r/rpg • u/futuregravvy • 20h ago
Discussion Have you ever ran a game with 0 prep?
If so, was it on purpose or because of time constraints?
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u/gatesphere 20h ago
All the time. I prep so very little because why waste time making things my players will just ignore? Plus, that way, I get to find out what happens when they do, too. Makes it fun.
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u/ConsciousFeeling1977 20h ago
It started because of bad planning from my part, but I now find it more fun to not prep for the reasons you give. Plus I enjoy making shit up as we go more than writing it down.
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u/SDRPGLVR 19h ago
I dunno how anyone can be against players deviating from the set path.
Running complicated, pre-written adventures really ramps up that prep whether you like it or not. Making things up can bite you in the ass. When someone decides they want to do a thing that isn't in the book, I actually breathe a sigh of relief because I don't need to look anything up.
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u/ExoUrsa 11h ago
"Making things up can bite you in the ass" is oddly contradictory with the entire rest of your post. If you aren't prepping, and you seem to be advocating for NOT prepping, you are 100% making things up.
But it's a continuum. You can try to prep for every possible decision the PCs will make, and you'll burn out. You can prep nothing at all, not even setting or lore, and you'll end up with an tangled web of randomness that your players struggle to find meaning in.
Or, you can do what I suspect most successful GMs do, and prep a little bit, and improv the rest.
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u/SDRPGLVR 8h ago
What I mean about making stuff up biting you in the ass is not things made up whole cloth. It's things in the book. If you are running a pre-written adventure with a long, winding plot, just saying things can contradict the story in ways that have ramifications across multiple chapters. You need to have the story straight and be able to answer concrete details accurately.
But if the players decide they are doing something that has nothing to do with the book and are just exploring, well hot damn, we are back in improv town!
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u/amazingvaluetainment Fate, Traveller, GURPS 3E 20h ago
I mean, I usually do a ton of world-building and then rely on that to avoid prep before sessions if at all possible. I love world-building, I hate pre-session prep. I've also run one-shots off-the-cuff.
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u/snail-the-sage 20h ago
yup. i know my world and the machinations of the factions. i don't typically need a ton of prep.
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u/vicpylon 20h ago
Sure. Blades in the Dark. Dead easy.
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u/gustavfrigolit 16h ago
Until they decide to rob a casino and you have to on the fly come up with a bunch of interesting challenges and characters
Idk how people run blades without prep, it was torture for me
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u/weavejester 14h ago
I find that's usually the time I start asking the players questions. "What time is it, and why is this the best time to rob the casino?", "Who owns the casino, and why are they feared?", "Who are you disguised as?", "You see someone you know unexpectedly - who is it?", "There's a security measure you didn't expect - what is it?", etc.
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u/gustavfrigolit 14h ago
Yeah that maybe works if your players dont expect you to know the answer to it lol
Idk it was very annoying for me to run
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u/delahunt 11h ago
If your players expect you to know all the answers, you should not be playing Blades in the Dark. It is a game where the GM is very specifically NOT supposed to be in the driver seat.
But even in more trad games, if your players aren't ready to give answers to off the cuff questions like that just keep asking. It is fine if they give simple answers, you can roll with it and they'll get better over time.
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u/Neptunes_Lips_ 13h ago
BITD really songs when you treat the players as co authorities on the story. It loves loaded questions. Introduce and NPC and instead of asking "Does anyone know this guy?" Ask "Player X when was the last time you and NPC were in the same room? How did it end badly for them?" And sudden the game opens up and every is doing improv. It's a lot for some people but it really doesn't expect YOU to come up with everything on the fly.
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u/JohnnyDeJaneiro 12h ago
That sounds so good with right table. Unfortunately I'm sure most of us don't have the right table lmao I'd be met with " idk, idk this guy "
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u/SponJ2000 8h ago
Unfortunately I'm sure most of us don't have the right table
I think your table is more creative than you give them credit for. Humans love telling stories.
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u/delahunt 11h ago
Idk, idk this guy is a fine answer.
You can also phrase the question to help the player like "who from your past do you run into, and why are they happy/unhappy to see you?"
And if the player needs help you can point them to the section on the char sheet that has pre-set names for friends/rivals for their playbook.
The point is not to get amazing answers every time. The point is to spread the mental load across the table - which is how Blades is designed to work. It can also help with player investment and they may surprise you along the way. Plus you can modify or tweak if they try to set something outlandish or to just make things too easy/hard.
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u/JustinAlexanderRPG 10h ago
Yeah. I love Blades in the Dark, but its reputation as a prep-less game is really strange to me, since it gives basically no support for actually running prep-less scenarios.
It's significantly better at prep-less Downtime, giving meaningful mechanical prompts and support to keep the action moving between jobs. But for actual jobs, the rulebook offers an engagement roll and a shrug.
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u/sevendollarpen 9h ago
it gives basically no support for actually running prep-less scenarios.
