D&D General Prep is Not Play. . . Or is it?

[Umbran]

Looking back of the responses, I think some posters interpreted my claim as "prep is the same as playing an RPG" (a claim I never made), but when what I mean is that it feels playful and fun and an exercise of the imagination.

I see the point. And maybe I'm going to be a bit picky here, but i think it is in line with your later comment about understanding things...

I don't know that prep has ever seemed "playful" or "fun" to me. When I've done a good job, the feeling is best described as satisfying, and when I am not too pressed for time, it is usually enjoyable. When I am very pressed for time, it becomes work, and less enjoyable, mostly because I don't have the freedom to really sink into the activity.

And I say this while I am generally in the midst of prepping up a new campaign, and specifically in the midst of prepping up a one-shot for a house-con this coming weekend.

I think considering exactly what words we use to describe things can be helpful. I'll use another hobby as an example: My wife does a lot of fiber arts - she preps fiber, spins yarn, and weaves, crochets, knits, and does needlepoint. And she describes different activities in the overall hobby with different words: Blending fiber before spinning is playful. Prepping up the loom is like a complicated puzzle. The act of weaving is meditative, for her, and so on.

For some others it seems that thinking about anything is overthinking it

Yeah, not that. I'm fine with prepping, as a general concept. I just have enough demands on my time that I can't really engage in it for its own sake.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

Resurrecting this thread because I have been thinking about DM prep and the varying attitudes about it regarding the amount of time it takes and how onerous it might be.

Looking back at my original post, I have made so many pieces of terrain of various sizes and degree of detail and literally painted over 500 minis since I first posted it and enjoyed every minute of it.

I also continue to find session prep and building monsters and writing up magical items (and even creating my own homebrew ruleset) a whole lot fun and a form of play. I’ve prepped probably 50 sessions of D&D since then.

One of the most recent pieces of scatter terrain I’ve built.

View attachment 407989

Looking back of the responses, I think some posters interpreted my claim as "prep is the same as playing an RPG" (a claim I never made), but when what I mean is that it feels playful and fun and an exercise of the imagination. For some others it seems that thinking about anything is overthinking it, but it is our understanding of things that often help us engage with them in a way that make them more productive or pleasurable or both.

I try to stay “in the game” and terrain, drawing, mini collecting helps curb the urge to play when I cannot.

Today I found images for character representation…and have a bunch of terrain to dry brush…

 

[el-remmen]

Prep is play for the kind of GM that likes prep.

Certainly. But I guess the question that jumps to mind is how might approaching prep as a form of play help those DMs who do find it onerous?

(Another question being, if some folks find it so onerous , why do they do it?)

But prep.is also mostly unnecessary.

Again, sure. But it is more unnecessary for some GMs (or systems) than others. I know personally, while I feel comfortable improvising my D&D sessions, i like having prep to fall back on and ideally all my prep builds on previous prep.

 

[SlyFlourish]

I have so many thoughts about this idea. I think it's dead on that there are actually several hobbies bound up in TTRPG prep and play. Miniature collection. Terrain construction and painting. Drawing. Mapping. And so on. All of it can be great.

One of my favorite bits of prep-play is just thinking about my game. I put myself to sleep tonight almost every night thinking about what's happening in the next game I'm going to run. Where are the characters? What do they see? What are the villains up to? I have these little worlds reacting to the last actions of the characters. I play little scenes in my head of the villains doing things the players will never see, but that's fine! It lets the world live a bit more and some of it manifests at the table. The players say "wow, that was happening and we didn't even know it".

I think its one of the biggest benefits of this hobby – we can just sit and think about worlds and what's going on in them and the results can be practical. We can use them. Not all the time, but sometimes.

I think one area where things can clash, though, and I see this with a lot of new GMs I talk to, is when the GM is super into a world and its background and story and the players just aren't. Players don't owe us the same level of interest in our worlds that we do. They dig their characters. They want to have a good time at the table. They want to do awesome stuff. My friend Enrique, the NewbieDM, long ago said something along the lines of "they don't care about that temple on the hill, what gods it has, or how ten thousand years ago a great war was fought there. They care about what's happening in town right now". I'm paraphrasing but that stuck with me.

So it can be awesome to dream up worlds but we can't always assome anyone cares but us.

