How to prep efficiently
In this article we’ll discuss how to get the most out of your precious prep time with some simple efficiency practices and concepts. This article assumes no knowledge of roleplaying games at all.
We’ll examine:
1. The four types of prep DMs do without thinking about it, AND
2. How to use ‘scenes’ to structure your preparation.
So you’re the DM, huh?
Preparing for a game is a lot easier than it seems. It’s a lot of fun and really engages your creativity. Just as our games are all different so is the way we prepare. There are so many ways to do it and a brief glance at any DMing forum or group online will show that there’s no single right way. However, whilst everyone has their own style, we can all benefit from efficiency.
We might each enjoy film and cinema but that doesn’t mean we like the same movies or directors. What counts as the best films is a very subjective notion. But whether you love Spielberg or Scorsese, if you are a fan of movies rather than a casual viewer, you will probably agree that some movies are just trashy. What we love is possibly more subjective than what lacks merit. In other words, there’s no right way but maybe there are wrong ways.
The tools we use don’t differ. Spielberg and Scorsese both tell stories and they both point cameras at actors. How they tell those stories, how they use their scripts, actors and camera angles varies greatly but none of that matters to the budding film student so much as how to use the camera. Picasso’s and Rembrandt’s works are completely different but they both used paints and brushes. No matter what artistic vision an artist has, they need to learn to paint first.
Learning how to Prepare
A person can be taught how to paint, make films, prepare a legal case or prepare for a D&D session. How much work you do before the game session is a very personal matter depending on how much time you have available and how much you enjoy the prep work but the time you spend should add value to your game. In time you’ll find your own ways of doing this.
It doesn’t matter if you prepare in minute detail, planning each NPC, creating detailed notes on multiple encounters and scenarios and drafting vast amounts of lore or if you do little to no prep, preferring to react to your players’ choices and improvise at the table during play. For each person there is a sweet spot but efficient prep is a skill that can be learnt no matter how we choose to implement it, (just as improvisation is a skill that you acquire with practise and becomes easier the more familiar you are with your chosen game system). When you first start, my advice is to do a decent amount of prep so you feel comfortable and relaxed in the material you’re going to run. A lot of my improvisation at the table comes from material I have written or prepared for in previous games. Half of all improv is recycling.
So in this article I am going assume a lot and be a bit more instructional than I would in general DM advice. Any half experienced GM/DM will disagree with some (or maybe a lot!) of this. This is my take on how to get over the teething issues of your first few sessions.
The Types of Preparation
It helps to split our preparation into different headings.
- Prepare for your System
- Prepare for your Party
- Prepare for your Adventure
- Prepare for your Session
Prepare for your System
Read the Right Rules.
Obviously, you will need to read the game’s core rules but there’s no need to trawl through 300+ pages. 5e (D&D 5th edition) contains all the actual gameplay rules in chapters 7 to 10 of the Player’s Handbook. That’s only 36 pages including a lot of art work. 36 pages might seem like a lot but it’s not as intimidating as the entire book and you don’t have to memorise it. The PF2e (Pathfinder 2nd edition) Core Rulebook runs to a whopping 600+ pages but Chapter 9, ‘Playing the Game’ is a mere 40 of those. That’ll be what we need then
The rest of the book is stuff the rules apply to. The game play rules can be better called ‘Mechanics’ and the other things are ‘Elements’. Attack rolls and Stealth checks and Hit Points etc; these are the mechanics, the core rules.
Barbarians and Firebolt spells and Goblins etc; these are elements. They might not come up. It’s not a problem during the game session to look up the rules on a firebolt spell which will tell you to ‘Make a ranged spell attack roll’; that’s the mechanic you need to understand.
A barbarian’s Rage feature uses a ‘bonus action’ to gain certain bonuses including ‘Resistance’ to certain types of damage. You don’t need to really understand how Rage works, you can look at up at the table easily enough but you’ll be well served by knowing what a ‘Bonus Action’ is and what ‘Resistance’ means.
Cover the mechanics as these are the general rules. Your players are also more likely to spend their time reading about their characters; their ‘Game Elements’. Some players read and re-read over their character class entry but only ever seem to learn the mechanics from the GM/DM. It feels kinda odd that the basics of how to play the game comes after 170 pages of stuff you can use in the game but there you go (in the 2024 edition of the rules this has been changed). As you gain experience you may not have to do this very much but from time to time we all have to go back to the books and it’s better done in between sessions. Underwater combat, fighting from horseback, exploring a punishingly cold tundra … If you suspect an area might crop up it’s worth a check before hand. As long as you have a basic handle on the ‘How to Play’ section of your rules book you’ll be fine.
