I was thinking about why I don’t post more on RPGnet (I concluded that while I like it there, I’ve never felt like I fit in; that’s not unusual for me), and looking back through some of the relatively few posts I’ve made, when I stumbled across one that fits right into the “this should be a blog post” philosophy I’ve been trying to live by since G+ shut down.
It was originally a response to a thread asking for folks’ experiences with zero-prep GMing. It’s a pretty tidy summary of where my head’s been at for the past few years specifically and the past twenty years more generally. (I’ve lightly edited my original reply post for Yore.)
On doing zero prep
I do as close to zero prep as possible.
I’ll happily do a couple hours of campaign prep, provided I can follow it up by doing zero session prep. If I’m running a module, I need to read the module before the session; I’m okay with that. I flat-out refuse to do “traditional” session prep. It’s not fun for me, I don’t tend to enjoy the games it produces when I’m a player, and I like a roughly equal distribution of surprise around the table. (“Play to find out what happens” is pretty solid shorthand for all that.)
I have two tips. One, run games that support this play style. You can bend a lot of systems to support near-zero prep, but it’s a lot easier when the game is designed to accommodate that from the start. I tend to run old-school fantasy (Old School Essentials, DCC RPG [affiliate link], etc.) and story games (tremulus, Dungeon World [both affiliate links], etc.), and both of those very broad categories support zero-prep play out of the box.
And two, tell your players this is how you’re running the game. Some folks hate knowing the GM is improvising major stuff on the spot, and mismatched expectations lead to bad experiences. Games designed to be run with minimal prep also tend to bake this expectation into the game so it’s less of an issue — for example, most Powered by the Apocalypse games have GM improvisation happening as a result of player moves, so everyone knows up front that will be happening.
You also mentioned mysteries, which are a fascinating case because the traditional approach for a plotted-out mystery requires a lot of prep. My approach there is to either use modules (Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green [both affiliate links]) or run games which solve the “mystery problem” in ways friendly to minimal prep, like tremulus [affiliate link]. In tremulus no one at the table, GM included, has all the answers or knows all the secrets when play begins; that stuff gets figured out through mutual improvisation at the table. Similarly, Brindlewood Bay [affiliate link] and its offshoots, which I’ve played a ton of but never run, solve it by having the players decide the nature of the mystery when they’re ready to solve it. Like other non-traditional solutions, those approaches can be polarizing (talk to your group!).
You’re on the edge of a potential shift in your play style that, for me, was a point of no return. Once I really internalized how much I hated session prep, and why, there was no going back. Good luck!
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t plug an old blog post I wrote which goes into more detail about all of that and provides links to tons of articles and other resources that shaped and informed my preferences on prep, and another which looks more closely at tremulus and why it works so well.