Zero-Prep
I’m a control freak. I’m also a GM. The two go hand-in-hand. That’s why today’s comic represents an act of courage on my part. Here’s the script I handed Laurel for this one:
TITLE: Zero-Prep
TEXT: ???
PIC: Draw whatever you want.
DIALOGUE: ???
SCROLLOVER: ???
Laurel asked if I was sure. I could feel my courage falter. I wanted to tell her, “JK! Here’s the real script. That was just a funny ha-ha joke.” But that would have been an act of abject cowardice. So I grit my teeth, nodded my head, and gave her the go-ahead.
“OK. But you’re going to get mermaids. I want to draw mermaids today.”
I was not expecting mermaids.
You know what though? I think it turned out pretty OK. Sure I had to scramble a little to provide appropriate dialogue, write up some Disney-flavored filk for the scroll-over, and rejigger the banner text to fit. But when you plan out every little detail of your story ahead of time, you lose out on the all-important element of surprise. Your characters become puppets rather than living, breathing creatures, and the thrill of discovering your story gives way to the tedium of inventing it from whole cloth.
We’ve talked about prep time before. You guys know how I like to sketch out my story beats and outline my “most likely” plot ahead of time, all with the understanding that it’s often the right call to abandon that plot in favor of shenanigans. Even that is working with a net though.
When you go into a session with zero prep, you’re actually more prepared to do that first and most sacred duty as a GM: listen to your players. We like to tell one another that GMing is an exercise in collective storytelling, but the aspect of collaboration can disappear when you hew too closely to your pre-existing vision. I’m not saying to give up your notes or to never run another module. But the game world doesn’t have to spring fully-formed from one dude’s head, even if that guy happens to sit behind a cardboard screen. Everyone at the table has something to offer, and following the players’ lead rather than your own can be a surprising (if mildly intimidating) experience.
So what do you say, O GMs of Handbook-World? Have you ever gone into a session with no notes, no plan, and no idea what might happen next? Was it scary or freeing? Exhausting or exhilarating? Sound off with your zero-prep exploits down in the comments!
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I love seat-of-my-pants GMing. It’s honestly what I’m best at, and it can allow for some zany adventures. Now, having properly planned out stories can be good too, so I think finding a balance that works for you and your players is most important.
True that. But I also think it’s important to expose yourself to other techniques. I’ve been doing the notes-drive approach for a while, and I think I’d like to seat-of-my-pants it a little more often. Don’t want the skill to atrophy, you know?
I’m with ChimeraVillain, I mostly stopped planning things a log time ago. Since your plans will not survive encounter with the enemy anyway, why bother prepping beyond the basic requirements (have dice, paper, pens, notes, and pre-campaign-made stuff).
Granted, when I do my post session breakdown, I make notes for possibilities next session and get what paper minis I think will be necessary printed if I don’t have them already prepped in my ‘paper mans’ folder. But beyond that? Not really any prep necessary.
Recently I started running a game of 5e for the first time and for the first few sessions I had relatively good notes about places, NPCs and possible plots. Cut to five sessions later where the only notes I have are the outline of the stats for the things I think they’re going to fight, a list of NPC names and an idea of where the plot should go. I feel having only a few notes has made me more likely to say yes to my players out of the box plans and has really encouraged more collaborative storytelling. I never expected my players to repair the warforged they fought a session earlier, let alone attempt to convert him to Pelor but it’s happening and I love it!
My dad likes to talk about his first experience teaching. He got through his prepared notes, looked at the clock, and saw that only 15 minutes of the period had passed.
“And that’s when I learned how to teach.”
I’m guessing Wizard either wants to reunite with her beloved on the surface (and lose that horrible 5ft ground speed without having to resort to Fighter methods), or she wants to create drama through an elaborately complicated Faustian deal.
“Ok, you have legs now again. Enjoy the surf-”
“What? Just like that? No cruel stipulations, no hidden costs, nothing?”
“Uhhh… I could make you… Lose your voice…?”
