Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 72 - Minimalist DM Prep Tips

Episode Date: May 9, 2021

This topic was suggested by Adrian Young on the Taking 20 Facebook page.  Lots of DMs burn out because they spend hours and hours preparing for gaming sessions while their players get to just show up and play.  In this episode, we talk about tools that DMs can use to reduce their overall prep time before each gaming session.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning into episode 72 of the Taking 20 podcast. This week, all about minimalist GM prep tips. This week's sponsor is Ballet Attire. The surest way to guarantee that your outfit will be on point. Don't forget, we still have the May 26th giveaway staring us in the face. Deadline's less than three weeks from this episode's release date, so get those emails in to contest at taking20podcast.com if you'd like to enter. This week's topic is courtesy of Adrian Young on Facebook.

It's a great topic, Adrian. Thank you so much for sending it in. As a reminder, I tend to use phrases like Dungeon Master or DM and Game master or GM interchangeably. Advice for one would be the same as the advice for the other. Different games call this position different things, including referee, storyteller, or obviously most beautiful, talented, amazing, and successful person at the table. Overprep is one of the leading causes of GM burnout. It's definitely not the only cause, and unforgiving schedule, difficult players, confrontations, party infighting, they all contribute to burnout, and I need to do an episode on that. First, a word of warning. Minimal prep does not mean no prep. I've been DMing for

years, and while there are a select few who could DM with zero prep time, most of us aren't them. This is especially true if you use battle maps instead of Theater of the Mind for combat. I, for example, still need to select and prepare maps, find tokens or miniatures, and probably need about 30 minutes to get organized for a good four-hour session. The process becomes easier the more you practice it, though. It's like a muscle. The first time you ever try to DM with minimal prep, it will be rough. The second time will be easier. Soon it becomes old hat. Stick with it and it will become second nature for you. Also, this process is easier for experienced DMs. If this is your very first

session as a DM, it will be difficult simply because you don't have as many tools in your toolbox as a long-standing DMs would. But you're prepping a lot as a DM and it's stressing you out. Okay, somebody would just say just press less. It seems obvious, right? The problem is that with less prep, there's this feeling of being ill-prepared at the table. It's the fear that your players will do something or make a choice that you did not anticipate and did not expect and therefore wouldn't give them a good session because of it? How do you combat that feeling? I used to be the exact same way as a DM. I prepped and overprepped and overprepped some more just in case the players went left when I thought they would go right, or dug through a tunnel that

should be impassable, or in the middle of the dungeon decided to fuck off and go a completely different direction. What if they go to the town of Dingleberry Ferry? I haven't prepped that town yet. I don't know what the names of the inns and taverns are. Who's the mayor? Do they even have a mayor? I'd better spend the next two hours designing Dingleberry Ferry just in case they go there. And of course they didn't. They went to the dungeon in front of them, cleared that out, and eventually went back to their quest hub town to sell gear, buy more stuff, and head to the next dungeon. So now I've got this town I've spent hours preparing that will never come into the campaign. Rinse and repeat over years and it's easy to see how DMs burn out. Being able to run an adventure with minimal prep time

helps to keep us GMs from becoming the soulless, burned-out husks robotically going through the motions, throwing the next monster in front of the party for them to slaughter. It gives us more free time to design the important parts of the adventure, like the big bad's plans, major antagonists and allies, and integrating player backstories into the campaign world. You spend less time coming up with the serving girl's name of Yvonne and her backstory and motivation that she's only waiting tables right now because she's putting herself through nursing school. But that means more time designing that memorable climactic battle on the rooftop of a burning building against Coesta the Doppelganger.

She's a crime boss with three random squares of the rooftop falling away every single round and flames erupting from the new holes. Well, shit, that's better than what I had planned for an upcoming one-shot. Time to revamp that third act. If you give your players agency and the ability to make their own decisions, inevitably they are going to go a direction that you did not expect. Unless the pre-made or custom-designed adventure is a pure railroad, at some point the players are going to make that decision and you think, well, crap, what the fuck do I do now? I didn't prep that.