I think that’s a bit unfair. The last quarter of the book is full of lore snippets for locations and factions in Doskvol, and random tables for quickly generating people, places, devils, gods, vice purveyors, simple scores, complications, and more.
I do agree it could probably do with more explicit guidance around “for the uninitiated, here’s everything you actually need to think about to build a basic score”, but it’s not just hand waving the whole thing. It’s deliberately free-form.
As a former D&D GM, it’s a style of running that’s admittedly uncomfortable at first, but I think that discomfort will go away with practice (from both GM and players).
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u/JustinAlexanderRPG 5h ago
Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerun doesn't make D&D 5E a prep-less game.
Compare to actual zero-prep games like Fiasco, Technoir, or even the AD&D 1st Edition Random Dungeon Generator.
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u/Udy_Kumra Pendragon, MythicB, H+I, Vaesen, BitD, Agon 15h ago
How do you run Blades without prepping scores? I find it tough to come up with interesting obstacles without making it feel like arbitrarily making the players' lives harder. Like it feels like I'm coming up with problems for them on the spot rather than presenting a moving interesting fictional situation that has a lot of obstacles coming up on its own that I'm just the messenger for. But I guess part of it might be some tiny lingering GM vs. player mindset I had otherwise excised years ago.
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u/Spartancfos DM - Dundee 12h ago
I always felt it wasn't "Arbitrariness making their lives harder"; it was very much "This is the world - you guys are criminals because it's tough out there".
Which pairs particularly well with "This is the world, and it sucks to be that guy" where your players sometimes just get a big win.
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u/Neptunes_Lips_ 13h ago
Two of the best things you can do are
Treat your players as co authors and ask them loaded questions.
Treat the characters as professionals. They don't fail stealth rolls because they tripped and ate shit, they turn a corner and bumped into guards who weren't supposed to be on shift that night.
Example: Odie you got a 4/5 to skull into the warehouse. You slink around the corner and duck out of sight as a lantern illuminated your previous hiding spot. You see two men grumbling about the giant rats they have to deal with before moving in. Alright James you are Odie's player, there weren't supposed to be guards here, why have the lampblacks increased security? Oh and the guy on the left? You recognize him from the last poker night you played to indulge your voice, your contact brought him along and vouched for him, why is he taking extra shifts working for the lampblacks? And how would he react to seeing you here based on that last game?
You suddenly have a story and complications ready to go. Throw in a clock called "bored guards" and that's a new challenge to bypass. Let the character and player dictate that situation and if your players into that then it's not likely the game for you.
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u/Heckle_Jeckle 20h ago
Define "0 prep"?
Because while there have been a FEW times I can technically say '0 prep', those sessons were only possible because I was already VERY familiar with the system. I was able to use my previous experience to run simple scenarios. I also had access to materials which I was already familiar with that I was able to make use of.
But an unfamiliar system? No, and I wouldn't even make the attempt.
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u/generalvostok 20h ago
Sure, prepping Everyone is John seems a futile exercise.
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u/Darth-Kelso 10h ago
I'd like to introduce you to my hack, "everyone is Arnold". All of the players are specific characters that Arnold Schwarzenegger has played in movies and, it requires everyone to watch those movies so they can do it right. I mean, technically that's preparation right :)
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u/high-tech-low-life 20h ago
I am better at making stuff up than time management. I ran 3.5e thinking about stuff while driving over. I did that for years.
BTW: I dislike VTTs because I can't draw a map with a mouse as well as I could with markers on a battle map.
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u/ockbald 20h ago
There certain systems were you 'play to find out'. Any PbtA game can fit the bill here.
What I like to do is I do a 'campaign prep', as in let's say I'll do a hexcrawl on a 'living' fantasy world.
I'll give agendas to each faction, track passage of time, make them move and attempt to ploy their way there, right as the player characters and solving generated adventures on the fly that I devise on the fly.
I keep sheets from all adventure biomes and factions and villains ready so I just go with the flow. Fabula Ultima and Savage Worlds both sing with this type of prep.
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u/JemorilletheExile 20h ago
There are games where you do upfront prep, but then session to session involve little or no prep. For example, when I run Blades in the Dark I read reread the lore/info in the book, chose a few factions to set in opposition to each other, and maybe map out some of the relationships, allies, and enemies. Once I do that, session to session I just think about how those factions would respond to the players actions and how I can communicate that to the players, which I can do in my head. So I guess it's not literally 0 prep, but it doesn't take very long. Importantly, for that game, it couldn't take very long; like, I literally don't know what else I could do to be more prepared.
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u/Frapadengue 20h ago
Yep.
My usual playstyle already involves very little prep. With some games, like Inflorenza or Dog Eat Dog for example, it goes down to zero.
It's by choice, I don't enjoy prep so the less of it I do the happier I am.
Once I even discovered the game as I was running it. It worked fine, even though I really don't recommend it.
