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Message: <blockquote data-quote="drakhe" data-source="post: 431081" data-attributes="member: 4930">Basicaly I think you should prepare. In my opinion there's only 2 kinds of DM's that can get away with not preparing. Either a DM with ages of expierience (who knows his world in en out wether it's published or self penned) or a Dm who's written his own world (but I think that's cheating: writing the world, developing it... is kind of preparing isn't it ;-) )Usualy I try to figure out what the group should be able to cover in a session and then prepare arround that, making shure I at least have leads and hooks in all directions should they decide to go off on a tangent. I for one definatly need preparation. Last session I dared myself to run with only a scribling of ideas on a notepad page. Luckily for me, my players were mildly surprised and very happy with the proceedings as I told them beforehand I had only a slip of paper with prepared notes. Myself, I was not happy. It's not that I don't mind making things up, but I should not need to do that for major plot-events or NPC's. It's going to bite you in the back later in the campaign. I also found that having to make things up all of the time (even with the help of a bunch of computer tools like etools, the old chargen, pcgen and a little program I wrote myself to handle certain skill tests and initiative) is just taking too much time and is not fun because of the stop-go mode your in (stop while I make up this bunch of NPC's which is a gypsy camp, OK go...) I mean, even with the best and fastest NPC generators it takes a couple of seconds to generate and another bunch of seconds to go thru the statblock and make sense of the NPC. Even published modules should be prepared, having to read a page of the module to make sense of a scene is just taking too much time of of playing!So, my advice in anycase is: prepare ! Know your NPC's and locations beforehand, work out handouts and maps beforehand and re-read whatever notes you have (either written yourself or from a published module) before you start playing!On the other hand, there are those few DM's who can run without preparation. My FR DM is one such beast. He doesn't use a screen, I've hardly ever seen him bring notes to the table and all his NPC's (including stats) live in his mind. But than again, he's been running games in FR for close to 20 years now...(guess running a RPG hobby shop helps the inspiration though)</blockquote>

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