How I Learned To Stop Worrying About Game Prep

View attachment 86610​

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?

 

[Celebrim]

Sounds like you are misreading my intent with the emoji. That's fine. Mistakes happen.

Ok, I'll assume I was misreading your intent. However, even without the emoji your statement reads: "I suppose, but that also makes the term preparation fairly meaningless, if not redundant with being a basic human."

What did you mean by that if not throwing down a rhetorical gauntlet concerning a point you wished to debate?

That was, however, no drive-by-attack.

It was short. It was an attack that made no attempt to justify its position through explanation. I still think the term is applicable. I concede you may not have meant it as such, and may not have intended it as such, but I don't know how else to describe it.

It was an off remark. Nothing stopped you from politely asking for clarification before assuming the worst and going on the attack and insulting. [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION], there is a difference between questioning someone's ideas and denigrating them. And there is also a difference between denigrating a person's ideas and insulting them. You engaged in the latter. And I will drop this matter now.

I ask you to review the statements I made and find the insult. I believe my response was certainly no more strongly worded than the original terms of the debate you initiated. I believe my response was measured and considered. I believe at no time did I insult you or engage in any ad hominem attack. I do not understand how you feel insulted, or why you feel I was not calm. I believe you are totally mischaracterizing my posts. While it is certainly true I verbally attacked right back, the attack was clearly made against your strongly worded thesis, namely "[your use of the term perperation] makes the term preparation fairly meaningless, if not redundant with being a basic human" that you advanced and was not made against you.

This exaggerated claim that I am insulting you and that I am not calm is simply, in my opinion, at best well-poisoning a discussion, and if not an open attempt to weaponize the admins against a position you don't like. If you really feel insulted, even re-reading my posts several times, I do not understand how unless you consider my disagreement insulting, and if you do consider disagreement itself insulting and you want to hold to a standard like "politely asking for clarification before assuming the worst and going on the attack" why did you write, "that also makes the term preparation fairly meaningless, if not redundant with being a basic human." and nothing else to clarify your intent with?

I protest that my posts have been filled with question marks, and yours have been rather lacking in them.

And if you believe I'm mischaracterizing your intent, well and good. Please explain your intent now and why you drew those conclusions, so that I can try to understand whatever it is that seems so reasonable and obvious to you, but which I'm baffled by.

While we are on the subject of clarity, please avoid introducing compound terms without explaining what you mean by it - if only because it is leaving me confused as to your intent. I still do not know what you mean by the term "basic human" or "basic human being", and both are so rare that searching for them returns this conversation fairly high up in the search results. I don't think either term is clarifying, nor do I think you know how such terms may be understood.

I likewise do not understand what you mean by "off remark". Do you mean it was an "off the cuff remark", meaning that you gave it little thought when you made it, or do you mean that it was a remark that came off wrong, meaning that you are acknowledging your intent was not clear, or that the remark has metaphorically spoiled, or do you mean something else entirely?

Anyway, to return to the subject at hand, your point seems to be that something only is game preparation if it has the intent of being game preparation, and that if I study something without the intent to use it in a game, but later use it in a game, I shouldn't count it as game preparation.

And I still disagree. I do so on several grounds:

1) Intent is a very hard thing to judge, and as much as possible I prefer to judge things without needing to judge their intent. This is because intent is hard to judge without knowing a person's mind, and because people's minds can be complicated. While there are many things that I study for pleasure and would study for pleasure regardless, it is nonetheless true that ever since I became a GM, everything I study is evaluated for its usability in a game and a great many things that I now study for pleasure began from the need to apply them to my game world with the intent of improving my game. The examples I offered earlier weren't drawn completely at random, but from my own experience. It is a mischievous but somewhat true statement by me to say, "Everything I know I learned from Dungeons & Dragons." I was a far better student at most things because I could apply it to my gaming than I ever was because it could further my scholastic achievement. The former I cared rather greatly about, and the later I neglected until much later in life than I should have.

