I was out of the gym for a few weeks recently healing up from something that happened to my shoulder outside of the gym. Just prior to this minor injury I had my work schedule adjusted, which impacted my gym schedule. Now, instead of leaving work and getting to the gym well before it got busy, I was now going at prime time where equipment scarcity and heavy population was a matter of fact. This led to a number of frustrating training sessions that either took far longer than they otherwise would have or ones that were incomplete because I couldn’t get to the equipment that I needed.
So during that time I took a long hard look at things. I looked at my program. I looked at my schedule at work. I looked at the rest of my calendar. And most importantly I looked long and hard at my goals. And I decided on a number of changes that needed to be made. The first thing that changed was how I was going to conduct my workouts. Working later meant I could have simply done the same program before work instead of after, but by doing so I would have given up extra time with several partners who also trained in the afternoons.
And while I found that I enjoyed what I was doing with the strength training portion of the program and did want to continue to see my numbers climb, I realized that my focus had shifted to a closer eye towards aesthetics. And so the concept for my training plan was born – strength in the morning and a main focus on building size and muscle in the afternoon. In the mornings I would be able to use an established, well constructed program in order to achieve those goals. But in the afternoons, I was in uncharted territory. Initial research didn’t find anything that was going to work for what I was going, so I settled down one afternoon to create my own. And you know what? I learned some things. I learned some things that can be useful to GMs writing their own material out there to challenge their PCs.
- Defined, Realistic Goal
This one seems obvious, but it’s easy to lose sight of. Beyond any other decisions that you make about the exercises you choose or how often you want to go to the gym, if your program doesn’t have a defined, realistic goal, you aren’t going to make progress towards those ends at the gym. “Getting strong and cut” isn’t a defined goal. “Building a base of functional strength” on the other hand gives you direction. “Gain 20 lbs of muscle in the next month” is very defined, but it’s not realistic. “Add mass to my shoulders over the next eight weeks” is much more realistic and gives you a clue as to how to select exercises.
Likewise, if you don’t have a clear goal for your adventure or campaign, you are setting yourself up to later realize that you’ve meandered off of the path and you have no idea where to get back on. “Highlight the use of the Action Track” is a good goal for writing an adventure – it gives you something to focus on and hang other things around. “Tell an awesome story about Rebel agents that blow up Imperial targets” is too vague to have a strong sense of identity when you go to craft the actual adventure beyond the story.
You also have to be careful here about how much time you have – you can’t fit 8 hours worth of adventure into a 4 hour slot no matter how hard you try.
- Adequate Challenge
When it comes to designing an exercise program you want something that is going to provide a challenge for you, but not be impossible. If it’s too easy you’re not going to get results. You can do as many bicep curls with 5 lb weights as you want, but it’s not going to provide you with any results. But if you write a program that is going to push you to your breaking point every day, you aren’t going to stick with it.
The same can be said for making sure the adventure you have written is appropriately challenging for your players. Too easy and it’s going to be a cakewalk for them. Too hard and it’s going to end in a TPK. Accept that there are variables to this. Dice rolls don’t always make for a fair arbiter of events. They can swing for and against the players at any time making an easy encounter deadly or a tough one easy. That’s okay. The same thing happens in the gym – out of every five training sessions, one will be great, one will be a real struggle, and the other three will fall somewhere around the middle.
- Exercise Selection
Similar to number 2, choosing appropriate exercises is very important. They need to support your ultimate goal. While doing 100 pushups a day might be a challenge, unless your goal is to “get really good at doing pushups,” it’s not going to help you. Smart exercise selection can help you to hit your goals and target what you want to target in effective ways, allowing you to do less with more.
The same thing can be said for building encounters in your adventure. Make sure you’re selecting foes and NPCs that make sense. Just because they’re infiltrating a secret Imperial base in a Star Wars game doesn’t mean they need to face Stormtroopers if it’s a black site scientific outpost. If you’re running Gundarks on a Space Liner, you obviously need to include Gundarks in the adventure somewhere. Smart NPC selection can help you to realize your goal and make for a more compelling and productive experience. Keep it in mind.
- Progression
How are you going to advance with the program? Is there an end goal that you want to realize before you move on to something else or can you simply add weight, reps, and sets as you become more practiced with it.
This is a big one for campaign planning – you need to account for the players growing, both mechanically and in their personal stories. To a lesser extent, it’s important in developing an adventure. How you flow from one encounter to the next and how you connect everything together is something that needs to be addressed. Cohesion makes for a better experience. It’s such a big thing, but at the same time it can be one that is overlooked. And if you have one or two scenes that feel disjointed, the entire game can suffer.
- Using Existing Resources
Sometimes someone has already written what you wanted to write. Don’t reinvent the wheel in these cases. My AM sessions are seeing me run two programs that already exist. One is a program that was written by a well known strength coach that has a specific focus of hitting the shoulders hard two days per week. The other three AM sessions are one of the most widely respected and recommended strength training programs that exists. I didn’t need to write anything for them. It was only when I started to look at programs for the afternoon that I realized I was off the reservation.
The same can be said for adventure writing or campaign planning. There is nothing wrong with using something that someone else has written if it does what you need it to do or easily can with a minimum of changes to it. You don’t need to write another Tomb of Horrors. It exists already. Same with the Kingmaker Adventure Path for Pathfinder. Don’t be afraid to use those.
And there we have it. Take these lessons to heart, internalize them, and use them in your own adventure writing. They’re such simple concepts, but that also makes them some of the easiest to forget. Now if you’ll excuse me, that was my rest timer going off. Time to get back under the bar for the next set.
Ben Erickson
