. And that means having a plan for the large deviations. In short, contingency planning. What if the heroes raise the alarm? What if they flood the dungeon? What if they decide to explore the forest or the town? What if they decide to activate the doomsday device themselves?

So, Hard Planning works best when things are fairly static. When the players really can’t do much to affect how things will play out on a large scale. Or at least, when their options are all pretty well defined. Dungeon crawls, for example, are usually Hard Planned. The players can wander around the setting, but they can’t really leave the setting. And there’s only so many paths they can take. And the inhabitants of the dungeon either don’t respond to the heroes until the heroes are kicking their skulls in or else they respond in predictable ways. And, strangely, I’m going to include mystery adventures here. A mystery adventure – one in which the players are primarily trying to work out the answer to a question by gathering clues – is pretty much just a dungeon adventure without walls. The players still move from scene to scene based on the information they have – the leads – and they overcome obstacles in those scenes in order to advance the plot – to find clues.

Hard Planning is at its weakest when things can change. And change dramatically. Basically, when things are dynamic. When things are open-ended, when the players can effect great change with even small actions, Hard Planning loses its effectiveness quickly. Now, that, by itself, isn’t a problem. The GM can always fall back on No Planning and improvise their way out of anything. But,…

Remember that Hard Planning comes with a heavy workload or a heavy brainload. If you’re putting in all of that work and not getting any of the benefits of the Hard Plan, well, that’s not very efficient. To put it politely.

Now, contingency planning does mitigate that. Good contingency plans are a requirement of Hard Planning. But, if there are too many options and they are too difficult to foresee, then contingency planning can become impossible. And even when it’s not impossible, contingency planning is a lot of extra work that, by definition, won’t end up coming into play at the table.

At the end of the day, Hard Planning almost always leads to a better game, but it also comes with a very high cost in workload or brainload. So, if the Hard Planning isn’t going to pay off because the game is likely to deviate wildly from the Hard Plan, a different approach is better.

No Planning: High Stakes, High Pressure, Highly Flexible

No Planning is basically the exact opposite of Hard Planning. Essentially, No Planning means that you’ve got nothing to go on and have to make up absolutely everything. It involves a minimal workload or cognitive load, for obvious reasons, but it also creates a great deal of pressure at the game table. And the quality of the game you get out of No Planning is highly variable. Sometimes, it’s great. Sometimes, it’s terrible. Your personal skill as a GM plays a part in determining how often it’s great and how often it’s terrible, but the end result is still highly swingy. And other stuff will play a part as well. For example, your mood. How much sleep you got the night before. Your energy level. Those things affect the quality of a No Planned game more than most improvisational GMs want to admit.

No Planning is incredibly flexible and responsive. You can adjust the play experience on the fly. You can change the pace, adjust the difficulty, follow the players on crazy whims, whatever. As a result, the level of agency the players have is very high. They feel like the world is bending to their every whim. And that’s great. It can be very empowering.

Now, just like some GMs with flawed perspectives can turn Hard Planning into a negative by being too rigid about their plan, some dumbass GMs can also screw up No Planning by being too flexible and too reactive. Because that’s what No Planning tends to emphasize. Flexibility and reaction. So, consistency – which is one of the pillars of a good RPG because it allows the players to make rational, reasonable choices – consistency can suffer when there’s No Planning. Details tend to be jury-rigged to fit together and the big-picture can become a little jumbled and nonsensical as a result. On top of that, if the GM is too reactive, they tend not to drive the players to act. And so, the players tend to flounder. They flail around, directionless because the GM isn’t driving the action toward something.

Beyond that potential, it can also be very hard to run the “game” part of the role-playing game with No Planning. It’s hard to run a combat with no stat blocks in a game like D&D. It’s hard to resolve complex scenes mechanically. And taking the time to prepare that crap at the table, well, it takes time from the game. There are just some aspects of an RPG that can’t be run without something prepared. And, again, making this stuff up on the fly tends to lead stuff that is less detailed and more inconsistent. Stuff that doesn’t fit together well. And I know a lot of improvisational GMs who insist that’s not true. But there’s also people who insist they can pay attention to you while they’re on social media on their phones. And if you’ve ever interacted with them, you know they are wrong.

No Planning is at its absolute best when the game is being driven by the players. When things are very open-ended, and the GM is in a reactive role. For example, if the players are organizing the defenses for a town – training soldiers, building fortifications, gathering supplies – in advance of a war, that’s a great place for No Planning. And if the players are chasing down a villain who is trying to fight them off – a cat-and-mouse game across a city, say – that’s also great for No Planning.