2) Your definition that includes intent is inferior to mine because it may and probably does confuse a novice GM about the nature of running a game "without preparation". In my opinion, the most important idea to communicate to a novice GM is that to improvise successfully they must "prepare to improvise". Imagine the situation where I ran the session in a pseudo-Roman bathhouse drawn from my memories of studying Roman baths for like 16 hours - videos, articles, books, etc. By the definition you just advanced, the only part of this that was actual preparation was the quick sketch I made in my head when I discovered or decided that at that moment a game in a Roman bathhouse would be fun. Using your definition, a novice GM might believe that that could similarly improvise a similar game in mere moments, and perhaps they could. But if they could, it wouldn't be because you can actually improvise a game in mere moments with no preparation, but because they had done the heavy lifting to prepare to improvise. By my definition, the studying of the Roman Baths retroactively becomes game preparation as soon as I rely on that knowledge to play a game, regardless of my original intent, just as a lifetime of intently reading DC comics and obsessing over the characters and plotlines serves as preparation to run an RPG in the DC universe even if it was done without that intent. From my vantage, a gaming definition needs to have practical value and needs to clarify. I would not want to introduce a definition that might confuse a novice GM, and in my opinion the definition that includes intent fails to explain to a novice GM why their "low preparation" DC supers roleplaying game is failing, when that of a GM that has spent a lifetime intently reading DC comics is not. As a practical matter, all that comic book reading was preparation, regardless of intent.

3) And I would also note that the definition of preparation that I'm offering is in agreement with that of the original essay, which I suppose - because I rather admire it and consider it important - I ought to find the time to review and explain why I like it so much. At the very least, this would only be fair to the writer, considering how critical I've been of some of his other essays I disagreed with.

 

[pemerton]

I'd say, creating a campaign that is as compelling as the BSG reboot would be a pretty good achievement!

I always like to take the "worst" or cheesiest examples of a literary, cinematic or TV genre as my model, not the best. IME they tend to be far more appropriate models for an RPG campaign. And I can see how they were done and hope to do better. I'm not going to recreate Milius' Conan the Barbarian, but I can do something like Sbardellati 's Deathstalker - maybe even improve on it!

I think it's fairly unrealistic for most RPGers to expect that the fictions they create will be as objectively compelling as professionally written and produced TV or cinema - even fairly ordinary TV or cinema.

I see RPGing the same as I see playing my guitar - it's not fun or compelling because it's objectively great; it's fun because I'm the one who's creating and enjoying it. That union of "artist" and audience is absolutely key.

I no more need to prep games beforehand than I need to prepare what I might need to say in a conversation with friends down the pub. It turns out I'm capable of holding a conversation with my friends without prep, whether it's a game or not.

<snip>

So anyone telling you that an unprepped game can't be a good game is describing their own limitations. There's no correlation between prep and quality or prep and fun or prep and entertainment.

Without wanting to put words in your mouth, to me this seems a related point. A conversation between me and my friends can be great for us not because it is great qua conversation - we're not necessarily leading lights of the salon set - but because it is our conversation.

I remember on one of these threads a while ago the idea of authenticity came up. This seems to be an aspect of that.

The one correlation that does exist is between prep and control. People write down words to control what is said, and to limit the range of what can be said. My experience of games is the same. The more prep a game has, the worse it gets for any player with any interest in having a say in it.

Control of the sort you describe seems to be opposed to the authenticity of creating something onself, in the moment, together with friends. Whatever sort of quality of experience it's going to produce, it seems different from those basic, shared creative pleasures I get out of RPGing. Which (thankfully) don't depend on the fiction itself being of terribly high quality.

