Zero Prep Considered Harmful

Why engaging with your own game is not a waste of time.

It’s that time of the month, Zero Prep has come up on the RPG Wheel of Internet Yelling once again, with some overlap in dungeon ecology this time. This is one debate I perennially participate in, because it’s one that I have a very strong opinion on; and as you probably gathered from the title, it’s not a positive one. Let’s get to it.

In defense of Zero Prep

Zero Prep is a play style that seeks to ease or erase the number one cited reason of Referee burnout: the amount of time a Referee must spend preparing for sessions. This prep can include anything from generating NPCs, stocking dungeons, laying out quest hooks, to more grand things such as world building or full dungeon design. In a traditional campaign, the dungeon master may feel forced to do such things before every session, which can easily lead to many more hours of work than an average player needs to put into a campaign.

There are many solutions to this very real issue, but the Zero Prep solution is almost exactly what it sounds like. Simply do not do traditional prep. Instead, rely on tools such as Appendix A and B from the ad&d dmg to generate content on-the-fly in session, utilizing your knowledge of Fantasy literature tropes (especially those from Appendix N if using ad&d) and game sense to fill in the gaps and answer questions that arise from the random results. The most extreme variant I have heard advocated for is to not even bother prepping a campaign map. Simply have the players in a town somewhere and only roll the surrounding terrain as it become relevant; if any nonsensical results show up, just roll with them and justify it using your imagination.

This style has several real advantages. Namely, it does reduce weekly referee workload significantly. It also means that any fantasy you consume now goes into your “prep bucket” (and let’s all be honest, you were going to steal that cool monster / trap / character from whatever you were reading anyway). It also completely does away with the idea that players can “ruin” a session because they went off the beaten path. There is no path, just tables that you can use to come up with an interesting challenge as needed. You will always be able to run a session; and with practice actually using these tools, you will be able to run a fairly high quality session at the drop of a hat.

The promise of zero prep is that you can run a good session and campaign with minimal between session effort of determining scenarios. It is a great tool on the tool belt of any referee of intermediate or better skill, provided they have put in the effort to learn the skill.

Whence the Harm?

Zero Prep truly is a skill, one you have to hone on its own. No one wants to sit at a table while a referee hems and haws flipping through pages of appendices they don’t understand. Appendix A is complicated; you can’t just rock up to a table having never used it. However, once it is learned, that is all the learning you need to do. Once you have acquired the skill, you never need to prep for a session again. It’s the difference between practicing a specific song and learning how to sight read music. There is a fundamental change in the level you think about the craft of running a game once you’ve understood the Zero Prep Philosophy.

So why (besides generating traffic) have I categorized Zero Prep as “harmful?” There are two major reasons, the first are what I consider adverse effects to the game, and the second is a meta issue of communication that links with the disclaimer above. Tackling the adverse effect first, those are: Turning the game from one where choices are meaningful to a simply slot machine, referee constraints, and content regurgitation.

Monty Hall’s Revenge

Let’s look at the slot machine allegation first. This manifests most egregiously in the dungeon crawling section of the game. Fundamentally, the point of a dungeon crawl is for players to correctly assess their abilities and the location of treasure and extract the treasure. It’s sort of an obtuse shell game (though one that is actually being played straight, and not an out and out scam). The players are looking for the treasure hidden in a room, the same way a player of a shell game is looking for a the bean hidden under a shell. An even better analogy is the same set up used in the Monty Hall Problem. Imagine you are in a really terrible dungeon. It consists of an entry chamber with three interior doors. Behind two doors are stinky goblins and behind the third is the goblin’s treasure. In a prepped dungeon the Referee knows which is which. In a zero prep dungeon, he doesn’t. He will instead roll a dice (a d3 in this case) to determine contents after a door is opened. Clearly, these are two different problems entirely to solve. The prepped dungeon consists of thee dependent doors, while the ones in the zero prep dungeon are independent. Now imagine that the party picks a door to open, however the goblins burst out of a different room before they can open it. Once the goblins are dispatched, what should the party do? The answer depends on whether or not the dungeon is prepped. If it is prepped, the party should actually open the other door, as that has the highest chance of containing treasure. If it’s zero prep, changing their door choice doesn’t matter, as the dice roll after is what determines contents. It’s always a 2/3 chance of goblins, since the doors are independent.

If you want this to go away, you have to change up the zero prep procedure somewhat. For example, you could have a limited number of possible outcomes. Say you after the party sees 2 goblin rooms in a dungeon, you simply have the next room be the treasure. Or if they hit the treasure room on the first roll, then they are guaranteed to only get goblins the rest of the time. However, this still changes the relationship of the rooms to semi-dependent as opposed to fully dependent rooms.

