Am also going to give a hearty back up recommendation to freemind, which I use for almost any kind of brainstorming activity, great for people like me who have a ton of ideas and need a visual way to remember and save them.

Now, character and narrative motivations are reallllly close in my mind. Not sure if I see a meaningful difference there. But I’ve also just come off a Smallville session today, for which the prep system is well-defined: look at the leads, find their conflicts, put NPC faces on those conflicts, figure out what will need to be revealed in approximately what order to make those conflicts get Big, and figure out where you start. So, the intimate ties between “conflicts between PCs’ relationships and values” and “NPCs that embody and spark those conflicts” is foremost in my mind right now.

I think that, for me, Apocalypse World has the most natural style of preparation—daydream about what bad things could happen because complicated people want things. Then, make them act when you get to play, and see what happens. But at its core, that’s kinda the same prep: see where people’s motivations and desires smack into each other, see what you have to do to make that happen sooner rather than later, and see what comes out of it.

Obviously, I’m playing games for classical-drama-style story, though.

I would have to respectfully disagree with you in your statement that the character building game has an optimum solution. If the game is properly designed, there are trade-offs for every decision. In short, there is no bad choice, just different kinds of good. It builds a sense of confidence and excitement to the game which allows a longer term game to persist.

In my experience, it also tends to bring the players back to the table with more energy which leads to a more intense game experience at the table. Like in a larp with written intentions during downtime, the homework lets the players continue to play the game outside of their limited game session. If you get an hour of enjoyable and meaningful choices as your homework for a 4 hour game session, I would argue that is a better design.

I would argue that the aspect of preparation does not inherently subtract from the player engagement at the table. Any element of character development will lead to the player identification. That won’t rescue you if the core game-play experience is flat, but that is a different issue.

But that’s just what I do, so obviously not authoritative or applicable for everyone.

I think that D&D is a game that you play between sessions, and sessions are when you get to see how many points you got in the inter-session play. And that can be fun, but that’s not the game for me. The choices are more like boardgame choices, where there’s a correct one for any given situation, and the fun consists in part in developing the ability to reliably and intuitively find that.

As you point out, through the editions, D&D has become more and more of a character-building game. And personally, that’s not where I want my choices to be—I really want my choices to be in-game around the table, in the heat of the moment, and with no good choice—just different kinds of bad. And that’s my taste, not everyone’s. Playing Annalise recently was one of the most satisfying RPG experiences I’ve had, because everything in play was about deciding among a set of painful outcomes.

But, you also bring up a very very good point: making your character is a way of engaging with the game. I personally disagree that anything in D&D helps me feel engaged when I’m at the table, but that’s only a small part of the game. D&D has a lot of structure that keeps you thinking about the game when you’re not at the table, regardless of whether you think about it when you are. And that’s really cool and worth thinking about and learning from. But I have yet to see an example that doesn’t, for me, sacrifice at-the-table engagement for away-from-the-table engagement.

Sebastian.

How do you organize your own content, from a technical standpoint? There must be a better way then my approach with a jury-rigged google docs spreadsheet.