“That’s good… For a start. Can you embitter the deal a little more?”
lol. I think you grok Wizard.
I played and watched sessions of Dungeons against Humanity. As in, D&D, but the story happenings are randomly pulled cards of Cards Against Humanity and action outcomes are also randomly pulled cards. It’s delightful and ridiculous chaos.
It originated from this post:
https://i.pinimg.com/564x/35/6f/95/356f95c9af1dafaa62ae9c6283f2e898.jpg
I can link youtube sessions of it if there’s any interest!
This sounds terrible, I shall try it out immediately. Can’t wait for CAH’s trump card to show up:
“Oh brave adventurers, I beg you to free our county of Gévaudan from a therianthrope in our midst!”
“Describe this man-beast to us monsieur!” pulls out card: A big black cock
“T’is the most terrible were-chicken!”
I suspect that playing with an Apples to Apples deck would be slightly less amusing.
Depends how well you curate the deck.
https://youtu.be/CTJ8LmDDQoU
Here’s how it worked in practice! Check out the other link too.
https://youtu.be/k-AM7UimW2I
Mer-Wizard and Mer-Witch will want to change back before their turn in the other handbook comes up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOLaTBMxmbk
Laurel missed a perfectly good opportunity to depict Fighter as a clownfish. Any chance of seeing more of the Mer-cast?
I shall make inquiries.
Quite often actually. The very first 5e campaign I DMed got way too much prep time and I was a trifle miffed when the PCs didn’t find all the stuff I prepared for them (plot hooks, items, lore, traps etc.).
So I prepped less the next time: cue the campaign experiencing a sudden genre shift from political manoeuvering within slavic mythology/early Rus’ manorialism (you see what the prep time went into) to New World voyages/frontier settling with megaufana.
I thought I learned from my mistakes, so I drew in the reins a little bit when DMing Tomb of Annihilation: cue me not having much fun, since the players could not surprise me any longer with out-of-the-box thinking. I knew exactly what the “correct” action was (conserve water, skin and eat every animal you meet, actively ignore the tips of the trickster god riding on your shoulder) and they knew it too. It felt like a checklist and only after letting the players loose (“Hey screw that snake-men cult noise. Let’s go Bilbo-style on that dragon living in an active volcano”) did I actually feel like playing a game and not doing admin.
So it’s thin line. Now I prep only the rough outcome of possible player actions and start every session with an in-game question what today is going to be about….unfortunately this too can go awfully awry.
Yesterdays session of R.Talsorian’s “The Witcher TRPG” ended with the party perfectly split 50/50. Half followed the nudging towards “Military spy thriller in occupied not!Belgian village” the other half had every reason to dodge away from soldiers so they followed the nudge toward “insular not!Scandinavian piracy”. Loose reins bringing about the awful dread of The Party and the Splitting thereof.
The tough thing about running out of modules is that, to run them optimally, you have to know them intimately. That means reading them, re-reading them, and understanding the nuances of the plot. All so you can be prepared to throw it all away to follow the players as they hare off to become magical duck farmers or whatever.
I honestly don’t think you have much of a problem in your Witcher game though. Players tend to want to stick together, and I think it’s on them rather than the GM to find ways to make that happen.
One of my supers characters was a mermaid. Or at least, that’s what everyone assumed when she was introduced as an emissary of the undersea realms.
They were a little disconcerted when they later learned that the undersea realm in question was Y’ha-nthlei, and that her true form had more teeth and claws than they’d been imagining…
https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Deep_One?file=Deep_Ones_(%C3%89ditions_Sans-D%C3%A9tour).jpg
I love that a lot, and kind of want to use it in my next supers game.
Feel free. The concept wasn’t entirely original, since the idea of a superhero Deep One was inspired by a character from the Annihilation Score, by Charles Stross… one of the Laundry Files series.
But the idea of setting people up to think of Ariel the mermaid or Mera of Atlantis, only to deliver something more Lovecraftian… that was mine (though I doubt I’m the first to think of it), and it was a lot of fun.
Amazing alt-text here. A lot of my personal DMing was a 4e group so I planned encounters intensely to balance.
Naturally they split the party….
Amazing alt-text here
That’s a self-correcting problem. 😀
Too true, it fell apart I think a session later, despite valiant efforts to have their deadly foes go easier on them..
One of my favorite things about modules is specifically that : all the important story beats are already done for me, all I need to do is read the current chapter before a session and then I can just roll with what my players do.
Though I should note my players are the kind that tend to go with the flow, they rarely derail and even more rarely do so on purpose, so of course that makes things easier for me.
I kind of dig the follow-the-rails style myself. It’s how I approach video games as well. I laser-focus on the main quest line, and only get into shenanigans on the second play-through.
It makes me wonder if “filler episodes” could be a useful device in tabletop. They could feature the weird conceptual stuff (you’re all mermaids now! for reasons!) that is such an obvious departure from the main story that players like me would feel more comfortable exploring the random asides and side-passages of the adventure.
What is “prep time”? I spend 10 minutes before a session making sure I have the maps needed, and if the party goes somewhere unexpected, I either already have a map for it from back at world creation or they are darn well going to wait 10 minutes for me to make one. Thatll teach them to go off the rails. shakes fist
More seriously, my friend that I homebrewed the world with and I put in a gargantuan amount of effort into this world. It was our senior project in High School, we did it for our Scifi/Fantasy class. With a couple of exceptions, if I need something, its already there and I just need to dig it up. The rest is just making sure I have everything within arms reach during play. It allows for some wild and crazy shenanigans sometimes.
You got to play D&D for your senior project? How the crap did you sneak that past your admin?
Do you ever feel as though you aren’t allowed to deviate from your established setting during play?
No prep, just pre-made characters, is how I do all my Pendragon one shots, at conventions and such. Just an idea, usually a short, somewhat convention location\time\theme appropriate blurb. What I do have\do is that I have the idea that there should always be one red herring in the setup. This mostly comes to me during the initial group talk about what the characters have to do, and where they have to go.
For longer campaigns I have some background, but even that usually grows out of the previous sessions, and the actions of the players.
Now that I am doing the GPC (Great Pendragon Campaign), which is (very) structured, and which needs at least some preparations, I sometimes struggle with the session prep…
For instance, this is the blurb for a short, 6 session campaign that I will be doing in the comming weeks, over discord: The quest for the dragons blood: The wife of your liege lord is still sick after having given birth to his first son. As the christian priests do not seem able to cure her, he has consulted with a pagan healer. She has told him that only the blood of a dragon can cure his wife. So, as his chosen knights you are ordered to go and search for, and then take the blood of a dragon, so the healer can do her work on the wife of your liegelord.
I have no idea how this will work out, just the vague feeling that the dragon might not be a literal dragon, but maybe Arthur himself.
I always dig your Pendragon experiences, Louis. It’s nice to depart from D&D and get a wider perspective. Do you find that you prep differently for a one-shot vs. a campaign session?
You’ve also got me curious about this “GPC” business. Care to elaborate a bit? Is it a living campaign or something?
My prep does differ for one-shots and campaigns yes. For campaigns I usually try to at least read my notes before the session. But as those notes are never more than about half a page per session, that is done rather quickly. I also have a rather good memory for all my plot twists and such, so that is also helpfull.
The GPC is The Great Pendragon Campaign, one of the largest RPG campaigns ever written. It goes from the Reign of Uther Pendragon (father of Arthur) through the anarchy after Uthers death, all the way through Arthurs reign from the Sword in the stone to the end at the battle of Camlann. That is about 85 years of gaming, with on average one session per year, so a lot of sessions. You start with your Characters, and end playing their Grandsons, so starting, and maintaining a family is one of the goals.
And you can buy the GPC at Drivethrurpg. It’s published by Chaosium for KAP (King Arthur Pendragon) rpg.