This removes a large part of the skill of the game. Looking at rooms, making informed decisions about dungeon layout and clues you get from room and hallway descriptions to intuit where the treasure is located forms a massive part of the dungeon crawling game play loop. It is extremely difficult to do that while a Referee is rolling everything at the table, even if he is using a deterministic method (appendix A is not deterministic. You will never find the “end” of a dungeon until the referee determines there to be an end). The referee simply lacks the information needed to telegraph things like that to the players. Unless he pre-rolls everything, but that is not zero prep, that’s prep using a generator.

Gilded Handcuffs

The second effect on the game is more personal. Whenever I’ve used zero prep as outlined (in the last 8 or so sessions of the mercenary game specifically) I feel extremely constrained as a referee. Zero Prep forces me to actively check out of the game that I am running because it takes away several aspects of the game I personally enjoy immensely.

The first thing it removes is the fun of having players in a dungeon. Let’s go back to my earlier point on how zero prep fundamentally changes the nature of a dungeon crawl. Lets say I have prepped a dungeon with a secret room near the entrance, this room is full of goblins. However, they won’t attack unless the players are doubling back through while retreating. If the players find the door and kill the goblins, I am happy to see them playing well. If they don’t and are attacked, I am also happy because I got to spring such a devious trap on them. If they look into the entry and say “screw this, let’s go do something else.” I am happy because my imposing entrance spooked them. This may come as a shock to many people, but I fundamentally enjoy when players interact with something I have created; even if that interaction is “missing content.”

Zero Prep takes this away from me, and replaces it with something much more boring. Now if they players get attacked by goblins while exiting, that’s just what the dice decided. I (and by extension the goblins) didn’t plan that. Sure, we can post-hoc justify it as a goblin plan, but it wasn’t. It was just bad luck that couldn’t be played around.

In this way, Zero Prep is a sort of devil’s bargain. Sure, I’m free from prep but am now bound to delivering a game that is far less satisfying for me to run (anecdotally it’s also far less satisfying for my players to play. They feel how artificial the content produced is and complain about it). It’s less satisfying because I can’t point to a map I made or modified and say “yeah they made some wrong turns here and walked into a nasty monster lair with no treasure” instead I have to say “Well, they just had some bad rolls tonight for even having a chance of success.” This checks me out of the game as a referee completely.

Wandering Encounters, an aside

Disingenuous vagabonds may perhaps attempt to read the above example as me being fundamentally against wandering encounters. On the contrary, a good wanderers table makes a dungeon. The key difference is that players can play around wanderers. They know, at least roughly, how often the checks are and what actions might incur a check. If, in the prepped example they did find the goblin ambush and still got caught out by a wanderer check while exiting, it still feels like the dice screwing them. However, in that case it was already established that the goblins had an ambush point, so the fiction that the goblins hastily cobbled together a second ambush fits more neatly into the established fiction of the dungeon. Secondarily, many wandering monster tables I create have groups tied to what exists in the dungeon. If there’s 30 goblins total, and the players kill 30 goblins during their delve. Then they will not hit that encounter. They have successfully eliminated that threat. A prospect not allowed (except by DM fiat, also known as fudging) in a Zero Prep game.

We’ve all read Tower of the Elephant

Advocates of zero prep, especially those from the ad&d corner of the world often cite the supreme story generation capabilities of ad&d and how good it’s implied setting is. They will argue that the point of the tools ad&d provides is to generate stories like those found in Appendix N. On this they are correct, ad&d provides a vehicle for outputting a campaign that would be right at home there. But that is all it produces; you are never going to produce something outside of the implied setting of ad&d. For some groups, this is more than enough. Others might simply need to change the encounter tables to produce different flavors, but you are still going going to get the implied setting of whatever tables you are using. This means that zero prep game play runs the risk of getting extremely stale. Just like any rouge like eventually becomes stale as a player learns the rhythm of the game; and this impending staleness will come about faster if your group is simply regurgitating the same tropes as what is found in the literature whatever the random tools are seeking to replicate.

This is content regurgitation. People complain about content regurgitation when players bring the 500th Drizzt clone to the table; why should players accept 500 sessions of algorithmic dungeons. Which is what fully embracing a fully zero prep style will produce. The fact of the matter is, if you reduce your role as a referee to rolling dice and telling a pretty story about the results (a story which is just a hodgepodge of the last three Conan stories your group passed around with some names changed) then you can and will be replaced by an AI. ChatGPT can be trained on how to read Appendix A and filled will Appendix N reference material to justify results. Zero Prep done straight devolves into soulless slop.