The best way to combat that feeling of being unprepared is to give yourself tools in your DM toolbox that will allow you to respond to the inevitable, unexpected situations. My first tool for your toolkit is going to sound completely counterintuitive. first tool for your toolkit is going to sound completely counterintuitive. To learn how to GM with limited amount of prep time spent before each session, it requires some work on your part ahead of time. What? To reduce prep time, I have to prep? That's right. Now wait before you turn this off. Let me explain. You have to train yourself for low prep gaming. The easiest way to start is to learn stories and story structure. Whether you know it or not, you have consumed stories all of your life. Grimm's fairy tales, television shows like Parks and Recreation, Rick and Morty, or The Office. Series like Game of Thrones or Lovecraft

Country. Books that you've read, both fiction and non-fiction. Greek mythology and countless other examples. Continue to consume stories for entertainment like you always have, but also now give an eye on how this story could be made into an adventure. So in short, read more, watch more, listen to more podcasts. Start looking for common elements that you see repeated in stories. These are what we affectionately refer to as tropes, and they are common for a reason. They are easy to define in a story element that I'm going to call a Lego block. Build some story Lego blocks that you can snap into your table's game sessions as needed.

If you think for just a minute, you can probably think of examples of the following. Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal. The killer was inside the house all along. The only evil that's present is that which we brought with us. The kidnapping victim was in on the scheme the entire time. Bring me lots of money or I'm going to tell the world your secrets. Kill the monster in this location before it kills us. Be the vanguard that prepares a site for non-combatants to arrive. Solve the mystery, clear a framed convict, countless others that we could name.

Start watching and consuming media for tropes and learn how they're structured to add them to your story repertoire as needed. Two, build an arsenal of encounters and situations. I am not talking about memorizing 200 different forest or mountain or cave encounters, but learning the types of encounters that you can have and being ready to drop them in your adventure as needed. Examples include the straightforward fight-encounter one-on-one right up against each other, the ambush, a long-distance confrontation, a pursuit or chase, the obvious trap that's in front of the party, the obvious trap that's in front of the

party, the hidden trap that's in front of the party, a trap with lurking creatures waiting to see what happens, the encounter where adversaries talk before we fight. By thinking of encounters in these terms, you're building a library of situations that you can break into components and reassemble in various ways to make new encounters. Third piece of advice for minimalist GM prep tips, learn to embrace the chaos. It really sounds bad when I phrase it that way, but lower prep DMing means more improvisation by you at the table. I've said it before in other episodes and I'll say it again, everyone can improvise, you just have to fuck your fear about it. You don't need to prepare before the

session exactly what Throat Crusher the Goblin King will say to the players. You know what story beat you want to hit. Is he going to return the kidnapped mayor's daughter in exchange for a magical hat? Is the Goblin King hellbound on fighting the players no matter what? Improvise the speech at that point. Put yourself in the shoes of that intelligent goblin king. Inside your head, you feel uncomfortable about making that up as you go, but the players don't know that you're improvising the entire speech, so improvise it. I know you as the DM want everything to be perfect. Every story beat falling into a perfect place.

Every NPC providing exactly the right information to engage the players. Every story being so engaging and so memorable and so amazing that the players go home and build a small shrine to you in their bedrooms. You don't want that. It's awkward as shit when you come over to the apartment for the first time. Um, are those candles around a picture of me and a small lock of my hair? Yes, do you like it? I gotta go. I just remembered I left the aquarium on. I know you want it to be perfect, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good. So what if you flubbed the Goblin King speech and forgot to give a key piece of information

that the players need to go find the Ushanka of Destiny? You can always have the players discover that information elsewhere in the Goblin Lair, or later on in the adventure. Fourth piece of advice. Focus on preparing situations, not solutions. I heard this advice so succinctly from the amazing Dungeon Master Matt Colville a few years ago on his YouTube channel. Oddly enough, in a recently released video, he repeated this advice, so I thought it would be good to reiterate it here.

