There’s been a bit of chatter on the #TTRPG internet again about zero-prep games, and whether this is a misnomer, a false claim, or even harmful to the hobby. So, in an attempt to clarify what some people are saying, I’d like to talk you through an example of prep for a convention game that I’ve got coming up.

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To start with, I’d say I’m aggressively pro-prep. If you’re running a game for other people, you owe it to them to have it ready in a usable way so that they have an enjoyable experience. Anything less just disrespects your players, the game, the hobby. (Now – I’d also say that there’s a bit of prep that players should do before they show up at the table – but that’s for another post!)

Random Encounters

This goes equally – and often more so – for looser games that claim to be zero-prep, or minimal prep. I have a finite level of patience for procedurally generated experiences where I’m waiting for a GM to roll dice and look up results at the table – I shouldn’t have to wait for them to show me 2d4 orcs, or what their motivations are, and how they should be approached. While I appreciate there’s a level of intrigue that comes from nobody knowing in advance, in most cases the encounter would be more engaging if they’d rolled it up beforehand, and given it some thought to fit it into the whole cloth of the session and setting.

The one time I’ve done this as a GM is in a recent game of Pirate Borg (which was for Unconventional GMs – you can see it in action here). In that adventure, M Allen Hall’s Unmoored, you’re on a sinking island and there’s a procedure for how parts of the island sink, and frequent random encounters. This works for me because it’s a finite setting, with each encounter already tied to a powder-keg of factions and history. This, to be fair, is one of the strengths of a lot of OSR modules – setting and plot embedded in random tables – and I can get behind it.

But, you know, I still read and thought about what each of those encounters would look like in my prep, and ditched a couple that I wasn’t too keen on. Prep.

So, let’s look at an example of what might be considered a low-prep game for me.

Masks of Lankhmar for DCC Lankhmar

I’m running this at Furnace convention in a few weeks. I’ve run DCC a few times before – check out my advice blog here – and ran another DCC Lankhmar game at Kraken in the summer, No Small Crimes in Lankhmar. So, with a published adventure, with a game I’m fairly confident of rules with, you might expect I’d be minimal prep. Nevertheless, I’ve still –

• Built 8 pregens (I’ve got potentially 6 players, and you always need spares). I had these made for No Small Crimes, but it’s still prep. They’ve got a few roleplaying touches, but are mostly blank slates for the players. Patreons have access to them here.
• Wrote up a one-sheet of DCC Lankhmar’s rules tweaks, such as the healing rules. Again, this was already done – but it’s still prep.
• Read the module. More properly, read it once, then went through with a highlighter to put key stuff in it. I print out modules like this 2 to a page – they’re portable, and it reduces the chance of me staring at it in play looking for answers it might not have. I want to be able to confidently paraphrase boxed text in a module like this, with only a cursory glance at the information in front of me.
• Listened to Fear Of A Black Dragon’s ep on it. The Actual Play I found of it was nearly 4 hours long, which was too long for me (all AP channels should be 2 hours or less one-shots, right?) – but the podcast ep gives me a decent overview. FOABD is crucially play-informed, so there’s commentary on what parts worked and what didn’t, which is what I’m after, as well as an overview of the adventure structure.
• And finally – for the first time – I ran a party through it using Cezar Capacle’s Triple-O “player emulator” solo rules. Expect a longer write-up of this tool later, but in short it’s a device for solo play that lets you roll a ready-made party through a published adventure and decide what action they take.

Is this too much? Not for me. Other games will have more or less, depending on time allowed and my familiarity with the system. While I’ve run DCC a fair bit, it’s not quite my usual style of game to GM – and I find I often prep more for a published adventure than I do for a ready-made one. This is for a convention game – and at one of the ‘flagship’ conventions in the UK, I’d say (size isn’t everything – often there’s an inverse relationship between size of convention and quality of games) – so I want it to be a good one. Clearly, when I’ve got Kraken coming up and I’m prepping to run 6 or 7 games at one con, I’m going to reduce that a bit – but some of that is by running games I’m already more familiar with.

So, an insight into how much prep I’d do for a con game. How does this compare with your prep situation? This is pretty much one-shot focussed – I wouldn’t do this much for a session of a regular campaign – although I might before launching a campaign. Let me know in the comments!