it's perfectly acceptable if your pre-written is just a constant forward moving, never backtracing, branching choose your own adventure structure

any kind of looping, clues based, hidden information, etc busts this apart instantly depending on what your players do

there's another issue which is playstyle

it's way easier to write, and imo run, adventures that are more sandboxy/open-ended like the way he describes

cyberpunk in particular tends to do this well: "this is the job, haggle over support/reward, here's the situation and setup, you figure it out, get back, get backstabbed, try and get paid"

it works because that's just a really common trope-y genre to run jobs in

it's a lot harder to do this if your system/setting suddenly has rigid rules about all sorts of things, from travel, tech level, MAGIC, order of who you talked to, places you visited or observed, etc

in fact this is a big problem in investigations i rarely see brought up because it's covered by other sort of bandaid "rule of thumb" advice: what happens if your clue is in a place players swept and missed"

and those two schools of thought are "just give it to them" or "move the clue"

i can't run a lot of good pre-writtens in the way this person wants

chariot of the gods is way too fucking intricate and interconnected to just glaze over for half an hour and wing it and that is a goddamn great scenario

the notion that you have to put in (seemingly any) work to get a pre-written to work shouldn't be so controversial

you can only really reach this level of winging it if you already know the material cold or the main thrust is very linear

and there's a third problem where pre-writtens have some awful sense of how people are going to be using their material

it is true that a lot of pre-writtens do not seem to have <running the game> in mind at all, which introduces structural problems, where you are not categorizing information in a way that is helpful to running the game but reading/understanding it

that's definitely a problem (hey i need the statblock here, fucking put it here wtf)

a lot of this seems to be that authors hate the idea of duplicate information, but if you want to reduce prep time for running your adventure, you do actually need to accomplish 1) helping the reader understand the flow and purpose of the game, but also 2) organizing that data in play sequence

this is also why core rulebooks get raked over the coals because picking just one or the other fucks the other camp over

anyway as a point of reference/additional context: i don't hate prep at all, i just don't really go all in on it when i run games for other people

but again that's a heavy style thing. when i do run pre-writtens they're after i ran them solo so i do know how it goes beyond a 30minute flip through

anyway, just to wank off traveller again because it's what i do: the mongoose traveller 760 patrons book has what i consider to be the most open ended/framework for scenario generation

you take this, you slap some mook statblocks together (or 7s across the board, baybeeeeee) and you're done

takes you 5 minutes, tops

for the record this is traveller 2e, but you can do this with every rpg system, it's pretty agnostic

just follow the framework:
job giver npc
requirements
player info
ref into
outcomes/complications

that's also the actual order i use to think of these. you might thing ref info before player, but honestly i don't

player info and presentation is most important anyway, and you can make whatever wild shit you want up in the background. wilder the better, actually

you know how a lot of titles basically just use adjective noun to give you a fast impression of what that thing is?

you can use that in your game prep, too. adjective adjective noun to describe that main quest npc. bam, you're rollin'

dirty cheatin' varmint
unethical cowardly accountant
lowkey ex-specops ganger
fat orange cat

the sky's the limit

now i wish i didn't cancel my traveller campaign

too much to do tho

maybe in 2030...

"The only way to stop this flow of sand is to hurl a chakram into a specific slot hidden in the far wall."

alright xena calm your tits i found another way actually

one thing i've noticed about some ostensibly explicit sword & sorcery adventures is that they... are not good at getting into the genre mindset wrt plot hooks

"do the right thing" is not a plot hook for this genre, really

all you have to do is the literal dnd thing of offering monetary reward. that's it man

rat-god diseased claws fucked me right up, killed two of my pcs :|

got a cool sword tho

"Tactics: The cultists attempt to surround enemies and stab them to death."

honestly fair

traveller, high fantasy: "wow! back here again!"

cyberpunk, sword & sorcery: "uhhh, we can't go there. for reasons"

"I don't begrudge people making money DMing, but I felt it was odd that she was charging her friends."

there's nothing wrong with charging your friends and family for professional services you're providing them

just because a lot of people don't doesn't mean it's wrong

in fact the way some of you talk about your families i feel like charging them should be the default

op red flags:

1) complaining about being a forever ref
2) would never put up with this because they're a longtime ref who picked up red flags immediately, and then
3) puts up with it for months to have enough material for a big post

they don't do a quite "and then everyone clapped" but it's pretty close

they left, dm supposedly nuked server with all her paid games

🤷🏼 calling this 90/10

oh lmao

this is a story he's been telling since at least eight months ago and when he went off on paid referee entitlement in /r/rpg he got downvoted lol

well i don't know if he's a complete liar but he likes gygax and doesn't like masks at cons so he's 100% a fucking asshole

anyway i'm done skimming edh posts i don't understand fuck this guy

rtal's april fool's day free non-canon dlc

https://rtalsoriangames.com/2026/04/01/april-fools-2026-at-r-talsorian-a-cyberpunk-and-shadow-scar-dlc-day/