Prepare for your Party
I’d certainly get copies of the player’s character sheets in advance and then look up what they can do. These are are the elements that will definitely come up! If there’s a Rogue in the party you can figure out in your own head how the ‘Sneak Attack’ feature works and at the table you’ll look like a slick, master of the rules … or at least they won’t surprise you.
Looking over your player’s character’s abilities and options will also give you ideas about how to support them and how to present the game to them. You may think about specific parts of the adventure you’re planning to run and ways the players could engage with it/overcome it. You might decide to telegraph certain options for new players to help them understand the options and choices they have.
Some players will write back stories for their characters which could be a few sentences or pages of narrative. Reading these will show you how the player wants their character to feel. Is that barbarian morose and grim, hellbent on vengeance or are they a jovial, beer-swilling Viking? It might not give you anything actionable at this stage but it tells you how the player expects the game world to react to their character. The player isn’t going to put out an Oscar winning roleplay performance but you will still be able to help them feel that NPCs (non-player characters) in the game world see their character as they do.
Prepare for your Adventure
I don’t advise creating your own adventure for your first game. I would use one of the many published adventures available to buy. There are literally thousands to choose from short ‘one shot’ adventures that take a session or two to hardback books covering fifteen levels of gameplay. DM’s Guild is a great place to buy third party content but you won’t go wrong starting with one of the Starter Sets like Lost Mines of Phandelver, The Essentials Kit or The Dragon of Stormwreck Isle or running something from the Tales from the Yawning Portal anthology.
I think of Adventure Prep as a sort of ‘high level overview’. You don’t need much detail and the object is to understand the adventure as a whole. Start by reading the adventure module. Some will read it all the way through but you don’t need to be ready to run every scenario. Scanning through so you understand the adventure flow is a good idea. There will probably be parts of the adventure you don’t like and want to alter or cut entirely. You might want to introduce a certain NPC at a different moment or change aspects of their character or appearance. At this stage you’re just making yourself aware of any issues and arming yourself with the features that will come up so you can drip feed some foreshadowing and understand which parts can easily be changed and which are pivotal to the adventure.
As you skim through think about:
- What links the different parts of the module and leads the party from A to B?
- What do you want to keep secret and not reveal by accident?
- What info is essential for the players to be able to engage with each choice or challenge?
You won’t need to understand each detail of the last dungeon but it helps to know what information leads the players to their final destination. If you get lost during the session you won’t have time to leaf through a book or navigate a PDF to find the answer. It’s far better to look your players in the eye and give an answer. Just make something up. Now this might seem a bit contradictory; ‘what’s the point in reading it all if I’m better off just making stuff up when I get stuck,’ you might ask. But that’s the real trick. A quick read through the book will make it so much easier to invent things during session. No adventure as played follows the line of the book but an earlier reading of the adventure module will spark your creativity and imagination in the session. Even if you don’t give the answer from the written module, you’ll give an answer that makes sense to you and your understanding of the adventure, which is possibly better than reeling off the writer’s phrasing anyway.
You might make some notes about the adventure as a whole but don’t go overboard. You probably won’t have much time to look at them during the game sessions anyway. It can be tempting to try and cover every possibility; I like to write things down but that’s just how my head works. For me the writing of it fixes it in my brain. However, for the overall adventure ‘flow’ or ‘structure’, a one page reference document might work better than pages of material. A few bullet points or a spider diagram covering the most important characters, developments and locations is more likely to actually be used than 10 pages of dense text.
Prepare for the Game Session.
This is where you put in your detail and close attention. Preparing an adventure in detail is not only difficult but possibly counter-productive. It’s hard enough to predict what the players will do in the next session let alone how they will tackle a challenge in ten sessions time. Roleplaying game adventures are more like TV shows than movies, they are episodic. Each episode needs to work as a satisfying section of play. Players might think about the adventures, but DMs are served better by focusing on the units of gameplay that are sessions and scenes.
Adventures exist in the fictional setting and are not a good method of managing the real world game. An adventure might include lots of game play options and choices to fight, negotiate or infiltrate; opportunities to explore the world, its history and develop characters. But if lots of the big choices occur in session one, social interaction challenges dominate session two and session three is all combat, the overall feeling is of unbalanced game play. The choices in the adventure are perhaps not as important as the scenes within each session.
Scenes
Each session is comprised of a series of specific gameplay moments we can all scenes. There is a lot that I could say about scenes, their purposes and how to frame them but it would go beyond the scope of this article so I’ll be brief.
