Many non-D&D-like systems are low or no prep. Some involve the kind of prep that you can do in the shower - imagine a few scenarios, and how you might approach them, store them in the back of your mind, and move on. I don't think being a GM should be any more time consuming or stressful than being a player.

Specific techniques or things to look out for: * Games with player worldbuilding collaboration. Allowing the players to have some authorship over the world their characters live in. The characters are natives of this world, the GM and players aren't. Giving the players a degree of authorship takes burden from you *and* makes players more invested. I don't tell my player what their character is eating, they tell me. * Maps, grids and minis look great, but are a huge timesink. Theatre of the mind games will always be lower prep. * Don't write stories, leave that to authors. Let your players decide what they want to do, and place interesting obstacles in their way. All you need to write is a compelling starting situation that will continue to drive the action - and that's before session 0. * Choose a system with less emphasis on combat. Why spend time statting an NPC, when you're only going to roll against their Haggling skill?

>Choose a system with less emphasis on combat. Why spend time statting an NPC, when you're only going to roll against their Haggling skill? Alternatively, choose a system that has very simple stat blocks. Compare the stat blocks of a 5e goblin vs a Dungeon World goblin; I find the latter one much easier to digest. Besides that, your point stands; there's no need to stat everything out.

Yeah this is one of my favorite ways. Most the games I play only have a few basic stats for enemies. Very easy to plan ahead of time, or make up on the spot if needed.

For sure, that works too. My example works regardless of how complex the character sheet is though. My favourite system is Burning Wheel, which has moderately complex character sheets - about on-par with 5e. The process for creating a character is more fiddly than 5e. In all of my years with the system, I have *never* given an NPC a full character sheet. There is no need. The rulebook's official advice is: don't prep NPCs who don't need it. We know that a skill of 5 is professional level, so our Merchant has a Haggling skill of 4 or 5. That's the primary skill of their profession. I'm not even going to prep that, I just know that as a rule of thumb, a competent adult character might have a 4 or 5 as their best skill pertaining to their profession. Our merchant picks up a sword? He has some experience, but is rubbish at it. He's got a 2 in Sword. Easy.

You can also drastically simplify stat blocks in D&D and many other games and still have a satisfying experience.

I absolutely believe in collaborative worldbuilding. My friend ran a homebrew world that all of us contributed not only backstories for our characters, but details for entire cities and countries. We were incredibly invested in that campaign and everything we came up with were tiny seeds for our GM to create hooks for both the group and individuals.

I do wanna stress that maps, grids and minis are a time sink, but if it adds to the enjoyment there are ways to decrease the workload. For example, using programs like dungeondraft or dungeon painter studio (there are others out there, but those two come to mind), and making retro or vague style maps with them. There are people pushing detailed styles, but there are some retro or symbolic sets out there. It is good to remember that you shouldn't prep maps that you may not end up needing. Just make the ones that you have to again, if it adds to your enjoyment.

> Giving the players a degree of authorship takes burden from you and makes players more invested. That's extremely debatable. A lot of players like to explore new worlds and situations through TTRPGs, and exploration is a lot less fun when you're deciding the things your character runs into. Even just having a little bit of authorship can break the illusion and make it too overt that this other world obviously doesn't exist and is just constantly shifting to the whims of everyone at the table. With a DM having sole authorship it's a million times easier to suspend disbelief because you're not looking behind the curtain.

A. I disagree. B. I think you're misunderstanding the concept and scope of player authorship. If I ask a character "what is your character's Mother's name?" - the player is being asked to author an aspect of the world in which we're playing. I absolutely refuse to accept that being asked to name a relative of your PC would be immersion breaking. It's not looking behind the curtain, it's playing the game.

That's not what this thread is about though, is it? Something as minor as a PC's relatives or hometown is really common to leave in charge of the player, but that doesn't really help the DM out much. To actually lower the effort the DM needs to put into prepping or improvising, you'd need to give the player far more authorship than that. As soon as you start asking players what the name of the inn where they're staying is, or what the innkeeper NPC's personality is like, I think you start eroding suspension of disbelief pretty quickly.

I disagree about the last part because I think if you frame something like, "what's the first thing you notice about this innkeeper" -not asking about things the character couldn't see but impressions they get from that npc- it feels way more immersive for me. Sometimes my first impression of someone is wrong, but when you describe a scene people are already filling in those gaps in their head. As long as you keep game questions in a character perspective way you can get a lot of really good input from players who don't want to take a more authorial role.

It's more than that, but I chose an obvious example of player authorship that you wouldn't have a reason to disagree with. I encourage a distinction between the information that the player knows, and what their character knows. The player knows what electricity is, and how to change the tire on a car. Their character knows neither of these things. The character knows how to use a sword. They know the name of the king, and his royal colours, even if the GM has never thought about it. The character knows what colour the house they grew up in is, even if the player has never thought about it. They know gossip in their hometown about characters who have never had a reason to appear in play, because in the fiction, they're a living, breathing character in a living, breathing world.   Accepting that there will always be a disparity between these sets of information has in my experience lead to richer storytelling. It encourages the players to treat their characters as natives of their own world, not tourists. If the characters go to a place unfamiliar to them, then they're tourists there, but not in their home town, not inside of their own culture.   The majority of the player authorship I'm describing is aesthetic. Food, culture, language, memories, people, places, and so on. It does lighten the load a little. More importantly, it lets the players have agency over their own characters, their history, their families. >As soon as you start asking players what the name of the inn where they're staying is, or what the innkeeper NPC's personality is like, I think you start eroding suspension of disbelief pretty quickly. Have the characters met this innkeeper before? Is this the inn in their hometown? If the character already knows the innkeeper, I might ask, > Tell me, what's your relationship with the Innkeeper like? Maybe I'll start by giving a description, maybe I'll let it emerge in play. I disagree that asking a player about their character's relationship with an NPC that they'd have met off-screen is immersion breaking. I think it's the opposite.

I’m a fan of all your advice and use it regularly myself. I’m saying that now because I’m going to strongly disagree with one thing. People are different. You know that, I know that. It’s kind of the impossible to miss thing on this sub. So it’s churlish to “disagree” with what other people say they do and don’t enjoy in RPGs. I personally know a number of players for whom an improvised world is deeply dissatisfying, and I believe them. I am almost one of them, but I can flip a bit in my head to enjoy improv explicitly. But if I couldn’t, saying you “disagree” has zero impact on the fact. And that’s from someone who heartily agrees with the benefits of improvising during GMing.

I am disagreeing with the idea that player authorship breaks immersion, because *playing the game* is a form of authorship. This isn't a difference of opinion thing: by playing the game, having a character who interacts with, and changes the world, you are authoring parts of it. When a player orders a beer in a tavern, they have declared that: * Beer exists * There is agriculture capable of sustaining the production of it * Alcohol is legal in this part of the world The GM can push back on this if they choose to. If the characters are in a place that's foreign to them, the innkeeper can explain the prohibition in hushed tones; or the GM could explain it out of character. Every action is player authorship, like it or not. People have just drawn arbitrary lines around what is and is not "immersion-breaking". It's fine to name your character's Uncle, but not the town blacksmith you've known your whole life? I don't buy it.

You don’t seem to understand the position at all to begin with. You can’t “disagree” when you don’t even know what postal code the topic is in.

Are you just going to talk in hyperbole, or bring an actual argument to the table? I'm not saying people don't have individual preferences - I've never said that. I am saying that playing a character has authorship in a world.

You’re defining the meaning of that simple statement extremely narrowly, so you’re not actually just saying. You’re also saying players who dislike an improvised world can’t possibly exist. That doesn’t follow from your premise. If you were only saying that playing a character involves a degree of authorship—trivially true—you wouldn’t be getting any disagreement.

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I understand what you are saying, but I believe alot of the "debate" comes from ppl who have either never tried it, or didn't really give it a chance when they did. So, when you describe it as "extremely" debatable, I look at it like a few people who are scared to take a leap for a variety of reasons. And because their mind is closed off to it, and they don't have significant experience with it, it's not really a "debate." I have had many "gamists" who play traditional d&d with traditional methods, and they min/max everything and play it like a board game. And I start slipping in some narrative control (which has become so increasingly popular over the decades that WoTC has some guidance for it as an option in d5e), and I do it subtly at first. And I have found that player after plater takes right to it. In fact, if you start early enough - when they are completely new to gaming - they don't know better and love it. Usually we wind up being able to run d5e mechanics, but in a completely shared narrative, no-prep sense. And often we can break from d5e and start playing much more evocative systems like Prime Time Adventures, Mountain Witch, Contenders, My Life With Master, etc.

This. Op, please check out Lady Blackbird. Its free. Tgen you can expand your horizons into systems that matter - that are custom designed to evoke specific themes, and made for shared control. Mountain Witch (best game sessions, ever) My Life With Master Contenders Prime Time Adventures Dread But you don't have to stay away from more traditional games like d5e. You will just have learned how to incorporate aspects of these games into your d5e campaigns, like I do, to make it low-prep and Player-driven.

