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.
If remember correctly, DC20 does something similar but instead of the same spell you must use some other spell that would be a reasonable counter effect against the effect that the spell is trying to produce.
I have mainly played DnD 5e, Mouse Guard and some amount of one-shot systems but my first ttrpg was somewhat surprisingly Dungeon World. I also love to run long campaigns based on published adventures or random tables, having something to bounce ideas against is must for my game mastering style.
After I get one of my DnD 5e campaigns to conclude I will pick something from the following list:
One-Shots that I want to visit again:
Shorter Campaigns (~10 sessions) I wish to run:
Quite the opposite. My two main hobbies are tabletop roleplaying and spending time in nature and both of those have an experience space that can't be explored fully in one lifetime.
I'm often even confused when people seem to think they need to travel far to gain new experiences and I haven't even fully explored the nature just outside of my apartment.
Everything is nature. But which closed quarters are they kept?
I moved to using DeepSeek which should have a much better energy efficiency compared to ChatGPT with same maybe even better results.
Pretty much the only things I use LLMs with ttrpgs is when I want to customize something I have an example of.
For example when I find a some kind of random table that has great format or style I like but doesn't fit the area I would yo use it on I give it to LLM to produce similar but something that is more fitted to my need.
Edit: the other way I use LLMs is to translate texts as we don't play in English.
I think the main way I acquire new ttrpg reading at the moment might just be Goodreads' suggestions.
Secondary sources for me are things like different ttrpg communities in lemmy and mastodon.
I only things I have used multiple years are mainly for DnD 5e 2014:
Had a wine & lore dump session with a partial group in our DnD 5e game. All of the speculation of my players lead me to realize how well historical events I have come up with fit to the official lore from Fizban's Treasury of Dragons. I got also to introduce a NPC who will come relevant in three levels when they can tackle one of the better adventures from Candlekeep Mysteries.
We also played Alice is Missing for the first time and while it didn't meet all of the hype, we had fun evening and I must play it again to get some more familiarity with the storytelling it assumes from the players.
I would say that most of the wisdom in Trajectory of Fear (https://nerdsonearth.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Trajectory-of-Fear.pdf) would work here as well even though it's about Horror.
If you think about the steps presented there as of Unease, Suspicion, Anticipation and Revelation then the advice should work really well.
"I can’t really do the same with my homebrew world which has very little in common with the real world." I don't think that is necessarily true but it requires the players to have a proper understanding of what is normal and expected.
Alexandrian had some interesting thoughts about what to avoid when running rival party in his Call of the Netherdeep -review (includes spoilers about the adventure): https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/48216/roleplaying-games/review-call-of-the-netherdeep
Why wouldn't China do exactly the same mistake in some point?
As European I would advice against the trust that the strong economic ties would keep totalitarians in check.