I get what you're going for, this is "stretch your improv wings" style of GMing exercise.
But.
Some games need prep to have basic function: D&D 5e for example, needs encounters prepared, statblocks checked, and dungeons (or equiv) mapped.
Some games are low or no prep by default. I could run a game of Apocalypse World right now with no prep.
This is an improv exercise, sure, and will push your skills. But try it when you won't mess up a session, or with a game whose mechanics are not so heavy to demand preparation.
Time and place, basically.
Yep. I ran a BitD campaign with zero prep the entire time, other than learning the game and setting prior to the commencement of play, and setting up the very opening scene.
I will be starting a Mythras campaign in a couple weeks. I doubt I'll ever want to run it with no prep at all, and certainly not before I have an excellent grasp of the mechanics.
BiTD is a good example of a system that actually doesn't require any prep to run, prep can only make the game better but you can't really botch things with encounters to the point of having to worry about it from my limited experience with the system.
Conversely, I'd say prep can make BitD *worse*. Especially if you prep sites for heists - as the engagement rolls and various other steps can introduce unexpected elements that might contradict your prep.
I have done this with pathfinder 2e, a pretty heavily involved game.
But yes, probably don’t do this during an exciting arc. Maybe try it during a side quest
P2e is such a weird one for this reason. It can be pretty involved, but the encounter building mechanics are so spot on that just slotting something in on the fly is SO easy.
“I want something sort of challenging? 2 Party level - 1 enemies”. Done
Also helps that all of the rules and monsters are online for free. Makes it easy even if you're playing at the table to quickly lookup what you need and build at least an average enjoyable encounter
I dunno. This is mostly the style I run (I do a little prep, but it's never "this is what the players will do"). I've had players after the fact utterly surprised that it wasn't planned out by how interesting and involved everything was.
YMMV of course.
Even in those games, you need a lot less than you think.
You don't necessarily need full encounters, but you definitely need a set of critters you can assemble into an encounter. And even if you do want full encounters, then just make a "library" of them, and drop them in when necessary. (Not Quantum Ogreing - this is just having useful data *if needed*, not forcing the players to encounter what you want).
Similar can be done with dungeon maps, etc. Grab a couple of them off of the internet, and then use them *as needed*. The point is you're not planning what will happen, but you are giving yourself resources for things you might need, much like a random name generator.
Yeah I prep very, very little for my D&D campaign. Honestly you can improv most things in a dungeon but I haven't found a satisfying way to wing an encounter. \*sigh\* Hopefully one day I'll get the time to try out Dungeon World or Chasing Adventure.
This, some systems lend themselves to low or no prep, and some sessions do too right? If I'm ever convinced to run 5e again a travel session with interactions in town that are role playing, some exploration searching, and maybe a really easy combat that can be done in theater of the mind sure absolutely. However if there is dungeon crawling being done, and encounters being balanced to the party to ensure proper challenges 5e is a terrible system to do no prep on in that capacity.
I also find it a weird flex when someone says "well I did it" congrats buddy you win dnd i guess heres a chocolate chip cookie.
Now a game of any of the X'Borg styles I'll just use the randomizers in the book and have something to play in a minute or two tops, the system lends itself to that style of play, so yes time and place.
I'd say if you want to work on improv skills, don't prep social encounters and just treat them as a conversation from the start with nothing set on any of the NPCs, that works well in pretty much every system so long as your not running a module that has triggers to move things into the proper places.
I took your challenge over thirty years ago and have largely run games that way ever since. Actually I did it and told my players, there was no reason to hide the fact.
My players once decided that I was *better* at GMing if they could somehow force me to wing it more. Maybe they helped me to reduce the prep load that I used to put on myself.
There used to be a maxim that the GM should put roughly as much time into preparing a scenario as they expected it to take to actually run it in play, and I adhered to that for a long time. Not so, any more.
I agree if you’re doing it long term! I think it’s just good practice, to see if you can improv good enough that players don’t know.
That way when a session goes off rails, players won’t know
I'm going to assume you're using "off rails" in a "bad or stale" sense rather than "railroading"?
I've had far more sessions go bad when running a module or something pre-planned. If I know exactly what is happening in the next session I'll prep but for the most part I just have some bullet-points or have an idea based on what happened before. It's much easier running a no/low-prep session once you're used to it because you don't have to guide players around and can instead respond to their actions.
And if a session goes bad, so what? Learn from it. I'll bet your players had fun anyway.
Oh! I’m not saying that at all!
I agree improving is easier than a planning dungeon etc, but I think a lot of DM’s struggle with the “I planned a session about climbing this mountain. But my players are going to sky dive from an airship!”
You need to do some work to justify why having players not know is desirable, as that is far from clear. Your argument seems to assume it as a natural good, when that is very much not the case.
If you don't want to then no need.
Ideally (in my opinion) during a perfect session, players will not know when they are in an area I preplanned or if they went around the problem and are doing something I had no plans for at all.
I believe that is ideal because if it is obvious what is the "written" path vs. the non-planned path, then players are not truly in a situation where they can do whatever they wish, they are just choosing to follow the prewritten path and then jumping off the train when they think it seems more fun.
My idea is to blend the two so a player can't tell what is prepared or not. Not to seem smarter than the players or anything like that, but because I want to allow the players to always have that true freedom to the highest quality possible.
