During my gaming career, I’ve been swinging hence and forth with my point of view on prep, and I’m still not sure what is the best one and whether per se there is the only right way to do it. But I can surely try to recollect what I’ve been through.
When I learned role-playing games, I did it by heart and by reading illegally ocr-ed books. Pretty un-typical, I know, but there were no older rp-ing comrades in my vicinity (maybe that’s why I don’t like dungeons?). And, basically, since I couldn’t possibly anticipate what I’m gonna need, my only way was to skip prep and go for action. Worked out mighty fine, actually – now I see lots of screw-ups, but back then I was doing fine for a rookie. Besides having no real rulebooks, I lacked official adventures, so I had to unfold my own story on the go, solve the problems as they were arising, and eventually developed a taste for long campaigns. At the time, I assumed “modules”=“one-shots”=“too much prep” and “campaigns”=“story-games”=“no prep”. I’m not going into details of why and how this is wrong, nor am I apologising for the mistakes of my youth here.
We were playing a lot, and we were playing AD&D and then PO. As one can guess, nobody can play AD&D for long and not develop at least some taste for gamism. I started to learn how to play with the game system, made up tons of house rules and wrote down dozens of NPCs. That, in turn, caused a huge boost in prep time. There were times when I was not DMing any group except for a couple of PbEMs, and I was updating the website with new house rules more often than I was sending game turns. Eventually I grew to be a prep freak, and at the time I advocated that I was doing the same all since the very start, because I apparently had to spend quite some time thinking about how the story would progress.
So here’s what I do right now.
I skip all mental masturbation prep. I agree it can be fun, but I’ve already had enough of this kind of fun. If I’m absolutely positive I’m gonna need a stat block for a monster or an NPC on the next session, only then I write it down. (Otherwise, I’m still confident I know what kind of abilities the one has). Then, I absolutely must spend some time thinking about what I call the metaplot – the events and tendencies that are going to shape the near future, like, five-ten next game sessions tops. I usually work from the most global and strategic issues towards the more local ones. I don’t write down a lot, but I have to be sure I understand the complete scheme. When I’m done, I choose the chunk that will be played during the next session. Again, usually I get it right just thanks for my experience, but it’s no big deal if I miss, it’s just a useful approximation.
Then I must prepare five to ten scenes that will fill the very next session. At this point they are just sketches, like “battle the demon”, “scout for the druid”, “get alchemical advice from a red-haired giant”, etc. Since I play in my own campaign setting that I feel very comfortable in and that I know a lot of, I can generate any required amount of Colour details on the fly, just based on my intuitive “feel”.
The last step in my prep routine is small but significant: I need to recall all the names I’m gonna need, and to write down as many names as I will need for newly encountered once – I dislike having incomperensible names, stupid trite names or the lack of names.
That’s it, I’m ready to roll some dice.
Posted by Radaghast Kary 
