The Three P's of Prep
While I'm still working on Domain play in the background, there was something I quickly wanted to get out because it was stuck in my mind and this requires way less proper thought. It's a question I see keeping come up again and again. "What should I prep?"
Now, there's some people who will say "nothing". That's fine; you can run a great #NoPrep game. I've done so too, but generally I find that my campaigns benefit from having some form of prep done (eventually). I'm not going to make any value judgement on how much and when you should prep; some people do much more than others. I'll talk a bit about how much and when I prep in the end. However, the bulk of this is going to be about what to.
So what's wrong with conventional prep?
Everything. Everything that (most) people out there try to tell you about running a game is wrong, for the simple reason they start with the wrong kind of presumptions. Based on those bad presumptions they then will give you easier ways to prep your games the wrong way. This, of course, doesn't help. You cannot build a long-lasting house if your foundation is sinking.
The Elephant in the room
"Story". It cannot be said enough: the TTRPG is not a medium for the referee to tell a story he has thought up. Any method of prep that assumes there's a story to be told at the start is going to fail. Trying to wrangle your story idea into a game will eventually fail for one of several reason, because your players have agency.
It doesn't matter how you do it. Node-Based Scenario design, 3-clue rules, Lazy DM. All of them rely on the idea that there is a scenario that the players will be going through. You'll run into the following issues inevitably
- Wasted prep. The players go left instead of right. Congratulations. All of your prep for "what if the party goes right" is now wasted.
- It straightjackets your thinking and takes away player agency. As soon as you write down a plan, consciously or subconsciously, will steer towards this plan. This takes away from player agency.
- You burn out
DM Burnout
There are generally two components that in combination lead to burnout, and conventional prep maxes on both of them.
- High demand/stress
- The reward of the work is low compared to the effort put in
Conventional prep is high demand. You're dealing with a constant stream of what-ifs that goes on and on. You have to keep in mind the 'end goal' of whatever story you're trying to tell all the while to keep on track. Exactly this is also what makes the reward of the work so low. The exponential what-ifs collapse as players go through your scenarios and only a pittance of what you actually worked on get used.
Of course you're eventually going to burn out doing this. You're putting in probably as much (if not multiples of) time preparing to run a session as you'll spend running it. This is frankly insane.
So what can you do to not do this?
Of course we need some pithy and rememberable acronym…
I've internally started calling it the Three P's. While this is technically not a great way to call it, since there's actually more elements, and one of them is highly poorly named, it has the advantage of adhering to the rule of threes and being pithy. Unless someone finds a better way to name it, I'm sticking to this.
Now, I'm not the first to do prep this way. I know the guys over at Black Lodge Gamesdescribed something really similar in one of their videos. There's probably oodles of others out there I'd love to link to but who I'm not familiar with.
So what are the three P's I'm talking about? People, Plots and Places.
People
Individuals, Factions, Nations, Organisations. All people for my purposes. Create a rich set of characters with means (resources), goals they wish to achieve, rivalries and friendships. Create a conspiracy board if you have to, showing which guys like which others, they are planning to kill, whatever you think is important.
Places
Any location that's pertinent. Make a vague map if you wish. Create a description of some kind. Know who (people, remember?) is there. Know what they've stashed there.
Plots
No, not the story kind. The Gunpowder kind. For your People, pick one or more of their goals and lay out some provisional steps on how they'd be able to achieve them, with the resources they have. If no player (or other People) interference happens, what is the timeline of each of these steps.
So why these elements?
Firstly, unlike prepping situations, scenes, story, whatever, these things are not emphemeral. If players decide not to interact with them, they will still exist. Your prep will not go to waste, because even if they haven't interacted with something yet, it's still there. The places still exists. They might not have interacted with Barry, but they killed Barry's best mate Chuck, who is now going about trying to figure out who did those horrible things. The Plots that weren't interrupted are still ticking away in the background.
Through play the players will find a world that feels rich. People aren't soulless automatons. They have things they want to achieve, they have friends and enemies. Places have a feel to them, and are inhabited by the People you made. While walking across a street, they might happen upon the fallout of a Plot, or, if present at the wrong (or right) time, see one happening in front of them.
The "stories" and "scenarios" the false prophets of conventional play want you to prep are made up of these elements. You meet one (or more) People trying to execute part of a plot at some place, at some time. When you have the latter elements in play, you don't need to prepare any of these moments in time and space, because they well come up naturally as the players do things in the game. All the prep you have done with these three points is to allow you to do what comes natural to you in the moment; sense-making of what would happen between what the players would do and what you know exists in your world.
The fourth P: Practical application
So what does your prep become when applying the Three P's? After each sessions, you go to your conspiracy board. Who did the players piss off, who are now their friends? Which Plots have been advanced in-session, which ones have been thwarted. How did the Places change? All of this is relatively quick book-keeping you can expand (or contract) as you wish to. You can make a quick character the players liked a full Person. The dungeon Place might need restocking, as one of the factions there was wiped out.
Personally, I'm extremely lazy. I'll have the bare minimum of People, Places and Plots in place as I begin, and I'll discover the rest in play along with the players. The wilderness/dungeon encounter tables inform me of which People there are. Reaction rolls tell me how the feel about the party and other people in the world, from which I can infer some semblance of plans. If I have not made up a dungeon yet, I could create one in play in various methods. The important thing is to write all of these things down. That way you can expand on them later after the session, to go from the Implied Person, the Implied Place and the Implied Plot to a fully fledged one, which is better integrated in the world. It's my compromise between my own obsessiveness driving me to want to have these things on paper, and my laziness driving me towards #NoPrep.
It works fractally
This form of prep works at every level of play for all styles of play. From single individuals in a Kindred Coterie, to rival adventuring parties the party pissed off, to thieves' guilds in a city contending with the city guard, to barons, to entire kingdoms. You can start at whatever level is necessary for play at that point, and work up or down if ever so required.
It works well with other good ways to play
This style of prep seamlesly incorporates into other modes of play. The Braunstein Weseley first ran, and which was recently expanded on by the BROSR works perfectly. You have the People with clear goals, so why not run these as a Braunstein? It works great with Patron Players as explained in many blogposts by Jeffro, BDubs, Purple Druid and many, many others (including yours truly). 1:1 timekeeping (or one-to-one downtime pacing, as Purple Druid named it). It fits greatly into the framework laid out in John McGowan's the Living Campaign. Hell, you could even use it with John Wick's Living City concept (as laid out in Play Dirty).
All of these are ways to do one of two things. Firstly: it reduces the burden on you even further. You outsource the bookkeeping, maintenance, and metal load of coming up with all of these things to your players. But secondly, and more importantly: make the prep more fun. It's more fun to run a downtime/Braunstein faction play than it is to sit all alone in the dark moving some words about a page on your own. It allows you to be excited by whatever madness your players come up with for the elements that make up the world.
Wrapping up
So try it. See what happens when you run a game prepping only these three principles. I'll promise you it'll be easier, more fun, and less likely to burn you out. So until next time, when we hopefully talk about domain play some more, count your torches and keep mapping.