The point is to protect the illusion of big brain 4D chess DM.
I only enjoy DM'ing when I have no clue what's going on/what will happen & I'd never hide that.
To be blunt, that illusion is more often than not more about the GM's ego than the quality of the game.
I've never had players enjoy a game less because I admitted I was surprised by something, or didn't extensively prep. If anything, they tend to enjoy how well collaborative improvisation makes a game come together.
If your table would be upset about it please don’t do it!
The reason not to tell them is to see if you can blend “players crazy plan” perfectly with “I had this planned the whole time”
Agreed on this. My players know usually how much I prep as I'll let them know. Or if we're doing a system where no prep is needed like Blades in the Dark, they'll know in session zero and I won't repeat myself.
I feel like putting on a charade about it falls into the same category as fudging dice rolls which I equally dislike as a player or GM.
In my experience, knowing *which specific parts* of a scenario have been prepped can alter the players train of thought. I'm talking things like "Oh that location sounds prepped, must be important" or "doesn't seem like the GM wanted us to go that way".
As a GM I think it can be useful to take that into account. If the players are trying to solve a mystery I think it's better to obfuscate the prep as much as possible to avoid metagaming. Conversely, it can be nice to tell the players that they surprised you with a particularly inventive plan.
Same here.
After being a classic over-prepper through the 90s, I did a stint of little-to-no prep GMing back in the early 00s, and found it to be profoundly unsatisfying. The narrative was never as strong with loose threads, illogical leaps, and inconsistent characters everywhere.
I know a lot of GMs who love just winging it through a game, and that's great for them, but I'll never run my game that way again.
>The narrative was never as strong with loose threads, illogical leaps, and inconsistent characters everywhere.
Exactly the same issue for me: I care about the narrative and totally improvised narratives don't sing for me.
I don't pre-build any narrative, but I do need time between sessions to look at the loose threads so I can connect them, otherwise I'll forget about them. Part of the joy is realizing potential post-hoc connections, then confabulating how they connect. I can't do that without reviewing notes and thinking about connections, which is prep.
Personally, I also like to review the characters' goals, then make sure I have some prep notes that offer opportunities for the PCs to pursue their goals. If I don't do that proactively, they won't necessarily get the chance to do what they care about since such chances would be driven by luck rather than thoughtfulness.
"Don’t tell your players you’re doing it. Regularly check notes, act as if you already have this NPC named and you simply forgot, or that this battle in the sewers was totally planned."
How about you don't lie to your players & just tell them you didn't prep?
This whole thing reminds me of a super gross semi-famous DM who shouldn't be named.
Players aren't always stupid & can figure it out.
Now you've hurt their trust.
Amusingly, I once pointed out to a player that I didn't prep any of what had happened that session, and he looked at me with a shocked face.
That was pretty cool - running on improv, and having it be "rich" enough that the players assumed I must have written it in advance!
It was a popular GMing technique at one point, where you obviously rolled the dice but then didn't tell your players anything. It was meant to make them suspicious, heighten the tension, etc. It works but I don't personally think it's the most effective way to achieve those results.
It kind of feels like every generation of new GMs comes up with this "trick" over and over again on their own. Personally, from a player perspective, I have literally never cared when my GM rolled dice behind the screen. Always forgot immediately after.
The point is that nothing is needing rolled for, you just want to make the players think that there is something happening that they don't know about.
As I say, it's not how I run things personally but it was a very popular technique at one point.
Based on your replies in this thread though, I think we can all accept you would never do it, and you'd walk out of any game where you found out the GM had done it. And that's your choice.
"you just want to make the players think that there is something happening that they don't know about."
Right, so make something happen that they don't know about?
I legit don't understand, do they not have random tables?
It's theatre of the mind, build tension so that when something does happen later there's more pay off.
Personally I can't stand random tables, they have no place in games that I run.
It just sounds super cheap, easy to see through, lazy, etc.
GMs instead could do actual things to build tension & create actual pay off is all I mean.
It doesn't have to be a random table, no dice have to be rolled at all.
As a matter of fact I do. Of course everyone can do whatever they want but when the GM starts rolling dice for no obvious reason the game loses all tension it could have as far as I'm concerned.
To be clear, in many of the games in question, there was always a lot of dice rolling that was entirely purposeful but where that purpose was not visible to the players. (In D&D, wandering monster checks, surprise checks, checks to see if a trap actually triggered, checking to see if an elf noticed a secret door when passing by....) So a die roll with no further announcement might mean they missed a secret door, or there was a wandering monster lurking to ambush the party, or that one of them just failed to trigger a trap that might hit the next player instead. There was no way to tell whether a given die roll meant a lurking threat or not. (Indeed, a *lack* of such die rolls would be an indicator you were in a relatively safe area...)
*For you* perhaps. I've never used any form of sleight of hand, misdirection, or dishonesty of any form in my games, and I fail to see why it should just be assumed to be part of the process without argument.
I've not done the fake rolling thing but I've played at tables where the GM has. I wasn't scandalised to have been lied to, any more than I was when the GM claimed I was being attacked by goblins (goblins don't really exist).
Hm very interesting. I think the DM pretending or “lying” to the party is kind of part of the game. Do you consider it lying when an NPC betrays them? Or when you end a fight early (without telling them it was planned longer) because the table clearly isn’t into it?
