Prep is a Four Letter Word: Intro (Almost a Four Letter Word)

If anyone finds this picture in error you've clearly never GMed for 3.5 DnD

Prep can be a task I truly dread. It's like doing my taxes; I have to do it on time or else. But fortunately that's not really what prepping is. Prep is setting basic things up so that way you can adapt more easily to the players. You're not doing prep to control what happens in the session but to make sure that you can improv more easily, which helps you have more fun.

First, ask what needs to be prepped in your game. Most games are good at telling you what must be prepped for each session, but at a bare minimum you must prepare your setting (even if you bought one), your overarching theme (which is based upon your setting), and the major NPCs of your game (who get their goals from deficiencies in your setting). And that's before you even start prepping your sessions!

Actual session prep can vary widely from game to game. You  might have to do anything from prepping set pieces and monsters, compiling a list of things to challenge the players, compiling charts, to nothing at all (that's rare).

But the real question is why prep at all? If you're good at improvising you may find yourself asking why in the world you'd waste your time with such things. It's possible to make all this stuff up on the fly, so why bother? The answer isn't that you should be making up what's going to happen in the session, that's the job of you and the players to figure out as play progresses.

Think of it as making a meal. Take spaghetti, for instance. It's relatively easy to make, even for cooking illiterate. The ingredients are easy to prep and put together. But y'know what's gonna make it hard to put this meal together? If you had to go to the store every time you needed an ingredient instead of just spending the time to get everything at once. Yes, you could do this, particularly if you're rich, fit, or crazy, but how many people would prefer to get their trips to the store down into as few as possible? That's prep: you're getting everything together so you don't have to constantly come up with new stuff on the fly. No, you're not going to see every contingency; somehow the players will find a way to surprise you, just like sometimes you find that you're all out of Italian seasoning for that spaghetti. But you can have a good amount of the environment, NPCS, and the general area done so that way you can be prepared. That way you can go with whatever the players come up with only using a minimal amount of effort.

Prep isn't about making everything up before hand to throw at your players, it's about making sure that enough of your general bases are covered so that way you can adapt to the majority of player craziness. Rather than having to make up stuff on the fly, it's much better to come to the session with a few things to fall back on, that way you can focus on what's most important: having fun

Stay tuned for next week as we talk about your setting, the container that holds it all!