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.