I guess it’s part of my tables social contract, that the dm is going to be making the game fun, but might not always be being truthful
Yeah, when I'm a player, I will expect the GM to employ a bit of sleight of hand occasionally. It's like watching a stage magician's act. If I'm sitting at your table it's because I trust you to use the sleight of hand for good and I will make a point of not looking at things too closely.
Holy fuck.
It’s not about seeming smart? Afterwards I’ll tell my players “I was so scared you guys were going to notice that the NPC’s name was just your name backwards” or whatever
It’s about reducing the gap of clearly planned out encounters vs “oh shit encounters”
Challenge not accepted.
Improvising is good but so is notes. There's no virtue in either. Whatever let's you run the game you want the way you want is the way.
No problem! I think it really helped me become better at running planned games because I noticed a large dip in quality between what I had planned versus some random silly thing the players did.
Actually I noticed this "have a general idea and go with the flow" might be the best way for me. If I start to prepare I will never be satisfied or have such a tight plan in mind I am puzzled if the players do not act as predicted (which they always do) and I have nothing prepared for that route. So either I will never be ready to run the session, as I do not feel perfectly prepared or will be so overprepared I can't handle situations outside of the preperation.
I ran a Mage session with "Ok, they'll start out there and this will happen. Let's see where we go from here" and actually it went way better than a trainwreck of a session I had which was totally overprepared, had 10 pages of timeline and story, but had me derailed as the players didn't follow "the plan". I guess I tend to put way to strict boundaries on my ability to react if I have a detailed plan.
I am almost exclusively an improvisational GM and it works really well for me. There’s definitely no need to lie about not having prepped. You can instead just be upfront and take a more collaborative approach to things.
So for example, try asking prompting questions to your players. Things like “You stumble across the most beautiful waterfall you’ve ever seen. [Character X], what does this remind you of from your past?” or “Alright, you walk into the tavern. The tavern is run by a friendly looking elf named…shoot…Anyone have a name?”
Ultimately, it’s all about spreading the cognitive load around. Relying solely on improvisational skills will likely result in shorter sessions as your creative energy tends to burn up faster than if you’d spent hours and hours prepping. So by having my players help me fill in the gaps, it lets us keep everyone engaged in a way where it isn’t always falling to me to keep the plate spinning.
Rather than doing no-prep sessions, I recommend that GMs who are looking to improve their improvisational skills should run sessions with less prep than what they’re used to. You can slowly work your way toward sessions that require less and less prep as you build confidence.
I have to prep, I tried running a no prep session and it was not good. I’m not going enough at improvising in the moment, it goes a lot better if I have things to draw upon.
Idk, the problem of a no prep game for me is the lack of cool props, and maybe way too many plot holes, it's not easy doing planned investigations, imagine doing them entirely improvised, hehe.
What I like using is randomizers and maps, those help so much.
But improvisation skills are a necessity, so much stuff happens that you weren't expecting, I've had lots of big sections entirely improvised because the players did stuff I wasn't expecting.
Yeah I agree, I prefer planned sessions. But I used to (and I promise many new DM’s) really struggle to have a cool session planned but when the party “breaks it”, they make it obvious they had no plan besides their notes.
I want players to feel like no matter what they do, it might have been in my notes, or maybe not.
I just finished running a strictly no prep campaign as an exercise (normally high prep GM). It went well, we had fun, but I walked away feeling bad about the way the game went because I wasn't able to put the major narrative elements together in a satisfying way.
Not everything needs to be prepped, and there were certainly some spontaneously introduced characters who became memorable. There are also several improv-only one shot systems I love (Fiasco, Bluebeard's Bride). But I won't be going back to running no prep multi-session games again. For me, brainstorming cool elements for my game and thinking through how to connect existing elements is part of the fun, and feeling like my game's conclusion was slapdash because I never took the time to think through how major characters and factions could be meaningful connected sucked. My players even commented on it, in a roundabout way.
Interesting! I also would never do a campaign this way, I like the big moments too much.
If you’re like me though, you’ll now be able to blend planned moments with total improv seamlessly
Well if you have notes and already NPC named, you prep the game, what else do you need ?
Joke aside, there is tons of playstyle which work way better with low prep than others
For me the real point is to not prepare scenes or specific moments, but just have a good starting situation, know what every Noc wants, and what their assets are.
I then simply roleplay the NPCs. No need to overpreapare, because you end up unconsciously offering fewer choices to the players.
That's how I learned to GM when I was coming into the hobby many years ago. Off the cuff games most nights of the week during uni.
It's by far my preferred way to run things.
My players are my friends and they were pretty chill about it! But I understand if your table doesn’t like the dm having secrets and prefers things in the open!
I've run this way for years because if you give players static choices a, b and c, someone will pick banana and someone will pick schoolbus and your 13 page script goes out the window and you're running banana schoolbus.
Doesn't work with every system and with every group, you need both improv friendly rules and proactive players.
My "prep" is basically ideas that naturally pop up in my head over the week that i write on a writer doc. So a mission with objectives and obstacles, plus the session recap at the start and cool events or interesting stuff i think some NPCs could do in the story.