 

[Aldarc]

1) Intent is a very hard thing to judge, and as much as possible I prefer to judge things without needing to judge their intent. This is because intent is hard to judge without knowing a person's mind, and because people's minds can be complicated. While there are many things that I study for pleasure and would study for pleasure regardless, it is nonetheless true that ever since I became a GM, everything I study is evaluated for its usability in a game and a great many things that I now study for pleasure began from the need to apply them to my game world with the intent of improving my game. The examples I offered earlier weren't drawn completely at random, but from my own experience. It is a mischievous but somewhat true statement by me to say, "Everything I know I learned from Dungeons & Dragons." I was a far better student at most things because I could apply it to my gaming than I ever was because it could further my scholastic achievement. The former I cared rather greatly about, and the later I neglected until much later in life than I should have.

Intent may be a difficult thing to judge, but intent is nevertheless assumed in vocabulary and in our common parlance. Using your earlier example, if one were to ask a student "Did you prepare for the exam?" that question implies intent or active preparation and not unintended preparation done outside of the contexts of the exam. If a new GM were asking me, "How do you prepare for GMing sessions and campaigns?" then the weight of the question leans heavily on active preparation. Telling them that they can pull from what they know doesn't require additional active preparation. I do think that a GM is required to be open to improvization, as no plan survives first contact with the players, but I believe that improv is a separate skill because I have seen GMs who can prepare well but not improv well, and vice versa.

In my opinion, the most important idea to communicate to a novice GM is that to improvise successfully they must "prepare to improvise". Imagine the situation where I ran the session in a pseudo-Roman bathhouse drawn from my memories of studying Roman baths for like 16 hours - videos, articles, books, etc. By the definition you just advanced, the only part of this that was actual preparation was the quick sketch I made in my head when I discovered or decided that at that moment a game in a Roman bathhouse would be fun.

Yes, I only consider your actual preparation the point where you intended to incorporate a Roman-style bath house into your game. However, you required less prep work because you drew on what you knew and "improvized" accordingly. I don't regard this prior helpful knowledge as retroactive game prep work.

Using your definition, a novice GM might believe that that could similarly improvise a similar game in mere moments, and perhaps they could. But if they could, it wouldn't be because you can actually improvise a game in mere moments with no preparation, but because they had done the heavy lifting to prepare to improvise. By my definition, the studying of the Roman Baths retroactively becomes game preparation as soon as I rely on that knowledge to play a game, regardless of my original intent, just as a lifetime of intently reading DC comics and obsessing over the characters and plotlines serves as preparation to run an RPG in the DC universe even if it was done without that intent. From my vantage, a gaming definition needs to have practical value and needs to clarify. I would not want to introduce a definition that might confuse a novice GM, and in my opinion the definition that includes intent fails to explain to a novice GM why their "low preparation" DC supers roleplaying game is failing, when that of a GM that has spent a lifetime intently reading DC comics is not. As a practical matter, all that comic book reading was preparation, regardless of intent.

Again, I regard improvization as a separate skill entirely that a GM should learn, and improvization takes on many forms in most campaigns. I do not regard improvization as active preparation work, and a bit of what you describe in terms of learning for the sake of the campaign, such as in your sailing campaign, comes across as simply "doing your homework." So let's be clear about you "using [my] definition" of game preparation. No, I have not presumed "that [a novice GM] could similarly improvize a similar game in mere moments," because I don't presume that a novice GM is attempting to do so.

I think that my definition of game prep as requiring intent succeeds for precisely what you write here, which I have highlighted in bold. Intent does explain the difference. Assuming an equal degree of relative preparation work, there is a difference in (a) prior knowledge that helps alleviate preparation work, and (b) the respective experience of the two GMs at GMing. (In regards to point B, I would note that you indicate that the former is a novice at GMing but the latter is not indicated as such.) I would expect that a novice GM who is less familiar with the source material should engage in more active preparation for their supers campaign if they lacked sufficient grounding in that prior knowledge. I expect and presume intent to prepare. I don't necessarily presume that the latter GM had done more preparation work, nor would I say that they did. I would say that the second GM has a greater reservoir of prior knowledge that they can draw on to make preparation easier or quicker. I also think that advising GMs to "draw on what you know" for a supers campaign is not inherently preparation, as it is advice meant to alleviate preparation work. So, again, I would argue that alleviating prep by drawing on what you know is the same as game prep. As you say, "a gaming definition needs to have practical value and needs to clarify," and I don't see how obfuscating the term "game preparation" to encapsulate a large variety of separate issues and terms succeeds in that goal. I would want a novice GM to have a realistic expectation as to what is required in running a game. But I think there is a difference between running a game and preparing for a game, whether that is a one-shot, a session, or a campaign. And I think that it is more helpful IME for a novice GM to have clear terms that break down the issues, terms, and expectations into clear bites.

