not-so-newguy
I'm the Straw Man in your argument
Taking a walk is the one good habit I picked up from the pandemic
What is "Prep"?
It is a lot of things.
- Read material and highlight information and note items.
- Look at notes from prior games.
- Set the Table - pens and dice, index cards/note pads, such items that will be useful during the game.
- Refreshments within reach, players can bring their own food, but some items (water bottles, snacks) are placed at hand so there are not interrupts running to the refrigerator.
Bill Zebub
“It’s probably Matt Mercer’s fault.”
not-so-newguy
I'm the Straw Man in your argument
That took me a second, but I see what you did there
Celebrim
Legend
"Prep" for me is all the time you spend outside of the game getting ready for the game. As an incomplete list it includes:
a) Brainstorming
b) Generating NPCs and recording their opinions and thoughts.
c) Drawing maps.
d) Producing props and images.
e) Detailing encounter locations and populating them with monsters, treasure, traps, and hazards.
f) Recording backstory and backgrounds for NPCs.
g) Figure out the clues and breadcrumbs that the PCs might find that allow them to find and interrupt the nefarious activities of NPC villains.
h) Reading and researching information online or at a library in order to enrich your setting.
i) Detailing setting at a high level through world building of religion, history, geography, politics, art, etc.
j) Reading published game or story material in order to either familiarize yourself with it or to incorporate lore from a preexisting setting.
k) Generating or collecting random tables in order to provide idea fodder for down time or unexpected events.
l) Writing, amending, or clarifying rules and rule sets in order to achieve some desired goal.
m) Amending or extending published adventures to get stronger story beats, fill in plot holes, and create paths if the players go in directions that the original author didn't anticipate, or to adapt the story to your particular PC's or setting.
n) Creating custom programs to autogenerate material that would be expensive to create by hand, such as random loot tables, random NPCs, etc. Or else learning how to utilize custom programs that others have created for that purpose.
In general, "Prep" in my experience takes 1-5 hours for each hour of intended play depending on the system, your ambitions in storytelling, how experienced you are with the system, and the level of professionalism you like in your notes (that is, how clear would they be if you gave them to someone else). Anyone that is spending less than that, probably isn't thinking about all their prep (running one shots in rules light systems still requires you to thoroughly familiarize yourself with the rules and setting) or else probably isn't running a very ambitious game.
As for running without prep, that either fails completely or else at some level you are using someone else's prep or your prior prep to get ready. For example, many extemporaneous GMs have scenarios that they have run many times in the past for different groups and so can run those scenarios with slight variation quite easily, they way that a public speaker can give a speech on short notice by relying on their existing material.
As for "running a game on the fly", all games are run on the fly because no amount of prep can ever fully prepare you for what players with real agency are going to do. You will always at some point be handling unexpected situations that aren't covered by the rules, or aren't covered by your notes. However, good prep prepares you to handle those situations well, so that you can easily extrapolate from your notes what might happen, or else be so familiar with the rules of the system that you can readily adapt some portion of it to the problem. A lot of prep time is actually created by recovering from the story going in unexpected directions or players proposing to do some perfectly reasonable thing that you have no rules for at all and now need a long term solution that is fair, balanced, and interesting.
a) Brainstorming
b) Generating NPCs and recording their opinions and thoughts.
c) Drawing maps.
d) Producing props and images.
e) Detailing encounter locations and populating them with monsters, treasure, traps, and hazards.
f) Recording backstory and backgrounds for NPCs.
g) Figure out the clues and breadcrumbs that the PCs might find that allow them to find and interrupt the nefarious activities of NPC villains.
h) Reading and researching information online or at a library in order to enrich your setting.
i) Detailing setting at a high level through world building of religion, history, geography, politics, art, etc.
j) Reading published game or story material in order to either familiarize yourself with it or to incorporate lore from a preexisting setting.
k) Generating or collecting random tables in order to provide idea fodder for down time or unexpected events.
l) Writing, amending, or clarifying rules and rule sets in order to achieve some desired goal.
m) Amending or extending published adventures to get stronger story beats, fill in plot holes, and create paths if the players go in directions that the original author didn't anticipate, or to adapt the story to your particular PC's or setting.
n) Creating custom programs to autogenerate material that would be expensive to create by hand, such as random loot tables, random NPCs, etc. Or else learning how to utilize custom programs that others have created for that purpose.
In general, "Prep" in my experience takes 1-5 hours for each hour of intended play depending on the system, your ambitions in storytelling, how experienced you are with the system, and the level of professionalism you like in your notes (that is, how clear would they be if you gave them to someone else). Anyone that is spending less than that, probably isn't thinking about all their prep (running one shots in rules light systems still requires you to thoroughly familiarize yourself with the rules and setting) or else probably isn't running a very ambitious game.
