So I've been running a game of ASSH for the past month and a half or so. We started off with the module Rats in the Walls but since that I've completely improvised it. Using a combination of tables and strategic pulling of things out of my ass and thus far it's been the best game I've seen in ages. I've pulled a location or two from a module but that's about it.

Historically I've been a low prep GM anyway, but this time I've just thrown caution to the wind. Whatever comes up goes down in the campaign notes and I may try to connect the dots in between sessions. We have had an absolute blast and I've found the lack of worrying about prep between sessions has been very freeing for me. Now I think this sort of thing is much more feasible in a pre-established setting but could be done in a homebrew with a little prep work. Seriously my between session prep time has come down to about 30 minutes or so.

So far my players seem not to notice nor care, they are having fun so no one gives a damn that the layout of the hidden cultist temple makes less than no sense.

I've also come to enjoy using the random tables as oracles and trying to suss out what it is the dice gods are trying to tell me.

I'm sure this isn't news to any of the old hands around here but I thought I'd share. Feel free to share experiences GMing this way, or tips to facilitate it.

Yeah, low prep snadbox games is a craft I am inspired to thrive to. I consider myself still beginner on this, so I still stick to running published adventures.

But some of books I like that inspire this kind of gaming are:
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/108572/The-Lazy-Dungeon-Master

And also a game called Muntant: Year Zero

Yeah, that's my thing. Now that I'm running Godbound, a game in which faction/domain management is a thing, I stat up the factions and communities, and grow the sandbox fractal-like, between sessions.

I still wish I was one of these disciplined GMs that showed up for the first session with a solid, fully functional sandbox map keyed in advance. But my players sure aren't complaining.

Ive always been an over prepper but after reading so much about Zero Prep/Sandbox type gaming Ive given it a try a few times. Ive been mildly successful, afterall its not a whole lot harder to make stuff up on whim at the table than it is at your GM prep desk by yourself. However, I havent been all that happy with the results. Nobody complained but I always felt rushed, that my on the spot ideas werent as original or detailed as they could have been if I had put some tiime and thought into them. Then there is the massive task of recording everything we generated at the table. Trying to keep detailed notes while playing and then sorting through them all was a major headache. I recorded the last couple of sessions to facilitate this but sitting there listening to 4 hours of banter is as bad as prepping for the next game!

Anyway, good luck to you. Ill probably try it again as I can definitely see the advantages but Im not ready to give up my prep yet!

I'm running Dungeon World and Freebooters on the Frontier. I prep the dungeons and discoveries for for drop-in, and DL'ed a bunch of one page dungeons just in case (at the very least, I have the maps). Lots of on the spot stuff, still, even with some prep. I do not know the monster creation well enough for my comfort level to run it completely on the fly (but I'm close!).

I'll take a shot at giving a little advice.

Strive to define the world as you go and then adhere to the way that you've defined it.

Let's say the party goes into a tavern and you decide there are 2 big bouncers. Then the party gets in a fight and makes short work of the bouncers.

The temptation might be to say, "4 more bouncers come rushing in from the back!" because you want a better fight. Don't do that. Treat what you decided earlier as the facts, even if no one else knows what you decided.

Take notes. Have a rough map of the city or countryside or whatever. Fill in the blanks as you go.

Pull elements out of character backstories and insert them into events. Let the game be about who the characters are and the choices they make.

Quote from: Arkansan;920308So I've been running a game of ASSH for the past month and a half or so. We started off with the module Rats in the Walls but since that I've completely improvised it. Using a combination of tables and strategic pulling of things out of my ass and thus far it's been the best game I've seen in ages. I've pulled a location or two from a module but that's about it.

Historically I've been a low prep GM anyway, but this time I've just thrown caution to the wind. Whatever comes up goes down in the campaign notes and I may try to connect the dots in between sessions. We have had an absolute blast and I've found the lack of worrying about prep between sessions has been very freeing for me. Now I think this sort of thing is much more feasible in a pre-established setting but could be done in a homebrew with a little prep work. Seriously my between session prep time has come down to about 30 minutes or so.

So far my players seem not to notice nor care, they are having fun so no one gives a damn that the layout of the hidden cultist temple makes less than no sense.

I've also come to enjoy using the random tables as oracles and trying to suss out what it is the dice gods are trying to tell me.

I'm sure this isn't news to any of the old hands around here but I thought I'd share. Feel free to share experiences GMing this way, or tips to facilitate it.