 

[Morrus]

@Celebrim and [MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION], I asked you to cut it out. This is the second (and last time). If a discussion about game prep makes you angry, then go talk about something else.

 

[Aldarc]

My apologies. I will edit my post to focus more on content.

 

[Celebrim]

Throwing down a rhetorical gauntlet? It was an offhand remark of disagreement.

If you disagree, then you are saying that the person you disagree with is wrong. I don't see how you can understand disagreement to mean anything else.

The dictionary defines the following as synonyms " take issue with, challenge, contradict, oppose, be at variance with, be at odds with, not see eye to eye with, differ with, dissent from, be in dispute with, debate with, argue with, quarrel with, wrangle with, clash with, be at loggerheads with, cross swords with, lock horns, gainsay". I have absolutely no problem with you doing any of those things. You'll note just before this, someone else disagreed with me and was worried that I'd be upset with them attacking me. I answered, "No, by all means, attack way. I'm not offended by disagreement."

Don't pick a fight where there wasn't one. It was not an attack, though you seem hellbent on misconstruing it as such.

There was strong disagreement. I treated it as strong disagreement, and responded that I strongly disagreed with your disagreement. That's it. I am not misconstruing that you disagreed. If you are triggered by the word 'attack', then fine, let's use the word disagreement so that there will not be any misunderstanding of what I mean by it.

I take issue with your insinuation that my own person most somehow be at fault for even disagreeing with you.

What insinuation? The only fault I find with you is your initial statement was not based on anything I actually had said, and you immediately began this whole thing about how insulting you found my posts.

It is ridiculous to read every post disagreeing with you as an attack or a declaration of war. Calm down.

Then assume that I read every post disagreeing with me as mere disagreement, and therefore an invitation to engage in a debate on the subject. I don't see what "declaration of wars" have to do with it.

And yet you apparently consider polite disagreement an attack and throwing down the rhetorical gauntlet. I did not think that my comment that you quote here was malign. It was polite disagreement of your definition of "game preparation." Nothing more.

You are willing to charitably describe your disagreement as polite, and yet you do not regard my own disagreement as equally polite. I don't see how you come to that conclusion. I didn't respond to you impolitely, and certainly no less impolitely than your statement. Moreover, your politeness or lack of politeness had nothing to do with my response. I'd just answered disagreement from another poster just before your own. Do you think I was impolite then? If you are of the opinion that I'm lacking in calm or that I overreact to disagreement, what do you think made for the difference in how I responded to you versus how I responded to someone else?

What doesn't become game prep? Now that you know how to make pasta, your experience as a pasta chef five years ago suddenly becomes game prep if it happens to apply to the game world.

I've answered this question at length already, and yes, if your experience as a pasta chef becomes relevant to how you run a game, then that time spent studying pasta becomes important game preparation. I don't know, maybe in your game world, "Pastamancery" is an important form of magic, and pasta preparation becomes something that is important to the in game fiction. Naturally, pasta chefs have a huge advantage running a game in that game world.

It is clear that my intent was entirely clear nor did I give it much initial weight, as I did not expect your disproportionately hostile response to my comment. Again, there was no gauntlet throwing. I expected that my comment would either be ignored in the shuffle of discussion or invite further discussion about differences in approaches to tabletop games.