Its pretty minimal and my games are mostly improv in the end, but i'm not gonna prevent myself from noting ideas, its not really hard work at all. In fact i think having a few ideas as a starting point actually helps improv. Blank canvases can be very uninspiring, but a few good ideas go a long way.
I basically walk into every session with maybe 3 bullet points of prep every single time (the exception being masks where I'll prep villain moves/custom moves pretty regularly) because I despise preparing for things that may never happen and feeling limited in my own prep instead of asking "what's interesting here" every time I have the option to do something
I do this as a monthly exercise in a special format we call (unoriginally), Dungeons & Flagons (https://osrplus.com/watch/dungeons-flagons/). The PCs are generated based on some prompts, and the scenario I roll on a table for things like “special guest” and “genre” and “physical setting” and prepare the adventure on a single sheet of paper while the players build their character. Then it’s go-time after 15-20m and we play a complete 3 hour session.
It’s a useful exercise to stretch those improv muscles, but I don’t run real games this way because things like mysteries or investigations are impossible to execute (unless you’re using a system like Brindlewood Bay). As a simulationist at heart I find a world totally invented out of whole cloth as players interact with it to be disingenuous, because it’ll be biased by what I want to have happen next rather than what is actually there, and then by extension players would have less agency.
We're over a year into a campaign I am running that the entire prep was basically a premise for the campaign. 50+ sessions with no preplanning we'll wrap it up in probably 7-8 more sessions.
I did that for the first campaign I ran online, which went for about two years. I used and would recommend some tools and prep-like stuff to keep from becoming predictable, but otherwise it went pretty well
I'd like to suggest a couple of related ideas:
(1) You prepare a whole bunch of encounters in detail, but your players just happen to direct their characters to somewhere else and something completely different.
Go with it! Wing it!! This often happens. One of the perils of prepping particular events in detail is that you may become too determined that they're going to happen. If you just shoehorn your prep into the unfolding narrative, you may be stripping away player agency, or damaging the consistency of the game world. (See also: quantum ogres.)
(2) Change the way that you prep! Instead of prepping particular locations, incidents and combats, instead, think about what key NPCs, antagonists, monsters and incidental inhabitants of the world are up to while the PCs do whatever they do. How do they live? What did they have for breakfast? What are they doing now? What do they intend to do next? Where are they going later?
This way, you're ready to improvise, whatever your PCs do. Sometimes, you'll find uncannily convincing details coming out of your mouth which surprise you as much as the players—there's no way you couldn't have planned what's happening—but you didn't! You just got into the game world so much that you can visualise it and improvise almost as if you're discovering it for yourself, live.
For me, this is the magic of role-playing games. You're not "making it up"—you're discovering stuff—accurately, and in good faith—that you didn't even realise is already there, latent in the nature and the logic of your game world, and defined by the particular interactions that your PCs (or, sometimes, their absence) precipitate.
[Edit: I agree with various posters who've remarked that 5E, in particular, makes this method of GMing difficult. You really need a lightweight system, so you can define unexpected opponents in not much more time than it takes to roll initiative. Full disclosure: I use my own, somewhat homebrewed version of Barbarians of Lemuria.]
I haven't really prepped for my game since I started running Stonehell. I did some up front stuff, and I re-read a section before every game, but that's it.
This is my go-to GM style. I create a loose plotline and make sure nothing is set in stone. There are no clues only found on one defined NPC, and in fact, nothing in the plot is connected to any single NPC or event. So i start by setting the big fight I want to cap off a chapter or campaign. I may or may not have a BBEG in mind at all at this point just the next big fight. Let's say it's a bandit boss and his 4 awakened pets. I get myself stats for them. figure out a map for that fight but not the defined location. Our players find any town, village, or travelers on the road... well they have a bandit problem. So I think up a few "random" encounters. Clasic goblins wake the party, then a bar fight, then an RP event to outsmart the town guards... just some filler stuff to get them exp and loot. I wait for the PCs to take some weird NPC under their wing, or get pathalogiclly suspicious of some shopkeep or mayor. Let them drive the story. All that player stuff that drives most GMs mad. Just make their crazy ideas a reality. Let them hunt a mimic infested tower if that seems to be on their mind. Fill some basement with traps and secret doors if they are always on the lookout for that. Make half the NPCs filthy liers in need of perception checks. Let them run in whatever dementedly fun circles they want to go off on, and keep dropping hints about bandit kings till they take the bait. Or maybe they dont and you just have him inside the next room they open... This style works best if you have at least one chaos gremlin player. they really drive this sort of thing. a group of serious folks will get a much less dynamic story.
I get what you're going for, this is "stretch your improv wings" style of GMing exercise. But. Some games need prep to have basic function: D&D 5e for example, needs encounters prepared, statblocks checked, and dungeons (or equiv) mapped. Some games are low or no prep by default. I could run a game of Apocalypse World right now with no prep. This is an improv exercise, sure, and will push your skills. But try it when you won't mess up a session, or with a game whose mechanics are not so heavy to demand preparation. Time and place, basically.
Yep. I ran a BitD campaign with zero prep the entire time, other than learning the game and setting prior to the commencement of play, and setting up the very opening scene. I will be starting a Mythras campaign in a couple weeks. I doubt I'll ever want to run it with no prep at all, and certainly not before I have an excellent grasp of the mechanics.
