Re-read what he was claiming and answering to... Then remember this is Sommerjon we are talking about here...

Quote from: Omega;924500Re-read what he was claiming and answering to... Then remember this is Sommerjon we are talking about here...

Well, particularly the last one, about the games not being as good as they think they are, there's a few people in this thread you can assume feel the same way from what they've posted, even if they didn't say as much.  

My knee-jerk reaction would be to agree, but then when I stop to think about it, then I think the truth is closer to what I said.  30 years of happy players doesn't mean you couldn't have been better with some prep, just like for myself, 30 years of happy players doesn't mean I essentially wasted a decent amount of time on prep that didn't really get applied, even years later.

Quote from: CRKrueger;92450230 years of happy players doesn't mean you couldn't have been better with some prep

Yep.

Quote30 years of happy players doesn't mean I essentially wasted a decent amount of time on prep that didn't really get applied, even years later.

I might not call unused prep wasted since I tend to enjoy the process*, but I'd agree that I prep lots of stuff that never shows up in a session and that the ratio of used to unused ideas is way higher for predominantly improvisational play than it is for things I have prepared ahead of time.


*  If I didn't enjoy prep I'd do far, far less of it.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;924268... did you just try to claim that random encounters weren't part of how D&D was played initially?

I think he was criticizing illusionism, not random generation.

Quote from: Headless;924346I wouldn't be satisfied with a random dungeon crawl.  If there is a random locked door in room 9 where is the key, it can't be in rooms 1-8 they already looked and it want there yet because the door and the need for it didn't exist.  Why does the beholder in room 13 tolerate the goblins?  What is the secret path the Drugar in room 3 use to get through the traps in room 18 does that leave clues?  Why don't the kobolds steel the treasure?  

These things bother me.  I don't put a Micky Dee's in so I worry about what they eat.

My lower prep solution for one campaign was to treat the dungeon as some weird eruption of chaotic primordial magic, so that the things that appeared there were copies of things that exist, existed or might have existed, more or less frozen in a short time loop until adventurers stumble across them. So any random encounter anywhere (although sometimes several related rooms placed at once, if the encounter seemed like one that would follow a routine of visiting several rooms, like your Drugar in rooms 3 and 18), without regard to purpose, food, water, ventilation or whether they get along with their neighbors. The player characters rescued a sage who discoursed at length about the philosophical implications, mostly in the course of being terrified that he might cease to exist if he left the dungeon. (For game purposes, treasure and magic items continued to exist when removed from the dungeon; so did the sage, as it happened, and other NPCs that I decided on a whim would be significant later.)

When I designed dungeons that made sense, they tended to turn into monster suburbia (all the same kind of monsters and not fun for me) or took a lot of time explaining the weirdness and worrying about whether they really did make sense. So I reduced the useless "prep" time of second guessing my design by embracing the randomness and illogic as a feature. That left more prep time for creating the non-dungeon world.

Lest we forget that zero prepping is a two-way street. Some DMs are insanely good at it. That style plays into the sensibilities of certain types of players. But there's also GMs that suck at it and players that are content with anything presented to them as long as Joe Fighting-Man can hack his way through Underground Locale #14B.

Let's assume you just played an amazing adventure. Afterwards, the GM tells you that he didn't do any prep, even though you assumed it.
What defines a prepped adventure for you on the player side?

I had a  player who was convinced that I used modules for adventures. (I do. Just not as much as he thought or in the ways he thought even when was) He hated modules. Even when other players pointed out I wasnt using modules he still thought I still was.

As a player I really dont care as long as the adventure is interesting and its not some sort of zero-choice thing where no matter what path you take, the same event will happen.

Quote from: Nerzenjäger;924528Lest we forget that zero prepping is a two-way street. Some DMs are insanely good at it. That style plays into the sensibilities of certain types of players. But there's also GMs that suck at it and players that are content with anything presented to them as long as Joe Fighting-Man can hack his way through Underground Locale #14B.

Thats a given for any style. One DM will be great running modules, the next cant seem to parse one out to save their lives. Ones good with NPCs and towns, the other fails brutally to run NPCs. Same with low prep and on the fly DMing. And of course same with high prep and plotted out DMing.

Quote from: Nerzenjäger;924528Let's assume you just played an amazing adventure. Afterwards, the GM tells you that he didn't do any prep, even though you assumed it.
What defines a prepped adventure for you on the player side?

Preparation defines a prepped adventure. Which side of the screen I'm on is irrelevant.

Now if your question is, can a player tell if the GM prepped...that's an entirely different question. Which depends. On the player. And the GM. And the adventure. But to reiterate, Can a player? tell is different than the question: Did the GM prepare? And both of those questions are different than: Does the player care whether pr not the GM prepared?

