Low Prep GMing
A few ideas on how to prep less for your sessions as a GM.
I've been GMing games on and off for getting close to 20 years at this point, and when I first started out I (like many new GMs, I suspect), I spent a whole lot of time preparing for the game before every session. It was a ton of work, a lot of fun, and sometimes returned the amount of work I put into it with a really great session.
Just as often, though, all of the prep I'd done was ultimately wasted. Sometimes you plan a thing and expect that the PCs are going to latch onto it, but they don't. Perhaps you've provided a secret letter for them to investigate, but they decide to burn it instead fearing that it is cursed or dark magic. You now have to improv how to get them that clue some other way. Or, worse, you just shove them back onto the plot you'd devised from the beginning. So what can you do to have a fulfilling session while lowering the preparation burden on yourself?
These days, I probably spend about 30 minutes doing a prep for a 5 hour weekly session, and rely heavily on improv for the rest. Our latest campaign, I spent several hours doing research to set up the game world before we began (setting up the factions and the underlying background situations), but now that it's all in place and moving, I don't have to do nearly as much work since everything is now being driven by player action and collaboration.
So let's look at some tools I use to run sessions this way and still (I hope) produce fun and satisfying game sessions.
Running a game with low-prep ideas
A good while back, I wrote about how I use published adventures and a lot of the ideas in that post also apply to how I run games that I've devised myself:
Alex Ward
One of the major themes in that post is ultimately "let the players do what they want to do, but the world continues moving while they're off doing the thing". Unlike a video game where a quest giver will happily stand around for three weeks while you do other things before helping them, my sessions have a relatively active world. Some things can wait for weeks, other things are going to become far more urgent if the players ignore them.
For example, helping a merchant locate their missing goods is a lower-pressure time table. If you take a long time, there may be no goods to recover, but you can still figure out what happened to them on the road. Helping that same merchant find their missing son is a bit more pressing with potentially life-or-death consequences (maybe he eloped!).
That way, you have a fully living world, where the players' action or inaction has a real impact on the overall function of the game.
By practical example, I'm currently running a game in a home-brew Elder Scrolls system that one of the group members made (it's a d10 skill-based resource expenditure system. It's wonderful). There's currently an army marching northwards and they've got several things they're trying to accomplish. The players have largely determined the "what" but haven't yet fully grasped the "why". Stopping the army in its tracks isn't really an option. The nation-states involved in this period of Tamrielic politics are currently incapable of mustering a unified resistance, and so it's been up to the PCs to defend the cities in the army's path as best they can, usually by giving them additional time to evacuate.
One very cool thing they did on their own was to go investigate a bridge where some of the army's necromancers were raising the dead from a prior battle. They eliminated every single necromancer on that bridge (I believe there were a good 16 of them), dealing a significant blow to the army's ability to replenish their forces by raising their dead opponents. That wasn't all the necromancers, but it was enough of them that the next encounters with the army are going to be easier.
I didn't prep any of that, by the way. The players came up with the idea to see what was going on back on the bridge. I knew based on previous sessions (and the motivations of the army) that they'd go where the corpses are, and do "cleanup". The players met them there, and then the dice did the talking.
There are a couple of points I'd like to pull out of that anecdote.
Use Factions and NPCs and give them motivations
Alex Ward
I talked about this at length over in the Designing Situations for Story Games post, but it's worth repeating here. One of the key things (I believe) to creating a believable and engaging session involves having NPCs and groups of NPCs that have desires. Introducing those NPCs and having them either challenge or augment the PCs makes for memorable encounters.
Another example: One of the PCs introduced an NPC named "Lucian", who she described as a bit of a huckster and snake-oil salesman. Through a series of scams, they'd become the mayor of a small town that was directly in the way of the enemy army. Based on the player's description of him, we could quickly determine that he was going to cause more problems than he solved - bam, instant conflict!
The PCs wound up solving this problem by intimidating him and getting him to leave town while they and the (now disgruntled) head of the town guard actually helped evacuate the townsfolk to the south.
They even set fire to the town to prevent the army from using it to resupply their living contingent (since they apparently lack supply lines). I didn't have any of that in mind when we started the session. The town didn't have any details when we started, but we filled it in together.
Leave Blanks, Even for Solutions
As I've mentioned on this blog many, many times before, I do not like random tables. I regularly get better ideas from the players by saying "You know I have no idea who this is, who are they?"
Expanding on that call-and-response idea, I've come to creating a lot more "situations" rather than problems with defined solutions. This is one thing that I think story games and OSR/NSR games have in common - often the players won't stumble upon a "fixed" solution, but they will have many plausible ideas on how to solve a given problem. Often, if it makes sense, we'll determine what the challenge will be and see where the dice land.
It gets even better if they don't succeed because we can use the improv technique of "yes, and" to keep the problem moving along. For example, there's a curse affecting a tower and the player reasons that if they carve some arcane symbols into the stone, they might disrupt the magical energies. That sounds great, they give it a shot and the dice say that they don't succeed. Instead of dead-ending it, you build on the idea.
For example, you could respond to that failure with, "Hmm, that doesn't seem to have done the trick, but you're pretty sure you know what the problem is - there's something deeper in the structure, you can see the lines of mana stretching down lower, disrupting your efforts. Looks like you'll need to head down into the basement and see what you find."
In short, use improv techniques, and "yes, and" or "no, but" in order to keep the situation moving along.
Have good notes based on what happened before, build on the ideas
I self-host an Outline instance for my regular group, and I keep notes from our sessions, along with any new NPCs that I or the PCs have introduced during the session along with what they did in the session summary and some notes about their personality.
Likewise, before each session, I jot down some bullet points around what is likely to come up during the session, and often those ideas are at odds with one another. I'm unlikely to use everything I write. Sometimes, I want to ensure some information comes up during the session, and since I've got an extensive stable of NPCs I can have one of them deliver it, or through some atmospheric element of the place where the PCs are.
Because I've got this ongoing reference of things that have happened, I can pull stuff from it as the session is going, and it's awesome.
Other Posts on the Subject
At the beginning of this post I promised to collate some of my other posts that touch on the ways you can do session design that also happens to help you prep less. Here those are (they're all in the #musings category):
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Wrap Up
I hope this was helpful, it feels a little meandering, but let me know if there's anything confusing and I'll edit that into the post.
Speaking of GM advice, if you want to check out a Backerkit I'm excited about, check out this one from Evil Hat:
