I know I said I'd finish up the Murder Mystery post but this week has been a doozy (end of quarter life), and I'll need a bit more time to finish it up!

So instead, for this week I've got some tips for all ye Game Masters who wanna prep faster. Just some tips I've learnt over the years, in one consolidated blog post, prioritizing the top 5 things I use. Let's get right into it.

Use Systems

Regardless of weather you're a D&D GM or any other TTRPG, create a system. The cover of this blog post is Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, and is a great system to start off of. In particular, I love the portions on starting with the player characters (and trying to test yourself by remembering their names and special features such as species and classes) and 10 secrets (which is primarily great for campaigns, but is a great way to prep one-shots as well). We'll go into a little bit of detail later.

Well, I'm getting ahead of myself, but I'll talk about some philosophies I have to optimize prep, for what I'd call the minimum viable game. But first, we have to define...

What is a "Minimum Viable Game"?

An MVG is just a term I've made up based off of the term "minimum viable product". I've basically stolen everything that a MVP has:

1. Define User Personas: Understand the target audience’s goals and motivations.
2. Map Core User Flows: Outline the essential steps a user takes to solve their problem.
3. Prioritize Features: Filter features by "must-have" vs. "nice-to-have".
4. Set Success Metrics: Determine what "viability" looks like.

How the hell does this relate to TTRPGs? Let's rephrase everything, and go into detail later:

1. Define your players and player characters. Remember your players and their characters, and their motivations.
2. Map out what the goals of the next session are. Where are the players now, and where can they go? For one-shots, this is essential. Railroading and linearity are not the same - if you want to have a complete story, you'll need to have a defined start and a defined list of end-points. More on this in a future blog post.
3. Prioritize prep work. There's an infinite things that a GM can do to prep. Prep what is needed first, then prep what is nice to have.
4. Set a complete metric. When do you know if a game is ready to be run? Define this.

As an additional caveat, this is typically what I need to run a roughly 3 hour game for anywhere between 2 to 8 players. More players typically means longer game time, but I try to keep it under 4 regardless. 

Define Players and PCs

As with Lazy DM, start by listing out your players and their characters. Every game is about these characters, and it's my personal philosophy to keep them at the forefront of every adventure. Occasionally, there may be a "storybook" game, where you have relatively passive players who want to just sit on the ride, and have you pull them along, but for most of the games I've run, players are active and want to impact the tale. Figure out what they are good at and figure out what they want to do. 

For my campaigns, I send players a background doc and the key section I'd like to guide you to are the character goal and player goal sections. "What do your PCs want to do" comes first only because it is easier to define - who do they want to save? What do they want to do? How do they want to exist in the world? It serves as a great prompt for GMs to think of potential situations to place the PCs in. 

For one-shots, it is even clearer, and is pretty much generally variations of the following: A concise and complete story that has some form of closure for the pregenerated characters (or characters they bring in). This means that the inciting incident (the thing that happens that motivates the player characters) should be clear with the "expected" ending condition, and suitable motivation to get there. Whether the players end up at the end condition is totally optional, but the motivation at the start HAS TO BE clear. 

Player motivation on the other hand is something a bit more abstract - I tend to only focus on this for campaigns since it helps with long term retention in the campaign. If the player motivation is kept up with, and kept up to date, every game would push the player to explore the world and their character's role in the world more. Common things that players ask for are tactical combats, high stakes and drama, a cool story, and moral dilemmas (just to name a few that I've seen recently). This is also a great way to see if players do not fit each other. If there's a player who really wants lots of combat and a player who wants to role play a lot, this is an immediate flag that they may not be compatible for this campaign OR they may need to compromise in order for both parties to be satisfied. Maybe you as the GM don't really wanna do combat. Easy to call this out before people get too invested.

TL;DR for this part - figure out who your players and player characters are, and figure out what their motivations are. 

Map Out the Goals of the Next Session

A great philosophy that I've heard time and time again is "the most important session is your next session". I've heard of GMs who have preparation times in the hours, if not dozens of hours, with their 300 page world building documents and 5000 reference links. I've also heard of GMs who show up, and wing it from start to end. More likely than not, you lie somewhere in the middle here. But how much of the world building doc do we really need? How much improv will we have? There's no clear way to say, but as you run more games, having more of both will only serve to help you. Both more lore and better improv skills will improve your game prep in the long run.

Goals should typically include how the session starts and directions where players can head. How many directions? I'd use the following to philosophies to decide. 

7-3-1

Typically, I like to follow the 7-3-1 rule for this. I cannot be certain where this tip came from, but I've seen it dozens of times on reddit DM tips forums. 

7 stands for 7 key elements in your games - be this people, places, things, or plot elements. Sometimes you may have more, sometimes you may have less (but they are bigger plot wise). Obviously, this isn't a hard and fast rule, but 7 tends to be the spot where my creative juices start to burn out.

3 stands for 3 details about each of those things. An NPC? What is their personality like? What do they look like? What do they want? Do they have a secret? What about a location? What does it look like? Why does it exist? Who frequents here or why don't people frequent here? A thing? What does it do? Is it a plot turning device? Is it a joke that's meant to squeeze a laugh out of players?

Lastly, 1 is a way that you, the GM, can embody that thing. Does the NPC have a descriptive accent, or a look? Does the location do something weird when the players enter? How does the item stick out in the PCs view when they enter the scene?

10 Secrets

This is from Lazy GM, where we prioritise 10 secrets or things that players can find out over the course of the next session. These aren't placed anywhere specific (though you may) and are things that are meant to be dropped in in the opportune moment. This is my favorite method, as it requires the least set up to get started - just a bulleted check list of 10 points, and I'm good. It doesn't get anymore simple than that

Ending Scenarios

For one-shots - this is ESSENTIAL. Listing out the half-dozen completion states are key. Murder mysteries? Find the villain and fight or kill the villain, the villain escapes, or the villain turns over a new leaf  - whatever it is, list it out. Heist? The party succeeds in getting what they want, and an epilogue happens. Or the party gets caught, and are sent to jail. Or the owner of the thing they wanna steal comes to a deal with the party. There are only so many scenarios.

For campaigns, sessions end best on cliff hangers. Who is about to die? What secret is the most juicy, that you can tease it right before the session ends? What cryptic message can you leave players with, that they'll be thinking about it over the next week? Just to give you some examples of cliffhangers I've used in the past week:

• A player character hits 0 hit points and is about to die. Will he or won't he?
• The party just cleared two waves of an "endless" zombie horde. They can tell at least one more wave is coming - but they don't know what is coming.
• A player character has been arrested and is under trial. He didn't know his crime, but the judge says that he killed his lover.
• The party wakes up a fleshly being in the corner of a cave. They find out that it's the sibling to an NPC they've grown attached to, and now need to decide if they fight or calm the monster down.
• The party just fought a demon that eats people, but it escaped. They have no idea where the demon has run off to.
• The party is in a dungeon, and just had a serious fight. There are 3 pathways, each with it's own descriptions (or lack of one!)

The hardest part of this is calming down and resisting temptation to tell the players immediately. The pay off is worth it, even if they find out within the first hour of the game - cause by the time you get to your next game, there'll be another week (well, for me it's typically a week between each game, or more!) to think of the next cliffhanger.

Auxiliary list

Do you need maps? Monster stat blocks? Random magic tables? Names? Key word here is need. Most of the time, especially for most D&D games, you don't need terrain, but you do need a general idea of the map, and figure it out later. Magic item tables? There are dozens online that you can reference. I strongly recommend donjon.  Nowadays, you don't even need a list of names anymore, there are hundreds of name generators. Or just open an ikea website page and randomly pick a furniture. Most monster stat blocks can be found online now, so you only need to really prep custom ones.

Prep Essentials First

 Now that we've defined the stuff we need for the game, we need to prioritize. This is where a 30 to 60 minute prep session can become 30 days - if you prep exactly what you need for your MVG (as close as possible at least), I guarantee you can be ready within an hour. I do this every single week, and on good days, I could prep a game in 30 minutes. 

Create 10 secrets - spam it. Don't think too hard, just type and don't judge whatever you're writing. You can go back and refine them or replace them after. I usually get stumped around the 7th secret, and then it requires more thought to get 8, 9, and 10. Usually by that point, you would have thought of the session enough, that you have enough material in your brain to run the session, if it were purely theatre of mind. 

If you're running online or in person, do you have the terrain you need to run the game? A board with markers to draw the terrain? A map you've downloaded that's exactly what you want? Flexibility is key here, especially if you've got 7 different locations that you players could fight in. Typically, there'll be one or two locations that are more fight prone than others, and I prepare those first.  

With NPCs and locations, the 7-3-1 rule is perfect, and keeps you from going too insane with the numbers. Sure, maybe you really wanna include that 8th NPC on your roster, but be cognizant that it is extra. You likely already have more than enough material for your session with the 7-3-1 rule.

The key philosophy here is that anything after the key things defined in the previous section, everything else is bonus. Drawing maps for your players? Bonus. Pretty version of props? Bonus. Memorising stat blocks? Bonus. Custom items and dialogues? Bonus. That 8 and 9th NPC and location. BONUS. It's ALL extra. A lot of GMs I have spoken to before swear that they need their 5 pages lore doc on the religion of their eldritch magical girl god of tarot cards, but unless you're reading this out loud to your players, I don't think it's gonna come into play for more than a few spiels. Yes, your lore doc will help you improv better - but this is a long term thing. It helps you get faster in future games, but it is not essential for the next game. 

Meet the Completed Metric

You've already defined the list when you mapped out the goals, this is simply check list and marking those things off. Afterwards, I also keep a list of non-essentials that I can work on if I have time. NPC art is one - if you're tight for time, it's perfectly okay to improv or write a description of NPCs, without finding art for them. Sensory things - music, sound effects, candles, lights, and food. Non-essential for game, but elevate the experience. I usually allocate a time once every fortnight or two to just spam playlist hunting or fixing up sound effects. There are so many cool sounds on Youtube that you can use. The key thing is to remember that these are non-essentials that are tapped on after everything else is ready.

The most egregious thing that many game masters have done is excessive world building. The number of GMs who have told me they just spent two days world building for their next session, and say it like it's a badge of honor to take so long to prep a game. I forgot who said it, but a famous GM said that worldbuilding is pleasure for the GM. I LOVE worldbuilding. I have hundreds, if not thousands of pages of content for my homebrew worlds. Dozens of maps. Definitely thousands of NPCs at this stage of my GMing career. You don't need an entire world for one session. You just need 7 or less locations, NPCs, and things. or 10 secrets. Your players do not have 2 days to hear about your world. They want to know about the places and things that impact them. 

The Reason to World Build

Worldbuilding is an improv exercise to me. If you have a more fleshed out world (whether it's something already made like Eberron/Forgotten realms or something homebrew), the easier it will be to improv in game as well. This is a product of time and love for a world, and is something that I hope every Game Master gets to enjoy. My only argument here is to never conflate worldbuilding with session preparation. Worldbuilding is supplemental to session prep. It's a powerful supplement, but with all supplements, it can be covered by having the essentials first. 

That's All Folks

Let me know if you wanna know more about specific things, but I think this blog post has gotten long enough for what it is today. Don't forget, who's awesome? You're awesome.