Many of us, have read GM-sections in RPG, RPG blogs, forum discussions, and sometimes books about the storytelling art.
All of these contains tons of interesting tips/techniques (and some will contradict each other, you don’t GM a gritty mega-dungeon and high-school drama game the same way), so I am curious which ones are your favourite and how do you use them in your game
Use every opportunity to turn planning into information gathering.
I try to use every opportunity to stop the planning “phase” of the game and go to the information gathering before continuing the planning. This can be pretty much any unknown that the characters bring up, like some if -statement in their plan, some fact they are unsure about etc.
The information gathering might be anything from a simple skill check to a full adventure and after that we go right back to the planning.
This has removed a lot of planning hours that wouldn’t have had anything to do with the situation they are going into.
FWIW, I have never managed to achieve that fluently. To elegantly switch from “sitting around, planning” to interacting with the world. Retrospections are the only way that works for me
Yeah, it was really a challenge to do that at first but when everyone agreed that our planning took too long and we decided to do this, it has become quite routine for us to notice when planning triggers the information gathering phase.
And as players are getting more familiar with this, their planning has changed as well. The focus of planning is now more about coming up with relevant sources of information than trying to anticipate the future.