When the GM isn’t in the position of having to react to a group of crazy players with an infinity of options, then No Planning really doesn’t pay off. And remember, No Planning does have costs. It puts a lot of pressure on the GM and the outcomes are highly variable and depend on external factors as well as the limits of the GM’s skills. Moreover, the narrative and mechanical level of consistency and detail suffer as a result.

Soft Planning: One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Obviously, you can see where this is going. Hard Planning and No Planning are basically the opposite ends of a spectrum. And they are the extremes. No game is purely Hard Planned or purely No Planned. No GM can Hard Plan for every contingency and you cannot run a game from a completely blank slate. There has to be some starting point. And even if you think you’ve run that game, you haven’t. After all, there are world details baked into the game system. And the rules and mechanics for the game define what you can do easily at the table and what stuff doesn’t work well at the table. That stuff actually provides some level of planning. The fact that elves exist in the world is a starting point.

So, if Hard Planning and No Planning are the extreme endpoints, Soft Planning sits in between and it’s obviously the best way to go. Right? Well, not exactly. If it did, this whole discussion would be useless. For practical purposes, Hard Planning and No Planning are not the endpoints. They are big, broad areas of MOSTLY Hard Planning and MOSTLY No Planning. And Soft Planning is also a big, broad area in between the two that overlaps between them.

Soft Planning does combine the benefits and flaws of the other two approaches. To some extent. That is, it’s more flexible and reactive than Hard Planning, but it is also more consistent and detailed than No Planning. Because, basically, Soft Planning is just “some planning.” More than None, but less than Total. Right?

But here’s the thing: the flaws tend to stack up faster than the benefits. That is, as you shift from Hard Planning to Soft Planning, the lack of detail and mechanical rigor, the strain on the GM at the table, all that stuff tends to increase pretty quickly. And the benefits – the flexibility and the reactiveness – they tend not to increase as quickly. Likewise, as you shift from No Planning to Soft Planning, the level of work and cognitive load and the rigidity tend to increase much faster than the benefits of having a solid plan. It’s funny.

So accepting the fact that Hard Planning and No Planning are not endpoints or extremes but PRACTICAL areas of “mostly planning” and “mostly not-planning” and accepting that Soft Planning is a PRACTICAL area of “mixing planning and not-planning to a greater or lesser extent,” then Soft Planning becomes either “planning only what you can’t come up with on the fly” or “leaving enough blanks in the plan to make it flexible.”

And I think this is getting needlessly meta. Or needlessly semantical.

My point is that, yes, Soft Planning is somewhere between Hard Planning and No Planning. But that doesn’t mean it’s always the answer. It works best whenever Hard Planning is too much work and No Planning is too much pressure.

Mixing and Matching

The truth is that every homebrew adventure is going to include some mixture of Hard Planning, Soft Planning, and No Planning. And for each element of the adventure, you need to make a deliberate choice as to whether to Hard Plan, to Soft Plan, or to No Plan. So, if your adventure includes a journey through the haunted woods to a cursed castle, you might rely on a Hard Plan for the map of the castle and most of the encounters therein. You might come up with a Soft Plan for the journey to the castle. Say, random encounter tables. You might also Hard Plan a few encounters but leave them off the map of the woods and drop them where you want them. Which is Soft Planning. In the castle, you might leave a few blank rooms that you can fill in as you need them. Which is No Planning. And, of course, the adventure itself is surrounded by a great, big No Plan. The major villain in the castle might be a ghost who wanders around tormenting the party. So, you might leave the villain encounters as a Soft Plan. The clues about the curse, those might be a Soft Plan too. And you might have the idea of having some ghostly NPCs around the castle that you can invent on the fly. Those are basically No Plan.

And, for all of that stuff, you might decide some of it has to be written down, requiring Hard Work, and some of it just has to stay in your head, requiring Smart Work.

And, you might adjust any or all of those decisions to play to your strengths. You might leave lots of blanks in the castle where you can invent NPC ghosts or haunting effects because you like to fly with No Plan. Or you might plan out everything in a mechanically rigorous way, even designing firm social-interaction scenes for every ghost, because you feel better with a Hard Plan.

That’s up to you. All I can tell you is when to use one and when to use the other. And I’ll do even more of that when I start talking about the Ingredients of an Adventure.