Quote from: Justin Alexander;924433Basically, you can't. Proper prep is always going to add quality. Because proper prep, by definition, is adding elements that can't be improvised at the table.

What low-prep experimentation reveals to many people, however, is that they AREN'T getting a quality boost from the type of prep they've been doing. That can be a really valuable lesson, if for no other reason than because it will let you spend your normal prep time on the stuff that DOES increase value.

Word.
But "right-kind-of-prep-only" ain't nearly as punchy as saying "zero-prep", so I don't plan of changing the term:D!

Quote from: Headless;924452So cool adventure glad it ran well and good job for 15 minuets or less of prep.  But here's my issue.  Player action is negated.  In the above example it didn't matter that one player had been on the look out for rats, the random chart the DMwas consulting (in this case subconscious inspiration) said rats so here they are, only they are spooky rats.

But then, not all zero-prep GMs use randomizers to that extent.

QuoteIn the further above example, the players can't find the secret of the Drugars ability to avoid the traps because they don't find the Durgar until after they have navigated the traps.  It doesn't matter how they look they won't find it, it's not there.  

If you look for something in a place where it is not, you ain't going to find it. Not in my games, at least.
Granted, I could almost always tell you why it's not there, too. The reason is almost never "I didn't roll it at a random table".
Different styles and all that.

Quote from: Sommerjon;924467I think the majority falls into this category.

Try thinking again, it didn't work the first time.

QuoteThis is what I know about the Zero Preppers, their games are not nearly as good as they think they are.

Says who? You, the unknown Internet guy I don't know and who has never seen my game?
Should I believe you, or my players, I wonder:p?
Oh wait, that one is easy;). Of course I should believe my players!

Quote from: CRKrueger;924496Or do you mean that people who aren't really zero-prepping but are relying on decades of experience and internalized goodies don't refer to themselves as zero-preppers, so someone who self-identifies as a zero-prepper actually is one?  That I can see.  I certainly don't refer to myself as that.

Actually, I'd consider betting that very few groups use the same setting and system for multiple campaigns in a row...if there was a way to verify it, that is. No, Internet polls don't count.

QuoteHmm, he may be overstating the case, I'd probably put it as "despite being wildly successful, and loved by their players, their games are not as good as they would have been with prep."

I've tried more prep, and less prep. Reducing the prep always improved the reactions of the players.
I've even double-checked it, by running pre-prepared adventures and zero-prep sessions in the same campaign. Again: less prep meant better reactions.
Other GMs that I know have had similar results (when I persuaded, bribed, cajoled, threatened or cheated them into doing the same experiment). Not only that, I could almost always tell them in the session de-briefing whether they had been using pre-fabricated material.
I only told them "how" after they confirmed or denied it. For the record, they always confirmed my conclusions.
(My secret way? If it was below the average session for said GM, I concluded he or she has been using an adventure. And I was right every time.
My logic was that there's two parts in developing any skill, not just GMing. The first is acquiring all sorts of tools, tricks and sub-skills. The other is discarding what's useless, because it drags you down, and too much prep essentially doesn't let you do that.
Maybe it would work better for some GMs, but I've never seen those).

Based on the above, and with all due respect, I posit Sommerjon's statement is simply a load of bullshit.

QuoteMost experienced GMs I know are harder on their own performance and game then the players are, so hard to get any objective metrics, of course, someone would have to shift styles without letting the players know and see what feedback they get.

Which is exactly what I do when I want to get feedback on a new GMing trick or technique:). Because I know that double blind control tests exist for a reason.

Quote from: CRKrueger;924502Well, particularly the last one, about the games not being as good as they think they are, there's a few people in this thread you can assume feel the same way from what they've posted, even if they didn't say as much.

I'm sure there are. But I feel, and my experience shows, that they're wrong.

QuoteMy knee-jerk reaction would be to agree, but then when I stop to think about it, then I think the truth is closer to what I said.  30 years of happy players doesn't mean you couldn't have been better with some prep, just like for myself, 30 years of happy players doesn't mean I essentially wasted a decent amount of time on prep that didn't really get applied, even years later.

There's always some prep. It's just that most of it is prep you can do while sitting on a toilet (and no, you don't need a book to accompany you there), traveling in public transport, and the like.

Quote from: Nerzenjäger;924528Lest we forget that zero prepping is a two-way street.

Yes it is, but the "no-prep" version on the players side is Develop In Play as opposed to Develop At Start;).

QuoteLet's assume you just played an amazing adventure. Afterwards, the GM tells you that he didn't do any prep, even though you assumed it.
What defines a prepped adventure for you on the player side?

