Ladino's Rogue Thoughts

Not all prep is the same

[With thanks to the folks over the RPG Talk discord for the many good discussions on the topic throughout the years]

[Also the excellent “How I Prep” blog bandwagon - the link is just a sample!]

Dwiz over at a Knight at the Opera famously said that not all crunch is the same. I want to build on that, and say that not all prep is the same. Which is perhaps obvious, but we still seem to forget it. If you've ever felt like a “low-prep” or “zero-prep” game failed to live up to that reality, this is maybe one reason why. Such games often still include types of prep that may require a good amount of effort, even though they are less conspicuous than the trad mechanical demands that are usually classified as high-prep.

(The other likely reason is that not all improv is the same, so something one person is perfectly comfortable coming up on the spot causes someone else to falter and stumble. And you can be better or worse at coming up with stuff on the fly when you’re already building on some kinds of information but not others, so some game texts might give you just the prompts you need to improv your way through, and others will give you useless details you can’t work with. But we’re not focusing on the improv side of the coin right now.)

So let’s play that fun game of scrutinizing RPG lingo and discuss how “prep” is (as is customary) a rather ill-defined term that causes a considerable degree of confusion and that hides a lot of the different processes that ultimately coalesce into game sessions.

First, I will offer a definition of prep – yeah yeah, another definition. There’s nothing quite like having a million of them for terms we throw around every day to show just how precarious some of our conversations really are, right? Who doesn’t love finding out that every time someone said a word they actually were actually assigning a completely different semantic value to them than the one you were decoding?

I jest – really, it is good to keep these discussions going. Not because by engaging with them we’ll finally find the One Correct Definition of All Time (we won’t), but because discussing it deepens our personal understanding of our own concepts and praxis, as well as that of others.

Second, and more interestingly, I will offer up a number of different lenses (I’m very much inspired by Jesse Schell’s Art of Game Design here) through which we can try to categorize our prep. This will serve both as a tool for recognizing all the different forms of prep someone might be using to make their games happen and as an abstracted list of things that can be considered prep under the working definition presented in the first part.

Plus, maybe it’ll also be a useful framework to bring up when discussing prep practices? Probably not, but a bloggerhead can dream, right?

Part the First – A Definition of Prep

For the purposes of this post, “prep” is any form of forethought someone gives to a particular game that they intend to run, done specifically with the expectation of making a future session better.

Some things to note about this definition. First, I’ve phrased it in such a way that it mostly applies only to GMs, since we don’t typically talk about players as “running” the game. So I will be discussing the issue assuming a fairly strict GM/player divide and pretty exclusively from the GM’s side - though some categories can be commonly prepped by players too. It’d be interesting to consider if and how any of this might apply to GM-less/GM-full, solo games, and other different practices besides! But that’ll have to come from someone else better suited to talk about it.

Second, this definition will no doubt be controversial, as not everyone would recognize a lot of the forethought given to a game to be actual prep. Note in particular that, by this definition, “prep” can include even things like watching a show or listening to music, so long as they are actively putting the GM in the headspace they want to be in to run the game in the future. The reason I’m adopting such a broad understanding of prep is that I think it is important that we recognize everything we bring to bear for our games, because failing to do so would obscure how we achieve certain results at the table.

For example, one important piece of input I bring to some games I run is a low-level obsession with it throughout my daily routine – I’ll think about different ways of building the upcoming scenarios I’ll throw at my players at random times whenever my mind is at rest. This obviously comes naturally to me, and because it requires no conscious effort on my part, it would be easy for me not to think about it as “prep” at all. But other GMs might not have that same instinct, or the ways they obsess about their games might be different, so if I never clarify that this is a component of how I get ready to run each session, a significant part of my process is hidden away in a blackbox, making it much harder for others to understand and build off of my experience running the game.

As broad as I’m making this definition of “prep”, though, I’m still setting a limit on it by counting only the forethought that is given to a particular game that someone intends to run. This limit serves to exclude from the label “prep” everything that we might consider honing our GM-craft in general, or RPG ideations made without any specific game in mind (e.g. this entire blog). So things like learning basics of acting or drawing or mini-painting, or reading RPG books or advice or anything else, any interaction with the RPG-adjacent hobbies that is done without having a particular game in mind in which to apply it – all of that isn’t considered prep here.

If we included the set of all activities that could make us better GMs in the long run into the label “prep”, I think the label would become expansive to the point of ceasing to be useful. The limit is still very fuzzy, however! For instance, at which point would a new game someone is thinking about become sufficiently crystallized to be considered “a particular game that they intend to run”? Do they need to already have made the pitch to the players? Do they need to have already gone through session 0? Or is it enough to just have an earnest desire to run the ideas you’re coming up with, even if you might never have the chance to actually do it?

The fuzziness here is acceptable, though, because wherever you place the limit in your own understanding, that is the right place for it be when you’re considering your own GM habits and practices. We just need to be mindful that other people define these limits differently than ourselves when having conversations, and we should be good.

Part the Second – Different Lenses of Prep Categories

The only preamble I want to give here is to clarify some misconceptions that might arise from these categories.

First, several different ways of categorizing our prep will be given by examining them through different lenses. The lenses tell you how we’ll be sorting the different forms of prep, so one might say that we are sorting them “by what we prep” whereas another will sort them “by when we expect to use the prep”.

Second, no specific relations are defined between the categories of prep as identified through different lenses. We might find that categories along different lenses go naturally well together – maybe prepping most of the fictional setting in the ‘prep before the campaign’ lens goes well with only updating what changed in the setting in the ‘prep before each session’ lens – but that doesn’t mean that one is predicated on the other.