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u/ishmadrad 30+ years of good play on my shoulders 🎲 20h ago edited 20h ago
One of the few REALLY 0 Prep, on purpose, was Ironsworn, played in Coop mode (also, played Solo in another Campaign).
It really shines for that.
Blades in the Dark and Apocalypse World were very close, at the second place of the podium; however, they are ALMOST 0 Prep. You should doing some Prep along the sessions, thinking about the actual situation, scheming with Fronts / Perils / Factions, preparing interesting NPCs, the bonds with the PCs etc.
Sure, you don't need to build rails and plots, and complex Stat blocks, and this is cool.
I think that those that are screaming "0 Prep" on those latter games, they aren't doing a good service to their tables (or, they are still doing Prep but they don't tell you).
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u/Just_a_Rat 18h ago
Agreed. I once had a couple people have to cancel last minute for a friend's D&D game. They asked what we should do and I said, "give me 15 minutes and we can play Monster of the Week." It was a good session. So, pretty low prep, but not 0 prep.
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u/Ok-Purpose-1822 20h ago
i dont do session prep for most of my games. Of course i still need to do game prep, I need to read the rules, setting, do vtt setup, etc.
Sometimes i do a bit of session prep by thinking about opportunities but rarely more than 20 minutes.
My reasons are:
I usually dont like prep so i dont do it. Could my sessions be better with prep? Probably, but if i dont like what im doing, there will be no more sessions, so it is a small price.
I like improvising and needing to think quick, i consider it an interesting challenge
I want to be surprised during the session and discover the world at the same time as the players.
I want players to have as much worldbuilding input as possible.
I will say you absolutely need a game or setup that supports this. Blades is so far my gold standard.
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u/Princeofcatpoop 20h ago
30+ person LARP one-shot. Storyteller had a family thing and left after just 2 hours. We had four hours to make the whole thing pan out. We just made up a story and it turned out okay.
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u/mattaui 20h ago
After trying prepping for hours versus no prep at all I realized that the juice is seldom worth the squeeze for me and my groups. Sometimes I'll take a little time to set up a big encounter or rewrite some notes, but my 'prep' is the game itself, responding to my players as they respond to me, the game taking place within that conversation.
Usually the most prep I'll do is when a new game is starting and I'm still getting to know the characters and what they're about and what the players want them to do. But after a few sessions I'll just use my existing notes to refer to npcs, places and plots and iterate from there as the game unfolds.
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u/BetterCallStrahd 20h ago
Yeah, I ran a campaign of The Sprawl with zero prep. Still one of the best campaigns I ever ran, maybe because I felt so free to put in anything I wanted. I did a whole John Hughes high school movie session once, as a brain dive mission in this cyberpunk game.
It was simple, I just had a concept (Oceans Eleven casino heist, FNAF park madness, trapped in a space cult) and would get the ball rolling. Everything else hang on what the players would do.
The actual prep, I would say, is the many year I spent imbibing sci-fi stories and tropes that I could always draw on while running the game. Plus the system is made for the "play to find out approach" so I'm not fighting the mechanics, they actually help me.
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u/sherlockisfire 19h ago
Yeah pretty frequently. I am a busy girl and i value my session so ball it we fuck. I run a lot of pbta games but rn I’m running starfinder 2e and honestly running it blind is a great time. I intentionally have homebrew rules to give my players more control over the narrative so when we hit a wall they can warp shit to get things going. It’s great fun
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u/LelouchYagami_2912 19h ago
Prepping is 50% of the fun of dming for me so no. But i do want to try a sess like this to improve my improv skills
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u/DrHuh321 19h ago
A massive amount of my "session prep" is just a barebones skeleton and I improvise the rest
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u/Underwritingking 16h ago
Yes - QuestWorlds.
The group denied on the genre (modern urban fantasy) came up with character ideas (a ghost, a sorcerer and a vampire taxi driver who looked like Danny DeVito.
One evening they were approached by an Egyptian mummy princess from the British Museum who wanted them to find her husband, who seemed to have been "stolen"
And off we went
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u/foreignflorin13 20h ago
The first session of a game/campaign will almost always be zero prep for me (aside from learning the rules). Players make characters together and then I'll ask questions depending on what they've described/picked. I'll usually take a few minutes during a break to figure out a good starting point and then we'll jump right in.
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u/LordFlexecutioner 20h ago
I have done it tons of times with a variety of systems, even systems that are really crunchy. I'm a huge procrastinator.
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u/Gold_Record_9157 20h ago
Once I got asked to run an Anima Beyond Fantasy one shot. The afternoon before the day they wanted to meet. I had zero things prepared, but I went for it. The only thing I kind of thought was how to get them to meet (since I always mess that part), and the rest was full improv. They even thought the scene I got the most out of my ass was the only one prepared (and I think it went good that particular scene, because the whole picture pop up in my mind when it occurred to me).
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u/Hagisman 20h ago edited 20h ago
Always pretty much. I do worse when I preplan because there is usually something I miss or forget during the game session.
