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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7721120" data-attributes="member: 4937">No, go ahead and attack.  I won't mind.  Honestly, when you open up with a disclaimer like that, it's the disclaimer that is the most offensive part of the post.  None of the rest would bother me at all.Potentially.  If you come up with concrete ideas that you implement in a game session, then yes, that's definitely preparation.  I'm not exactly sure what "screw my players" over means in this context, but if it is things like figuring out how to make a skirmish tactically interesting, figuring out how the BBEG would respond to learning of the players activity, figuring out how the notary devil is going to work the contract he tempts the player with, brainstorming a dastardly trap and so forth, and then you actually do that thing (or decide, no that's a bad idea, I'll do this instead) - then yes you preparing for the game.  I mean, literally, you are.None of those count until you actually run one of those campaigns, at which point all the pondering you did would count as preparation for the campaign.Only if you run Savage Worlds or steal ideas from the podcasts to use in something you do run.  I don't think this is nearly as hard as you are making it.  Are you literally thinking about a game you are running, or are you thinking about something that eventually makes it into a game you run?   Then it's either preparation or became preparation the moment it became applicable to your game.So, for example, the martial arts system I created for Battletech when I was 17 doesn't count as preparation for anything despite the fact I wrote like a dozen pages detailing close combat in Battletech.  It never saw any use in anything, nor did any of that brainstorming, nor did the system I created for abstracting the abilities of a Mech for use in a grand operational level Battletech game.But, when I spent some time writing down notes for what sort of things could be considered 'heretical' in a cosmopolitan polytheistic society did literally become preparation for the game I'm currently running when it became part of the inspiration for my current campaign.   I have actually made use of the notes I wrote down in this game.  The fact that I made them years before I even knew I would be running a game or incorporating them in a game doesn't mean that they weren't part of the preparation for the game, because they became part of the lore and backstory of the world that is driving the story's conflict.Likewise, when I watched a video about the construction of Roman baths, and then did some reading and research about Roman baths and their different layouts and how they worked and how they were a manifestation of their societies mores and a shaper of them, even though at the time I didn't think I was doing preparation for a game and thought I was just indulging my love of historical minutia, at the moment six months or so later that I needed to improvise a scene and decided that a bathhouse would be an appropriate and cool mini-dungeon, that research quite literally became preparation for the session I ran that night.  I had a map in my head instantly, knew what sort of things could be found inside, and very quickly stocked the map mentally with the sort of innocent bystanders and evil minions of the BBEG that might be within.   There is nothing abstract about my argument at all.   If your time thinking, researching, and planning actually enables you to run a session, then it is preparation.</blockquote>

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