Scenes are often not defined in the rules at all and players are usually unaware of this concept but scenes are the building blocks used to construct a session of game play. Rather than encounters, events or locations, I think it helps to think in terms of linking different scenes. A scene might be a literal location but it could be a conversation that takes place over a day or a week long hike through the woods. You probably won’t know which scenes the players will engage with, in what order or how they will react to them. We skip from scene to scene like a film editor, focusing on the interesting and important moments. I’ve seen the Avengers films but I’ve never seen Tony Stark brush his teeth. I infer that he did at some point but the films skipped over that because it’s dull. As you prepare, think of what might be fun or useful scenes and how to move the game to the next one rather than defaulting to the very next thing to happen.
Each scene needs to serve a purpose.
The purpose of a scene might be to let the players decompress, as their characters discuss all they’ve learnt and plot their next move around a campfire. A scene’s purpose could be to deal with the threat of the orcs in the next room. A scene might simply be a fork in the road and the players have to choose which way to go. In your prep and whilst you run the session, keep in mind the purpose of each scene. Once they’ve talked it out, defeated the orcs or chosen a route; the purpose is fulfilled and that’s your cue to move or nudge the game onto the next scene.
Moving the game on is the DM’s responsibility. The players have agency in the story but you control the pacing of the game.
Each section that poses an obstacle or a challenge, ie an ‘Encounter’, you can usefully prepare in a bit more detail. Sections that don’t obstruct the character’s intentions, like a fork in the road or a village market, can be dealt with more lightly.
Decision Scenes
Decision scenes can affect the overall direction of the game. The players should be making decisions in every scene but here I refer to matters that set the course of the session or adventure. Like a literal a traveller facing a fork in the road, the players need a certain amount of info to feel like their decision counts, otherwise it’s just a random selection. ‘The left path or the right path’ isn’t a choice of outcomes, they may as well toss a coin.
‘The left path leads deeper into the mist choked woods and the right fork heads towards the bustling market town of Randoville. Ahead the cliffs block progress. Which route will you take?’
That is a choice. Players can get the wrong idea easily enough and there is a virtue in making sure their choices are informed. Do they need to know that the necromancer awaits in the woods and time is running out but at town they could re-equip and purchase healing potions? If it won’t spoil your game to be candid, I suggest you do. Consider what the minimum, essential info is and how you will provide it. Will one of the characters know it or could an NPC tell them? Might a certain clue be unmissable?
Player Led Scenes
Other scenes, can have less shape and structure. You may decide to run a town market as a whole bunch of different scenes. Each shop, trader and tavern getting its own part of the game devoted to it. On the other hand, if wandering around the market only justifies twenty minutes of session time then you can run it all as a single scene. Each shop or NPC just becomes one thing a player can interact within that scene. The most important thing to fix in your head is what is that scene here for? If we’re spending game time on it then it has to have value.
It might look like this;
‘You arrive in town as the sun has just past its zenith and the afternoon stretches before you. The market square throngs with the smells and sounds of traders hawking livestock from wooden pens. A juggler entertains outside of a rural tavern, from across the cobbles rings the sharp sound of a blacksmith’s hammer from behind a brightly coloured tent and a queue of people wait outside a hall to bring petitions to the aldermen.’
Plenty to do and investigate there but then again, the players may not do any of it.
That’s fine if you decide that this scene is really just to provide a break after some action, to create a low stress moment and develop the sense of the game setting being a real and breathing place. The players might be able to find a healing potion for sale or learn something but none of it is that important. If we wanted it to be more focused, the scene framing bit would be better if it included a reaction point – something that happens which requires a response from the players. (Something like “…when suddenly a man tumbles from the tavern screaming about raids in the farmlands. He sways drunkenly, locking eyes with you. “What are you staring at?” he shouts as he swaggers towards you.”)
You could deal with the market as a montage. You could ask each player what they do with their afternoon in town before resolving the whole group’s actions and let them each make a dice roll or two. You don’t need to plan out the life story of the juggler or write a rigorous haggling section with the blacksmith. You may have a few ideas about a fortune teller and some interactions with the traders but there’s no challenge to be overcome or decision to be made. If they really like the juggler NPC then you can roll with it or maybe this scene blows up due to a character trying to steal something or trying to outdo the juggler for small change. Whatever; anything is possible. On the other hand, you are ready to skip over this scene quickly if the players don’t engage with it.
If a character haggles with the blacksmith I might let that play out but it’s hardly moving the game or story on. I’d let it have a few exchanges before calling for a check and moving on. You could spend a lot of time preparing all of the things that might happen in the town but it’s not going to be as important as later challenges and important decisions. By focusing on the purpose of a scene you will easily see how much prep to spend on it.
Your agenda is not what has to happen in the story but rather what gameplay moment you are creating. Think of your scenes in that way.
Next up, a more detailed look at the sharp end and a special type of scene, in Preparing an Encounter.
Thanks for reading.