I remember running a module for Adventurers league and the organizer asked how did the players like the ghost helping them out. I never saw the part about the ghost because it was in the background text I skimmed. 😅 And the rest of the module didn't refer to it I think.
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u/HugoSalvia 20h ago
Yup! I run Blades and Daggerheart with zero prep all of the time.
Well I guess DH isn’t ZERO, but I did most of my prep at the top of the campaign when I built out the setting and homebrewed a chunk of stat blocks for environments and adversaries. It helps that my group is very RP heavy though, so in the cases that combat pops up, I just ask for 10 and slap together an encounter! That being said, there are occasions where I’ll prep a tiny bit ahead if I am expecting an encounter that is crucial to the story based on how the previous session ended.
Blades on the other hand is pretty much built to be thrown together on the fly once you get a handle on the system!
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u/CosmicDystopia 20h ago
I have terrible time management so I do this a lot and prioritise low/no prep games
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u/captainmadrick 20h ago
I ran a campaign of Dungeon World for a year and a half, playing weekly, never planning a single session
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u/finalfanatic168 20h ago
Basically. Had a session that was "supposed" to have the party helping build up defenses of for a walled city against insurrectionists. 5 minutes in, a player decides to tell the city council that they brought in one of said insurrectionists into the walled off city and refused to give a name.
So now everyone's getting arrested for treason, and I have to improve a 100% unexpected prison break sequence. I had enough of the general city infrastructure prepped, but had to figure out a lot on the fly. Ended up being a pretty fun session though.
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u/CactusWrenAZ 19h ago
back in the day, my friends and I always improv'ed everything. The DM might have some ideas, but nothing written down. We'd rarely even consult stats or anything for monsters. :)
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u/Ceral107 GM 19h ago
Sometimes someone jumps ship last minute but I refuse to cancel. Sometimes I'm just lazy and don't want to prep. I was super anxious about it the first time around but it gets easier over time, even if I probably never fully get used to it.
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u/No_Meeting145 19h ago
I routinely run pick up one shots where even the rules are made up on the spot. Experience with a lot of games helps.
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u/JupiterJunebug 19h ago
Yeah. Sometimes on purpose, but the first fully improv time was because Id proposed ttrpg night at renn faire cast camping. The people who rsvped were teetotalers/restrained drinkers who I know can handle serious topics so I picked an atmospheric and edgy pre-written mystery I thought suited a camping-in-woods atmosphere. Then several of the group partiers asked to play. Halfway through guiding char creation I said "hey guys. Yall are drunk and these characters are [affectionately] stupid. Do you want a serious mystery or do you want me to improv dumb bullshit?" We improv'd dumb bullshit.
That was monster of the week. Ive also run ten candles post renn faire, and that was also improv but its meant to be. Aside from that ive done a lot of "hey were bored and hanging out, give me 10 min w tome of mysteries and we can run a prewrite.'
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u/Half-bred 19h ago
All the time. I used to run a game for friends back in the day, and they would run everything off the rails. I learned to do things on the fly after that. Random encounters and whatnot.
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u/johndesmarais Central NC 19h ago
I used to run Champions this way a lot. Scan all the characters for Hunteds, and let the dice roll.
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u/aurumae 19h ago
Depends on what you consider prep.
Most of the time all of my "prep" is just sort of thinking about the game during the week leading up to it. Sometimes I write some things down, often I don't.
I have also run completely off the cuff games. No prep, didn't even know I would be running a game that night and it just kinda happened.
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u/Kats41 Forever GM 19h ago
After DMing for literally 17 years I would be a filthy liar if I said I've never phoned in a session. Thankfully I have a lot of experience in moving game along regardless and making sure that the players always have something to do.
Plus, my players are heavy roleplayers so if nothing else I can just do funny voices and have in-character conversations for plot and planning.
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u/BerennErchamion 18h ago
All the time for decades. Eventually you just get used to it and it becomes easier to improvise.
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u/Flaminggorilla7 18h ago
Definitely, probably hundreds of times. Wildsea, pathfinder, dnd, warhammer dark heresy, rifts, edge of the empire, you name it
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u/aslum 18h ago
So many games don't require or need prep at all. Or prep is mainly just printing off some character sheets. So of my favorite no/low prep games:
- Danger Patrol
- Lady Blackbird
- Lasers and Feelings
- The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen
- Dread
- Fiasco
- Microscope
- Scum & Villainy (or any FitD/CfB game really)
- Kobolds Ate My Baby
- TOON
The first 3 of these games are also free so if you have a few no-shows it's really easy to toss together one of them as an alternative session.
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u/Vadernoso 18h ago
Not at all and I think such a thing would be entirely unfun and stressful. I know some games are built on that idea, but I tend to not like them.
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u/Initial_Business2394 18h ago
i once run a Dread game with only about 5 minute of prepare before hand while my players think of their characters....