I do think there's some basic guidelines we can understand when we're dreaming up our worlds and their various movements and still make it practical for the table and that's in avoiding dreaming up plots and stories that require the characters to do something. Instead, we think about the world and its inhabitants and how they move around, sometimes reacting to the actions of the characters, but let the players drive the actual actions of their characters and then see where the world moves next.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

A trip in the way back machine reveals Young Swarmkeeper spending maybe 5 times the hours rolling on the random tables in the back of the 1e DMG to create dungeons on graph paper than actually playing the game with other people. Was it fun? Yep (some use the term “lonely fun”). Was it prep? Yep, even though much of it never saw the game table. Was it play? Yeah, why the heck not?

Many decades later, though I don’t have endless hours to randomly generate dungeons, I still find prep fun and consider it an important part of my D&D play experience.

 

[MNblockhead]

I think of painting minis, creating terrain, configuring VTTs (prepping maps, playing around with community mods, writing macros) all an important and enjoyable part of the hobby, but I don't think of it as playing the game. The parts of prep that I do consider playing the game is rolling for random encounters, building NPCs, testing out encounters with white room combats. Engaging with the rule and mechanics and rolling dice make it feel more like part of the play.

 

[el-remmen]

I think one area where things can clash, though, and I see this with a lot of new GMs I talk to, is when the GM is super into a world and its background and story and the players just aren't. Players don't owe us the same level of interest in our worlds that we do. They dig their characters. They want to have a good time at the table. They want to do awesome stuff. My friend Enrique, the NewbieDM, long ago said something along the lines of "they don't care about that temple on the hill, what gods it has, or how ten thousand years ago a great war was fought there. They care about what's happening in town right now". I'm paraphrasing but that stuck with me.

So it can be awesome to dream up worlds but we can't always assome anyone cares but us.

I think that potential disconnect of interest is part of the reason why keeping a playful attitude (there is probably a better/academic word for how I am using "playful" here) during prep is a way to engage that interest on the part of the GM, without forcing it onto players who are not as interested beyond what they need to know to move forward.

Personally, as a DM I aim towards providing enough for that rare player who does care, while not making it mandatory homework for those who don't.

I totally think your 8 steps of the Lazy DM is a kind of pre-game game, it's prompts triggering responses that work towards a success, a success equaling "a fun session."

 

[BookTenTiger]

Traditionally, prep has been a big part of play for me. In the past I would often prep whole campaign worlds, or come up with systems to randomly generate adventures or settings or encounters, even knowing it would probably not be used. When I ran campaigns, I actively and purposefully over-prepped because I found it fun. For example, in a campaign that had a lot of saints as part of its religion, I created an entire Random Saint Generator that would create a saint's name, what they were the patron of, and in-game benefits for praying to that saint. It never got used, but it was a lot of fun to make!

Since having a kid, though, my creative time has become limited, and I'm finding it more difficult to enjoy prep time. I wrote in my post-mortem for a one-shot I recently ran about finding the prep time frustrating, even though I did have fun creating the adventure. I think that exposure to no-prep games like Ironsworn have also opened my eyes to other ways to run games.

I'm sure when my son is in school and I have more time on my hands I'll find myself enjoying prep again. But for now it's a detriment to my play, not a part of it.

 

[cbwjm]

I guess the difference between prep and play can be a little nebulous, I'd definitely call it an exercise in creativity, not sure if I'd call it play but I wouldn't argue strongly against that as an interpretation especially since the following resonates with me:

A trip in the way back machine reveals Young Swarmkeeper spending maybe 5 times the hours rolling on the random tables in the back of the 1e DMG to create dungeons on graph paper than actually playing the game with other people. Was it fun? Yep (some use the term “lonely fun”). Was it prep? Yep, even though much of it never saw the game table. Was it play? Yeah, why the heck not?

Many decades later, though I don’t have endless hours to randomly generate dungeons, I still find prep fun and consider it an important part of my D&D play experience.

 

[el-remmen]

I'm sure when my son is in school and I have more time on my hands I'll find myself enjoying prep again. But for now it's a detriment to my play, not a part of it.

One thing I probably should have mentioned is that when I first posted this thread my daughter had not even been conceived, let alone born yet. I definitely played fewer sessions in the first two years of her life, but I still managed to keep two games going and started squeezing in 20 to 40 minutes of crafting/painting minis or game prep after bedtime a few times a week once the night-feeding era was over. But that's because I am lucky enough to be in a position to do that.

Parenting is hard, and for me prep and crafting has been a necessary break when I can make time for it, even if just a little bit. I can imagine that for those people for whom it feels like work, it would be miserable to have to do after a long day of looking after a kid, which can be both physically and emotionally exhausting.