I hate to admit this has been a lot of my sessions. This last seasion though, I had good reason. I had an enemy leader I wanted the party to get information from but other than what they would get from him and his name, I had nothing planned. I told the party itd probably be a short session, as I wanted to prep the next session based on what they do in this one (also because last time I had them do something like this they didnt go the way I prepped for and to improv anyway). Turned I to a nice lengthen session with an unexpected level up.
I feel like you “yadda-yadda’d” the good bit there. What was it that turned your short session into a long session? Did the players supply the content? Or did you manage to tapdance your way into new adventures?
More that they supplied the content, prepping g for the kidnapping and planning it out, then interrogating. Granted it was like 2-3 hours but that’s about our normal session length.
Just in time for Mermay!
Is… Is that a thing?
That is absolutely a thing!
Wait, we’re not supposed to go into games with no notes, plans, or ideas? That’s basically how I run 90% of my sessions. I generally have an idea of what might be cool and what the general overall plot is and let my players sandbox around my obstacles.
Yeah. Naw. I’m very much the opposite. I like falling back on a bit of structure when necessary.
“Mermaids!”
“But, this art is for a Dark Sun suppl-”
“Deal with it!”
Dark Sun mermaids would be a very short campaign.
Maybe they’ve adapted to swim through sand instead of water and have a burrowing speed.
Homo sapiens atreides, I like.
Eh, D&D has burrowing land-sharks already. Sand-maids would hardly be a great stretch…
Zero prep. This is how the game crashed and burned the first time I played.
Right? That’s the trouble. I feel like you’ve got to have a couple of campaigns under your belt as a GM and as a table of players to make the zero prep method work.
It takes a lot of experience to be lazy.
I did run a one-shot of Paranoia where I had a loose idea of what I wanted to have happen and by the end of it, I’d tossed aside the rules and just made things up. The alcohol I was drinking at the time helped with that a bit.
Alcohol for players, caffeine for GMs. That’s my motto.
I actually have a Pathfinder group right now where the whole idea is that it’s a shared world with shared houserules, which anyone in the group can run a game in. The only expectation is that you go in with little to no prep, and that the players are understanding of that – they know the GM might stumble a bit, and the idea of the group is that it’s just a fun side thing that we can have some fun, throw some dice and do a bit of improve. So far, we’ve only done two sessions (both of which I ran) and I went in with zero prep – I just looked at some monsters stats so I knew some creatures the players might encounter at their level and rolled with the punches. It’s actually very fun.
Is it monster of the week style? Just making up dungeons?
More or less. It doesn’t have to be limited to dungeons, but it’s recommended to make it more about combat because you know, Pathfinder.
Do you remember when i mentioned a campaign made as an exquisite corpse? We have done that and it was great. Funny thing to hear you talking about the DM having the world already constructed on his head when in my group i am the one in charge of that. Lots of time we have improvised, sometimes i don’t even go with the world already constructed and in just the very five minutes i make things just there in the spot. Many times our DM have told us that relieving him of part of the weight of DMing is a great help for him. RP is not collaborative just for playing in group but also for helping each other not only on rolls and in-game 🙂
By the way, the comic looks excellent. Witch looks great, she is a mermaid, but the way she contorts her tail adds a serpentine touch that augment her sexy evil look. Her human part with her hand on her face and the eyes make her look even better. Wizard looks good too, their hair covering part of their face while undulating on the water is very good done. And the song appears as something from a poetry book. A poetry book about roleplaying. Good job, well done to you two 😀
Well said.
Heh. I’d love to do a proper book of RP filk. It would make fives of dollars! I’d have a blast writing it anyway.
I literally do not take session notes. The only prep I ever really do other than having what the party might deal with rattling around in my brain for the week, is making the occasional custom stat-block/consult loot tables, and upon learning how many players will be showing up, eyeballing how difficult combats should be on Kobold Fight Club. Then they manage to infiltrate the Dwarf mobster/oligarch (Parody of modern day Russia so there’s overlap) stronghold, dump the entire desk full of incriminating documentation into their portable hole and Home Alone their way out without fighting any of it. They didn’t even end up schmoozing at the Oligarch/Don’s daughter’s wedding. (Which had to be called off because of the party’s break-in at the compound)
I’ve never been prouder of them than in that moment since they completely slapped away the lifeline I offered them to do things their own way.