It is sound advice, and I have very much adopted good to reiterate it here. It is sound advice and I have very much adopted it as part of my DM style. Don't necessarily prepare a solution to every challenge for the players. Put the challenge or the situation in front of the players and challenge them to come up with a solution. If you think you have to prepare a diplomatic solution just in case the players do that, oh, or a combat, oh, or they could negotiate, you're tripling your preparation work for one encounter. You don't need to come up with the exact number the PCs would have to roll to jump over the pit trap or disable the flame jets. Now, I can hear people saying, wait, wait, wait, how will I know if their roll succeeded if I don't

have that number ahead of time? Give the players success or failure based on what they roll. Nearly every single game system I've ever played has general numbers that can be used by the DM based on an estimated difficulty of a skill check, attack roll, ability check, and so forth. In 5th edition, for example, a difficulty class or DC of 5 is something that is very easy for an ability check, whereas a DC 10 is easy, 15 is medium, 20 is hard, 25 is very hard, and a DC of 30 is nearly impossible. Pathfinder 2nd Edition has a similar table, just using different terms. Simple DC for untrained actions is 10, trained is 15, expert's 20, master's 30, legendary is 40. So if your 5th edition player says that their character wants to try to clear the pit

that's on the sandy floor at a full run, have them make an acrobatics check. Let's say their roll was 23. That puts the ability check somewhere between hard, 20, or very hard, 25. In your estimation, would that be sufficient to clear the pit as shown on the map? If so, congratulations, they cleared it and can keep running. And if not, here's where you can decide how badly they failed. Either way, the adventure continues on, and you didn't have to memorize that this specific sandy pit trap

located in Hall 7A has a DC of 22. Once you decide on a number in your head, keep it consistent, though, for the duration of the encounter encounter unless the situation changes. Like a storm comes in, visibility becomes more difficult, or monsters are shooting at the creature trying to jump the pit, etc. But Jeremy, you may be saying, what if I have a rules lawyer at the table who looks up specific information in the dungeon master's guide that says this exact pit type with width, should have a DC of 26, not 22. Simple answer? It's your world. You're the one presenting the challenges in front of the players, allowing them to decide how they want to confront those challenges, and

then determining if their die rolls are high enough. Not the Dungeon Master's Guide. You, the Dungeon Master, are. You simply have to tell the player that the situation was such that the DC may have been slightly lower than what's in the DMG. Or you could say that the DMG is simply a guideline and that can be adjusted by DMs as needed. If they continue to press you about it, just simply say, hey, let's discuss the issue during a break or between sessions and allow the adventure to continue. Fifth tip, let your players help you with your descriptions and narrations. When you introduce a new NPC, ask the players what they look like. When you enter a new area or hex on a map, ask one of your players to describe

what the character is seeing. This allows your players to contribute to the narrative of the adventure, and that's what RPGs are, collaborative storytelling. You'll probably get a mixed bag of reactions at first, and thinking about my gaming groups, I know four people in my groups that would jump at the chance to help with descriptions because they have before. I know a couple of them that would look for ways to turn into a joke, inevitably a penis joke, one or two who wouldn't enjoy describing things at all, and a few who would maybe enjoy it occasionally but not regularly. I think the DMs should describe major plot points, NPCs, locations, but a new plus one dagger, the ruins entrance, Jill the bartender?

Sure. Hey player, what does Jill look like? You may get something unexpected. Your player may make Jill gender neutral, or six foot two inches tall, or blonde when you had something different in your head. No worries, go with the player's description, doesn't matter. Some players may want to throw something in that simply doesn't work, or they want to be snarky, like, Jill has red hair and brown eyes. She has three arms and six hands and she's currently eating the heart of one of the other patrons. If you get something like that, just play it off by saying something like, you shake your head and rub your eyes and realize that Jill doesn't look that much different than Morlock does. You begin to worry about your mental state and continue on with the

adventure. Now if you want to do minimal GM prep, there are some resources you're going to need to have handy while you are GMing. And let's go over those real quickly. One, you need the previously described arsenal of situations and encounters to build. Keep a document with your notes in it. It helps a lot. Just make sure you can decipher your notes later. I once found a note in my gaming notebook years ago that said, quote, the nuns of the order of pepperoni pizza, end quote. I still have no idea what the fuck that means. Two, a bunch of random tables. NPC names and brief descriptions, maybe one sentence,

NPC motivations and personalities. Random generators such as item generators, loot generators, heck, entire dungeon generators, they're all available online. Have links to them available to you so that you can use them when you need. Know them, learn to use them, learn to love them. Pre-roll some results and have them ready. Mark items, though, as you use them. Make a little note next to the name, for example, to remind you where you used it.