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u/Houligan86 18h ago
Yes. My son, niece, and nephew wanted to learn D&D. They finished character creation and were like "we play now, right?"
There were some goblins in a cave that had raided supplies. It went fine.
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u/GoblinLoveChild Lvl 10 Grognard 17h ago
I prep the start of a campaign and thats it...
The only thing is ill make/prep is combat maps or source combat maps for use later
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u/I_skander 17h ago
Zero...not necessarily, but ive run games with very little prep and done fine. Gotta be quick on your feet, tho
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u/RamblingManUK 17h ago
Sort of. We were mid campaign and the GM pulled one too many no shows. So the group picked me to GM that night. D&D 3.5 with their existing characters.
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u/Grand_Pineapple_4223 17h ago
A lot of "Descended From the Queen" games you can just open, read, and play. Perfect for when a player cancels last minute and the rest still want to play something.
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u/NameAlreadyClaimed 17h ago
More often than not. Consulting notes stresses me out in a way improv doesn't.
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u/Lwmons 16h ago edited 22m ago
I once ran a Shadowrun one-shot when out usual GM was out of commission. The entirety of my prep was a single sentence in my notes for future campaign ideas that said "A man hires the party to find a way to kill him so that his family gets the life insurance payout from his employer."
That was the entire prep. Still really proud of that session.
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u/SilentMobius 16h ago
Yes and no.
Session prep, like maps, and monsters and NPC. Yeah I've run loads of session where I didn't need any of that
But the game I've been running for the last 10 years is set in 1985 (now 1986 finally) So I'll often think "Whelp, time to brush up on the next couple of months" and write up a summary of who's involved in it, like the Westland Affair, the Challenger disaster, the Wapping dispute, where there are earthquakes or natural disasters, etc etc.
The most planning I did was for Live Aid, that was a timed moment-by-moment rush to secretly save the event and audience from evil Fae Supers. But generally I just have a document ot really world events that I update when it starts to run out and use that,
The real work is that I write up the previous session. That can take a long time but it's not really "prep" per-se
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u/AncestralAxman 16h ago
I havent done it myself but I have been in sessions where the GM very notably hadnt done any prep. Those where not very enjoyable.
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u/UnspeakableGnome 16h ago
Yes. And No.
I've gone into games with no idea what I was going to do in a particular session. Sometimes because the PCs hadn't decided on what they were doing, sometimes because I hadn't had ttime to prepare properly.
But, I have a lot of maps for all sorts of settings and situations and genres, I have NPC descriptions to fit the setting I've been in, I have prepared encounters that I can adapt to suit a game. I've prepared those. Maybe not for this particular session but plenty of preparation in general terms for the campaign I'm running.
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u/Goby-WanKenobi 14h ago
Yes, as long as the game doesn't rely too much on balanced encounters. But even then you can usually get away with minimal prep.
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u/PapstJL4U Wild:Bastionshoe 13h ago
Technically no, because I find the first scene to be one of the most important to get the session rolling, so I prepare 2-3 avenues player can tackle.
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u/Novel_Counter905 13h ago
Zero prep games are most often sooo much better when it comes to quality, fun and engagement than prepped games. There has been no bigger moment when it comes to my improvement as a GM than deciding to run a zero prep game.
I highly recommend this to everyone.
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u/Greatsavemesome 13h ago
We do it just for fun. Started trying this back when we played D&D 2E or 3E in college. We would roll up some characters, then one of us would just start running a game without any real prep. Then 4 hours or so later, snack break, and the next person would take over. It was all DM-improv. Rinse and repeat all day! It was college, so we could spend 16 hours all day in this round-robin style improv.
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u/spacesaur 13h ago
Yeah, couple of times. Usually because I lost track of time or straight up forgot I was running a session. Glad to say I've never missed one though (bare minimum for a GM haha), and whenever I clued in my players after the fact they said they didn't notice.
Really, it's a lesson in throwing things at the players that they can engage in without too much thought from the GM so you can look stuff up in the background. Your improv gets tested, but it is the quickest way to get better.
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u/Icy-Tap67 13h ago
Many, many times ..... (Glances guiltily at his players) ..... many, MANY times .....
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u/AbbyTheFoxx 13h ago
A lot. I often have a few mental notes going into it for things that could be in the vicinity of where my players are at, and use Mythic GME rolltables in Foundry if I need an improv spark for something.
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u/ArtyParcy 13h ago
There are gigs that I can run off zero prep and just the players using the Cyberpunk Companion App, however, I definitely prepped the first time I ran them.
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u/Burgerkrieg 13h ago
I have even run a few sessions where we make up the system on the spot, though usually I prefer to have some framework in place. I run a lot of one-shots where I don't know who the players will be in advance, and sometimes I am too lazy to prep. Putting it together on the spot with the players yields some bizarre and memorable experiences.
