Fast forward to today and I have finally reached my current DM nirvana. I have reached my inner peace. I spend maybe 30 minutes to an hour each week actually prepping my game and here is what I changed.
1st - Understand your world's truths, don't memorize your NPC's bits of knowledge. This is true for any setting, homebrewed or published, you need to make sure you understand your world's inhabitants' world views through their eyes. You don't need to memorize the dates of your world's history you need to understand the repercussions of the actions of history. If a cataclysm happened long ago and the cultures of the world directly reflect this, it paints a much more vivid picture than just knowing that dragons destroyed the world 1000 years ago in a great war. Maybe the scales of these dragons are now the currency instead of gold, or dragons are being hunted and exterminated so that it never happens again. To do this, I don't sit down and write it all out I just think about different aspects of the setting as I am out walking my dog, driving to work, listening to music, doing anything really. But the important part is I am just digesting my ideas, not making anything explicit and a fact until it comes out at play.
2nd - Do less, only prep what you need. If your players told you that they are planning on going into the dungeon over the hill, just prep the dungeon over the hill. Don't worry about the ruins to the left or the goblin cave to the right. Players have a short attention span. If you give them an endless menu of options just because you want them to have the most fun and choose their own path, more often than not the options on the menu will end up being bland compared to if you focused all your fun and ideas into that one dungeon they already said they wanted to go to. Players also will get distracted easily and lose track of the hundreds of locations with carefully planned interconnected plot hooks. Combined with the toolkit point coming next, prep really gets streamlined. To that point, have you ever spent hours and hours planning an extremely complex plot only to have your players forget it all? Me too! I got to this point from that happening countless times.
3rd - Expand your toolkit. Make sure to have a diverse toolkit that you understand and know how to use and use well. Personally, I think the names in the back of Xanathar's are terrible. It's hard to use to me. So I made my own, a simple 2d20 list of first and last names and cross them off as I go. It's simple, I know how to use it and it's quick. The same goes for the encounter tables in the DMG and Xanathar's, they are utterly unusable to me. Instead, I make a simple 2d6 bell curve encounter table for the immediate region around the players full of hand-picked monsters that I can roll on if the players go exploring. I frequently use the Reaction table as previously explained in the last posts to give flavor to these encounters as well.
4th - Respond don't predict. If your players ask what's over the mountains to the east, tell them what the NPC they are talking to actually believes is over the mountains. If you understand your setting and the customs of the people are who inhabit it, these kinds of questions shouldn't need explicit prep. If you understand your world and have the proper tools, the game runs itself. The players gather rumors from nuggets of knowledge that are from the point of view of the NPCs in the world, including all of their misconceptions, they piece together where the adventure is, they set out, decide how to approach, decide how to handle the situation and the world reacts. At every stage of that, no pre-planning is needed it can be done entirely reactionary. As a DM, this is freeing and truly exciting because you are no longer reading off of a script you are exploring the world with them.
Hopefully, this perspective on prep gives your game new life. Use it all, use none of it, let me know what you think! If I can clarify anything more, leave a comment and I'll be happy to.
- C&D Daniel
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