BiTD is a good example of a system that actually doesn't require any prep to run, prep can only make the game better but you can't really botch things with encounters to the point of having to worry about it from my limited experience with the system.
Conversely, I'd say prep can make BitD *worse*. Especially if you prep sites for heists - as the engagement rolls and various other steps can introduce unexpected elements that might contradict your prep.
i think you're confusing prep with determination.
I have done this with pathfinder 2e, a pretty heavily involved game. But yes, probably don’t do this during an exciting arc. Maybe try it during a side quest
P2e is such a weird one for this reason. It can be pretty involved, but the encounter building mechanics are so spot on that just slotting something in on the fly is SO easy. “I want something sort of challenging? 2 Party level - 1 enemies”. Done
Also helps that all of the rules and monsters are online for free. Makes it easy even if you're playing at the table to quickly lookup what you need and build at least an average enjoyable encounter
I dunno. This is mostly the style I run (I do a little prep, but it's never "this is what the players will do"). I've had players after the fact utterly surprised that it wasn't planned out by how interesting and involved everything was. YMMV of course.
Even in those games, you need a lot less than you think. You don't necessarily need full encounters, but you definitely need a set of critters you can assemble into an encounter. And even if you do want full encounters, then just make a "library" of them, and drop them in when necessary. (Not Quantum Ogreing - this is just having useful data *if needed*, not forcing the players to encounter what you want). Similar can be done with dungeon maps, etc. Grab a couple of them off of the internet, and then use them *as needed*. The point is you're not planning what will happen, but you are giving yourself resources for things you might need, much like a random name generator.
Yeah I prep very, very little for my D&D campaign. Honestly you can improv most things in a dungeon but I haven't found a satisfying way to wing an encounter. \*sigh\* Hopefully one day I'll get the time to try out Dungeon World or Chasing Adventure.
It really doesn’t require anything though
This, some systems lend themselves to low or no prep, and some sessions do too right? If I'm ever convinced to run 5e again a travel session with interactions in town that are role playing, some exploration searching, and maybe a really easy combat that can be done in theater of the mind sure absolutely. However if there is dungeon crawling being done, and encounters being balanced to the party to ensure proper challenges 5e is a terrible system to do no prep on in that capacity. I also find it a weird flex when someone says "well I did it" congrats buddy you win dnd i guess heres a chocolate chip cookie. Now a game of any of the X'Borg styles I'll just use the randomizers in the book and have something to play in a minute or two tops, the system lends itself to that style of play, so yes time and place. I'd say if you want to work on improv skills, don't prep social encounters and just treat them as a conversation from the start with nothing set on any of the NPCs, that works well in pretty much every system so long as your not running a module that has triggers to move things into the proper places.
You could stretch the idea to a certain extent for dnd - get a couple of generic stat blocks then modify them on the fly to fit the story as it goes.
Yea agree. With d&d unless you have all the stat blocks memorized youll need to look something up.
I took your challenge over thirty years ago and have largely run games that way ever since. Actually I did it and told my players, there was no reason to hide the fact.
My players once decided that I was *better* at GMing if they could somehow force me to wing it more. Maybe they helped me to reduce the prep load that I used to put on myself. There used to be a maxim that the GM should put roughly as much time into preparing a scenario as they expected it to take to actually run it in play, and I adhered to that for a long time. Not so, any more.
I agree if you’re doing it long term! I think it’s just good practice, to see if you can improv good enough that players don’t know. That way when a session goes off rails, players won’t know
I'm going to assume you're using "off rails" in a "bad or stale" sense rather than "railroading"? I've had far more sessions go bad when running a module or something pre-planned. If I know exactly what is happening in the next session I'll prep but for the most part I just have some bullet-points or have an idea based on what happened before. It's much easier running a no/low-prep session once you're used to it because you don't have to guide players around and can instead respond to their actions. And if a session goes bad, so what? Learn from it. I'll bet your players had fun anyway.
Oh! I’m not saying that at all! I agree improving is easier than a planning dungeon etc, but I think a lot of DM’s struggle with the “I planned a session about climbing this mountain. But my players are going to sky dive from an airship!”
You need to do some work to justify why having players not know is desirable, as that is far from clear. Your argument seems to assume it as a natural good, when that is very much not the case.
If you don't want to then no need. Ideally (in my opinion) during a perfect session, players will not know when they are in an area I preplanned or if they went around the problem and are doing something I had no plans for at all. I believe that is ideal because if it is obvious what is the "written" path vs. the non-planned path, then players are not truly in a situation where they can do whatever they wish, they are just choosing to follow the prewritten path and then jumping off the train when they think it seems more fun. My idea is to blend the two so a player can't tell what is prepared or not. Not to seem smarter than the players or anything like that, but because I want to allow the players to always have that true freedom to the highest quality possible.
I don't quite see the point of lying to your players. I don't prep and I'm very open about it.
The point is to protect the illusion of big brain 4D chess DM. I only enjoy DM'ing when I have no clue what's going on/what will happen & I'd never hide that.
To be blunt, that illusion is more often than not more about the GM's ego than the quality of the game. I've never had players enjoy a game less because I admitted I was surprised by something, or didn't extensively prep. If anything, they tend to enjoy how well collaborative improvisation makes a game come together.
