How to find the "joy of prep" in PbtA games?

[BookTenTiger]

Hi everyone, I've been mulling over something lately and wanted to collect some thoughts.

I've really been enjoying running Ironsworn games for a small group of friends online, and I want to start running it offline as well. For those who don't know, Ironsworn is a game similar to Dungeon World, Apocalypse World, etc, all those Powered by the Apocalypse games. It's a "play to find out" game in which the adventure or even game world may change due to the rolls of the players.

What I love about running Ironsworn is that I get to be surprised by the plot! Friendly NPCs turn out to be villains in disguise. Simple journeys turn into harrowing encounters. Alliances are made with former foes.

Our current adventure started as a missing person, and has escalated into an entire town being kidnapped by wolves and brought to an ancient, ruined castle by a mysterious hunter trying to avenge his ancestor's death!

But...

I do miss the joy of prep. The folks I play online with are people I've played with for ten to twenty years. We all love to collaborate on the story during the game, and I try to honor that by not generating too many ideas between sessions.

I've got to admit, I miss making maps, writing down ideas, creating NPCs, new monsters, cool magic items. All that between-session-DM-work of D&D. Even though it's a time-sink, it's part of the hobby I do enjoy.

As I said above, I'm going to try to organize some in-person Ironsworn games with some folks I know who are new to TTRPGs. I think this would be a really good opportunity for me to do a little more prep than normal. But I'm struggling to figure out how much is the right amount.

When you are running a PbtA (or similar Play to Find Out) game, how do you prep in between sessions? Do you use Dungeon World style Fronts? Do you make maps or figure out campaign backstories?

How do you find the joy of prep in running a Play to Find Out game?

 

[Committed Hero]

At a minimum you can think about what will happen in the setting without the PCs acting. Even the earliest books have moves for fronts and their NPCs. In between sessions you can decide what important NPCs know about the PCs' activities and consider what they might do to address them.

 

[thefutilist]

I don’t play Apocalypse World as a Play To Find Out style game. So in my case I just prep. If you are playing that style then it does seem prep is against the improv spirit. If you really wanted a similar thing you could introduce old school style random encounter charts. That way you get the joy of creating the random encounters but they still have to be woven in to the friction so you still get the whole finding out thing.

 

[innerdude]

This is such a good question!

So, I found with Ironsworn that it was still okay to do some prep. I had no issue prepping maps, names of places/locales, NPC names, things to find (weapons, artifacts, etc.).

The thing I had to keep reminding myself was that I needed to keep some options / motivations / elements open to modification, as well as reminding myself that it may never get used, and that's okay.

My general philosophy around PbtA / Ironsworn prep is that it's generally okay to create "stuff" that's there in the game world. What I shouldn't create is where it is now or what it has already done or what it's about to do. Create the stuff, but keep the broader connections to the game world somewhat fluid.

 

[RenleyRenfield]

I run PBTA games every week now for many years. My prep its "What is the world up to?"

By that I mean, I think of what the goals of the main NPCs are, and how they might attempt to achieve those goals, an what assets they have to use. I make notes around such and then...

When it comes time to run the game, I set a scene with the player characters up to whatever is relevant at the moment. If they are between drama, then I seed the scene with open-ended questions which hint at their place in the overall world/plots. "Why is your character crushing a photo of someone in their hand over and over? Who is in the photo?" or "You are our looking for a charming date, and someone you know will be trouble starts to flirt with you, why do you return the flirtations anyway?" and so on....

Once the player characters are doing whatever it is they want to, I let them see the NPCs of the world doing whatever it is they are up to (or the ripple effects of such actions). Just the starting events right?

Then I let the PCs go poke around, shove their nose it, or ignore as they wish. The game just snowballs from there.

Every so often, if they ignore a plot the NPCs are doing which I feel will be relevant to the PCs, I describe a vignette of something going on "off camera". Or I let a NPC close to the player characters talk about how their life has been impacted by the NPCs plots.

...

TL/DR
I let my NPCs talk and act and make lots of NPCs for the PCs to also talk with, trusted, loved, hated, and otherwise. The more the players talk to people in the world, the easier it is for me to prep what the world is doing and set up drama/plots.

 

[overgeeked]

The level of prep depends on the PBTA game. In Monster of the Week you have more leeway to prep things. The monster, the mystery, the locations, etc. Maybe look at that game and port in some elements.

 

[Blue]

1. Prep about the world. Things happening if the players don't interact with them. Blades in the Dark is an outgrowth of PbtA, and they have clocks going for things that will happen if the players don't act.

2. Prep other things - as long as you are 100% on board with tossing it or modifying them. If your prep is "what if?" so you can better handle different routes, and better improv what emerges during play, that's great. You just need to be okay that it could be wasted time, invalidated by play. You can't get attached, and need to be willing to kill your darlings. (I do this even in prep-forward games like D&D, calling it Schrodinger's Plots. Nothing is true until it hits the table.)

3. Run another game. A game can't be all things to all people. If you accept that not all games will scratch your "I want to prep" itch, then when you really want to prep, find a game that lets you do it. This could be in addition to Ironsworn, another regular game, or maybe something you run when you're down players, or most extreme wrap up Ironsworn if it's not providing you the enjoyment you want - everyone at the table deserves to derive pleasure from their role, it's a shared hobby.

 

[Joshua Randall]

PbtA absolutely has prep. Fronts and threats. AW the book talks about this extensively.

 

[zakael19]

DW and the games from it also have prep! It's just prepping "cool things to say" and ideas of potential dangers/complications/consequences/etc. For Stonetop if I know the players are going on an expedition (and you should very much be encouraging goal declarations between sessions if there's not clear next steps from session end), I'll prep stuff that might come up along the way. If there's a site at the end (dungeon), i'll sketch out some ideas so I can describe things better. If there's custom enemies, or ones in the setting book, prep those too so you have them handy! You can even prep some leading questions to ask, I like to do some "icebreaker" stuff to get us back in character that either reflect on events of last session (hey Fox, what went through your head when that crinwin sprang at your throat?), or deepen the world/get us ready for the upcoming one (So Blessed, what would you just love to find in the forest that would be perfect for spring rites?)

It winds up being a sheet or so of paper, and a couple of map sketches so I can orient us spatially as required. Half the time just writing it out means things flow naturally in my head without consulting the notes, but they're there as needed - and I can stay faithful to them if I said a threat/dire portent/impending doom is next and I need to make some hard moves.

 

[Sparkle_cz]

I run PbtA games with heavy prep and it works fine. The only difference from traditional games prep is that the elements you prepare should be more "floating in time and space", because ideally you introduce them to the game as a result of a player's roll from a move. For example, in a traditional game prep, you would prepare an elaborate magical trap in the corridor between room 3 and room 4, while in a PbtA game, you prepare this trap as "being somewhere in this dungeon" and then, after the player rolls a move with a result that says "a new hazard emerged", the trap presents itself right there.
But still you can prepare this cool and elaborate trap, also cool and elaborate NPCs and events and political machinations.