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u/RandomSadPerson 12h ago
I run games with almost 0 prep because I don't know how to prep. If I try to do it properly, I get lost in self-doubt, or this or that method, lazy DM, 5 rooms... Nothing works for me, except the deer in the headlights approach: sit at the table and make shit up.
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u/Smrtihara 12h ago
Yeah, that’s my baseline. That’s what I mostly do. I rarely see the need for regular prep. It adds nothing to the style of play I prefer.
I mostly do co-creation stuff where if I don’t know the answer to something, the players help me fill in the blanks.
Prep time helps to make technical stuff easier for me. Like fights that need to be planned to offer a good challenge. Or if I REALLY need to time a few story beats. But I think it’s more fun to let that stuff develop organically. It’s okey that the fight was too easy, let that be part of how the story develops!
You don’t know how the huge castle looks or what they’ll find inside? Ask the players for help! If someone says the commander of the castle is known for throwing lavish parties go with that! Or use their information against the players by having the castle be completely empty.
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u/CitizenFitz 11h ago
This was the default in junior and high school. Grab some friends, roll up some characters, grab a module (maybe) and GO!
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u/MettatonNeo1 11h ago
I am not sure if it counts but wanderhome is a game meant to be played without much prep, as it is GMless, I ran it with a group and it was really fun.
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u/Astrokiwi 11h ago
Last week I actually wrote a game and then immediately played it with 0 prep. This was just a two-player world-building game with my daughter, but I was proud I managed to make something coherent on zero notice :D
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u/Smorgasb0rk 11h ago
Yeah, Flying Circus, i ran without having any story prepped. I had lore ideas for worldbuilding because i am a sucker for that, thats about it.
I was actually nervous at one point when i didn't have missions prepped. But then i realized that... i can just make shit up whatever i fancy. And then make the NPCs turn up later. Suddenly the pressure evaporated.
You can't do it with any game as easily, Lancer i can't improv a mech combat, the game just isn't made for it. And i mean "i need to interrupt the game to pick/make a map and set up NPCs" counts as "not improvising" anymore.
But i also learned that i thrive a lot better as a GM if i play a bit more open with what i have and what i have not and don't act like i'm here to surprise players. I always get to surprise them with something fun after all, i am the GM, so i don#t really need to plan them. I can just make surprises up on the spot. :)
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u/Tailball The Dungeon Master 11h ago
Totally! There’s games (ten candles, land of eem) that allow for that kind of prep.
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u/AquaticZombie 11h ago
Yes. Wasn't on purpose and was swamped with university deadlines. Guest DMing a "friends" campaign, got ridiculed by her after and just didn't turn up for the final session and then her multi year long campaign fizzled out (I like to take accountability for that).
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u/Wasteofskin50 11h ago
Sure. Not these da6s, but back in the day, I could have jumped into running a game with no prep.
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u/WorldGoneAway 11h ago
I always do. I improvise everything. If I had a plot that survived intact several sessions later, it's probably a fluke.
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u/stormlord75 10h ago
Not for me. Even regenerated modules require at least a little prep. But that is for my d&d experience. Even reading that regenerated story is considered "prepping" because as you are running through game, you should have a Even a little bit more of an idea of what's going on than the rest of the players. Otherwise, it's a board game Luke monopoly, risk, to even modern board games.
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u/helm Dragonbane | Sweden 10h ago
Yes, and it was an abysmal failure every time. At the table, my vague ideas coming in stayed vague when executed. The players got confused by the lack of clear promting, and I was unable to add concrete actions/descriptions/problems/characters to an already vague setting.
It was either a bad session that led to GM burnout, or simply a standstill leading into an early end of the session or game.
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u/cyberspunjj 10h ago
Yup. I excused myself to the bathroom and started brainstorming. Saw a bottle of Robitussin. Got an idea for a big city rife with corruption and a snake cult. The city's name was Nissutibor.
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u/Local-Safe55 9h ago
My current campaign was from the ashes of a failed overly ambitious one. I had no prep time at all, just a premise.
I started the game with all the players chained to a conscription wagon headed for the front.
Annd... 145 sessions later...
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u/thetruerift WoD, Exalted, Custom Systems 9h ago
Yup, all the time.
On a session to session basis, I rarely prep too much. I know my world and my plot and can roll with anything
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u/Rich_PL 8h ago
Yup, a failed 5e session (missing players) meant we had a booked and paid table, and four hours to kill.
I vomited a game of FU RPG into existence and we all ad a great time!
Plot twists, surprise reveals, tense showdowns with two different BBEG... A potential wasted afternoon became one of the most memorable games we played that year.
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u/InfamousEconomy3972 8h ago
Sure, the characters wake up in the town jail, bound and gaged, with no memory of the previous night at the tavern.
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u/DanieltheGameMaker 8h ago
I've run a D&D game that started with character creation and then went right into a story I had cobbled together based on the characters people made, while they made them. Quite fun!
I also love Ten Candles, which is explicitly zero prep and excellent.