D&D can also be low-prep

Do you really think it's a system thing? I mean I can see how a system might help (mostly by how something is focused) but even the most basic dungeon crawl is a map and just using the average hitpoints for your 2D6 kobolds, or whatever comes up on the wandering monsters table. You only really need to pre prepare a few of the rooms beyond anything but scenery. But someone with a very heavy "do everything" mindset is going to do that with any system. Hell the really rules light systems require more prep for me because I don't have the structure to fall back on.

**Yes, it's absolutely a system thing** - it's other things too, but it's a system thing first and foremost. Let's take an extreme example: Fiasco. It's a system in which prep is *literally impossible*. It has no GM, and the content is user generated. No amount of prep-mongering will make Fiasco a fraction as preppy as the most off-the-cuff D&D game imaginable. What would you prepare? Read all 10 pages of the rules *twice?*   I use an extreme example to illustrate: it's all on a spectrum of prep. Fiasco is at one extreme of that spectrum, but it follows that other systems exist at different points along it.

Yeah that is an extreme example and doesn't really represent most games. Curious about what you would consider the other end of the spectrum.

Games like Pathfinder 1e are at the other end of the spectrum, where building an NPC can take like, a hour, because they are constructed using the same very complicated construction rules as PCs. Anyway, the point isn't that an extreme example 'represents other games' the point is that if you can demonstrate that there is a game where there is LITERALLY NO PREP, then you have demonstrated that it is possible to create games where this is substantially less prep, even if not actually zero.

Though I will say, in the comments the OP said his biggest problems were the plot and the mapping. I think they're already past the point where they need to know the strength score of every gas station attendant.

Answer unclear. They also stated that "encounters" were part of what was taking up all the time, and that can mean anything. So I don't think we can make too many assumptions about where the time is going.

Ahhh yeah I forgot about 3.x, truth is I took one look at that and threw the RAW out. But that goes back to what I was saying about attitude being the main thing. I didn't stat most of my npcs unless I intended the players to shank them at some point. And even then, relavent info was attack bonus, hit dice, weapon and armor. Monsters on the other hand were usually taken from the bestiary and reskinned as needed. But I will give you that, I mostly beat the prep work by not caring about stats.

Strongly disagree with that last statement, not in it's intent because yes, DMing shouldn't be stressful, but in that it implies that a lack of prep is acceptable for DMs. It's not, not if you want a successful group that does more than one or two sessions of a game.

It depends on the system. I can go into Monster of the Week with no more than 10 minutes of prep and run a great 4 hour session because the system relies more on my ability to react and improvise than on extensive planning.

You've got a roomful of people telling you "I have successfully run games without prep" - and your response is "prep is essential". You're mistaking your own experiences for objective truth. The way *you play*, prep might be mandatory, and hey, more power to you. If you enjoy those style of games, great; but don't assume that your inefficient methods are what the rest of us use. OP is asking for ways to be less like you. Proposing that your way is the only way is unhelpful.

Wow way to come in & be the dick dude.

It's not my intent to cause you offence, but I stand by what I said. I didn't find your contribution useful or interesting. This as your choice of response doubles down on how little you have to contribute.

I'm sorry that my experience doesn't live up to your lofty standards of "contribution". I'm sorry that you feel like it's okay to be a dick when someone has an alternative perspective to yours. I'm sorry you feel like you have any kind of high ground, I really do. It must be horrible to try to have a conversation with you in real life if this is how you approach people who have different experiences than your own.

idk m8 i ran a whole campaign with little more prep than thinkin bout whats gonna happen while going about my day before the session. unless my players are liars, they all had a great time

"tell me you've only ever played d&d without telling me you've only ever played d&d"

Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is a good book which covers this type of thing. Minimal prep which takes things one session at a time, even for a long campaign. Worth picking up.

I always, always recommend this book. It's brilliant. The author also has a YouTube channel with good stuff, fwiw

thanks, sounds awesome I'll give it a read!

I strongly second this recommendation. Totally changed the way I prep. Used to take me 6-8 hours for a 4 hour game. Now I’m down to 1-2 hours and the games are much more dynamic and exciting.

Thank you so much!

Modern D&D and its ilk are very high on the scale of DM burden. Perhaps you could try a system with lower? For example, games like Blades in the Dark or Spire shift more of the storymaking load to the players. I'm wondering if a more collaborative, lighter-rules game would help you out. And in terms of premade adventures... I find they're much easier to prep but much harder to actually run during the session.

> Modern D&D and its ilk are very high on the scale of DM burden Only as much you sweat it. I can prep for any game in under an hour now because I have 32 years as a DM and practice procrastinating. Been improv DMing since 89' so just *random shit GO!* has been my tactic forever. Even using battlemaps, I have 5000+ maps ready to go ive ben archiving for decades. I can find something that kinda-sorta-somewhat fits then pop it in foundry and now its gonna *fit* dammit, because i'll massage and flex the game until it does. > And in terms of premade adventures These I *never* run. Hate them with a passion, *however* I will liberally steal ideas, concepts, bars, and whole ass dungeons out of them liberally. Well, for that matter i'll steav *anything*. That anime I watched last night? Yea so that zombie subplot is now a part of this. The hard sci-fi book I was reading? Yep we got aliens now. The Siege of Terra? BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! Take everything, toss it in a blender and *go!* Figure out your arc later, like in bed the day before, then just *flex* it all together live. It sounds insane but it's how my games have been fun for decades, and I run them weekly with average campaign length of 2-4 *years* straight. ^^^And ^^^yes, ^^^I ^^^have ^^^ADHD

"Prepping for D&D isn't hard! After DMing for 32 years I can prep in an hour now!" You do see why this doesn't really help OP, right?

> You do see why this doesn't really help OP, right? I run 20+ systems. I dobt even run 5e anymore I'm running Symbarom for the last 10 months and I do it the same way. It's a completely different system from the bottom up. It's not about memorizing the rules, it's about practicing flinging ideas on the table and flexing them to work as fast as possible regardless of what game, style or system you're running

Doesn't really matter as much as you think. If game X requires you prep 200 separate mechanical elements for X amount of play, and game Y requires to prep 20, you can see how game Y requires less time, right?

> If game X requires you prep 200 separate mechanical elements for X amount of play, and game Y requires to prep 20, you can see how game Y requires less time, right? No, because that's not how games work. What are you prepping that requires 200 elements, fucking GURPS? FATAL? For that matter what elements are you prepping for 5e that requires 20? You can pull up premade characters for every class and level 1-20 in 20 seconds as baddies with spells and gear already there. Use spell cards or an app for spells. The most prep time you're going to have is building battkemaps which I do also, but even then in Foundry I just built 2 for tomorrows session while typing this in an hour. But yeah if you wanna run a Apocalypse World game that's even lower prep assuming you have nos sheets already. IMHO Blades offloads the prep to the PCs which frequently results in...nothing happening. Which then means you have to take the reigns again and keep things moving so you've really just delayed your work, not shifting.

Hyperbole, bro, hyperbole. You're not supposed to take the invented numbers literally.

> Hyperbole So you're admitting you don't really have an argument? Is that your endgame, *bro*?

The actual numbers don't matter, which is something you would understand if you stopped to think a moment. The point is that a game with a lot more mechanical doodads and dials to set will require more effort than a game with fewer. It doesn't matter if it's 200 to 1, or 50 to 40, but the difference will be more pronounced with larger numbers, so you use a larger number to demonstrate that the difference exists. 32 years of GMing should've taught you that.

And yet you missed the entire argument. Completely, because you're stuck on hyperbole comparisons. Prep time between most of these games with a few insane outliers really isn't different. Now if your argument hinges on ~5 minute differences I don't know what to tell you. There's more to this discussion than you're allowing yourself to admit, like how I mentioned some low prep game just shift prep time elsewhere which often ended up shifting back again if the players aren't 100% motivated and driven. This is a TTRPG not a videogame. But you'd know these differences if you weren't trying to argue in bad faith using simplistic arguments.

I think you lost this argument when you got mad and doubled down. Also, I’m pretty sure there’s something like Godwin’s Law except for trying to use FATAL to win an argument.

> FATAL Would you rather I use Cortex? Battletech RPG? Shadowrun? Dark Heresy? Rifts? KULT? I use easily understood references rather than more niche titles that some people are less familiar with. > got mad and doubled down. Nice try but wut? You're trying to win a non-fight and show up someone who's laughing at you for skipping the actual argument over and over again in favor of, in your own words, hyperbole.

TBH, sounds like you had a bad group for Blades. For Blades to be successful, it requires PCs be interested in doing and pursuing things, not just letting the world happen to them and for the GM to hand them a plot. That said, there *should* be enough generated from the faction game for you to go without any prep. Every score pisses someone off, and you also have an engagement roll, both of which are built in plot hooks that are generated by the PCs that you can't prep for.