You would do this on the day of his daughter’s wedding? Such disrespect….
I like to think I’m a pretty savvy guy when it comes to DnD, so one day while visiting my cousins I brought my nephew some nerd stuff from a combover book store including a pack of MTG cards and his own dnd dice set. I decided to teach him a little bit of DnD so I made a grid map on a piece of paper, used a coin as his token, and decided to use some knight guy from the booster pack to be his character. I pretty much mentally rolled out your basic sword and board fighter.
His opponent from said booster back was a giant demon toad. Gave him a quest to slay it, said it was in an hut in the swamp. So far everything pretty straightforward for me, I explained to him how a lot of the mechanics work and that he should be creative. I gave him a few ideas like “chop down the rope holding the chandelier to make it fall on the road for a lot of damage” and throw mud into the roads face to temporarily blind him”. All good stuff.
He kills the toad easily enough and I decided to use a few zombie tokens from the booster pack to say that the roads minions were coming. He had a few seconds to get ready to fight them. Now I was expecting him to fight these guys since it was just four nerfed zombies I made up on the spot, but when you run an improvised game on the fly, sometimes your player does improvised stuff to surprise you too.
Instead of getting ready to fight my nephew said he wants to crawl inside of the giant toad’s mouth and hide inside of his body until the zombies leave. Made me have to think what exactly the zombies would do. Being zombies it’s not like they had amazing perception checks and because they’re zombies they don’t particularly care about their master’s death. I also had to figure out if this level of cover entered any stealth bonuses or perception debuffs. In the end I just rolled perception for each one, and none of them rolled higher than my nephew’s stealth, so they left after about ten minutes,
I didn’t really have any other encounters planned after that but my nephew expected more, so I just told him he would get back to town and meet up with the guards to report the roads death. Than we let to go eat dinner and play Minecraft.
Dammit I wish there was an edit function. All these typos. Alas…
If your nephew is anything like me, that follow-up Minecraft session was full of the mental exercise, “How would this work in D&D?”
You two have a good relationship. I like that~
Most of the time. When I ask for post facto changes to the art, it’s less good. We’ve got a very comfortable couch though! 😛
I totally enjoy zero-prep gaming sessions. I was recently asked by a friend to introduce his wife to tabletop RPGs and so I went over with my laptop and asked to see what she had in mind for her character.
Elven Sorceress.
He had a Gnome Hunter with a big dog he rode around on.
I instantly whipped up a small fishing village on the edge of a bay and they went around fixing things that needed fixing (the untold story was that the Gnome was interested in the Sorceress romantically but she hadn’t committed yet to the idea).
And then someone stole the local farmer’s prize winning boar pig and he was worried about the big lug. Cue adventure to find out who pig-napped the pork.
It was lots of fun and very spontaneous.
Well don’t leave me in suspense! Who done did the pig-napping?
I feel like these kinds of spontaneous sessions work better in one-offs and short campaigns. Do you think it’s difficult to sustain that level of spontaneity over a longer campaign?
Due to the fact all the games I run are play by post “no plan at all” would basically be an active choice. And probably wouldn’t work since I’d have to somehow force myself to not think about what’s going to happen for days or weeks even in the time frame of one small event in game.
The last time I can recall having no plan…. wasn’t even a time when I had no plan exactly. This was back in my high school days. We were playing TFOS (Teenagers From Outer Space) and rotating who was GM each week. My turn came up and my idea was to make an elaborate maze.
I got part way through and decided it wasn’t worth the effort and I’d just wing it. So when game day arrived, the players went through the part of the maze I designed until I ran out of it and had the goal literally run away from them and lead them on a marry chase all over town, just making up each new locale and the issues involved on the fly.
