This is a seriously useful book for any GM. Never Unprepared is exactly what it says on the cover: “The complete Game Master’s guide to session prep”.
Desperately Needed Help
Doing Prep “Wrong”
As for not liking prep, it is my belief that the reason that many GMs do not enjoy it is because they are doing it wrong. That may sound bold, and I will defend that point later on in the chapter, but I think that prep has been given a bad reputation over the years.
In the way that many parts of our hobby are passed down from experienced GM to new GM, I think that we older GMs have perpetuated the belief that at best prep is some kind of necessary evil and not an enjoyable, creative process.
In short, I’ve been doing prep all wrong. More accurately, it turns out that I’ve not really being doing much prep at all.
I’m one of those annoying GMs who can improvise a session very well, rolling with a basic scenario starting point and delivering a fun evening of gaming. All well and good, you’d suppose.
You’d be wrong.
The problem with impro is that, once the session is over, that is that. It’s very hard, after a day or two, to remember many details from the session. This leads to my inability to keep a game going because, if I can’t keep the details straight, then the players don’t have a reliable setting to continue playing. With my heavy schedule of work and home life, plus my desire to avoid prep because “it is some kind of… evil”, no game that I run can ever have legs.
I have been, for many years, the one-shot GM. And everyone knows that the secret to any relationship lies in being able to sustain more than a one-shot good time.