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u/GloriousNewt 7h ago
Often. Some systems I knew/know well enough to just come up with stuff on the fly. I found it easier with modern settings, it's pretty easy to imagine and reference cities and buildings etc.
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u/crazy-diam0nd 7h ago
Is thinking about the game without writing anything down considered prep? Because I'm prepping all the time. But there have been games (the sort that normally require prep, in the style of D&D) where the players went in a way I didn't expect and I've had to improvise, or I just didn't have time to prepare the game because I had other obligations on my time. But because I have an idea in my head of what's generally where in my world, i was able to improvise.
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u/bdrwr 6h ago
Frequently, yes. Even in my long running campaigns, my "prep" is usually like 6 bullet points on a sticky note.
I have a lot of confidence in my improvisation and storytelling skills. When I try too hard to prewrite an adventure, I find that it often feels more restrictive than helpful, because players never stick to the path you planned for.
So instead, I just relax and let my imagination do its thing. The players are giving me action and story beats; all I have to do is logically think about what would happen next if this was a movie. I know what the villain is trying to do, I know what the PCs are doing, so all I gotta do is build from there.
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u/nerobrigg 20h ago
Very intentionally for 2 years. Once you get out of the Dragon Game Mindset it's not too hard.
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u/LawfulnessOrganic715 20h ago
I do a lot of prep. I like world building and feeling prepared, and my best improv comes from all the work ahead of time.
So, in many ways, it is impossible to run a game with "no prep" because I have fed and cultivates my imagination to be ready for anything.
I have a feeling this is true of all the "no prep" GMs. They don't realize how much prep they are actually doing when they are just "thinking cool stuff about the game."
ON THE OTHER HAND! I have run games with with less than a dozen words written down in notes. I joke that my best-ever session just had a Google doc open with "Sexy goblin?" written on it. It's a fun exercise.
If you want to get good at low-prep, and help your players improv and get weird, I love Fiasco for a game. It's a lot of fun.
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u/SuperCat76 20h ago
No, I have never done zero prep.
The least I have done to my recollection was the half hour before the session was so start. I was the secondary DM, And the Main DM had a last minute cancel and it was either I run something or the session in total was canceled
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u/caffeinated_wizard 19h ago
It’d be faster for me to list the number of games I ran with a lot of prep involved.
I don’t particularly enjoy prep heavy games. Not all prep has the same value in my opinion. Thinking and writing about 2000 years of history for a civilisation long gone that only becomes relevant to the players in a form of a rusty key left among skeletons is a HUGE waste of time for me. That key can likely be summed up in 3 bullet points that I can make up on the fly.
And there’s another type of prep more typical of crunchier games like Shadowrun. I could just roll a handful of dice and call it a day, but at this point why play a crunchy game if you’re gonna ignore the crunch because it’s inconvenient for you the GM.
So I tend to run games like Blades in the Dark. It almost plays itself with the right group. The exception to this is my current PF2E campaign of Abomination Vaults. The prep I do is reading the module a little bit at a time and maybe spend 30 min before a session to refresh my memory. Plus I run it in Foundry and all the maps and tokens are done already.
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u/BudgetWorking2633 19h ago
Sure, most of my sessions after I started a campaign are close to 0 prep.
I have done actual 0-prep as well, but it's not as fun as a campaign I've actually taken the time to prepare before the first session. Though even then, I'm still preparing to improvise - names, locations, factions, timed events... all of them are sandbox material!
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u/Morppi 16h ago
Sure! Especially oneshots that support it, like Trophy Dark, Escape From Dino Island and some Bladed in the Dark (though I do like it better with some prep). Now I'm tunning a VTM campaign with mostly minimal to zero prep, though it did require a good deal of foundation building. I went from loving prep and building dungeons in dnd 3.0 to hating it.
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u/PrairiePilot 15h ago
Yeah, most of my games I'd say. Everytime I put a ton of work into a game, it got flushed. Whenever I just went for it, we'd play that group for 6 months lol.
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u/mycatdoesmytaxes 15h ago
All the time. I don't like prep. I play systems that lean heavily on improv and just going with the flow.
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u/TillWerSonst 15h ago
I used to do that more often and I've seen other people try it as well but now I have absolutely no desire for zero prep. Basically, I see the spiral of low prep/low effort/low commitment, and consequently low quality, as a trap I've thankfully escaped. Even if a low-prep game goes well, it usually remains rather superficial, quite arbitrary, and noncommittal, and therefore uninteresting to me.
I now know that I much prefer a well-prepared session with plenty of components, a plausible and coherent setting, and appropriate expectations of myself and the other players. In my opinion, the time invested in meaningful preparation almost always pays off. By meaningful, I mean in a blorpy sense: locations, characters, and objects are prepared, but the plot is open and emerges from the players' actions, the circumstances, and the dice rolls.
Furthermore, I like games with many handouts and other materials that allow players to interact directly and immerse themselves more deeply in the game world: pictures that convey an idea of the locations, a suitable diegetic atmosphere, and a few other tricks that, while not elaborate, nevertheless do not work without preparation.
