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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7721060" data-attributes="member: 4937">So, we seem to have some argument going on over terms.I would consider all the time a GM spends thinking about the game outside of the game to be 'prep', including brainstorming, research, planning, note taking, reading rules or modules or other resources relevant to the game, and generating documents (maps, encounter notes, randomizing tables, background lore, stat blocks, etc.).  Anything the GM does that increase their ability to respond to events in game session is 'prep'.   Some GMs spend a lot of time thinking and relatively little time taking notes and generating documents, and basically store everything 'in their head'.  Other GMs rigorously document all their ideas.  But it's all preparation even if you aren't spending most of the time generating documents.  If you are running a supers game - and the OP correctly calls this out - all the time you spend reading comic books and immersing yourself in the lore of the genre is preparation to run the game.  If you are running a D&D game, all the time you spend reading modules and prepublished adventures is preparation, if you are in fact taking ideas from that time spent studying and using them in your games.  So to give some scale to what I would consider typical levels of preparation.High Prep: 10 or more hours of prep per session runLow Prep: 5 or less hours of prep per session runNo Prep: 1 or fewer hours of prep per session runIn general, I find that for a given GM, there is a linear improvement in their game related to the investment in time that they put into it.  That isn't to say that there aren't exceptions - it is possible to prep badly, and in a way that is actually less than useful, and we could talk about that - but in general good preparation is always good in the way that good preparation for any demanding task (giving a speech, writing a book, doing a business presentation, building a building, painting a painting, playing a sport, etc.) is always a good thing.   Preparation time doesn't have to be smoothly spread out over the course of the campaign.   If you are going to sandbox with the players having a very free hand to set goals, you might up front typically invest 200+ hours in preparation inventing, investing in, and describing the setting to yourself, and then just 2-3 hours per session collecting some ideas based on what you think might happen during the next session.  If your game goes say 24 sessions, that was 'high prep', even if each week of the game you only spent a few hours getting things ready.  That's why you can meet GMs that have spent literally a decade investing in some homebrew setting, that can 'improvise' an adventure on the fly that is seemingly rich in detail, NPCs, and even philosophical depth.   They've reached the point that whole portions of that world are alive in their heads.  There is a great story about MAR Barker where a player off-handedly asked what people in a particular city typically ate for breakfast, and MAR Barker rattled off without thought that they ate cottage cheese spiced with cinnamon and the player realized that MAR Barker was not just improvising this - he'd already spent time thinking what the local cuisine was like based on the culture and availability of food stuffs.  The conclusion was that there was so much in his head that wasn't written down, that only he could truly run Tekumal as it was intended. In my opinion, I don't think 'no prep' works in the long run, and 'low prep' only works if you are offloading a good portion of the mental work to some other GM who has done the prep for you.  That said, the more mechanically simple the system, the easier it is to prepare.  And some sorts of games - traditional mega-dungeons for example - can achieve very high play to preparation ratios because it takes so little to create a mega-dungeon if you free yourself from economics, ecology, and other unnecessary 'realisms'.  Likewise, you can get really good play to preparation ratios by going completely the other direction as well, and playing 'all the world is a stage', preparing only NPCs and motives and going high melodrama.  This is typically marked by games were stereotypically, all combats occur 'on the street' or 'outside' and the world has no tangible or important physicality to it, as if the whole game was played on a single stage and the GM just changed the drapes and the props.</blockquote>

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