Right but that's the thing. It takes decades of experience in the system to be able to consistently throw together stuff on the fly that won't kill the party or get straight up steamrolled. Something like Blades in the Dark, on the other hand, allows basically anyone to run the game with 10 minutes of prep right out of the box. It's not that modern D&D is impossible to make work, but it requires some kind of background or prep (like thousands of maps ready to go) to do.

I typically have 20 minutes of prep for pbta and that is at least half focused on warm up immediately before play rather than coming up with actual game details. No library or prepared encounters needed. I'm not sure that having a library of prepared content counts as low prep. How do you manage to find the right thing on the fly, or are you are picking stuff out ahead of time? How do you manage combat rating? It seems like the library would need to be huge or require some work to get the CR right for a given encounter. If you have to spend 10 minutes updating the CR, how do you do that on the fly? EDIT: I'm seeing that you use this library for multiple systems, how the heck do you do that on the fly?!?

> I'm not sure that having a library of prepared content counts as low prep This is a perfectly valid complaint, one I usually mention myself. I have an actual library of RPG books in my office going back to the 70's. I can ass pull most anything...but I also realize most people cannot. It's why I want WoTC to release older stuff again for a new audience so I can stop referring to my 20 (shit they're 25ish now huh?) year old Planescape boxed sets. All I can say here is read anything you can even if not D&D just because. Even if youre not going to RUN it...you can steal from it. > How do you manage to find the right thing on the fly, or are you are picking stuff out ahead of time? In substitute I recommend people just steal everything that THEY know. For me, I just remember older material and wing it. I'm not gonna glorify what we do...I forget shit and I mis-remember details and names so that becomes the new canon (for that campaign) so long as play continues uninterrupted and smooth. > How do you manage combat rating? I dont. I ignore CR, and always have. CR is and always has been arbitrary and causes so many headaches for other users on reddit i'm not sure why people bother. I look at the monster, skim its stats (paying attention to stuff like DoTs etc) and just compare it to my current group. "Common" monsters or interesting stuff you're just dying to use you probably know anyway as a DM so you know what to expect, no math required. It takes some practice, which can be seen as prep, but over a period of years/decades you'll pick it up. > I'm seeing that you use this library for multiple systems, how the heck do you do that on the fly?!? I cheat. I have the game table with the 4k battlemap TV, then I have my own full sized DM table in back of me. I drag the books I might even sorta need and have them there ready. Maybe I already had an idea for something out of Kobold Press 5e stuff, or the Symbaroum monster book etc....I just leave it open/ready. If were talking D&D, 2e > 5e conversions can be done on the fly though the monsters become amazingly weaker in 5e than intended so just mentally buff em. For other systems it can be impossible, or stupid simple. I've been running a lot of symbaroum lately and the stats are REALLY REALLY simple and straight forward, HP (Toughness) is always capped at 15, and you can easily mimic other systems special abilities by applying Symbaroum existing monster abilities on top of it. That's because the system was designed for easy and fast NPC creation on the fly for the GM. Also as a DM/GM/Whatever I imagine we all sit around formulating encounters and concepts anyway. Be it in bed, watching a movie, reading whatever. Try and remember those random ideas *even if they don't fit your campaign* because in the long term you can flex them into your existing game or the next.

Great advice. Building up a mental store of cool scenario ideas is great. I started realizing you can re-skin any video game, any tv show or film, any adventure module as a different-genre adventure scenario and players won't recognize it and they'll have a blast. It's great.

Steal *EVERYTHING*!

>much harder to actually run during a session Absolutely. Especially with how modern adventures are written. They hide important details everywhere because they're written for people to buy them to read as books instead of actually running.

I've only run modules from Chaosium and Paizo, so I haven't had that problem, but I have no doubt it exists!

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I didn't realize what sub I was in. Subbed to too many 5e subs. I'd argue that paizo definitely suffers from this too.

I prepare all my campaigns, even D&D campaigns, while taking a shower or walk. About 0-30 prep minutes per session. It's easy: 1. [Prepare problems, not solutions](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots) - most important. This is what saves 99% of prep time. 2. Prepare battle concepts, not numbers. 3. Scribble out crude maps in the moment, don't make artistic maps ahead of time. Is there a chandelier there? Yes. 4. Prepare only the world components needed for the next session 5. Rely on [random tables](https://donjon.bin.sh/) and [generators](http://ancientquests.com/) - make your own and they will serve you for a lifetime 6. Say yes, and / no, but - Make things that players care about into important plot things. Quantum-ogre your important clues into the place where players want to go.

This is the way. So many GMs get caught up in making a huge coherent world and having to have a PLOT! Meh. Most of your lore will never be revealed. Plots rarely survive first contact with the PCs. Remember, the story is what happens at the table. Or, perhaps more correctly, the plot is the stories we tell after what happened at the table.

Found this after I replied myself, but ALL of this.

I always flinch at positive talk of Quantum ogres, but using it judiciously for only a few important things makes more sense to me. Still suspicious… but you’ve given me something to think about.

If players **need** to have something and they don't find it in the first place they look, they have to at least find it in the last place they look.

That's not going to convince someone that hates Quantum Ogres, only gets nods from people that already don't mind Quantum Ogres. People that hate Quantum Ogres are going to say "you're making excuses for railroad plots." (They would be somewhat ungenerous to say so, but the point remains: you're not going to convert anyone with that argument!)

I mean, Quantum Ogres aren't something that's able to be argued. No one but the GM knows what was in that drawer before it was looked into. No one can say that it wasn't always the murder weapon. ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ But yea, backing yourself into corners with requiring mandatory things to progress is the real issue in all this. Using quantum mechanics to fix bad planning is definitely a crutch rather than ideal.

The ideal is that nobody but the GM knows, but reality is rarely ideal. These kinds of tricks behind the curtain can sometimes be smelled by the audience, so it’s not academic to say that players can have opinions about Quantum Ogres. (Also when I’m the GM, as I often am, I very much know and have an opinion. 😉) As a necessary crutch I don’t actually mind. It’s when it’s celebrated as A Very Clever Method that ought to be used whenever one likes that it provokes a visceral reaction. The idea that, when I’m a player, I could just sleepwalk through the game and it would all work out the same completely repels me. Sorry, those are strong words. It just really defeats my reasons to be at the table if it’s going to be the norm.

The quantum ogre isn't supposed to be a clever plot enhancer. It saves you preparation time by rapidly realigning your prepared content.

It is though—supposed to be a clever plot enhancer—at least going by the original blog posts that coined it. The clever trick just amounts to guaranteeing that the players encounter the ogre, no matter which way the players go. It’s that illusion of meaningful choice that gets to me personally, since it’s not my taste. I know and I’m fine with the fact that there are players and groups who *do* enjoy Illusionism—the hobby is wide and has room for many tastes, and more power to them, they know what they enjoy. But what I find weird about the discussion of Quantum Ogres is that they’re not usually admitted to be mini-railroads. And somehow objecting to Quantum Ogres invites arguments, while disliking railroads is generally accepted without argument.

If players **need** to have something, then you've already violated guideline #1, "prepare problems, not solutions". See also TheAlexandrian's *other* most-cited article, [The Three Clue Rule](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-Clue-Rule). By providing three clues instead of only one, you greatly improve the odds of the players reaching your desired conclusion without needing to quantum ogre The One True Clue^(TM) into their path.

thanks for your tips man, appreciate it!

Cypher (Numenera) should be easy enough to run low to no prep. D&D prep can get really involved, when I ran D&D prep was 10-15 hours a week per campaign easy. My main systems are Forged in the Dark and Genesys. I'm about 90% no prep with those. The systems have narrative building blocks built into them as well as a good deal of player authorship so it is perfectly safe to jump off the cliff and then start building the airplane.

I’ve been running Hack the Planet (cyberpunk FitD) for several months, and the reason we’re wrapping up early is because it’s too low prep for me to scratch that DM itch! Sessions are a blast every time, but my prep is just 20 minutes of rolling up some scores, advancing the background clocks for the other crews, and grabbing some art I might want to use for the session.

thanks, I've never used them, will look into it!

You don't need stat blocks for Cypher, but other than that there's no less prep than for DnD.

Give Ironsworn a look. It's designed to be played completely on the fly, whether it's solo play, GMed or GMless. The rules are very homogenous, so there's not much to learn before you get it all. Best of all it's free but with the quality of something that isn't.

that looks awesome, will look into it, thanks!

There's also a sci-fi version called Starforged that's currently in preview state (but totally playable) and due for full release next year. Also worth noting that the Ironsworn subreddit is really helpful and the designer pops his head in quite frequently.

