So how much time do people spend on penning adventure fronts when not too sure how long the campaign will last?
From what I can tell it looks like it’s not necessary to craft a perfected masterpiece, especially as my games are usually very off the cuff (another reason why DW is pretty perfect for me) , but I don’t want to be short-changing my players.
Guidance?
The thing about Fronts is that they just get messed with and adapted right away, so don’t worry about them being perfect. Just make enough to feel prepared to represent the world to the players and have at it. They’ll be filthy and messed up very quickly.
For my first front (loosely adapted from a very linear scenario), it took me around four hours to prepare 4 dangers with a total of 20 Grim Portents. It took my players 6 hours to play through the fist three Grim Portents 😉 Now that I understand the mechanic better, I expect my second front shouldn’t take more than two hours to prepare.
It took me 30-45 minutes to write my first adventure front, and the same time to write my first campaign front. As an edit to this, I wrote the first adventure front after the first session and the first campaign front after the second session. We have played 3 sessions total and should wrap up the first adventure front in a session or two.
I don’t write any fronts until session 2, 3, or 4 generally, but I’m crazy like that.
I tend to write fronts either right away (when adapting an adventure) or not until the second session. I make notes on what might BECOME fronts, all the way through.
Yup, notes are critical.
Yes, you need notes to incorporate the consequences of your players’ actions (and wishes) into the campaign.
As a clarification, I wrote my first front after the first session and I plan to write a campaign front after the third session, when the players are further along the first front.
As an aside, I was pleasantly surprised by how much a driving force in player’s interactions are the relations decided at character creation. It was very fun to see the thief robbing the evil wizard of one of his scrolls and the wizard trying to uncover what (if anything) was stolen from him, while covering up his evilness from the prying eyes of the paladin.
Like Jonathan, like Mozart and other geniuses, we get everything done just thinking of it 😉
Seriously, do as Philip (who’s the hardworker of our gang).
After the first session I came up with some dangers related to the mcguffin the player’s found and based on their description of what it is. They felt like campaign fronts so I wrote them up that way. I then wrote down what the players plan to do next (travel to a specific library to gain more knowledge of the mcguffin) figured out which grim portents from the dangers may happen on the way and made those portents dangers for the adventure. I want to add at least one more danger not related to the campaign front to give the party a chance to go off the rails and keep them from feeling like everything is tied into the mcguffin so I can trick them later.