Third, the categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. They are meant to illustrate that, for each lens we bring to the work of prep, we can find different ways of engaging with them, but one can alternate between or combine those forms without difficulty. For instance, setting up a battle map, from the perspective of what we prep, can involve a representation of what exists in the fiction as well as system mechanics to cover its effects and statements about what is true in the fiction.

Fourth, while I’m trying to be exhaustive with these lenses, trying to cover every form and function of prep that I’ve used or seen be reported, it is pretty much guaranteed that I’ll be leaving a lot out of the list – the breadth of possibilities and practices in RPGs is vast and I only know a tiny fraction of it. Suggestions for new inclusions in each of these lenses (or perhaps even new lenses to use) are naturally welcome (if you can find me somewhere on the internet, that is)!

But bear in mind that each category is still fairly abstract, and so some disagreement on what does or doesn’t fit inside any given entry is expected. If you like the idea of these lenses but disagree with the specifics, feel free to make your own version however you think it best! This list isn’t intended to be authoritative, but merely a tool for discerning how to engage with prep.

Fifth, the lenses are also assuming that there does exist a functional way of using each form of prep presented. That is to say, none of the categories identified through these lenses is assumed to be dysfunctional by default! It is certainly possible to have dysfunctional relationships to prep (I suspect this is true for any form of prep, but that’s just an intuition), but no specific form of engaging with prep is taken to be inherently bad. The whole point of these lenses is to encourage us to observe our practices from different points of view, and we can’t see things clearly if our minds are clouded by premature judgements.

Sixth and final: these categories are not presented as a personality test. They are not presented as a litmus test for any “culture of play”. They are not presented as a tool for deciding what kind of prep is the best, or for defining which systems are actually “low-prep”. They are decidedly not for selecting the true and virtuous forms of prep so we can mount a crusade on the non-believers. I imagine that, if this post ever gains any sort of traction, some people will use them for those purposes regardless, but the responsibility for doing so will be theirs and theirs alone.

So, here are some lenses for examining prep, and some of what we may find when we look through them.

We Can Sort Different Forms of Prep…

By What We Prep:

Facts or details about the fiction or setting – which includes:

Reactive approaches (since PCs did X, Y will happen);
Conditional approaches (if the PCs do X, Y happens);
Tentative approaches (NPC X will attempt to do Y);
Probabilistic approaches (X has an x% chance of happening) or;
Deterministic approaches (X thing will happen, no matter what the PCs do).

Tools or practice for enhancing aspects of "GM performance" – which includes:

Representations of what exists in the fiction – which includes:

Tools and ambience for the table – which includes:

By When We Prep:

By How Much of the Fictional Setting We Establish Before the Game Starts:

By What We Need or Want to Have Ready to Run the Session:

By When We Expect to Use the Prep:

By How We Prep:

By the Purpose of the Prep:

By How Much Effort it Takes to Do the Prep

Some Scattered Parting Thoughts

Hopefully, when you read this list, you can identify forms of prep that you like better or worse, or forms of prep that you do or don’t normally use. The main thing I’d like people to do with this, though, is to consider what kind of prep is being asked for by different systems or styles of play, and understand better whether or not that form of prep is convenient to them.

I’ve seen folks around the interwebs talk about setting up West-Marches campaigns with hexmaps as something that doesn’t require much prep, for instance; but they’re usually assuming that you already have a sizeable collection of dungeon modules you’d be interested in running to seed into the hexes. I, however, don’t have those, and find the task of reading through and selecting modules to be a bit boring – it is decidedly not my preferred way to prep. So, while that may be a very reasonable form of prep for a lot of people, which can make it seem relatively effortless and “low-prep”, it would be very high-effort for me!

It is also important to consider what kind of prep you can manage in the context of what your life is like when you intend to run! I had no issues running the notoriously fiddly 3rd edition of D&D back when I was in college: back then I had enough free time to throw together complex maps, NPCs and encounters for my players. I won’t deny that the system (particularly the way I used it) demanded a significant amount of dedicated prep time before a session, but it was easy and fun for me to do (plus I found good tools to cut the work down), so it wasn’t a problem. I was happy to spend some more hours on my favorite hobby!

Nowadays, though, I do have to place more of a premium on my free time, so as much as I’d love to run an involved D&D campaign with all of those prep demands, the truth is that I’m more likely to burn out or fall behind given everything else I have to juggle in my life, so I don’t run games like this anymore. This style of prep is currently mismatched with my life, so I’m using systems that favor types of prep that require less dedicated time. That isn’t the game’s fault, though, and demanding a good amount of dedicated prep time isn’t an absolute failure of system design or morally reprehensible in any way.

It is also notable that all of these lenses still leave out a lot of factors that are relevant to our experience of prepping a game. Take, for instance, the issue of what are the best practices for writing and diagramming an adventure module – say something as simple as whether to employ simple prose or to organize the information in bullet point lists (those in the know are aware of the vast quantities of digital ink that have been spilled on the subject). Ultimately, though, preferences of prose, bullet points, keys, bolding, etc. all come down to how each GM likes to read and reference a given material for play – i.e. what makes it easy or hard for them to prep the contents of the module to run later.

One thing I find myself drawn to when looking at these lenses is the idea of learning new avenues of game prep. I personally find it difficult to collate and revisit a collection of genre-staple touchstones to get myself hyped when trying to keep a game going, but hearing how beneficial the practice is from other GMs out there makes me want to do it – something that could not only improve my games, but potentially improve my whole outlook on appreciating art, as well.

So, these are the lenses I think about when I’m trying to make sense of what kind of prep a game is asking of me. I hope they will be useful in some way for you as well!

#definitions #lenses #prep