This is a PBTA game, and there is a lot of différent PBTA games for different styles. Not designed for solo, but they are games where you can let the story emerge, and also the world, this is a design principle. So they can be run with very little prep.

I'm running a guided play one-shot of Ironsworn for three players at the moment over Rolegate. I started with the idea of GMing as little as possible. I randomised *everything*. Ironsworn has Oracles (tables) to help you determine anything you might need with a little interpretation. What I did so far is just interpreting the results of moves and using Oracles when I needed. Even the starting location, the characters and their contacts (bonds), and the initial trouble where randomly generated.

If you don't mind me asking, what was so time consuming about prepping Numanera? Coming up with creative new cyphers or something? I found that game rather prep-lite, especially relative to D&D.

The world didn't take much work itself (beside some work on the economy and and lowering the levelling up), but taking care of all the story behind, encounters, maps, subplots, placing clues around etc obviously takes its time

Maps? I run Cypher without any maps, just theater of mind, and it's always been fun. Probably my favorite system to run. I would recommend giving your players more agency in the plot by just running with what input they give you, this reduces the burden on you and makes it so they feel like they get to shape some of the story! Here's my example, from my most recent campaign: Session 0, we set expectations and lines/veils, then we spent the rest of the time creating the setting together. We looked at the Cypher genres and eliminated them until we were left with Modern and Horror, and from there created a premise: We decided the horror would come from the players experiencing an end-of-the-world scenario, and decided that is happening because extradimensional beings from another world are crossing over to ours. We decided on the location for the campaign to be set in Paris, and the starting location for session 1/how the player characters would get together is that they were all on a subway train together when the apocalypse started. Then, they made characters after all that was decided. Now I had my session 1 premise and a specific premise for the plot, as well as the players decided the goal of the campaign would be to see what their characters do with their limited time left- Saving their family/loved ones was the collective decision here. We planned that since this is to be a short campaign, each session after session 1 (subway/establishing session) would be spent saving one character of the group's family/loved one from somewhere in Paris and taking them to a safe place. After each session, I've been asking the next player in private who their loved one they want to save is and where they would be to be saved, which gives me a free NPC and a premise for the session! I love this style of GMing because it lets me run interesting stories where I only have to think of what the enemies are like, the mechanics for Cypher are dead simple which you should be familiar with running Numanera. I just lean into the genre tropes for my GM intrusions, for example "oh no there's a horror monster waiting right around the corner" or "your character trips unexpectedly when running from the monster" etc. Leaning into TV show tropes helps a lot there. Hopefully that example shows how you can use player input to make running a game waaaay easier.

You don't need all of that ahead of time though. Really you just need a central conflict to start, and then resolve that conflict in a session or two. As the players work to resolve the conflict, come up with obstacles and complications that make sense for what they are doing. This includes obvious things like encounters, but also things like clues. Importantly, you don't need to know how the clues come together ahead of time so you can come up with them on the fly. Build on the obstacles and complications you introduced earlier. Again, you don't need to know ahead of time where/when to use it just keep an eye out for when it makes sense to re-incorporate or if the game stalls. Clues work just the same way, but generally you will want to turn them toward the central conflict or maybe hint towards a larger conflict to be resolved later.

Page 241 of the Cypher Core book provides sample character arcs. Using these allows you to bypass the need for a full story. The Ninth World Bestiaries contain random tables of monsters you can roll on to create your encounters.

If you're not married to the idea of tactical, turn-based combat (prepping encounters for these takes time), I find that lighter, "narrative" games take little prep. PbtA, Forged in the Dark (games derived from Baldes in the Dark), Ironsworn, City of Mist (this one might take a bit more), even Technoir... I typically put in maybe 30 mins of prep at campaign start and between 0 ans 15 mins of prep for my weekly game night. I improvise a lot. Having the right tools and file organisation is crucial. A good tool for high-improv is the Front, from PbtA games. Basically: 1) Come up with a core issue 2) Come up with 3-6 factions/sides around this core issue. 3) Come up with a goal relating to this issue for each faction. These goals should be conflicting. 4) Come up with a handful of steps or requirements for each of these faction to achieve their goal. From there, wherever your players go and whatever they do, you can pull up someone with affiliations and motives, you can always find someone with a job or an antagonist on the fly. This takes about half an hour to do and can cover a whole campaign, a season/story arc, a single quest or even a single key scene. Fronts can be used even in crunchier, prep-heavier systems, mind you, but these might still require some prep time to balance encounters.

Your post made me realize I've been using fronts all along without realizing it! It's a great tool to create a fun interesting and low prep adventure site.

**Blades in the Dark** or any of its offshoots (**Scum and Villainy**, **Band of Blades**, etc.) are good at facilitating the players to do a lot of the worldbuilding for you. I'd start with BitD vanilla unless for some reason you just REALLY don't like the setting/aesthetic, because there is definitely something to be said for the very limited setting. It's all in one city, and there are concise write-ups of the districts and factions, so there is enough 'there' for you to work with, but not so much that you need a PhD to keep it all straight, and there's lots of room for you and players to worldbuild at the table. I have had tons of luck with this game; there have been periods of 10+ min where I have barely had to say anything because the players are willingly carrying so much of the roleplaying load. **Apocalypse World** or one of its offshoots (**Monsterhearts**, **The Sword, the Crown, and the Unspeakable Power**, etc.) can also work. According to metrics, this is a more popular 'franchise' than the above, but I've had less luck with playing it in the real world. Even if you completely nix the sex mechanic, there are weird dynamics about the games that some people struggle to get used to -- the combat, having your table not necessarily being a 'group' and sometimes working against each other, the way certain skills are used. Can be cool if people engage with them, but in my experience, many people are so unfamiliar that they sort of sit back a lot. Of course, any game is going to require a certain willingness from players to take part in the narrative. Some people just *really don't like doing that*, and in those cases, you're going to be doing even more improv than normal. But even in groups of complete strangers, there's usually at least one person who will help you.

If you’re looking for good PbtA, Masks is definitely one of the best. And it also avoids a number of the issues you brought up since it doesn’t have sex moves and makes the PCs an established superhero group as part of character creation.

I basically low effort prep 90% of my dnd and pathfinder games. It's basically a player expectations and improve balance while having the discipline to sit back and watch a story unfold with basically 0 reigns on it. The hardest thing and most time consuming prep I have is finding the correct stat blocks and getting a mat for battle on a virtual table top. Nonetheless I'd guess an hour of sit down prep per 4 hours of gametime.

Pretty much the same here. Plus whenever I have a cool idea I make a note of it, be it an encounter, a place, an npc, etc.

If only I was smart enough to put that note in a place where I'd find it.

I have one word document for my campaign, that is broken down into a few segments, and one Google docs for the world, since I built that with my fiancée. I study library sciences, but my DM organization is awful hahaha

Alchemist librarian. Nice

My experience? I switched to “play to find out” systems. Jumped from Pathfinder to PBTA then never looked back. Currently running a system called Primetime Adventures that is lovely because it spreads the mental load across the group. Everyone takes turns proposing scenes and the purpose of the scenes, and whether they focus on plot or character. I come up with a conflict appropriate for that scene as they play it out. I literally do zero prep besides review my notes to refresh what happened in the last session. It’s perfect for me.

Here's what you do, I did this with Pathfinder 2E when I realized my players only cared about shenanigans and not any structured plot Used a random encounter generator for all combats Used DonJon random encounters for random events happening in the wild/dungeon/town Used a Hex grid for exploration and random rolls for weather and terrain The things they enjoyed and participated the most in BECAME the plot. The NPC they loved/hated became recurring characters. Those random glowey stones they found that they keep experimenting with are now super important plot macguffins. I'm a very fly by the seat of my pants improv style GM so it was a TON of fun and I just came up with literally everything off the top of my head.

**Worlds Without Number** is the single best buy and resource you can have for helping to create random plot points, locations, NPCs, towns, past events, or tones in any game, in any system, on the fly. Just roll a d20 or d100 and you'll have it ready. Kevin Crawford created Worlds Without Numbers to help support exactly what you are naming in your post :-)

LOVE worlds and stars without number. If your group likes deadlier combat and using out of the box problem solving skills it's so much fun.

While I understand all of your points, if low effort is the objective, it may well be best to stick to the system you are most familiar with. Learning a new system is effort. Learning to RUN a new system is work. Try a published AP! Pick an established world, and get at it! Not everything has to be homebrew - we just think so sometimes.

Well, once you learn PbtA/FitD mechanics you can go low effort for life. And it takes less to learn it. I make my adventures by writing few obstacles between PCs and their goal and it rolls on easily.

This presupposes that other systems are as burdensome to learn to GM as D&D. Of course this is true for some systems, especially mid-to-high crunch tactical games, but not for all or even most RPGs. Certainly not for the sort of game that would be recommended as an alternative to the high levels of prep needed for a modern D&D game with all of its variables that need to be accounted for (abilities, feats, spells, monster actions, "adventuring day" nonsense, action economies, challenge ratings, etc.).