Your intent may be clear to you, but it was not clear to me. All I had to go on was that you disagreed axiomatically with my definition.

Intent may be a difficult thing to judge, but intent is nevertheless assumed in vocabulary and in our common parlance.

I disagree. Intent is always almost impossible to determine. Why someone is saying something is the most important and most difficult to discern aspect of any statement. It's one of the reasons that teaching a computer natural language parsing is so incredibly difficult. Context and intent are everything. Natural language does not inherently disclose context, and most especially the intention.

Using your earlier example, if one were to ask a student "Did you prepare for the exam?" that question implies intent or active preparation and not unintended preparation done outside of the contexts of the exam.

I don't agree. It only implies that the student had at some prior point done the preparation for the exam. For example, if the class was English Lit, and the test was on Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn", and that prior to taking the class the student - because he considered the story to be one of his favorites, had read the story 4 times - and upon learning that they would read the story in class this sesmester, the student reread it again to once again familiarize himself with the story and to review it from a more mature perspective, then the student would be completely in his rights to answer "Yes." to that question. That the student and the teacher now have a different mental model of what "Yes" means is very relevant to running RPGs, because GMs have to be very aware when giving descriptions of the different mental pictures the same description may create, but for the purpose of this discussion we are only trying to define preparation - not argue about how to create a shared mental space.

If a new GM were asking me, "How do you prepare for GMing sessions and campaigns?" then the weight of the question leans heavily on active preparation.

There is nothing inactive about unintentional preparation. Unintentional doesn't imply inactive. But even passive preparation is still preparation. You've added now a new qualifier limiting how you define preparation. Yet, I would argue your qualifiers do not aid understanding, but reduce it. My answer to, "How do you prepare for GMing sessions and campaigns?", and the answer provided by the original essay, includes both active and passive, and intentional and unintentional preparation - and I believe that this is correct and gives the greatest understanding.

Telling them that they can pull from what they know doesn't require additional active preparation. I do think that a GM is required to be open to improvization, as no plan survives first contact with the players, but I believe that improv is a separate skill because I have seen GMs who can prepare well but not improv well, and vice versa.

Telling them that they can pull form what they know implies that they actually know it. So if they do not know it, giving them a prerequisite to running a campaign is that they first learn those things that they don't know is in fact extremely good advice.

Wording like this does not foster a productive discussion in good faith, especially as this sort of thinking does produce OneTrueWayism...

I don't understand how you draw that conclusion. If we are disagreeing over something, clearly we both believe that one of us is more right than the other. People don't disagree over wholly subjective matters. Exactly how you go from, "Your definition that includes intent is inferior to mine..." to me not arguing in good faith, I have no idea. But I am still seeing no evidence of your assertion that I insulted you.

[Yes, I only consider your actual preparation the point where you intended to incorporate a Roman-style bath house into your game. However, you required less prep work because you drew on what you knew and "improvized" accordingly. I don't regard this prior helpful knowledge as retroactive game prep work.

I believe it is extremely helpful to tell a novice DM that they, if they wish to successfully run an RPG, must do more than just prepare for what they expect to happen in a session, and instead must also acquire system and genera mastery. If they already have such mastery, it will decrease the amount of preparation the must do because they will be prepared to improvise, but if they do not yet have this mastery they should strive to obtain it and this will increase the preparation work that they must put it.

Again, I regard improvization as a separate skill entirely that a GM should learn, and improvization takes on many forms in most campaigns. I do not regard improvization as active preparation work, and a bit of what you describe in terms of learning for the sake of the campaign, such as in your sailing campaign, comes across as simply "doing your homework."

So let's agree to call "doing your homework" part of preparation. If we can't agree that "doing your homework" is preparation, then we are going to have to agree to disagree, because my main point could be understood as, "doing your homework is preparation". I consider that trivially obvious. And in any event, I'm getting really tired of talking about how one ought to disagree, rather than talking about how one ought to prepare for a game. So can we start confining things to that?