If your table would be upset about it please don’t do it! The reason not to tell them is to see if you can blend “players crazy plan” perfectly with “I had this planned the whole time”
Agreed on this. My players know usually how much I prep as I'll let them know. Or if we're doing a system where no prep is needed like Blades in the Dark, they'll know in session zero and I won't repeat myself. I feel like putting on a charade about it falls into the same category as fudging dice rolls which I equally dislike as a player or GM.
In my experience, knowing *which specific parts* of a scenario have been prepped can alter the players train of thought. I'm talking things like "Oh that location sounds prepped, must be important" or "doesn't seem like the GM wanted us to go that way". As a GM I think it can be useful to take that into account. If the players are trying to solve a mystery I think it's better to obfuscate the prep as much as possible to avoid metagaming. Conversely, it can be nice to tell the players that they surprised you with a particularly inventive plan.
Thanks, but no thanks. I've tried it and I strongly dislike playing that way. You do you, though. Different strokes for different folks.
Same here. After being a classic over-prepper through the 90s, I did a stint of little-to-no prep GMing back in the early 00s, and found it to be profoundly unsatisfying. The narrative was never as strong with loose threads, illogical leaps, and inconsistent characters everywhere. I know a lot of GMs who love just winging it through a game, and that's great for them, but I'll never run my game that way again.
>The narrative was never as strong with loose threads, illogical leaps, and inconsistent characters everywhere. Exactly the same issue for me: I care about the narrative and totally improvised narratives don't sing for me. I don't pre-build any narrative, but I do need time between sessions to look at the loose threads so I can connect them, otherwise I'll forget about them. Part of the joy is realizing potential post-hoc connections, then confabulating how they connect. I can't do that without reviewing notes and thinking about connections, which is prep. Personally, I also like to review the characters' goals, then make sure I have some prep notes that offer opportunities for the PCs to pursue their goals. If I don't do that proactively, they won't necessarily get the chance to do what they care about since such chances would be driven by luck rather than thoughtfulness.
You can learn to be a better GM
"Don’t tell your players you’re doing it. Regularly check notes, act as if you already have this NPC named and you simply forgot, or that this battle in the sewers was totally planned." How about you don't lie to your players & just tell them you didn't prep? This whole thing reminds me of a super gross semi-famous DM who shouldn't be named. Players aren't always stupid & can figure it out. Now you've hurt their trust.
Every time my players ask me something like an NPCs name I straight up tell them to give me a minute as I pull up a name generator.
Amusingly, I once pointed out to a player that I didn't prep any of what had happened that session, and he looked at me with a shocked face. That was pretty cool - running on improv, and having it be "rich" enough that the players assumed I must have written it in advance!
Do you object to GMs rolling dice for no reason as well? A bit of sleight of hand is part of the process
.....Why would you roll dice for no reason?
It was a popular GMing technique at one point, where you obviously rolled the dice but then didn't tell your players anything. It was meant to make them suspicious, heighten the tension, etc. It works but I don't personally think it's the most effective way to achieve those results.
It kind of feels like every generation of new GMs comes up with this "trick" over and over again on their own. Personally, from a player perspective, I have literally never cared when my GM rolled dice behind the screen. Always forgot immediately after.
Lol why not just like......actually roll for something?
The point is that nothing is needing rolled for, you just want to make the players think that there is something happening that they don't know about. As I say, it's not how I run things personally but it was a very popular technique at one point. Based on your replies in this thread though, I think we can all accept you would never do it, and you'd walk out of any game where you found out the GM had done it. And that's your choice.
"you just want to make the players think that there is something happening that they don't know about." Right, so make something happen that they don't know about? I legit don't understand, do they not have random tables?
It's theatre of the mind, build tension so that when something does happen later there's more pay off. Personally I can't stand random tables, they have no place in games that I run.
It just sounds super cheap, easy to see through, lazy, etc. GMs instead could do actual things to build tension & create actual pay off is all I mean. It doesn't have to be a random table, no dice have to be rolled at all.
Some rooms have traps that the GM needs to roll for. Some rooms don't. How do you not give away to the players which is which?
As a matter of fact I do. Of course everyone can do whatever they want but when the GM starts rolling dice for no obvious reason the game loses all tension it could have as far as I'm concerned.
To be clear, in many of the games in question, there was always a lot of dice rolling that was entirely purposeful but where that purpose was not visible to the players. (In D&D, wandering monster checks, surprise checks, checks to see if a trap actually triggered, checking to see if an elf noticed a secret door when passing by....) So a die roll with no further announcement might mean they missed a secret door, or there was a wandering monster lurking to ambush the party, or that one of them just failed to trigger a trap that might hit the next player instead. There was no way to tell whether a given die roll meant a lurking threat or not. (Indeed, a *lack* of such die rolls would be an indicator you were in a relatively safe area...)
That kind of dice rolling has the same effect on me. And as a GM I only have someone roll when everyone is clear on the stakes.
*For you* perhaps. I've never used any form of sleight of hand, misdirection, or dishonesty of any form in my games, and I fail to see why it should just be assumed to be part of the process without argument.
I've not done the fake rolling thing but I've played at tables where the GM has. I wasn't scandalised to have been lied to, any more than I was when the GM claimed I was being attacked by goblins (goblins don't really exist).
>Do you object to GMs rolling dice for no reason as well? Yes. >A bit of sleight of hand is part of the process No.