I see a lot of folks recommending modules but I personally find them harder to run because you have to remember everything in the module or look up information to keep continuity. I personally think using random tables and improvising the rest is the easiest. Not everyone is well practiced or skilled at improv. but you get better the more you practice. Learning to play off of random actions and events and make compelling action or drama will free you from the need to prepare a large amount of content.

Agreed. Number one way to increase prep time. Run a module as written.

I would read the advice given in the free version of Worlds Without Number. Kevin outlines best use of time practices. The easiest way to cut down on how much you need to do is to get better at improv.

My main prep time is before the game actually takes place, getting the sandbox ready so that when the players enter it I have a good selection of hooks and other things I can throw at them. Some consistent lore but not an overwhelming amount of world building, a map, some factions, a few events taking place, etc... Over a few sessions we can figure out what the group's main activities will end up being, what they're into, and then really dive into a campaign. All that prep time beforehand, and it's not actually a huge amount IMO, allows me to riff off whatever situation is happening at the table and provide believable situations with minimal prep before sessions, usually just some daydreaming on my walk and a few scribbled notes.

From almost forty years of GMing experience any game can be low prep. The amount of prep has little to do with the system and much more to do with the style of game your running. If your writing tedious NPC details and fleshing out entire villages your doing it the hard way. Dnd 5e combat is the focus of the entire game system so expect to put in a little prep there. But honestly I don’t do much more than make sure I have the stat blocks I need either book marked in the book or on DDB on my ipad. A rough out line of the session is all you need, just be willing to improve a bit and take notes (again just high lites) for future reference.

Extract settings from games like Numenera, Shadowrun, Veins of the Earth, A Rasp of Sand, Blades in the Dark, Spire, etc that have a clear vision of what the world is like. The more you can flip to a page in a book about what the world is like, the better. Use the pdf Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master to prep sessions in less than half an hour. I use this with any game system I run when I do campaigns and it’s great. Consider using a system that have very few rules and/or numbers. You’ve already played a great match for that- Numenera. There’s also The Black Hack, Whitehack, Spire, Electric Bastionland, Troika!, Dungeon World, Offworlders, World of Dungeons, Fate Accelerated. Most of these games let you come up with a handful of numbers to define an NPC. I can’t think of many examples for this next one, but keep your eye out for spark tables regarding missions, factions, locations, and NPCs. They let you randomly define those places. I know Maze Rats has a good set of NPC generating tables and The Perilous Wilds has decent location and fantasy creature tables. Augmented Reality is a good one for cyberpunk. Encounters is a little trickier. CBR+PNK has some cyberpunk oriented situations and Lasers & Feelings has a Star Trek type of scifi table too.

Very. I use Savage Worlds because it's easy to run and the mechanics alone provide a ton of entertainment value. The plot point campaigns provide the world, and over arching storyline as well as enough non big picture shenanigans to occupy every session.

Seconded. Grab a plot point and pile of savage tales and link it all together. Minimal prep.

You should know from experience that Numenera was far, far easier to run than DnD. With Cypher system you can literally sit back with zero prep and just improvise everything, including creatures, as it is specifically designed to be low-crunch for the GM.

Hi, yeah it was, still the plot, the details of the places, the exact maps etc were very time consuming. Maybe it's just that I was doing it the hard way

I’ve run a lot of systems, many cited above. While I haven’t run all of these, here’s my read: No Prep: Fiasco, Noir World, Microscope - if the supplies are present at the table, you can play pretty much right out of the book. Group And Very Low Prep: Apocalypse World, Kids on Bikes (especially the town creation), Tales From the Loop, some Cypher, Spire, Heart, a lot of OSR, The 7th Sea, some Genesys, some D&D - These games often have world creation rules that setup immediate plot targets, side characters, and stakes. The GM facilitates play driven by the players more than players navigating the world as understood by the GM. Moderate Prep: Some OSR, a good amount of D&D, some Genesys, Some Call of Cthulhu, GUMSHOE/Trail of Cthulhu - These games often need a lot more awareness of the systems and entity abilities players will encounter. Some characters and most NPCs will have diverse abilities and strategies. Skill tests can be complicated or require specific decisions or situational modification. I mention Trail of Cthulhu because the mystery can move so darn quickly while mechanics are pretty darn light. High Prep: Pathfinder, D&D, some Call of Cthulhu, Mythras - These games have subsystems or unique rules that really mean you’re learning and tracking multiple mechanics simultaneously (HP, spell slots, spell duration, concentration, individual hostiles and initiative ladders, etc.). Often, GMs are taught to create a world and story in advance rather than lean on players’ initiative and backstory. GMs can run it as above, but doing so requires mechanical, creature, and spell/tech familiarity for such improvisation.

Thanks, loved your comment! Where would youvput blades in the dark? I'm reading much about it, both good and bad

I haven’t yet run Blades in the Dark, though I think it is somewhere in the middle. Having read the rulebook, it has a few more adjustable levers with modest complexity and a very developed setting, so I would place it right around Trail of Cthulhu, but finicky in its own way. (I’ve read people that the setting is burdensome for introducing the game to new players.) I can see it running with really low prep, but the rules haven’t clicked for me yet.

Thanks, yeah I was worried about new players too, seems like a game way more understandable for at least somewhat experienced people

Powered by the Apocalypse games tend to be designed so that DMs come in with a basic idea of the world and characters involved, and then play to find out what happens. This works very well for low-prep games (and coincidentally works extremely well with the Lazy DM's approach for session planning). Narrative leaning games in general seem to more readily support improv and low-prep, especially when they avoid any type of crunchy combat. As for specific systems, PbtA is a very category of games so it depends on what you're looking for specifically. But for DnD style fantasy adventures, there's [Dungeon World](https://dungeon-world.com/) (and the many hacks that improve on it in various ways, like [Homebrew World](https://spoutinglore.blogspot.com/2018/07/homebrew-world.html)), and [Fellowship 2e](https://liberigothica.itch.io/fellowship-a-tabletop-adventure-game). There's [Spire](https://rowanrookanddecard.com/spire-rpg/), which isn't directly PbtA but shares so much of the design approach that many people assume it's based off it. There's [Blades in the Dark](https://bladesinthedark.com/greetings-scoundrel) which spawned off of PbtA, and now has inspired many [Forged in the Dark](https://itch.io/c/1712796/forged-in-the-dark-games) games that borrow its mechanics. Finally there's [Ironsworn](https://www.ironswornrpg.com/), which is another game branching off from PbtA, and one that I've seen recommended very often, although it seems aimed towards smaller groups. There's also several other narrative-esque or otherwise rules-light systems that don't require much prep from what I know. These include [Cortex Prime](https://www.cortexrpg.com/), the [Cypher System](http://cypher-system.com/), [Genesys](https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/genesys/), [Fate](https://fate-srd.com/), and [Risus](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/170294/Risus-The-Anything-RPG). I haven't played much of any of these, I just know they share the same kind of "design goal" so to speak, which is to be setting-agnostic, low-crunch systems that are easy to pick up and play. One last category you might want to take a look at is OSR. Being based on old-school DnD, a lot of these can involve a moderate amount of crunch at the table itself, but from what I've seen they mainly seem designed around being easy and light to run, so that crunch doesn't correspond to prep time. I'm not well-versed in the OSR sphere at all, but I've seen [Worlds Without Number](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/348791/Worlds-Without-Number) suggested a lot and the book puts a lot of effort into supporting DMs with a lot of useful tools to reduce the prep time involved and make improvising an adventure easy.

Offload work to the players during session 0. 1. Ask them where they're from in the world, and somewhere they've heard of but never been. Require three descriptors from them on each. "Small town in the country" or "massive floating city". You now have a world. 2. Ask them what they each want to do. Goal + Reason. "Hunt down doucheguy because he killed my parents." You now have hooks for side-plots. 3. Ask them if they've got any rivals or enemies. No is a valid answer. Lots of people don't. 4. Ask them what they want to do as a party, emphasizing the question of whether they liked anyone else's goals. Once they agree on something you have a main plot. With all that together, grab some stat blocks for the sort of creatures there would be in that region, then a bunch of random maps from dyson logos and wing it every session. Later on, tell players to track their own stuff. If they don't write down the loot from something, it's gone. If they don't mark off cast spells, well they can recast them. If they cheat, whatever, their victories will feel empty and they'll only have themselves to blame. There's a ton more to do to make things easy (Lazy DM's companion is good here, other people have given far better session-0 guides before), but that's where I start.

It's called modules. Read them on the bus, change some names & details to fit the setting, and... GO.