That reminds me of my first steps in running sandboxes, before I knew that's what they were called, so I'd say you're on the right track:).

As it happens I've just started up a Patreon writing mini adventures to minimise prep for sandbox style GMs: $1 Adventure Frameworks.

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=645444

Basically drop in rumour/adventures, with enough meat for the GM to improvise the gaps confidently, at about 4-6 pages (excluding credits). There's a free example adventure, the Tomb of Horutep, at the link.

Cheers

This is how I have GMed for years. I will sometimes design little set piece encounters or adventure hooks, but have given up doing heavy prep because my players always go off in some unexpected direction anyways.

What does prep mean?

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;920565What does prep mean?

Good point, I mean different people of course prepare to run a game different ways.

I've found that keeping a list of random ideas and short scenarios to spring on players when the opportunity presents itself is better than a written adventure, but that is still sort of preparing.

Quote from: Arkansan;920308So I've been running a game of ASSH for the past month and a half or so. We started off with the module Rats in the Walls but since that I've completely improvised it. Using a combination of tables and strategic pulling of things out of my ass and thus far it's been the best game I've seen in ages. I've pulled a location or two from a module but that's about it.

Historically I've been a low prep GM anyway, but this time I've just thrown caution to the wind. Whatever comes up goes down in the campaign notes and I may try to connect the dots in between sessions. We have had an absolute blast and I've found the lack of worrying about prep between sessions has been very freeing for me. Now I think this sort of thing is much more feasible in a pre-established setting but could be done in a homebrew with a little prep work. Seriously my between session prep time has come down to about 30 minutes or so.

So far my players seem not to notice nor care, they are having fun so no one gives a damn that the layout of the hidden cultist temple makes less than no sense.

I've also come to enjoy using the random tables as oracles and trying to suss out what it is the dice gods are trying to tell me.

I'm sure this isn't news to any of the old hands around here but I thought I'd share. Feel free to share experiences GMing this way, or tips to facilitate it.

I'm quite the opposite.  Doesn't make me right, but I am quite on the other end of the spectrum.  
Now, truth be told, I run everything in the same setting I've used for years...ok, over three decades....and my games tend to go very long, possibly partially due to the large amount of prep.  One of my two online games, the Collegium Arcana game, hits session 100 this week. So I believe in 3 sorts of prep.

• Accretive Prep- Years of work adding to a setting, layering and putting things together.  This is often not listed as separate, but this kind of prep goes a long way to making a game come alive. A wiki works really well for this.

• Campaign Prep- Making plots for the way you think things will come to gether, NPCs, relationships, deeper area dynamics and politics.

• Game Prep- plot and planning based on the recent games and how that means the new edges of the game need to get filled in.  Fleshing out and listing NPCs met, deepening the areas of interest the PCs have shown, redrawing in the effects of what the players have done to the setting itself.

Again, this is me.  And if you and yours are having a grand time, have at it.  But I though that I'd present a contrary view that seems to work, at least for me.

I couldn't have explained it better myself.

I easily spend 70% of my prep time working on the setting. I flesh out far more than is needed for any given session but the extended details make the world feel more like a real place and allow the players to deviate more without having to conjure up setting specifics on the fly.

Campaign prep is about another 10%, essentially a rough and loose outline of how the general plotline 'should' play out.

the final 15% is Game or Session prep. Statting NPCs, writing up some cool dialogue for some, generating a few random encounters in case things get dull, etc.

Im an over prepper but I don't mind, I love it. I easily spend oh, 3-4 hours of prep for every hour of actual game time. Running a session once every other week is about as fast as Ive ever been able to pace a campaign. If the adventure is caught up in one town, one dungeon, one area etc. its easier but once the group starts moving again into new areas that require background detail etc. It slows way down again.

I run everything from incredibly prep-heavy campaigns to completely improvised sessions based on nothing more than my ability to flip through a monster manual.

Here's the thing about prep: It will always, always, always add value to your game and make for a better session IF (and this is a very important if) you focus your prep on the stuff you can't improvise at the table.