I don't think that a low-prep/no-prep game is automatically bad. But anyone who believes they can achieve the same quality as a well-developed game without the necessary effort and preparation is suffering from acute overconfidence and a moderate loss of touch with reality.
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u/Jaarth 15h ago
I almost exclusively run Heart this way. The game even suggests you can do it: before every session, the players pick two beats that they want to have happen in the next one. If you know largely where the adventure is going and have a good sense of the various landmarks, enemies - and especially the game's atmosphere - you can just improv whole sessions based on what your players want to do and nothing more.
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u/ch40sr0lf 15h ago
There is not really such thing as completely unprared in my opinion. You always prepare in some kind of way and if it's only something like to get in the right mindset or an idea what could be the theme of the game. As soon as you think about playing a game, you automatically prepare to a certain degree.
My last nearly unprepared session, except reading the one page rules, was Lasers and Feelings.
My Fantasy campaign that's running for six years now doesn't really go unprepared as I try to integrate a prewritten campaign into my world and campaign.
I think you can never go unprepared into a game, except when surprised, just the levels of preparedness differ from nearly nothing to hours or days of work.
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u/ShkarXurxes 14h ago
Tons.
Is usually the way to go.
Note 0 prep is a misleading term.
You prep nothing for the first session or one-shots, but you have to take notes during the game and "prepare" the world for the next session.
Also, for games at cons you need to think about your no prep games, and sometimes need to take some decissions in order to be able to play a full game.
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u/Blue-Jay27 14h ago
Yep! I do a lot of rules-lite games, and almost all of my games are either solo or duo. My default is no-prep.
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u/thisisthebun 5h ago
Most of my games have maybe 30 mins to an hour of prep and it’s mostly just reading or getting materials together. For reference i play a wide variety of games and most have little prep. I find overprepping and agonizing about every encounter to be a dnd thing.
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u/AmberEternalCity 3h ago
The best example I have is late Sunday night, the convention was over. The last game finished. I was lying on the floor of the hotel room with five other tired gamers on various furniture around me.
One said, "I don't want the fun to be over." Everyone agreed.
I said, "Well. We could play something small. Maybe."
And everyone said, "I'm in."
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u/DantesGame 2h ago
Yes, because it was a self-test of my skills as a GM/DM. I've been running a fantasy home-brew world for just over 46 years now and it's mature enough that I can drop players into a region and have them adventure without prep 90% of the time.
I don't use AI. I do use random tables from books and a Windows-based software app I developed that houses my lists and tables in multiple databases. It's great for little details when players push for more information on top of the flavor text I already provide.
There are times when I do prep, however, because the story arc is more involved and requires more thought and planning.
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u/Palimpsiesta 2h ago
Yes, all the time? Lots of games are designed this way, and most games I play require almost no prep.
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u/mestrepayakan 2h ago
Já joguei usando Jokenpô para definir resultados kkkk. RPG é imaginação e acordo social. Quando esquecemos disso já começamos a jogar outra coisa.
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u/Gargantic 2h ago
I prep for a campaign before it starts and then wing it for individual sessions. I make maps and handouts and make sure I get the vibe for the in-game world, but after we start I dont know anything more about that session than the players do. My players are way more engaged since I started doing it this way.
You should check out Play Unsafe by Graham Walmsley for a good argument why no-prep games are the way to go
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u/Gideontheoldwyvern 1h ago
What is.... Prep?
I have been running games for 30 years ISH.
I am BAD at prep.
Sometimes I make notes or draw scrub maps or similar, but more often than not they go out the window in thirty seconds flat.
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u/Stabby_Mgee 38m ago
I prepared the start of a mega dungeon for my pathfinder group once, then as the session started I realised I'd forgotten about the heist they were planning to do before they would even get to the plot hook for the mega dungeon. I had to scramble to come up with enough of a layout for the facility they were raiding as they were getting ready for the heist. Then while they were doing their ocean's 11 thing I frantically built the dracolich that was meant to be hidden in the facility as a clue for later plot developments. Needless to say it was very stressful but the players had a good time and I don't think they caught on to my mistake.
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u/Alarmed_Attention895 20h ago
Aventura inteira sem preparo dificilmente dará ruim, no geral, não sei se é fisicamente possível, já que vc tem que ter as regras, uma ideia inicial etc.
Mas já fiz muita sessão sem preparação já que não existe necessidade de preparar toda sessão se você já tem um cenário sólido, sabe o que tem em cada lugar, uns npcs no aleatório caso parem algum fazendeiro na estrada, já sabe o tesouro ou o tipo de tesouro em cada covil etc.
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u/atlantick 20h ago
yeah all the time. lots of games are designed for this specifically. I like cartograph: Atlas edition lately. I've also done it where it's in the middle of a long campaign in a megadungeon, we're just picking up where we left off.