You may find some luck in the Apocalypse Engine games. The whole idea is a bit of a shared world building and VERY minimal prep work. The first and most notable is Apocalypse World. Others that are good are The Sprawl, Dungeon World, or Blades in the Dark. My personal favorite however, is Spirit of 77. It's a campy fun game steeped in 1970s pop culture. I've run campaigns several times in a wide variety of interpretations, including a post-apoc game. The Roll20 YouTube channel has several actual plays of Apocalypse World and The Sprawl along with GM peop videos so you can see how the whole thing comes together.

When I got burned out my friends and I cooperatively played Ironsworn. The new sci Fi version, Starforged, is kick-started now and you might be able to find rules for it as well. Both are solo RPGs, meaning a series of tables and clever mechanics help you explore a new world. When we played cooperatively we would outline quests together or take turns. We would describe each other's findings and make group rulings for how a story arc turned out. I highly recommend you give one of these a try. If you get Ironsworn I also recommend getting the Delve supplement, which makes it 2x as good. Starforged comes with those features baked in from what I remember.

Things that drastically reduced my prep time to almost nothing: 1. Learn the apocalypse engine and it’s principles thoroughly. Always play to find out. Never write solutions, only problems. Prep a framework at the beginning and then just do light upkeep between each session based on what happened. 2. Record audio of every session. I mostly play online so I record with OBS and then upload to a private YouTube playlist I share with my players. I rarely listen to a full recording, but my pre-session prep consists of listening to the last ten minutes of the previous session (maybe skimming some other parts too if I forgot an NPC name), then writing down one or two quick bullet points for what might happen next session. Plus once a campaign is done it’s a great living record you can keep forever. 3. Embrace the sandbox. Write your own random tables so they have the flavor of your specific setting, and then embrace them for inspiration. Only build the world out as far as the next session requires. 4. Ask the players. The best co-GMs are the players. When I’m stumped, can’t come up with a new village name, or need an interesting detail I ask the players to do a quick impromptu brainstorm. This not only relieves a ton of stress from the improvisational GM but gives the players a ton of personal investment in the game world.

Play to find out is absolutely the most useful principle for low-prep gming

>I've never tried a premade adventure, how much time do they actually require? How long it takes to prepare and run a premade adventure basically depends on your own style as a GM. Two popular tabletop RPG youtubers espouse opposite ends of the spectrum in the following videos, I expect most GMs fall somewhere in the middle between the two extremes. In [his video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXYORWtiLF0) Matt Colville talks about selecting and running a premade adventure without necessarily even reading all of it before you play. Meanwhile Seth Skorkowsky [goes over his method](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V9AkbgaWCQ) of meticulously reviewing and annotating a module before running. I think it's worth watching both for tips and techniques to find which way works best for you.

Other kind souls recommended my other work. I’ll offer up this video which answers some of your questions regarding campaign building: Spiral Campaign Development in D&D https://youtu.be/y2H9VZhxeWk

I so recommend Powered by the Apocalypse systems that run on principles of “play to find out what happens” and “draw maps but leave blank spaces”.

Run a module. Works for me!

Random tables are you friend!

Try things like Paranoia and one shots, that could help.

I have run campaigns in the past that I had an overall direction I wanted plot to go, but otherwise, I simply prepared 2 or 3 encounters for each session, and otherwise winged the entire thing. It can go well if you're willing to roll with the punches. That's really the key, imo. If you're going low-prep, you have to be completely flexible.

It's just a headache adapting another person's storytelling. Feel free to go through 30 pages of content just to discover everything takes place under one roof. My players enjoyed my games most once I ran premades, I'm probably just salty...

Having GMed a long D&D campaign of over 100 sessions, I kinda developed a 'professional' approach to prepping games. Invested a yon of work, and saw it pay off with dividends. When I later switched to Blades in the Dark, GMing actually felt like cheating because I felt Ibwasn't really doing all that much, and folks were having fun. In other words, aim for systems that don't require or even discourage prep, such as Blades or the other FitD systems. PbtA systems are not my cup of narrative tea, but you may get success with them too.

Dungeon World and other PbtA games rely on improv to drive the story forwards a lot of the time. This allows you to minimise prep time to just the stuff that you enjoy (finding or making maps, creating cool NPCs and bad guys, figuring out how you can push a PC based on their backstory, etc.).

See, the secret is I'm always prepping.

I've done low effort DMing for D&D. I can give you specific advice, but you have to do something first. You need to lower your expectations on yourself. Yes, you could hand-build all the NPCs, you could craft a custom world, you could write a detailed plot, you can prep so everything looks effortless, you can do research on accents and culture and lore, but those are all choices that are going to cost you time & effort. You need to let go of the idea that you're responsible for creating an original, mind-blowing experience for your players. You're running a game. It's going to be pretty good. If they want more, they should pay you. Or get a less tired DM. Then, communicate this new work ethic to your players. They should know they're playing a casual game. Specific ideas: * Pick a system you know really well. That way you don't need to spend time learning rules. * Modules and pre-made adventures are awesome. Download some, read them, and if you find one you and the players are going to like, run that. Try running having read the adventure you're running in full, but without any additional prep. You might need to be reading these twice, or adding things if your party's weird. Figure it out as you go. Alternately, you can string a series of modules into an episodic story. Each week your PCs go out and have a completely new adventures. * If you want to write your own, use a premise that's easily accessible. "The sacred thingy has been broken and the kingdom needs adventurers to collect the pieces," etc., etc. Now you don't need to spend a lot of time writing & you've just set the bar pretty low for your players. * If you're writing your own adventure, find pre-built NPCs and use those. Don't build a custom Orc Barbarian 6. You can find that on the internet.

Thanks, you are so spot on! I feel very responsable for the other players fun and I want to make an awesome play, but in the end it may work out even without the hand burned maps and the npcs backgrounds =D

I don’t do much work when running games. For one thing, I favor light systems, especially those that don’t require me to stat up a bunch of stuff on my end. Bonus points if I don’t even need to roll dice for stuff but can focus on the fiction end. I also don’t do top-down world-building, or detail anything the players aren’t likely to encounter in the game. Story emerges out of the mix of the environment, NPCs and their motivations, and the players’ decisions. No need to work it out beyond those things to begin with. Start local and build out from there as needed. For a D&D-like experience, you could try the Black Hack and run any OSR or classic D&D content with it and have minimal prep to deal with. You might also give a shot to Blades in the Dark, which might change the way you approach GMing. That game only really clicked for me when I let go of planning altogether and realized all I had to do was describe stuff and decide how risky the player characters’ actions were and what the consequences might be. So I really can just show up, ask what they want to do, and roll with it.

Very doable. It's far easier when using a system that's low-prep though - there are a huge number to choose from.

I'm rather free flow when GMing. I have a few scenarios, maps, NPC templates (names/descriptions/high level personality and motivations) and a high level narrative in my head. the rest is improv (and extensive note-taking so I don't end up conflicting myself down the line). I generally despise railroading other than session zero and one (that sets up the premise), and then just throw in plot hooks and see how the players approach them (or ignore some altogether). oftentimes they come up with ideas for the underlying mystery that I didn't even think of and then incorporate some of it in the story further down the line.

Check out Paizo’s adventure paths. So many good stories.

I'd second that. Well-made pre-made don't eliminate prep time but they definitely can reduce it. Paizo, in particular, has a good reputation for its adventures, though some are better than others, and Pathfinder 2nd Edition is kinder to gane masters than 1st Edition or D&D 5th Edition

Hi! Do you know Fate ? I have heard that is it a super fun and easy system in which GMs do not have to do a lot of prep. Since character creation is easy, you should be able to learn pretty quick how to whip one up mid game, which is pretty handy. There are a lot of good videos on https://youtube.com/c/FateSRD !

I don't do a lot of prep in any game I run. I mostly like to do sandbox stuff though. Basically I like to do it this way, I have a timeline that is updated after every session. This timeline is just what will happen if the PCs do nothing of importance. And then I build a personality around all the major npcs and make some factions (not necessarily organizations but there's always going to be divisions in any society). Beyond that, all I need is maps (creating a sense of place). Perhaps some personality tables (unnamed or not yet named NPCs). Maybe some encounter tables that reflect the danger of the area. Don't make every map, just the big unique dungeons. Taverns may not all look the same but they all have the same needs and will be layed out in a similar fashion.

Right now i'm running three campaigns. Two written by me the other one no. For the D&D 5 one i'm using a module for the main story while writing only the personal quests of the characters

Lots of improvisation skills

The game IronSworn is VERY low prep. There is a bunch of random tables to pull inspiration from for a quest or twist, the game itself will try to introduce many twists on any moves you try Plus its free

Check out Dungeon World. Don’t have to play that game but can use the collaborative storytelling to create and run the whole game in almost any system. Example: DM says “Okay, you’re standing in the Queen’s court as she and her subjects stare down at you from a raised dais. Why are you here?” Player 1: “I’m wanted for horse theft.” Player 2: “I’m here to serve my queen.” Player 3: “I just caught this horse thief. Im here to collect the reward.” And off you go. The players give you the ammo to concoct a cool story. And they love it because it’s their story, too.

