Preparation vs Improvisation

In Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games, there's one player whose role is very different from the others'. While the other players put themselves in the shoes of adventurous heroes, this one player is charged with the task of creating and governing the world the heroes are adventuring in. This player, or rather non-player, is called the Dungeon Master, or DM, and he or she has many important tasks. For example, it's the DM's job to understand and apply the rules of the game. They describe what happens in the world as the players interact with it. The DM plays the role of everyone in their fictional world who isn't one of the few player-controlled characters. And almost always, the DM prepares an adventure for the players' characters to go on. This preparation often involves creating important non-player characters, establishing a history and description for the fictional worlds, and even laying the groundwork for a basic narrative plot for the adventure.

However, as the DM prepares the adventure, they should be cautious not to over-prepare. One thing that role-playing games give players more than any other kind of game can, is freedom. Within certain limits, role-players can be whatever they want, say whatever they want, and do whatever they want. This can be a great challenge for the DM, because the players often have their characters do things that the DM couldn't have expected. When the players make choices the DM didn't consider, the DM usually has to improvise. Sometimes, players go completely "off the rails," and the DM has to abandon their plan altogether.

However, that doesn't mean that the DM shouldn't plan at all. On the contrary, the DM needs to do a great deal of planning, especially in the creation of their characters, to figure out how the characters they create would react to how the player characters behave, and they need to plant clues everywhere, so the players are constantly run into reminders of what adventure they're all supposed to be on.

Finding the balance between preparation and improvisation can be tricky for DMs. Each DM needs to figure out for themselves how much preparation they want to put into their adventures ahead of time (knowing that the players will probably mess up their plans) and how much they can afford to "wing it" and still make the adventure interesting.

That's the difficulty I'm having right now, planning my Elder's Quorum lesson. If I were giving a talk, I would know that I can simply plan the whole talk word-for-word, because I know that the audience won't have any input. I can create the whole plan in as great a detail as I would like, knowing that the plan will only go off-track if I do. On the other hand, if I were planning a lesson for a Gospel Essentials class, I would know that that level of detailed planning would be a bad idea. In Gospel Essentials class, each member of the audience has their own two cents that they want to add to the conversation. Sometimes, they start commenting on each others' comments, and all the teacher has to do is make sure everyone stays mostly on-topic. If I were giving a talk, I could plan the whole talk. If I were giving a Gospel Essentials lesson, all I'd need to do is establish the topic of the conversation and plan a few quotes to share and questions to ask. For an Elder's Quorum lesson, I'm not sure how much preparation I need.

In my experience, Elder's Quorum classes are almost as talkative as Gospel Essentials classes, but I'm not sure how much good my experience will do me in this case. My Elder's Quorum recently merged with another Elder's Quorum, and I haven't attended enough of the new, combined Elder's Quorum's meetings to get a feel for how interactive this new Elder's Quorum is.

Perhaps it would be best for me to make some kind of in-between level of preparation. Perhaps I should prepare quotes and questions, like I would for a Gospel Essentials class, but prepare so many quotes and questions that they could fill all my allotted time, if they have to. At the same time, though, I should highlight the most important quotes and questions so I can make sure we get to them, in case the Elder's Quorum has a lot of input and I have to make some cuts for the sake of time.

Basically, it sounds like I have a lot of planning to do tomorrow morning, and I still have to be prepared for my plans to change on the fly. This problem, along with my tendency to "go with the flow" too often, is why I didn't make for a good DM. However, my lax nature may be an asset here. I'm sure I can prepare enough material to fill the amount of time I'll be given, but I also know that, while I'm giving the lesson, I'll have the flexibility to let others have their say. I need to prepare an adequate amount of material, but I don't need everything to go exactly according to plan. If we want to go on a small tangent in the middle of the lesson, we can do that. That might be tricky in the middle of a role-playing session, but in an Elder's Quorum lesson, it shouldn't be too hard. I've taught lessons in settings like this before. I don't know exactly how much material or flexibility I'll need, so I'll just plan on having a decent amount of both. I'll give the lesson a few minutes of introduction, ask a question, see how many answers I get, and we'll see where things go from there. Sounds like a plan.