I congratulate him, or her, even more, of course - why would I do anything differently?
I mean, if it was amazing, and he didn't achieve it by cheating me somehow*, why would I care how much time he spent preparing? It's not something that matters to me.
For that matter, given the above part of my post, if he or she said he's been doing a load of prep to achieve that, I'd really like to know what said prep was. And I'd want to persuade said GM to try and run a zero-prep adventure at some point, without telling us, in order to observe how his results changed;).

And yes, I realize how much prep was involved is something that might matter for some people.
In that case, I'd like to know why, though. I know I'm not going to persuade them otherwise, but I am curious about their reasoning!

*Let's just skip that debate - I see illusionism as cheating, that's not subject to change. To me, the point of being a player (unless the system assumes we've got narrative rights, and that's a different kind of game) is to explore what is there and see what my PC can do about it.
And yes, I used to see illusionism as cheating even when I was using it, and I was good at it. It just wasn't nearly as fun for me as sandboxing.

Quote from: Bren;924533Preparation defines a prepped adventure. Which side of the screen I'm on is irrelevant.

Now if your question is, can a player tell if the GM prepped...that's an entirely different question. Which depends. On the player. And the GM. And the adventure. But to reiterate, Can a player? tell is different than the question: Did the GM prepare? And both of those questions are different than: Does the player care whether pr not the GM prepared?

The question takes Justin's thesis as a baseline, that any prep you do will improve the adventure. If I'm sitting on the player side, how do I know and if I don't know, should I care?

Additional parameters for my question are a naturalistic game and no cheating (=zero prep railroad). Everything the players encounter is not there because they are, but because it can be assumed that they are there because the world is built that way.

Quote from: CRKrueger;924468That's an interesting statement.  Do you have a short list or examples of things that you think would fall into each category - "Prep that adds value"/"Prep you could easily improv"?

This can vary a lot from one GM to the next.

For example, I know that I have a tendency to make questioning NPCs ineffective in mystery scenarios. Due to some bad experiences in my early days as a GM, I'm paranoid about about ruining a campaign by revealing too much of the mystery early on. So I end up defaulting to NPCs who know nothing or bite down on cyanide capsules or whatever. So one thing I make a point of prepping in detail is a breakdown of what various NPCs know. I get a ton of value out of that. Another GM who doesn't have this particular weakness when improvising could easily find that sort of prep completely useless.

This can also change over time: Stuff that you needed to prep 3 years ago could easily be a waste of time today because it's a skill that you've mastered and internalized. For example, I used to get a significant value add from prepping specific boxed text describing locations. I virtually never do that any more, usually just jotting down a few bullet points instead.

Props are a good example of something that's always a value add. (Improvising anything more than a rudimentary prop is obviously impossible to do on-the-fly.)

Something that I think is almost universally a waste of time is prepping a lot of specific contingencies based on hypothetical choices the PCs will make. Unless you're railroading, you're basically guaranteed to end up prepping contingencies that will never be used. You'll gain a much higher quality-to-prep-time ratio from virtually anything else you choose to prep.

Quote from: Nerzenjäger;924541The question takes Justin's thesis as a baseline, that any prep you do will improve the adventure.

To be clear: That is not my thesis.

Quote from: Nerzenjäger;924541The question takes Justin's thesis as a baseline, that any prep you do will improve the adventure. If I'm sitting on the player side, how do I know and if I don't know, should I care?

Preparation defines a prepped adventure. Which side of the screen you are on is irrelevant. As a player, you should care, if the GM's lack of prep is making the game less fun for you.

QuoteAdditional parameters for my question are a naturalistic game and no cheating (=zero prep railroad). Everything the players encounter is not there because they are, but because it can be assumed that they are there because the world is built that way.

You lost me here. I'm not understanding what you are trying to communicate.

Can some one tell me what illusionism is?

Quote from: Headless;924582Can some one tell me what illusionism is?

You have 3 doors and one bad choice to make.  No matter which door you open it is the bad choice.

Quote from: Omega;9244881: You thought wrong.

Strange, why didn't you tell Krueg he was wrong then?  I was merely agreeing with his post.

Here let me draw you a picture.

Quote from: Sommerjon;924467

Quote from: CRKrueger;924343Estar has a good point, Headless.  For example, I ran so much Shadowrun in Seattle, give me a set of PCs, and I can come with a run on the fly because I've completely internalized the Setting, System, NPCs over years of play.  That's not Zero Prep, it's "Bag O' Stuff", "Setting Mastery", "Prep via Play" whatever you want to call it.

I think the majority falls into this category.

tada.
See, this is me agreeing with Krueg's comment that it is more System Mastery than Zero Prep.  I even went so far as to leave the corner cases in.

Quote from: Omega;9244882: They are better than you "know"... Because you are a moron.

You hurt me.  Wait a second, you're mad bro cuz I easily deflate your pet theories.