One of the things that eternally plagues game masters is the subject of game prep. How do we find that balance between having more material than we will ever need, and having a session come to a stop because there wasn't enough prep done? This is something, I think that most game masters deal with regardless of how long of a time they have been sitting in the game master's chair. Really, as long as a game entertains everyone at the table, you've done the right amount of prep. However, the question will always remain.
I've been gaming since 1979, and by about 1980 or so I started GMing more or less full time. In the "old days" the answer to "How much do I prep?" was answered by the very robust publishing schedule of most role-playing game publisher. For example, I played a lot of the Marvel Super-Heroes role-playing game from TSR in college, and the years afterwards. I didn't read as many Marvel comics as I did (do!) read DC comics, so I was always at a disadvantage with the Marvel universe because of that. Because of the fact that TSR published so much material for the game between adventures and roster books, they managed to fill in a lot of the blanks for me with their official material. Many of the TSR published settings for AD&D around that same period gave you a lot of material to work with, regardless of whether you played in the Forgotten Realms or Al-Quadim or the Planescape settings, you had a lot of your prepwork done for you.
Publishers like White Wolf took this tact as well, sometimes giving you more material than you might ever even need as a GM.
Unfortunately, while we are in a different sort of golden age of riches as gamers, the day of the overabundance of pre-made material is in the past. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it sometimes requires adaptation from those of us who have been gaming for a longer time. I like a low prep approach to gaming as a GM, since I'm not 11 years old anymore, I don't have the time to spend on game prep that I once did (nor do I really have the desire, either). Sometimes my preferences for low prep games interferes with my running of older games at times, the techniques that work for newer games don't always work in older games.
This is why I was attracted to a system like Fate from Evil Hat Productions. I've played and run Fate games since Spirit of the Century debuted years ago, and the approach of the game has been becoming my default approach for a few years now. The first rule of game mastering is that no idea that you have (regardless of the amount of prep that you put into a game session) will survive its encounter with the players. They will zig when the story zags. But the nice thing about the system is that when this happens all that you need to do is come up with a couple of aspects, a skill or two (approaches if you use Fate Accelerated like I do) and roll with it. Games like the many, many variants of the Basic Roleplaying Game or the open content of Mongoose Publishing's fantasy RPG Legend (or their version of the Runequest rules from which Legend was derived) make that easy too. Come up with a couple of skills on the fly, give them percentages and worry about filling in the spaces later.
With our ongoing Marvel Super-Heroes game I find myself taking NPCs and working them into something close enough to work with. Our campaign is loosely based in the Marvel Universe, which works mostly because the players don't have a super detailed level of knowledge about the world, so that gives me plenty of wiggle room. Besides, the longer the campaign goes on, the less it has to do with the Marvel Universe proper anyway.
So, how do you balance these things out when you want to be a low prep sort of GM? There's a few guidelines that come from how I run a game:
- Know your system. This is probably the most important one. You hear a lot of people talk about "internalizing" a game system. What this means, for me, is that you have developed a high degree of system mastery in your chosen game system. One of the reasons that I like to use the Marvel Super-Heroes RPG is because I have run it long enough that I know the system really well, and can run it without having to flip through books trying to find something. I'll have a few pages of notes, NPCs written out if the game is complex enough to need them in advance, and then everything else during our sessions have me make situational rulings. I will use the game's universal table to resolve things, and come up with similar resolution ideas on the fly. But to do this, you have to know the system.
- Know your genre. This is almost as important as knowing the system that you're running. I've read comics for longer than I've played role-playing games. I have enough comic plots nearly memorized to be able to repurpose them for campaigns for years. If I don't, I can read a trade collection before a session and use the ideas in our game. Most GMs have read enough fantasy novels, or seen enough fantasy movies, to be able to do the same things. The trick is to find the things that the players don't know, so they won't think that you're just repurposing someone else's story.
- Be able to be flexible about things. One of the basic skills of a GM is that you need to be able to learn how to spin things out on the fly. If you can't be flexible as a GM, if you can't make things up on the spot as a reaction to what the players are doing, you are going to have a hard time being a low prep GM.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, but they are a good starting point. Not everyone is going to want to be a low prep GM, but there will be those times when it will be needed and you might want to know what to do.
I have a friend who is always amazed when I run an evening's game with just some notes in my gaming Moleskine and a copy of the Fate Accelerated rules. Sometimes I'll have a brief idea of what I want to use for the setting, and other times I'll see what bits and pieces the players give up, that excites them.
Recently, on Free RPG Day, I ran a three hour session of Fate Accelerated for eight people (only about half of whom I actually knew). The idea was that the whole game would be generated on the spot, and play would roll out of what the players and I created. Fate's game creation rules are helpful for this, because they quantify a way to make up a setting at the table. I started with some prompts for the game. I wrote up a set of basic genre cues on index cards which said things like "A Space Ship Adventure…but…" The players filled in the "but…" with "all the characters are robots." We were off. For the next few minutes we outlined the details of the setting: everything took place on a sentient AI-driven biomechanical space ship, except the ship's AI was getting senile and things were slowly starting to malfunction. While the players made up their characters I put together a few other details: the ship was on a ten year exploratory tour, beaming back information to a central command that would be used later for voyages with ships that were occupied with people. The ship itself was built with planned obsolescence in mind, and the "falling apart" was planned from the beginning. Within about half an hour we were ready to go, and we played for another two and a half hours, until we got to a stopping point. The game was still left open-ended, so that if we had all so desired we could have spun it into an ongoing game.
This shows the basic concepts of low prep play in action. If this is something that you want to give a try, you now know where to start. The genre of the game, the system that you use all figure into how you do this. Now you know.
What sort of prep do you do as a GM?
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