There is a wonderful sequence in the Aardman Animation film ‘The Wrong Trousers’ that features a homage to classic mad-cap chases from The Keystone Cops, Harold Lloyd and other greats. In it, the dog, Gromit, is holding on for dear life to the model steam engine of a train set that is travelling preposterously fast. In order to prevent disaster, he has to keep laying the track ahead of the engine, one piece at a time, at furious speed. This is how I describe my GM prep for sessions of play. Although for some investigation games and campaigns with definite story arcs, I might have a meta-plot (in the case of my metaphor, this is ‘the chase’) I don’t permit myself to prep for anything other than the next session - and that often only in outline (continuing the metaphor, I lay one piece of the track at a time, often in a great hurry).
Of course, this means that one has to be willing to throw prep away as soon as the shape of the session becomes clear. In the most recent session for my current Cthulhu Dark mini-campaign, I prepped a bunch of locations and NPCs that could be used to advance the investigation, knowing full well that I would almost certainly never use 50% to 80% of the notes I’d made. In the end, it was closer to 80% that was junked. But that’s alright, because they were only a few lines of description and what could be found out in any given encounter. Better yet, as the characters do what they do, they almost forge the next piece of the track for me because I take their speculations and use them to inform what might happen going forward.
There is a wonderful sequence in the Aardman Animation film ‘The Wrong Trousers’ that features a homage to classic mad-cap chases from The Keystone Cops, Harold Lloyd and other greats. In it, the dog, Gromit, is holding on for dear life to the model steam engine of a train set that is travelling preposterously fast. In order to prevent disaster, he has to keep laying the track ahead of the engine, one piece at a time, at furious speed. This is how I describe my GM prep for sessions of play. Although for some investigation games and campaigns with definite story arcs, I might have a meta-plot (in the case of my metaphor, this is ‘the chase’) I don’t permit myself to prep for anything other than the next session - and that often only in outline (continuing the metaphor, I lay one piece of the track at a time, often in a great hurry).
Of course, this means that one has to be willing to throw prep away as soon as the shape of the session becomes clear. In the most recent session for my current Cthulhu Dark mini-campaign, I prepped a bunch of locations and NPCs that could be used to advance the investigation, knowing full well that I would almost certainly never use 50% to 80% of the notes I’d made. In the end, it was closer to 80% that was junked. But that’s alright, because they were only a few lines of description and what could be found out in any given encounter. Better yet, as the characters do what they do, they almost forge the next piece of the track for me because I take their speculations and use them to inform what might happen going forward.