#gmprep

Since we started the podcast, one of the questions I get asked the most besides “What the hell do you actually do for a living, Troy?!?” is “What goes into your GM prep?” In an effort to share what I do and hopefully start conversations so we can all learn from each other along the way, here’s the first in a series of posts geared at scrutinizing what goes on not only behind the GM screen but before it even goes up.

Unless you’re a professional GM who gets paid a handsome six-figure salary to run Pathfinder Adventure Paths for your ungrateful friends, you only have so much time to devote to getting your sessions prepped. (By the way, if that job exists and you’re hiring, I’m available.) Since I’m in the unique situation of broadcasting one of the games I run to—at last count—billions of people all over the world, that means I have to put a lot more prep into my sessions than most GMs have the time, interest or permission from their non-gaming significant others to do. But there are times when even your old pal Troy only has X amount of time with XYZ worth of material to prep. So, one of the most important things a GM should do when approaching both session and long-term campaign prep is PRIORITIZE. And if you’re like me, hopefully you’ll find prioritizing fantasy game prep a lot easier than prioritizing important life things like paying bills on time or not opening that fifth IPA at one in the morning.

I could (and probably will, eventually) write a whole post on adventure prep versus session prep, but in terms of the importance of priority, I would say play to your strengths for session prep and play to your weaknesses for adventure path prep. What does that mean? To me it’s the difference between “hard prep”—the actual focused prep you’re doing for a specific session—and “soft prep”—the kind of reading up and studying you do between sessions to familiarize yourself with deepening your understanding of the overall world and the game in general. So, if your bread and butter is crafting exquisite combats and encounters, then make sure you know your monsters’ every single special ability inside and out. Likewise, get character sheets from your players (an easy process which usually entails no less than 40 emails begging for them until you break into their houses and photograph them with a tiny spy camera and a flashlight in your mouth while they sleep soundly nearby) and know all of their powers and spells so that you can give them multi-layered encounters geared specifically to them at their next session they’ll never forget. Or let’s say you really love the role-playing aspect of the game. Then maybe spend your prep time writing out dialogue for the enemies or NPCs they might face at the next session. When I’m focusing on that, I like to walk around my apartment talking to myself and telegraphing how I think the role-play will go and then making notes if I come up with a good line or recording myself if I find a fun voice. Then when it comes time to put it into action, I refer to notes I’ve scribbled in the margins of the adventure path with bits of dialogue I can throw in at the right time. If you have two hours to prep a six-hour session, focus first on what MUST get done to keep the session moving without constantly having to refer to the book, then spend the rest of your prep fleshing out the other details that won’t grind things to a halt if you have to pause to google something. For example, the day before a session I like to re-read the sections I think the PCs will be going through. Then the day of, I re-read it again taking notes along the way. Then I draw my maps, pre-roll all of my enemies’ initiatives and cross-reference all of the feats and spells I’m not familiar with. Then, time permitting, I re-read it AGAIN taking even more detailed notes and outlining as much as possible with boxes that I can check off as I go.

When I’m gearing up to prep a four- to six-hour session, I need to focus on what’s most important to that session, but when I’m just lounging around killing time between sessions, I like to do “soft prep” on the aspects of the campaign that I don’t usually prioritize during #seshprep. It’s embarrassing the number of times I’ve found myself sitting around at home reading the seemingly endless section on Gamemastering Combat at d20psfrd. Or, if I’m noticing that my players are focusing on the historical or religious significance of what they’re discovering in the adventure and I haven’t spent any time learning about those topics in advance, I’ll take that time between sessions to familiarize myself better with geography or deities at sites like Pathfinderwiki.com or archivesofnethys.com. When fellow Glass Cannon Podcast castmate Joe O’Brien GMs games, he devotes a lot of his prep to knowing the geopolitical history of the area where the adventure takes place. He recently started running Curse of the Crimson Throne and our Session Zero included a two-hour lecture on the history of Korvosa and the surrounding area. I’m not exaggerating. Two HOURS! And you know what? We were hanging on his every word. That shit is fascinating to nerds like us, and because of that we were able to create our characters each with rich backgrounds steeped in the reality of this fantasy setting. I, on the other hand, give cursory glances at best to that sort of stuff, because my main focus is on creating intense drama and humor out of story, character and action. Here’s the thing: you can totally do one or both or neither. As a GM, you have so many things you NEED to do, it’s up to you to choose what’s most important for your campaign and what best suits your GM-ing style. I say I’m not big into knowing the nitty-gritty about the cities and towns etc., but if I was running an urban adventure set in one static location like Curse or Council of Thieves, you can be damn sure I’d know the name of every street, important building and the best public restrooms in town if my NPCs need to recommend good spots to piss on the fly. Likewise, and this is a fun trick, if I’m under-prepped for a subject that a PC tests me on during role-playing, I’ll just improvise/stall while I’m googling that town or deity or important location and then I work that information into the dialogue. You know how many times I’ll mention something casually and one of my PCs will say, “I’d like to do a Knowledge (History) check on that.” While they’re rolling, I’m both 1. hoping they fail (since it wasn’t important enough for me to look up beforehand) and 2. quickly googling it on my iPad so I can give them a little nugget to make them feel like their high roll meant something. The moral of the story is you need to figure out for yourself before you start any adventure what your priorities are, what you want to devote your prep time to and what is best to focus on to do justice to the Adventure Path. Then you just have to try your best to let go of the antagonizing ever-present feeling right before your session starts that you didn’t prep enough.

Do your homework, play to your strengths, prioritize first what absolutely needs to be done for your session to happen and then—depending on how much time you have left—what other things you’d like to focus on to spice things up. And the best thing is that the more you GM, the more you’ll be able to prep in the same amount of time available to you. I remember prepping an early encounter in my Jade Regent campaign where four PCs face a Sinspawn and it took probably two hours to prep. Now I find myself briefly glancing at CR 14 encounters for five minutes and being like, “Oh cool, I know these creatures and how their 17 metamagic feats work. I got this shit.” Prep will eventually go faster, and then you can spend more time crafting cryptic NPC dialogue ahead of time or drawing fancy multi-colored maps. Or, if all else fails, get your players drunk and then they’ll never notice how unprepared you are—one of the oldest GM tricks in the book.