Second secret of prep: What you can improvise effectively will depend on your own strengths as a GM, it will change over time, and it will vary based on the system you're running. I talked about one facet of this in The Hierarchy of Reference, but it applies across the board. Maybe you struggle with having dynamic battles featuring clever tactics, so you spend a little effort prepping Tucker's Kobolds. Maybe you find it easier to run Pathfinder monsters if you make a point of highlighting feats you're unfamiliar with and jotting down a note about what they do. Personally, I know that I get too tight-lipped with NPCs revealing the deep secrets of a campaign (because I ruined a campaign once by getting too loose-lipped with those secrets and it's a Pandora's Box you can't close -- if the PCs don't know something they can always learn it later; if they learn too much they can't forget it), so personally I focus a certain amount of effort on prepping exactly what NPCs know.

Third secret of prep: Some stuff you find hard to improvise can be made easy to improvise if you prep the right tools. Procedural content generators are an obvious example of this. But it can also include stuff like "if you're bad at coming up with names on the fly, prep a list of names".

Particularly valuable prep targets, of course, are the things that can never be improvised on the fly. Props and handouts are perhaps the most obvious example of this.

Quote from: Octiron;920599Good point, I mean different people of course prepare to run a game different ways.

I've found that keeping a list of random ideas and short scenarios to spring on players when the opportunity presents itself is better than a written adventure, but that is still sort of preparing.

It's sort of preparing, but it's prep that can be done fast. When I say "no prep", I don't mean "no prep whatsoever", because it would make it impossible to run any game that's not based purely on cliches and using a system you already know - at the very least, you have to read the setting and system, and that's preparing.
When I say "no prep", I mean "virtually no prep", or to put it in more detail, "little prep other than reading the setting and system".

Quote from: LordVreeg;920678I'm quite the opposite.  Doesn't make me right, but I am quite on the other end of the spectrum.  
Now, truth be told, I run everything in the same setting I've used for years...ok, over three decades....and my games tend to go very long, possibly partially due to the large amount of prep.  One of my two online games, the Collegium Arcana game, hits session 100 this week. So I believe in 3 sorts of prep.

• Accretive Prep- Years of work adding to a setting, layering and putting things together.  This is often not listed as separate, but this kind of prep goes a long way to making a game come alive. A wiki works really well for this.

• Campaign Prep- Making plots for the way you think things will come together, NPCs, relationships, deeper area dynamics and politics.

• Game Prep- plot and planning based on the recent games and how that means the new edges of the game need to get filled in.  Fleshing out and listing NPCs met, deepening the areas of interest the PCs have shown, redrawing in the effects of what the players have done to the setting itself.

Again, this is me.  And if you and yours are having a grand time, have at it.  But I though that I'd present a contrary view that seems to work, at least for me.

Accretive prep happens anyway in no-prep games. It's just called "game continuity", and doesn't take much time.
Campaign prep is kinda mandatory in order to get to the "no prep" stage, but it can be done almost blindingly fast, I'm talking at most a couple hours here. Of course, there are some tricks for it, but they're simple and easy, and have been in use for decades now. They also help with the "accretive" part.
"Game prep", for me, follows from the "accretive prep", and the same tricks from the previous two stages keep it down to around 15 minutes before every session.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;920710I run everything from incredibly prep-heavy campaigns to completely improvised sessions based on nothing more than my ability to flip through a monster manual.

Here's the thing about prep: It will always, always, always add value to your game and make for a better session IF (and this is a very important if) you focus your prep on the stuff you can't improvise at the table.

Second secret of prep: What you can improvise effectively will depend on your own strengths as a GM, it will change over time, and it will vary based on the system you're running. I talked about one facet of this in The Hierarchy of Reference, but it applies across the board. Maybe you struggle with having dynamic battles featuring clever tactics, so you spend a little effort prepping Tucker's Kobolds. Maybe you find it easier to run Pathfinder monsters if you make a point of highlighting feats you're unfamiliar with and jotting down a note about what they do. Personally, I know that I get too tight-lipped with NPCs revealing the deep secrets of a campaign (because I ruined a campaign once by getting too loose-lipped with those secrets and it's a Pandora's Box you can't close -- if the PCs don't know something they can always learn it later; if they learn too much they can't forget it), so personally I focus a certain amount of effort on prepping exactly what NPCs know.

Third secret of prep: Some stuff you find hard to improvise can be made easy to improvise if you prep the right tools. Procedural content generators are an obvious example of this. But it can also include stuff like "if you're bad at coming up with names on the fly, prep a list of names".

Particularly valuable prep targets, of course, are the things that can never be improvised on the fly. Props and handouts are perhaps the most obvious example of this.

Listen to that advice, too.