https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots
Great article for everyone to read.
Personally, I find even the three clue rule a little bit too restricting in practice. Like, what if the players just never investigate the locations where those clues were placed? I find that if you prep options A, B, C, and mayyybe D, players will inevitably take a hard right over to Q like it was the only logical option. (Plus, even if everything works out, it's triple the prep vs whatever actually becomes relevant in gameplay.)
The approach I've found success with is to prep secrets, not plots or clues. Write out a list of a dozen or so things that it would be helpful for the PCs to find out, and then actively look to shoehorn in clues about at least one of those secrets no matter what the players decide to end up doing.
Like, let's say one of the important secrets is that the captain of the guard is a drunk. If your players go to the tavern? They see him passed out at a table in the corner, and the tavernkeep remarks on how sad it is that he's been like this so often lately. If they go talk to other random guardsmen? One of them makes an off-colour joke alluding to the captain being a drunkard, then they all get really uncomfortable and tight-lipped if pressed in seriousness. If they break into the guy's office? They find a bunch of empty bottles and a letter of condemnation from his superiors. Etc etc, you get the idea. The big mental flip is, instead of going "okay here's the scene, what does it make sense to do here (and would any secrets come up as part of that)" --> to instead go "okay here's the secret I want to share, how does it make sense to share here"... there's still no suspension of disbelief needed, it's just a somewhat more narrative attitude to developing things without breaking an overall more simulationist framework.
This method does admittedly require a bit of thinking on your feet, but I find that having the secrets prepped and listed out in advance gives enough of a framework to think within that it's not actually as much mental load as you might think. A++ would recommend all round. I've shaved off tons of prep time since I started going with this approach, and have actually made my sessions more dynamic as well (since I'm more actively looking for chances to feed them info, instead of more passively guarding my hoard of secrets).
Personally, I find even the three clue rule a little bit too restricting in practice. Like, what if the players just never investigate the locations where those clues were placed?
The nodes thingy work by being basically a bunch of arrows. The redundancy of "three" makes it very hard for them to miss everything. If they did, the clues they had to begin with were lacking. Alex said in some blog post that he adds new clues on the fly when the players are lost and there is only one remaining for them to discover, but even this should be a rare situation.
(Plus, even if everything works out, it’s triple the prep vs whatever actually becomes relevant in gameplay.)
There's an article of Alex where he said it's not true, because the new clues could either give the players more assets (like new allies) or information about the issue at hand. Since there isn't supposed to be an order of events, this is good. There was this game I planned with three angles to approach the "High Mage": One by her discredited rival trying to desperately accuse her of crimes, other by listening to gossip about her as a great ally for the trans community and the third as the heretic who stole and raised a dragon as a human child. Each combination of those "clues" is a different way they'll think of her entirely.
The approach I’ve found success with is to prep secrets, not plots or clues. Write out a list of a dozen or so things that it would be helpful for the PCs to find out, and then actively look to shoehorn in clues about at least one of those secrets no matter what the players decide to end up doing.
The issue with this approach is that you seemingly shoehorn the clues at the start until the players finally bite, then move to the next one. This goes counter to the spirit of plotless prep. You aren't dictating how they will find out something, but you're still dictating the order in which they will. This is a structure for linear campaigns, not for dynamic ones.
I did the same thing some years back. It ran with success until one of my players complained about being railroaded (wherever I go in town, everything points out to the goblin cave!). I had an ugly discussion with him at the time, but now I realize he was right.
I’ve shaved off tons of prep time since I started going with this approach, and have actually made my sessions more dynamic as well (since I’m more actively looking for chances to feed them info, instead of more passively guarding my hoard of secrets).
What attracted me to plotless prep is that I was sick of trying to "hide my agenda" and I would rather have no agenda at all. I already was always actively looking how to keep them in the rail roads without looking like there are railroads, and this is just a way to do it with more leeway for error.
All being said, I also did a "secret list" structure that was just a list of topics with a rough order. But it wasn't for the plot, it was for the information that the Summoner's Angel Eidolon would gradually share by accident and I wanted "Ah hey I was a mortal once :) I was a mathematician called Jeff who lived over that hill!" (fluff) to come before "your god doesn't exist, although we celestials do, and we only pretend your faith is real because it makes it easier for us to do our bidding" (major world secret).
You aren’t dictating how they will find out something, but you’re still dictating the order in which they will.
Nope, not in the slightest! I keep a list of maybe a dozen or so possible secrets relevant to the broader arc that they might discover that could be helpful, and maybe only two or three will actually come up in any given session. That makes it a lot easier to find useful tidbits to work in organically, without keeping a vise grip on the narrative the way you seem to have interpreted from my initial comment. If I only had a small number of "relevant secrets", or was too precious about the order they'd be revealed in, I can absolutely see the issues you mentioned - but that's not how I run things. That larger list gives me the chance to look for the one(s) that actually make the most narrative sense instead of feeling the need to shoehorn anything. Sometimes I don't even have a narrative in mind, really - just a series of interesting facts about this part of the world/the NPCs in it, and leave it to the players to chase those interesting scraps of knowledge and make of them what they will.
Ah, this is how I run my solo PbP games. I like it for being no-prep, but also found it to suffer from some continuity issues if you look too meticulously at things. Like an AI-generated story or a dream. I would set this kindly stranger to be secretly from the same persecuted people of the PC, but only realize later it would make him way more wary when they first met. I would then make him an ex-army officer, not realising this meant he would know how to properly disarm the PC before the PC threatened him at gunpoint. Etc.
I think it would as well wouldn't fly at all on intrigue campaigns (where it's relevant to keep a rather hard track on what NPC knows and what they do not).
Well, there is some important prep, and it's to decide those key secrets up front for the purposes of continuity. Like for example I'd decide from the beginning that that NPC is from those same persecuted people as the PC, I just wouldn't have a clear pretedetermined path or set of clues in mind for how the players might figure that out. Those details can emerge organically through gameplay so long as the core foundations are laid in advance. I do run a bunch of one-shots the more open ended "generative" way you describe, but anything longer running needs the explicit advance prep to work out those key secrets up front in order to keep things stable and consistent.
The way I prepped with nodes was that I didn't set three clues for every secret a NPC had, doing what you did as well, just on ties to other people and how they "became contactable". I'll reuse the High Mage example. For some context, this was a matriarchical sultanate of wizards where only women could use magic. The High Mage had four clues:
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Proactive: Someone finds the magic necklace that can talk telepathically to the High Mage's "adopted daughter", the dragon girl whom she keeps in a (nonliteral) golden cage. -> This was one of the major secrets for this campaign. The High Mage had tapped this line and the dragon tried to hide as much personal information as possible.
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Hidden ally of the terrorist cell of maiden knights.
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Her apprentice had helped the rich warvet directly with his grievous wounds.
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Knows about the existence of The Robot and actively hunts it down.
And those were the clues that pointed to her:
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Her enemy in the Mage Council is largely discredited, but she still (indirectly) accuses her, under her breath, that she is a heretic, or trying to become a lich, or helps people circumvent law, or... She doesn't keep the facts straight and everyone thinks she is bullshitting since the claims are disconnected and are all of grave crimes, but they're (mostly) true.
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She had offered directly to turn a male wizard into female with her secret potion so he would be respected as a magi and not have the police called on him for being an "illegal bard" every two weeks or so.
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The Eldritch Fey knows about the dragon girl.
Some pointed directly to secrets (mainly those who had to do with the dragon), but mostly were just to other people. Even the pointers to the dragon weren't pointers to the fact she was a philactery.