Last month, I talked about When Play Does Not Go To Prep, mostly about how deviations are normal and ways to adjust your story when it drifts from your prep. There is something that is underlying that previous article that I wanted to expand more about today. I want to talk more about the nature of prep. 

What is Prep?

There are a lot of answers to this question, but regardless of the content of your prep, prep has one purpose. Prep is whatever you need to be comfortable GMing the game. This is why prep differs in content and length. It is why, in Never Unprepared, you can learn to hone your prep to be just the things that you are less comfortable doing on the fly. For some, this can be a few notes on a Post-It note, and for others, an elaborate binder with sections and indexes. Whatever gets you to the table. 

Prep is Aspirational 

Another characteristic of prep is that it is meant to be aspirational. It is what you hope or think could happen, not what is going to happen. Just because you put a trapped bridge across a chasm in a dungeon does not mean that is the only way the characters can cross the chasm. It is the one that you aspire to, the one you hope will happen. Sometimes the characters will cross that bridge and find the trap (in both the good and bad connotation), and sometimes the players will break out a magic item you forgot about and transport themselves across the bridge, never encountering the trap. 

As I said in the previous article, play deviates from prep, and that is a feature, not a bug. 

Prep is not Authoritative 

 …prep was never meant to be authoritative, that is, to direct a specific outcome. 

To further make that point, prep was never meant to be authoritative, that is, to direct a specific outcome. Just because there is a trapped bridge over the chasm does not mean that the players must cross that bridge. In fact, in order to make that happen, you have to possibly rob players of their agency, shutting down other ways to cross, and now you have begun to railroad your characters. 

Note, I am very specific about the term railroad. A railroad is not a linear plot, but rather when the choices you make do not affect the outcome of the game. If every choice you make leads to having to cross the bridge on foot, then you are railroading the players onto the bridge. 

To be clear. That is a problem.

Prep Is Your Guide

Prep serves as a guide. It gives you a narrative construct from which you can start to narrate play and to have some idea of how different things connect or interact with each other. The construct allows you to convey information to the players. If your prep includes the details of a town and its buildings, and someone asks where the Tavern is, you can tell where it is because the Tavern and its relationship to other buildings in town, who is in it, etc, are in your prep. 

The narrative construct can be more than a map of a town. That narrative construct may be a web of clues and relationships in a murder mystery. Having that prepped allows you to answer questions from the players, even ones that you did not expect. 

In fact, when we get to last month’s topic of deviations, this is where your prep acts as a guide. When play moves away from your aspirational prep, you can use the constructs in your prep to understand how the deviation affects the narrative construct. You can then adapt your construct to the deviation and still draw upon it as play continues. 

That is not to say that you need prep to do those things. You can ad lib anything or everything in a game. There is nothing wrong with not having the location of the tavern and making it up on the fly, or creating a clue in the moment.

In fact, since few things are black and white, the sweet spot for your prep should always be the right mix of things you prep and things you ad lib, and knowing which things should go into which column for you. You might ad lib the name and location of the tavern, but prep the key clues that link the Baron to the murder. 

Prep As Your Aspirational Guide

Stitching these ideas together, your prep should… 

Be all the things you need to be comfortable enough to run your game. That could be maps, names of NPCs, a web of clues, stat blocks, snippets of rules, etc. That is the core function of prep.

Be aspirational in that it is one way that the game may play out, but is open to change, so that you do not force play to follow your prep. 

Be a guide to help you navigate the game. Your prep should help you understand the narrative, locations, relationships, etc, that you can draw from to answer questions and react to the players. You can adapt that construct based on what the characters do and keep playing. 

My Prep Aspires To Be a Good Guide

The relationship between prep and play is tricky. On one hand, if you come up with some cool ideas and prep them, you want to see them come to fruition at the table. On the other hand, players outnumber you and will nearly always find a way to do something you did not expect. That does not mean your prep is worthless; we need to use the prep as a baseline and then adapt to what has come up in play. 

There are always people who dismiss prep, and they are entitled to their own way to play, but for me, in the 40+ years I have gamed, I am my most comfortable when I have prepped my session and have some idea of how it will go, and then being fine in play adapting to the choices my players make and the outcomes of the dice. 

How about you? How do you manage the aspirational nature of prep? Where is your sweet spot of prep for the games you like to run?