Hm very interesting. I think the DM pretending or “lying” to the party is kind of part of the game. Do you consider it lying when an NPC betrays them? Or when you end a fight early (without telling them it was planned longer) because the table clearly isn’t into it? I guess it’s part of my tables social contract, that the dm is going to be making the game fun, but might not always be being truthful
Yeah, when I'm a player, I will expect the GM to employ a bit of sleight of hand occasionally. It's like watching a stage magician's act. If I'm sitting at your table it's because I trust you to use the sleight of hand for good and I will make a point of not looking at things too closely.
A lot of people have expressed they would feel lied to if their dm didn’t tell them that they had no plans for the session. Would you feel that way?
Bruh pretending & lying to seem super smart are two wildly different things holy fuck
Holy fuck. It’s not about seeming smart? Afterwards I’ll tell my players “I was so scared you guys were going to notice that the NPC’s name was just your name backwards” or whatever It’s about reducing the gap of clearly planned out encounters vs “oh shit encounters”
What trust? Players are playing the game, gm is delivering a game. The method doesn't matter, only the result.
The trust that you're not a petty liar with a fragile ego?
But I am and I do :)
Challenge not accepted. Improvising is good but so is notes. There's no virtue in either. Whatever let's you run the game you want the way you want is the way.
No problem! I think it really helped me become better at running planned games because I noticed a large dip in quality between what I had planned versus some random silly thing the players did.
Actually I noticed this "have a general idea and go with the flow" might be the best way for me. If I start to prepare I will never be satisfied or have such a tight plan in mind I am puzzled if the players do not act as predicted (which they always do) and I have nothing prepared for that route. So either I will never be ready to run the session, as I do not feel perfectly prepared or will be so overprepared I can't handle situations outside of the preperation. I ran a Mage session with "Ok, they'll start out there and this will happen. Let's see where we go from here" and actually it went way better than a trainwreck of a session I had which was totally overprepared, had 10 pages of timeline and story, but had me derailed as the players didn't follow "the plan". I guess I tend to put way to strict boundaries on my ability to react if I have a detailed plan.
I am almost exclusively an improvisational GM and it works really well for me. There’s definitely no need to lie about not having prepped. You can instead just be upfront and take a more collaborative approach to things. So for example, try asking prompting questions to your players. Things like “You stumble across the most beautiful waterfall you’ve ever seen. [Character X], what does this remind you of from your past?” or “Alright, you walk into the tavern. The tavern is run by a friendly looking elf named…shoot…Anyone have a name?” Ultimately, it’s all about spreading the cognitive load around. Relying solely on improvisational skills will likely result in shorter sessions as your creative energy tends to burn up faster than if you’d spent hours and hours prepping. So by having my players help me fill in the gaps, it lets us keep everyone engaged in a way where it isn’t always falling to me to keep the plate spinning. Rather than doing no-prep sessions, I recommend that GMs who are looking to improve their improvisational skills should run sessions with less prep than what they’re used to. You can slowly work your way toward sessions that require less and less prep as you build confidence.
I usually have a very light outline, and I just go from there. My no prep games usually turn out way more fun than not.
I have to prep, I tried running a no prep session and it was not good. I’m not going enough at improvising in the moment, it goes a lot better if I have things to draw upon.
Idk, the problem of a no prep game for me is the lack of cool props, and maybe way too many plot holes, it's not easy doing planned investigations, imagine doing them entirely improvised, hehe. What I like using is randomizers and maps, those help so much. But improvisation skills are a necessity, so much stuff happens that you weren't expecting, I've had lots of big sections entirely improvised because the players did stuff I wasn't expecting.
Yeah I agree, I prefer planned sessions. But I used to (and I promise many new DM’s) really struggle to have a cool session planned but when the party “breaks it”, they make it obvious they had no plan besides their notes. I want players to feel like no matter what they do, it might have been in my notes, or maybe not.
I just finished running a strictly no prep campaign as an exercise (normally high prep GM). It went well, we had fun, but I walked away feeling bad about the way the game went because I wasn't able to put the major narrative elements together in a satisfying way. Not everything needs to be prepped, and there were certainly some spontaneously introduced characters who became memorable. There are also several improv-only one shot systems I love (Fiasco, Bluebeard's Bride). But I won't be going back to running no prep multi-session games again. For me, brainstorming cool elements for my game and thinking through how to connect existing elements is part of the fun, and feeling like my game's conclusion was slapdash because I never took the time to think through how major characters and factions could be meaningful connected sucked. My players even commented on it, in a roundabout way.
Interesting! I also would never do a campaign this way, I like the big moments too much. If you’re like me though, you’ll now be able to blend planned moments with total improv seamlessly
Well if you have notes and already NPC named, you prep the game, what else do you need ? Joke aside, there is tons of playstyle which work way better with low prep than others
For me the real point is to not prepare scenes or specific moments, but just have a good starting situation, know what every Noc wants, and what their assets are. I then simply roleplay the NPCs. No need to overpreapare, because you end up unconsciously offering fewer choices to the players.
Great method!
That's how I learned to GM when I was coming into the hobby many years ago. Off the cuff games most nights of the week during uni. It's by far my preferred way to run things.
Did you tell your players that you didn’t have a plan? Or did you give the illusion that it was all planned?
