Prepping from first principles, OR, I wrote this meandering advice post so that I could get the ideas out of my head and focus on writing a completely different post

 

General Advice

• Own your game. Hack, modify, extend, and experiment. Almost all the published stuff is crap. Most of the blog and youtube stuff is crap too. The best system is the one you will make.
• Time, both ingame and out of game, is the most precious resource of all. Usually, we have better things to do than spend our lives prepping games: we work on it to learn to do it better so that we can do less of it. However, if you enjoy some element of it, you can spend as long as you like; if you want to write an entire setting guide, go for it.
• GMing should not be seen as taking your turn in the barrel. You should like doing it!
• The GM's three game duties are: to keep track of what is true, to resolve what players do, and to communicate the current situation to the players... and doing these things should be an enjoyable social activity.
  • Your processes, material, and skills can be tested by how quickly and how enjoyably you can perform these three things. See prioritisation below.
• Reading blogposts and watching videos on how to run games is useful but you should never spend more time reading and watching things than prepping a game, running it, and thinking about it afterwards. After the first couple sessions, no more than 10% of your system (your entire toolkit) should be new to you at any time.
  • Three overlapping processes (can be used for the same situation) is a problem, not a solution.
• Go take a walk. It will help you think.
• What is impressive to you probably seems that way because it seems difficult. However, forcing yourself to work in difficult and unnatural ways and use content you don't understand does not give good results. Experienced GMs pick tools that work well in their own tool ecosystem: you cannot just transplant them. You cannot satisfactorily use anything not properly integrated with the rest of your kit.
• Simpler processes are better than complex ones. Less notes is better than more. Delete steps. Going faster usually means doing less.
• The Quantum Ogre, the Rule of Cool, and Skill Challenges are bad tools to reach for first, and should only be used in situations where the results really don't matter.
  • They break coherence. They are disconnected from the rest of the work, robbing you of value that you should be getting from that work. They create new information (partial information) without foundation, without examining what is implied by new established fact.
  • I believe that it's fine to decide that some things should just happen, but when a player asks "why did that happen" the answer they give themselves should never be "because the GM wanted it that way" or "because the GM rolled on a chart and that's what came up"
• There's an amazingly large amount of overlap between GMing effectively and being good at lying. Be bold and confident. 

 

The priority chart: doing less when you run games

The way that you use your system and processes, what you prepare and how; when the game is on, you must make judgements, resolve actions, and supply information, and better tools let you do this faster, by involving less steps.

Zero steps: Immediately Knowing
One step: Instant Lookup; Improvise; Lie
Two steps: Fill information (all immediately known) into memorised process, resolve
Three steps: Getting a player to give you the answer
Four steps: Look up right process, look up right information, fill it in, resolve
More: Rolling on charts, nested processes, undisguised generating new content
Failure: Searching your materials for the information that you don't know the location of; searching materials for information that may or may not even exist; doing a google search; asking chatgpt; trying to work out what the text means; trying to work out where an error happened

Special: creating things when the players know that the results will be exciting is still engaging (anticipation). Curate your random tables carefully.

Effective prep is whatever makes you able to operate higher on that chart more often.

Trying to prep everything to instant lookup (effectively, scripted content) is the obvious solution to the novice, and it only works as long as you can still navigate instantly it on the fly; the failure mode of this style is having to search it and work out what it means.
Instead, aim to adopt a toolset that lets you operate across 0-3 steps 95% of the time; material that is instantly usable for generating things as you need it is often just as good or better than the thing itself.

Do not just think about whether your processes will help you solve one step in isolation, but whether they continue to be good after an hour of using them ingame and you have a mountain of results and new information that also needs to be tracked: ongoing informational load needs to stay low.

Surprisingly, writing static material (stuff that is written for one specific sequence of events) can be effective prep, as it forces you to get more specific about the underlying facts of the material. Steal "acting is reacting" and practice how characters and factions will react to different situations.

 

 

Make a copy of this chart and empty it. Try to work out how you will achieve each of the three goals with your processes, material, and skills. This lets you identify where you have gaps in your toolkit and you can look for things that complement the parts you do have.

	Processes	Material	Skills
Keep track of truth (especially new / evolving truth)	(Goal: Simulate a world that naturally puts the players in Situations, while tracking as little player-unknown information as possible)	Game-dated searchable notes. Calendars, weather flowers, random tables, moodboards.	Creating efficiently both before and during the game. Keep information organised.
Resolve what players do	Reusable, non-overlapping, quick, believable.	Clear, concise reference information; current situation is a direct lookup to get required info.	Able to perform (Situation x Process x Material => Resolution) smoothly, seamlessly, without hesitating
Communicate effectively with players	(the one, two, many technique is a good one)	Player-visible maps (tactical mats)	Entire books have been written about this.