How Zero Prep Games Work (RPGs as structural experiences)
Hello creatures,
Seen a lot of stuff on Twitter about prep lite or even zero prep gaming for old school D&D. I’ve been flirting with this idea a little recently and it’s made me realise something.
Zero prep games are not zero prep. They’re built on a body of experience and intuition.
I realised this after the semi-failure of my hex fill rules. Within are detailed rules for generating types of castles, but come game time, these tables just did not help me at all. What was missing? An idea of how encounters like that are used at the table.
Running an RPG well is a combination of a three things. Rules that create a good structure for your game, stuff you have prepped that interface with those rules, and tools that let you generate stuff that fits the rules of the game (like encounter tables). These three things construct an experience that is playing the RPG at the table.
Rules are conducive to certain actions in the game world. Example: in Old School D&D, you will have the best (or at least, most structured, therefore directed, therefore easiest to run, therefore likely to be higher in quality (rules matter!) ) experience when you explore the dungeon or the wilderness or fight monsters.
Here’s the thing: when you know what the experience is, you can actually leave some of the stuff you need to construct that experience blank until you need it. Since you know what you’re aiming for, you have all the tools to fill in the blanks to get to that experience. The actual filling in of the blanks (generating game content on the fly at the table) becomes easy and cohesive when you know how the game goes. At the end of the day, it doesnt really matter which hallway we’re crawling down, just that there’s gold at the end.
So actually. You need a strong understanding of the game structure, or at least the feeling the game gives you as its going. This is why old people on twitter keep harping on about reading the books and playing the game (very good advice). Developing this strong intuition for how a game flows means you don’t have to prep beyond speculating about the setting (or, more likely, absorbing lots of relevant media and stealing the stuff your players haven’t read).
My castle generating tables didn’t work for me because I had no idea about how a castle encounter goes. It wasn’t until I read the AD&D DMG (pg. 183) that I got an idea.
This is where a lot of the people that yell on twitter have diferences I think. From one side (the ghibli-core 5e crowd), the experience they are looking for hanging out with friends, speaking to cool people. This is why they get laughed at when they say they use 5e. People (usually old grognards) familiar with D&D know that the game is ostensibly about fighting monsters and winning treasure. This side see the others doing things that outwardly violate the learned intution they have about the system. These people want fundamentally different games. It’s very funny that both of them play D&D.