As for running without prep, that either fails completely or else at some level you are using someone else's prep or your prior prep to get ready. For example, many extemporaneous GMs have scenarios that they have run many times in the past for different groups and so can run those scenarios with slight variation quite easily, they way that a public speaker can give a speech on short notice by relying on their existing material.
As for "running a game on the fly", all games are run on the fly because no amount of prep can ever fully prepare you for what players with real agency are going to do. You will always at some point be handling unexpected situations that aren't covered by the rules, or aren't covered by your notes. However, good prep prepares you to handle those situations well, so that you can easily extrapolate from your notes what might happen, or else be so familiar with the rules of the system that you can readily adapt some portion of it to the problem. A lot of prep time is actually created by recovering from the story going in unexpected directions or players proposing to do some perfectly reasonable thing that you have no rules for at all and now need a long term solution that is fair, balanced, and interesting.
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Ralif Redhammer
Legend
The number of adventure ideas that would come to me in the steps from getting off public transportation to my front door back when I was commuting was not inconsiderable. Something about being on autopilot for a couple minutes does wonders for thinking.
If brainstorming is prep, you might as well include engaging with potentially inspirational media with prep too.
Celebrim
Legend
Yes, absolutely. In fact, it was on my list under "h) Reading and researching information online or at a library in order to enrich your setting.", but I neglected to consider prep in terms of reading inspiring fiction or watching inspiring movies and stealing ideas.
For example, part of the Prep of my now long running Star Wars D6 Bounty Hunter game has included watching episodes of "Miami Vice", "The Rifleman", "Wanted Dead or Alive", and "Have Gun – Will Travel".
Reading the books in "Appendix N" counts as Prep for D&D. Likewise, most game systems will list inspirational media you should consume in order to prep yourself for running the game, precisely because it is in fact useful prep.
When I say that it can take up to 20 hours of Prep to run a 4 hour session depending on the system and your ambitions, many people I suppose are imagining nothing but grueling effort. And it can be that sometimes. Ask anyone who has published something to a professional standard. But that 20 hours of Prep might include 4 hours of brainstorming, 4 hours of consuming media for inspiration, 2 hours of making and 10 hours of writing. Ideally a lot of your prep is "lonely fun" that you enjoy doing as a GM. And probably you should focus your games and your prep on the things that you enjoy doing and can follow from the things that you do. If you don't enjoy making maps, don't run heavily site based games or outsource the map making to someone else. If you don't enjoy detailing NPCs, don't customize your NPCs from a rule perspective and outsource the personality of those characters by yanking them from movies and TV shows, filing off the names, and recreating them in your setting. And so forth.
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When I prep for a convention adventure (which is more prep than I do for home games unless I am running a pre-written module) I do it in 2 stages. I'm almost always running a "con campaign" so one extended scenario over multiple 4 hour slots. The broad design of what I am doing, from brainstorming the idea to laying out the key points to developing NPCs etc probably takes 8 hours. It might be more if I am learning a new system (especially if one were to count unrelated one shots in that system to learn the rules as "prep", which I don't). At the actual con, especially for the sessions after the first,I do additional prep in the form of making adjustments to my broad outline based on what happened in previous sessions. This usually takes about an hour per session but might be longer or shorter depending on the exact outcomes of previous play.
For my home campaigns (again not using a module) numbers are roughly the same although I have to do more extensive outlining and development every 6-8 sessions, rather than just the adjustment stuff. Note that I run on the fly a lot, including using random generators, so my prep is especially light.
If I am running a module, though, I find prep much more onerous. Most modern modules bury a lot of relevant information in walls of questionable prose and are extremely light on the kind of map notes, relationship diagrams and if/then flow charts I create for myself. It can be excruciating. WotC campaign modules are pretty bad but Pathfinder APs are the absolute worst in this regard. Newer modules are better, particularly OSR and OSR adjacent adventures.
For my home campaigns (again not using a module) numbers are roughly the same although I have to do more extensive outlining and development every 6-8 sessions, rather than just the adjustment stuff. Note that I run on the fly a lot, including using random generators, so my prep is especially light.
If I am running a module, though, I find prep much more onerous. Most modern modules bury a lot of relevant information in walls of questionable prose and are extremely light on the kind of map notes, relationship diagrams and if/then flow charts I create for myself. It can be excruciating. WotC campaign modules are pretty bad but Pathfinder APs are the absolute worst in this regard. Newer modules are better, particularly OSR and OSR adjacent adventures.
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not-so-newguy
I'm the Straw Man in your argument
This last part; it's the part that makes the game fun for me. Sometimes I have to remind myself that I don't need to cover all the answers. In fact, I don't want to start play thinking that i have every contingency prep'd. Some chaos is needed