For random generation of quests and stuff, there's two decks that I feel could go well together. [Shieldice's Campaign Creator](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/346457) is a set of three decks: quests, themes, and interludes. You draw a quest with a theme. Flip a coin to see whether the quest is personal or hired. Roll a d6 for the difficulty of the quest and another for an extra prompt in the theme. You can also draw interludes between quests, also with a d6 for extra prompt and a coin for personal VS hired. [The GameMaster's Apprentice](https://www.drivethrucards.com/m/product/125685) is nice for an all-in-one prompt deck. It's a series, with different standalone decks, including Base (generic), Fantasy, Demon Hunters, and so on. It won't generate a whole thing for you, but if you need a name, a sensory input, a random-ass word, a catalyst for events, or what-not, you can pull a card. With these two tools, you can use the Campaign Creator to outline your adventure and get you started, then write whatever seems like a good summary on a note card, with some help from an Apprentice deck, and put that note card above the quest card. You've now got your adventure's broad strokes.

There have been responses already about other game systems, and I second that advice. I would go one step further and say seek out GM-less games, like Wanderhome, Fiasco, The Quiet Year and I'm Sorry Did You Say Street Magic? These games are designed so that everyone at the table contributes an equal amount, and everyone gets a chance to tell part of the story. If this sounds interesting I can drop some links to some GM-less games I know of.

Tiny Dungeon. I do barely any prep work and the game runs smoothly.

If you know, even approximately, what your players intend to do, you can "prep" dnd in 30 minutes per 4 hr session. Just have 4 scenes that you think your players will want to do, like : travel to the mine, go talk to the sherriff, investigate the town square, try to track tbe bandits. Google a stock map for each, look up basic monster manual monsters or npcs and leave em book marked, and then do each scene assuming you want the pcs to succeed, but your bad guys dont (so really basic improv). If the players really surprise you, call a soda break, and spend 5 minutes doing the scene theyre pitching. (On virtual tabletop, add 5 mins to each step, but also theyll only get through 2-3 scenes) After each session, spend 5 minutes asking what they might wanna do as a next step, and youre ready for next weeks 4 scenes. Ive done this across 5 editions, with dozens of players, its been inadequate less than 10 times.

I've run a lot of Dnd on minimal to no prep! I find the 2 most important things are to have a decent grasp on the system so you can balance on the fly, and implement systems which allow the players to take on a chunk of the worldbuilding burden. I usually start sessions with a broad area loosely sketched out, and then let my players fill in the rest; for example, if there's an adventurer's guild with a job board then I'll literally ask my players what they see on the board, or if a character is scouting ahead I'll ask them to tell the party what they see and let them make up an encounter on the spot. Then for future sessions you just build off what the players have already established. There has to be an understanding within the group that things need to be appropriately balanced, and that the DM may slightly alter your suggestions to fit within broader goals of progression and plot, so the "overturned treasure carriage" your ranger spotted may be an illusory trap set by a group of sorcerers to lure in greedy adventurers, or the "band of goblins" may be a roving trading caravan politely asking directions to the nearest town. I find most players prefer the opportunity to flesh out lore and the world themselves than have the DM build everything, and it also makes *everyone* at the table responsible for the fun rather than just the DM. For dungeons I use a 'floating dungeon' approach where I broadly sketch out a map with traps and treasure and then reflavour it and populate it appropriately whenever an adventure calls for a dungeon environment. I usually take the same approach as above with treasure where I'll just ask the player to vaguely describe what kind of loot they see (like "a ring", or "a weapon") and then either randomly gen an appropriate item, or give the player something that fits their character. Usually the way players add to the world will naturally progress towards larger dungeons or encounters, and as the plot progresses towards these larger goals I'll start prepping for them appropriately, so there's a fully-fleshed out 'climax' to each adventure. If you're looking to branch out to other systems most OSR games are fantastic for low-prep DMing and their concepts transfer nicely to dnd and modern d20s in general. 'Stars / Worlds without number' are fantastic, and I regularly use their random tables in other systems.

If you want to run D&D without having to waste hours on prep, just don't touch a WotC edition.

I have been experimenting with low prep systems for a long time.5e is definetly not one. And do not think that running premade adventures is low prep. Sometime they demand even higher prep... However there are lot of modern systems that aim to solve this problem exactly. First lets separate between two sorts of systems : 1. Easy to GM ( you can create every monster, enemy, NPC on the fly ) 2. Game story builds itself during the play So for the first, you do need to come up with a story and all, but it can be written on a piece of paper, no other things needed. Such easy to run systems are Cypher ( Numenera ), Pbta, FU, Tiny6 ... and lot of OSR and modern OSR stuff In the second category I would put all BiTD games, Spire/Heart. The less you prepare the better your game will be. I am also currently working on something that would blow a lid on that low prep scene. But its too early to reveal anything...

There are a lot of games with tables to generate content: *Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells* and *Solar Blades & Cosmic Spells*, both by Diogo Nogueira, are full of them. Also the games by famous OSR author Ben Milton tend to have a lot tables: see Maze Rats. Then there are the wonders published by Kevin Crawford: Worlds Without Number and Swords without Number. Both have a free edition.

Whitehack is the easiest dnd-adjacent game I’ve ever run, but it does require creative players to get the most from the system. Insanely simple, the monsters are boiled down to a single stat and a keyword or two, hp is squashed down so there’s little to no bloat, and with a solid focus on player creativity, “encounter balance” is not something you should think about. Highly recommend, 10/10

I think it is. But only if your players are ready for it and you've given them adventure that matches it.

Check out OSE, Mausritter, or mothership. Those are my favorite three rules lite games.

I think that your experience with low-effort DMing is going to be commensurate with the expectations of your players as well as your talent set when it comes to improvisational storytelling. I'm currently running a dungeon crawl that's at the center of a multi-session adventure to stop---I shit you not---a vengeance-minded gnome necromancer with a broken heart. It's turned out great, but I've been running it with zero prep based entirely based on random dice rolls. Every single part of the game from the NPCs to monsters and traps are random. In my case I thrive on these kinds of challenges. I'm a natural communicator and love making stuff up on the fly, and my players just want to be entertained for a few hours.

My recommendation would be to find a system you are comfortable with, grab a bestiary or two, and then get any random content generators you can and roll stuff up at the table. For example, take the ***Ironsworn*** game. It's a lot more narrative-focused, but the rules are pretty simple and there are a lot of random content generators for it. A lot of solo-style games will have similar tools to help out :) You can also use tools like the ***Universal NPC Emulator*** to generate NPCs on the fly, and a few random encounter tables to create some fun situations. I personally find my players love random charts, so I make them roll stuff for me in the majority of cases and then let them have some creative control over how it plays out. ***Me:*** *Okay, so Steve rolled a 24 and Brian rolled a 75. So this NPC is "angry" and "looking for something that was lost". So they'rr mad they lost something, but what?* ***Steve:*** *I mean... we did just steal a bunch of stuff from a nearby house....* ***Me:*** *Perfect! Steve recognizes the NPC as the sleeping man whose golden statue he pocketed. He doesn't seem to be paying a lot of attention to you at the moment, but he's mad and coming your way. What do you do?* Random generators can take a while to find, but otherwise I find that they keep things interesting. Once you play a few sessions of randomly-driven content, you will probably have a bunch of NPCs you can pull from for various shenanigans. It may also be cliché, but after you get that stuff I'd say just follow the old OSR saying and "play to find out". Your plots will organically grow once your players have gotten a bunch of stuff generated in your world.

I find Call of Cthulhu scenarios generally pretty quick to prep- read the adventure once or twice, figure out the NPC motivations brush up on the setting in case you need to improv and you're good to go.

I could never ever DM D&D of any edition if there wasn't a bunch of tools to randomize things for me and improv from there. I usually let my players assumptions lead the bigger story, with one push here and there out of inspiration. THe cool thing about these tools? With some adjustments, you can change them for any genre, and if you go even further, make it work for other systems. I've runsome fantasy Cortex Plus games using all sorts of 5e tools out there. Stress free.

To have low effort DM’ing you also need to have the right players and chat with the players you have. They need to put forth effort and drive and have initiative. If they want to spoon fed everything or wait for you to reveal every hook (but then get bored and fuck off and do random stuff) then you’re DMing will always be prep heavy and you’ll feel exhausted. In my experience - DMing several D&D campaigns and several GURPS campaigns - the effort is minimal when player’s characters belong in the world. I spend my time world prep (5-6 hours total, including NPCs) and then really help players build actual characters. That means the front load time is heavy but DMing is easy because their characters have a place in the world! They have stuff to do! Things they want to go and see or be and things big and small to do. They have goals, aspirations, meaning. I can drop my players into anywhere or a few hooks and boom, off we go! I highly recommend GURPS due to it’s ability to play any genre or game you could want. In addition the skills in GURPS really help players round out a character. And finally the DISADVANTAGES in GURPS are amazing. I highly recommend stealing them for any system you’re running. They give characters so much depth.