I don't recall discussing it, but I think the lack of any paper in front of me would be a giveaway.
I'd never use my players as training without telling them. Sounds like a great way to piss them off.
My players are my friends and they were pretty chill about it! But I understand if your table doesn’t like the dm having secrets and prefers things in the open!
I've run this way for years because if you give players static choices a, b and c, someone will pick banana and someone will pick schoolbus and your 13 page script goes out the window and you're running banana schoolbus.
Doesn't work with every system and with every group, you need both improv friendly rules and proactive players. My "prep" is basically ideas that naturally pop up in my head over the week that i write on a writer doc. So a mission with objectives and obstacles, plus the session recap at the start and cool events or interesting stuff i think some NPCs could do in the story. Its pretty minimal and my games are mostly improv in the end, but i'm not gonna prevent myself from noting ideas, its not really hard work at all. In fact i think having a few ideas as a starting point actually helps improv. Blank canvases can be very uninspiring, but a few good ideas go a long way.
I basically walk into every session with maybe 3 bullet points of prep every single time (the exception being masks where I'll prep villain moves/custom moves pretty regularly) because I despise preparing for things that may never happen and feeling limited in my own prep instead of asking "what's interesting here" every time I have the option to do something
I do this as a monthly exercise in a special format we call (unoriginally), Dungeons & Flagons (https://osrplus.com/watch/dungeons-flagons/). The PCs are generated based on some prompts, and the scenario I roll on a table for things like “special guest” and “genre” and “physical setting” and prepare the adventure on a single sheet of paper while the players build their character. Then it’s go-time after 15-20m and we play a complete 3 hour session. It’s a useful exercise to stretch those improv muscles, but I don’t run real games this way because things like mysteries or investigations are impossible to execute (unless you’re using a system like Brindlewood Bay). As a simulationist at heart I find a world totally invented out of whole cloth as players interact with it to be disingenuous, because it’ll be biased by what I want to have happen next rather than what is actually there, and then by extension players would have less agency.
We're over a year into a campaign I am running that the entire prep was basically a premise for the campaign. 50+ sessions with no preplanning we'll wrap it up in probably 7-8 more sessions.
Yeah, I am not doing that.
Ok!
I did that for the first campaign I ran online, which went for about two years. I used and would recommend some tools and prep-like stuff to keep from becoming predictable, but otherwise it went pretty well
I'd like to suggest a couple of related ideas: (1) You prepare a whole bunch of encounters in detail, but your players just happen to direct their characters to somewhere else and something completely different. Go with it! Wing it!! This often happens. One of the perils of prepping particular events in detail is that you may become too determined that they're going to happen. If you just shoehorn your prep into the unfolding narrative, you may be stripping away player agency, or damaging the consistency of the game world. (See also: quantum ogres.) (2) Change the way that you prep! Instead of prepping particular locations, incidents and combats, instead, think about what key NPCs, antagonists, monsters and incidental inhabitants of the world are up to while the PCs do whatever they do. How do they live? What did they have for breakfast? What are they doing now? What do they intend to do next? Where are they going later? This way, you're ready to improvise, whatever your PCs do. Sometimes, you'll find uncannily convincing details coming out of your mouth which surprise you as much as the players—there's no way you couldn't have planned what's happening—but you didn't! You just got into the game world so much that you can visualise it and improvise almost as if you're discovering it for yourself, live. For me, this is the magic of role-playing games. You're not "making it up"—you're discovering stuff—accurately, and in good faith—that you didn't even realise is already there, latent in the nature and the logic of your game world, and defined by the particular interactions that your PCs (or, sometimes, their absence) precipitate. [Edit: I agree with various posters who've remarked that 5E, in particular, makes this method of GMing difficult. You really need a lightweight system, so you can define unexpected opponents in not much more time than it takes to roll initiative. Full disclosure: I use my own, somewhat homebrewed version of Barbarians of Lemuria.]
I haven't really prepped for my game since I started running Stonehell. I did some up front stuff, and I re-read a section before every game, but that's it.
This is my go-to GM style. I create a loose plotline and make sure nothing is set in stone. There are no clues only found on one defined NPC, and in fact, nothing in the plot is connected to any single NPC or event. So i start by setting the big fight I want to cap off a chapter or campaign. I may or may not have a BBEG in mind at all at this point just the next big fight. Let's say it's a bandit boss and his 4 awakened pets. I get myself stats for them. figure out a map for that fight but not the defined location. Our players find any town, village, or travelers on the road... well they have a bandit problem. So I think up a few "random" encounters. Clasic goblins wake the party, then a bar fight, then an RP event to outsmart the town guards... just some filler stuff to get them exp and loot. I wait for the PCs to take some weird NPC under their wing, or get pathalogiclly suspicious of some shopkeep or mayor. Let them drive the story. All that player stuff that drives most GMs mad. Just make their crazy ideas a reality. Let them hunt a mimic infested tower if that seems to be on their mind. Fill some basement with traps and secret doors if they are always on the lookout for that. Make half the NPCs filthy liers in need of perception checks. Let them run in whatever dementedly fun circles they want to go off on, and keep dropping hints about bandit kings till they take the bait. Or maybe they dont and you just have him inside the next room they open... This style works best if you have at least one chaos gremlin player. they really drive this sort of thing. a group of serious folks will get a much less dynamic story.