Oh, the name Tina McElroy was the elf Uber driver who likes the PCs. Tragar Benhelm was the dwarf bartender at the Grappling Gripley. I have a series of names that I've already pre-randomly generated, an entire sheet of them that has somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 of them on there. That way I can just check them off when they're used and consistently bring them back in the exact same place or with the exact same backstory. Three, you need some organizational tools. A DM screen, list of convenient tables from the DMG and the player's handbook. Classic example would be a list of standard difficulty classes or DCs by level of

difficulty or level of the character. Fourth thing you need, maps. Start collecting, drawing, and cataloging maps that you'd like to use as a DM. I have said in previous episodes I have an unreasonable love of maps. I've been collecting maps for a while now and have cataloged many gigabytes of maps and I may have a hoarding problem. This is a cry for help. No, it's not. I want more. I need more maps. I'll go looking for more maps as soon as I'm done recording this episode. Okay, seriously, amass a couple of forest, tundra, desert, river, ocean, ruins, dungeon maps. Keep them handy on a hard drive or on a removable disc or whatever. Some sort of digital or physical format

that you can pull out whenever you need it. Battle maps, subreddits, various Patreon map producers, Google searches, Pinterest, et cetera. Get maps that you can pull out at a moment's notice when your players inevitably make some sort of weird decision that takes them to the desert. Five, for bonus points, keep a list of interesting ideas about creatures, locations,

and encounters. These are random ideas about how to spice up combat, traps, and other session encounters that you can pull out as needed. Examples from my list include adding elemental damage to the monster or the environment itself, adding elevation changes, varying your enemies like baddies have pets. Adding flying creatures. Fighting on a timer like in one minute the building will be shelled by distant artillery. Have non-combatants nearby that could be innocent bystanders. Have baddies stall for reinforcements.

Give the PCs a moral quandary. Have the battle end in a chase. Make there some lethal background environment and i'm going to stop reading here because the list goes on and on and on ideas for stuff like this will come to you at random places so have a document where you can just add to them when these ideas come to you so now here's where we come to the payoff of your hard work before each session here's all you have to do grab a list of monsters or nps about the right challenge rating or level, do a Google search for them, or keep them on a piece of paper or whatever your choice is.

Select the next story beat you want to pull off during the session. Pick a few LEGO pieces out and only prep those. Decide what aspects of the adventure you want to allow the players to describe, and if the PC is going in a different direction, wing it. Keep your table of names and random lists handy and random generators available and use them whenever you need. The very first time I tried to run a session with minimal GM prep, I was scared out of my mind.

My brain was running 100 miles an hour of what-if situations and worrying that my players would not have a good time. That first session went a little slower because I didn't have a list of names printed in front of me ahead of time when I was trying to run the session. I had to write names down as I thought of them, which slowed everything down a little bit. The adventure was a little disjointed as I forgot to give the

players the name of the cave where the bandits were hiding out. That was probably a key piece of information for that quest, by the way, and QuestGiver probably should have handed that over to them, but oops. The players were all the way out into the wilderness heading towards the mountain cave complex before they realized they had forgotten to ask. Inside my head, all I could hear was, oh shit, what am I going to do? I knew the players needed the information, so what I did is I had the players come upon someone

who had been robbed by the bandits recently and was left for dead. She had heard the name of the specific valley where the cave was in the middle of the battle, and they were talking about where they were going to take their treasure home. Which brings me to my final piece of advice. Don't get married to what you prep. PCs aren't going to follow a script that you have in your head, and you shouldn't railroad them into the script. They're going to bypass fights you made specifically to showcase a cool idea, or an amazing fight with an awesome monster with these cool abilities. The PCs will bypass this room with a devious pit trap with the bottom of the

trip filled with, I don't know, an advanced gelatinous cube waiting to digest the party, but no! The party finds a secret door that's a shortcut to the final area and son of a bitch! Fear not, dear DM. Take that idea, file it away with your other Lego pieces. This won't be the last dungeon they enter. Recycle the trap, the monster, the room, and use it later. This will help cut down on the amount of time that you have to prep each dungeon, each encounter, each monster, and hopefully you as the DM will have more fun doing it. Adrian, I hope this gives you some ideas on minimalist prepping as DM, and I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you have a topic idea or feedback, please feel free

to send it to feedback at taking20podcast.com. Once again, I want to thank our sponsor, Ballet Attire. The inventor of the ballet skirt couldn't think of a name for it, then he put two and two together. This has been episode 72, Minimalist GM Prep Tips. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.