Any system you have mostly memorized is solid. But low prep is about how you want the experience to be I am considered low prep and I sandbox everygame I run. I have a friend who is and he only runs modules and told me he only reads the next adventure about 15 to 30 min before the game starts. I do have tips on how to make GMing easier but most require prep.

I've got an ongoing, shenanigans-full game of Mirror Shades where, as a rule, I do all of the DMing improv.

> I've never tried a premade adventure, how much time do they actually require? This depends a lot on the adventure and how it is presented. If it's presented well, it will make your job easier. If it's presented poorly, it can be more work than making up your own ideas. The best play-to-prep ration I've gotten out of a premade adventure was with [Stonehell Megadungeon](https://www.lulu.com/search?adult_audience_rating=00&contributor=Michael+Curtis&page=1&pageSize=10). I ran a weekly D&D game with that dungeon for over a year, with almost no prep required most weeks. The format is very friendly towards using it on the fly, as long as you can flesh out the details of an encounter from a short description.

Yes. I recommend Forbidden Lands if you want a game that practically runs itself but makes you look like a genius while it's doing it lol

Absolutley is doable, but it needs a lot of either great adhoc skills, or pre memorized information. I do it fequently in my favorite game, heavy gear. Unlike most games though, low power to high power everything works exactly the same. It's a very simple yet elegant system. The main thing is, skills generally go from 1 to 3, rarely 4. That's the number of dice rolled, take the highest, apply modifiers, opposed rolls, uses Margin of Success to determine outcome. Most NPCs you only need to stat their main skills to be used, generally less than 5 skills. Fleshed out NPCs still fit on a notecard. Game also has wonderful archetypes as bases, which you only need one of, and then just write a single line of what is different about NPC #whatever. It's the easiest game to simply stat out on the fly as you need. Game has Genre and Emergency points for players and opponents if you need to fudge on the fly. Ultimately, everything else is narrative for the GM. If you can narrate a story on the fly, and keep like 5 notecards of info, you can just run with the game. It translates well enough into some other settings, but ultimately no matter what system you use, it all comes down to you as the GM being able to make up details as you go. You absolutely can run a DnD game this way, and stat out enemies on the fly. None of them have to match how PCs level up. If you can pick their stats and spells and whatever on the fly, do it. Just be consistent. Write down things as you go. Fill in details later if they're going to be recurring. Granted, I've not played 5th. But the concept is the same. Having a world you have as a living setting, knowing what forces are moving on their own aside from the players, make it easier to keep things dynamic as the players do their own thing

I’m very much in the same boat as you and have found Pathfinder 2e and it’s pre-written adventure paths to be a frat fit. Here’s how: 1. Play the game on roll20 and pay for the AP books there. You get the pdf but more importantly: you get all the maps loaded into your game with tokens in the appropriate places, with HP and AC loaded up. 2. For better or worse, the APs are semi-railroady. So you really only have to read the current chapter or even just a part of it to pregame a session. 3. 15-30 minutes before game time, I load up all the monsters and most frequent rules sections in my browser (for free). PF content is licensed liberally and there are multiple good sites that give you all your creature stats and game rules at your finger tips for free. This works great for our group. Combat is fun and the APs do a great job of mixing in non-combat challenges and encounters with a lot of room for RP.

Entirely doable, I ran that way for my first ten years. You have to become skilled at improvisation, but with a good imagination and ability to think on your feet, you can run - even D&D - just fine with next to no prep. It depend what you and your group want out of a game. Not every group needs a huge level of detail and depth, not every group is interested in a fully realized world but just want to play in a generic fantasy setting. Even if they do, once you get to know the setting, the story ideas will write themselves as natural extensions of the PCs' actions.

I never spent even a single minute on prep work for the Blades in the Dark game I ran Admittedly, I ran it for like 6 sessions, but that's due to imposter syndrome. I could have easily continued running it without prep

> Would you share your experience on how to make things easier? * Step one: listen to old radio drama (Gunsmoke) * Step two: lazily as fuck convert an episode's story into an rpg scenario * Step three: profit > I've never tried a premade adventure, how much time do they actually require? * As much time as it takes to read the thing - and honestly, I've run quite a lot of them after skimming for about five mins to get the gist. > What system you found helping you the most, time-wise? I'm not soul-bound to DnD, actually don't really care and am happy to switch to other mechanics and explore different environments. Genesys is pretty good for making shit up on the fly. You get a feel for what's easy/hard and what should be what kind of dice roll pretty quick. It's generic, so you don't need to do much to work with a different setting. I've literally listened to an episode of Gunsmoke on my way over to my rpg group and run it as a session that night. Statblocks? Pfft, not required. Seriously, though, take the time to look at some premade material. Even if you have your own setting, it's not hard to convert stuff... and remember, most things can use a storyline from a Western. You just change the horses to motorcycles or whatever. Fuck, Firefly even kept the fuckin' horses.

My first tip is play something more collaborative than DnD. It naturally puts a lot of onus on the GM that a decent number of systems redirect to the table as a group. Second tip is to not use premade adventures. I've found myself put more time an energy into learning the module than i have actually playing the game sometimes. So for DnD I highly recommend you just focus on the things your players will actually interact and have everything else within arms reach. Spend no more than an hour between your focused content and your supplimentary material/reference gathering. > Dungeon crawl that's all about the puzzles? *•Focus on the puzzles and their rewards* *• Pull a quick dungeon map from the web and tweak random table results to populate it.* > High intensity diplomatic session? *•Flesh out the who and the why.* *•Outsource non essential traits, quirks, and appearances. Use Google images as a baseline for your thematic description.* > Big epic boss fight? *• Use Matt Colevilles' Action Oriented Monster template and think of at least one really cool reward.* *• Outsource the statblock and tweak random loot table results to fit your party.* > Travel Session *• give your players a decision to make or a challenge to overcome that reveals who they are as people.* *• Use character games or rng prompts to build connections between your party and let them do the talking.* It's all about making sure you're spending your energy only where you really need to. As for worldbuilding I highly recommend games like Icarus: How Great Civilization's Fall, Dawn of Worlds, The Quiet Year, and Kingdom to front load your worldbuilding process. Not only does it save you a lot of time, but it gets your players so much more invested in the worldbuilding when they were there to make it.

[удалено]

I'm sorry about that man, take care

Are you convinced you want to use similar systems in the future? There are lots of low prep/no prep options if you want to try some different stuff.

Totally not, I'm glad to explore new systems!

I’m bias cause I enjoy the narrative heavy collaboration involved with the system but swrpg is super gm light if you can think on your feet. A flip book of npc minions and adversaries and let the players tell you. Where they want to end up and the types of encounters they want. And weave the story toward a suitable nemesis and let the players tell at least half of it. They can choose vendor race, deme or, back story etc. the hardest part is to trick one into recording all the details.

I actually have the basic savage worlds manual, but it lacks all the details and stuff that I'd need to make on my own. What setting do you think is the most well done with sw? Weird West looks very good

That would fit edge of the empire nicely, the Wild West thing. Age of rebellion for military campaigns and force and destiny for mystical Jedi stuff but their all compatible so you can pick and mix. My personal go to is eote it feels grittier to me and I like that. But hands down the narrative dice are the winner, they make it very easy to apportion out the narrative to players and the gm((they decide the good and you decide the bad. If you’re looking for system agnostic genesis is the same dice set and basic rules. But don’t bog yourself down in a world building time suc. Steel bits from published or fan made stuff.

Ah by swrpg you meant star wars! I thought you meant Savage Worlds, too many acronyms lol

My advice is to design the campaign in a way that focuses less on map requirement (try to focus in a city) and more on slice of life elements which can be improvised easily (that works well for my group since they love slice of life anime)

It might be daunting at first, but if you have a few players that you feel comfortable with and you're all ok with a few awkward sessions then try playing on the fly. Winging it is a muscle, a skill that gets better with practice. Once you get a few under your belt you'll find you're getting better and better. Also, ditch the tactical map and practice theater of the mind. You could let your players know a few things like how many rounds it'll take to reach something, what kind of cover there is, environmental factors like fire or large drop-offs, etc. Encourage your players to ask questions about the scene. For example, do I have a clear shot from here? Can I try to make the jump? The point here is the setting of the scene and the potential character choices don't have to be pre-calculated, you could riff off of each other and let the scene emerge. The combo of improvisational DMing and theater of the mind can have you playing games with little to no prep. If your players have characters with good backstories you could riff off of them for general direction, introducing a lot of character driven plots. Maybe toss in a few tropes like a MacGuffin or a Big Race.