So, again, I would argue that alleviating prep by drawing on what you know is the same as game prep.

Unless you meant to put a "not" there, then I have no idea any more what you are arguing, as I also agree that drawing on what you know is the same as game preparation because all that stuff you learned prepared you for the game you are running. Either that stuff has to already be there, or you have to actively work to put it there. The implication is, the more experienced you are, the less you have to prepare to run a successful session.

Fundamentally, game preparation is something I consider to be a very complex topic, potentially involving all sorts of different things.

 

[Aldarc]

As we have reached the wall-of-text that I originally sought to avoid as well as two admin warnings, it's clear that we are at an impasse as I still disagree and I don't see this matter being resolved anytime soon. It is as if we are speaking in two separate languages. So I will respectfully agree to disagree and bid you adieu in regards to this particular discussion, though I hope we can have productive discussions in other matters.

 

[Celebrim]

As we have reached the wall-of-text that I originally sought to avoid as well as two admin warnings, it's clear that we are at an impasse as I still disagree and I don't see this matter being resolved anytime soon. It is as if we are speaking in two separate languages. So I will respectfully agree to disagree and bid you adieu in regards to this particular discussion, though I hope we can have productive discussions in other matters.

Ok cool.

Please understand that what you think of as "wall of text", I understand as "being considerate to the persons in the discussion". I write a lot because I know how easy it is to misunderstand the purpose, intent, and meaning of short statements, and want to make every effort to explain myself fully and clearly.

 

[pemerton]

As a kid I read a lot of books about knights, castles, arms and armour, vikings, the crusades, etc. I also read fantasy books (Earthsea, JRRT, Alan Garner) and Marvel comics.

That reading helped me, and still helps me, to GM fantasy RPGs. My approach to long-term, party-based fantasy RPGing is heavily influenced by Claremont's X-Men - which is a long-term, party-based, science-fantasy comic with political/social sub-themes plus plenty of soap opera.

But none of that reading counts as GMing prep in any meaningful sense. I wasn't prepping for GMing. Rather, it's because I was interested in all that stuff independently of RPGing that I (i) got into RPGing, and (ii) turned out to be OK at GMing.

(I think the above is similar to what [MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION] has been saying.)

 

[Manbearcat]

As a kid I read a lot of books about knights, castles, arms and armour, vikings, the crusades, etc. I also read fantasy books (Earthsea, JRRT, Alan Garner) and Marvel comics.

That reading helped me, and still helps me, to GM fantasy RPGs. My approach to long-term, party-based fantasy RPGing is heavily influenced by Claremont's X-Men - which is a long-term, party-based, science-fantasy comic with political/social sub-themes plus plenty of soap opera.

But none of that reading counts as GMing prep in any meaningful sense. I wasn't prepping for GMing. Rather, it's because I was interested in all that stuff independently of RPGing that I (i) got into RPGing, and (ii) turned out to be OK at GMing.

(I think the above is similar to what [MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION] has been saying.)

I agree with this. I don't think its particularly useful to lump together the following bits of advice for MCing Apocalpyse World:

1) Watch A Boy and His Dog and Mad Max (etc) and read The Road.

2) Apocalypse World is first and foremost a disciplined, structured conversation. Everything you say and do as MC should (a) make Apocalypse World seem real, (b) make the PCs' lives exciting/dangerous, and (c) allow you to play to find out what happens.

3) Make sure you understand the moves structure specifically, the resolution mechanics generally, the pressure points, the advancement means, and how play snowballs as a result of all this stuff (and (2) above) coming together.


Each of these would likely generically qualify as "prep" (and they all facilitate GMing best practices and fidelity to principles) but if you did a Venn Diagram of some sort, they would be discrete enough to surely have a better label attached to each (at least if you're trying to optimize explanatory power/clarity for prospective MCs).