Now some players complained about me literally moving the goal post. And others thought it was a great laugh. But it’s what I’d intended to do as soon as I abandoned the idea of spending all week trying to made a proper maze that I knew people would figure out a way to circumvent and probably wouldn’t really enjoy all that much given the zany nature of the game. So oddly while I was literally moving the goal post, I wasn’t figuratively doing so. It was just a different kind of race than they thought they were getting into at the start.
Now is this a good idea to do as a GM? I still have no idea. All I know is that at least some people enjoyed it and I had a lot of fun doing it.
But I struggle with thinking about how I’d ever go completely unprepared in that way for a game that was at all more serious in nature.
That was my more or less the campaign finale to my truncated Strange Aeons game. The whole “after ’em!” trope is a great way to move from Point A to Point B in an open world environment.
The Powered Be the Apocalypse Crowd is very serious about this kind of off-the-cuff play, and will write dissertations describing how to do it. I’m inexperienced with the style, but my general understanding is that it boils down to “let the players come up with the plot.” When you distribute the workload of coming up with the story, you ease the burden on the guy behind the screen.
Wizard: “Wait, what happened? I thought we left off at the tavern.”
Witch: ” http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/353k5t ”
Extreme noodle arms are a well-known feature of Handbook-world merfolk.
Regarding no-prep sessions, as a DM I am always at least moderately prepared because of my DMing style. I am a “curator” DM who runs fairly linear campaigns plotted well in advance. So I usually have a good understanding of what kinds of things are going to be happening in a given session. Not necessarily what the PCs will do in response to those events (that’s the fun part), but what everyone else is going to be doing. I also do a lot of worldbuilding as a part of this process, so I have a pretty good knowledge base for guessing what a character or faction will do in response to utterly unforeseen PC actions. Now, mechanics-wise, I don’t always have all of the enemy statblocks prepared that I should (sometimes improvising with random NPCs from the Archives of Nethys), and I often haven’t plotted the exact layout of buildings the PCs will be going to (mapping them out on the spot), but those are manageable.
Extreme noodle arms are a well-known feature of Handbook-world m̶e̶r̶folk.
FTFY
Most of my games are happening over Roll20 at the moment, so it’s a lot harder to sketch out buildings in a reactive way. Kind of makes me want to run a more theater of the mind campaign next time around.
I’ve also been doing Roll20, but fortunately we are a low-tech and low-budget group, so I’ve been able to get away with drawing black rectangles with smaller black rectangles in them for buildings, which makes improvisation a lot easier.
Huzzah low standards!
Heh. Straight up did not occur to me to use the “fireball templates” as a way to draw buildings. I’m so used to spending a quarter hour resizing each and every map to fit the grid, lol.
Define “blursing.”
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Blursed
This is basically the only way I run my games, usually because I’m pretty new at GMing, have a boatload of work, and am cursed with the attention span of a hybrid elephant-squirrel. On a good day, I outline in my head how events will go, google up some monsters, think up some NPCs, and write some flavor text. On a bad day, I let the party screw around and I invent things on the spot, usually worse than if I have a bit of consideration beforehand.
Plot outline+monsters to fight? Useful, but extremely flexible (by plot outline I mean “players find dungeon, fight necromancer” not anything on the terms of single-session). I find flavor text and a couple of sentences about an NPC is great, but prepping dialogue (which I’ve tried) is counterproductive. I’m also struggling with a strong aversion to railroading and a group of new players who have fewer conceptions on the expected actions.
This is how my players spent their first twelve hours of gameplay, over the course of several weeks, in a bar.
It’s weird to say, but I find that this is a shifting target when dealing with new vs. experienced players. I like to provide a bit of additional railroad to newer parties to show them the ropes, then let the reigns go a bit when the group is more comfortable with the game world.
Count me in as another ‘seat-of-your-pants’ gang!
Or rather, all my planning goes on in the back of my head. I’ve usually got campaign-related malarkey stewing in there at a low level, any time of the day. It just needs a few kicks to spin back up again, and we’re on air, live.
Something about this one cracks me up, even more than usual. I think it’s just the blunt ‘Mermaids today.’ It isn’t up for argument. Some days, it just is that way.
Mermaids.