The common rebuttal is “Well if your group is good, you will create a compelling story together!” Which is an utterly toothless response, as if your group is good you can do the same with prepped content or, heaven forbid, modules. Playing with friends makes many things better, that doesn’t change the inherent issues in whatever is going on. Modules are still fundamentally someone else’s work being shoehorned into your game. Traditional prep is still going to cause burnout, and Zero Prep is still going to lead to stale game play. A group may prefer any of these things in any combination, so this line of argumentation is a waste of time. It is just another form of “this is more fun.” Fun is subjective and only extends as far as your own table. Anyone using it as a justification for why their game is objectively better than anyone else’s is arguing in bad faith.

Communication via the Tubes

That last sentence was kind of harsh wasn’t it? Everyone? Really? Isn’t that a hasty generalization? Yes, it is. Intentionally so. There are several situations where I could think of someone saying “My game is better than yours because my group enjoys it more than we would yours” and it not be in bad faith. The most common of these is that they genuinely believe that whoever they were talking to would also enjoy their style more. This is the wellspring of stupid catchphrases like “prep addiction.” A generous reading of how this term is used is that it’s intentionally inflammatory to shake people out of a rut. But that’s rarely what actually happens. People mostly just hear “your game is bad because you do something I don’t like” and then it’s off to the races. Insulting people outright is rarely the way to get them to actually think about the ideas you are presenting.

The second half of this coin is the other side. Suppose someone says “alright, fine, I will try this zero prep thing.” Maybe they were growing bored with their methods and had a series of bad games. So they run it and find that actually they don’t like the results it produces. Then they report back to whoever told them of it, and generally the response is something like “well you’re an idiot who didn’t do it right.” Which helps no one, except the people ego farming on twitter. While I am sure people on the prep heavy side also do this, I generally see it from the Zero Prep crowd far far more. Zero Prep comes with such a bad method of communicating it’s merits and receiving criticism that it often feels futile to even discuss it’s genuine merits at all. Since anything other than slack jawed praise is met with derision and scorn from it’s adherents.

On Prep Addiction and Wasting Time

So I’ve spent most of this blog post complaining about the gripes I have with Zero Prep. But instead of simply leaving it at that, I’m going to talk about my normal process and why I think it’s the best (for numerous subjective reasons). People don’t need to agree or adopt it, I’m not selling anything. But I genuinely enjoy running games and want more people to have that feeling. Referees should not be getting burned out by whatever prep method they use and I want to present an alternative to both.

Campaign Prep, not session prep

Firstly, all of my heavy prep is done before a campaign even starts. That means:

• Maps

• Major Dungeon Locations

• Regional Monster Lairs

• Wilderness Wanderer tables

• Settlements and rulers

• Nearby Major Dungeon Maps

I generally followed a process similar to that in the ACKS II Judges Journal, but now that I have that resource I generally go through that checklist. This is a lot of work, it can take me a few months¹ to get a campaign map ready before I start. The Reichstag game took a full year to plan. Is this a lot of work? yes. But I also don’t do it often. The last game I prepped like this for was the original Shallow Sea campaign, which ran for two years and took around 3 months of campaign prep. So it’s been almost three years since I did this last. Note that this allows me alot of use. I’m running three games on the Reichstag Game map, the Reichstag itself, the Mercenary Game and a conventional story campaign, and am nowhere close to using up all the content that is there. The same goes for the Shallow Sea. Once a campaign map is prepped like this, you don’t need to constantly fill stuff out.

The bulk of this work is actually the last step. I like to seed my starting area with filled out dungeon maps to kick start the campaign.

Prep what you want, not what’s “needed”

This is where my method diverges from general prep advice. I basically never consider what my players are doing when deciding what micro details to prep. If I want to prep a vampire lair in disguise as a merchant house, I do. If I want to prep a city riot, I do. If I want to make a stupid lighthouse dungeon halfway across the continent, I do. That all goes into my world. I may occasionally drop hints at goings on but my players are free to bite or ignore it as they want. The fact is good players are not going to be staying on the dungeon treadmill forever, or even that long. The game is going to move to a faction war way faster than you can manage, so you generally don’t need to constantly be putting out dungeons each week; and once the game reaches that stage, you spend less time prepping and more time reacting to what the players are doing, one way or the other.

Vary your prep methods

Sometimes I don’t want to build something. My notes on a major dungeon location are as simple as “I’m running Temple of Elemental Evil here.” Sometimes I grab a Dyson map, sometimes I make something from the ground up. Sometimes a take a group of NPC adventurers and run an appendix A solo game to generate a new dungeon. This is how I engage with the world I’m running. This is part of the fun for me as a referee. It’s why I don’t view my players missing something as a “waste.” It’s not a waste to spend my time thinking about how the world works independent of my players. If my players are playing well then they will force me to think about how to world reacts to them and that will be my ‘prep’

Have a backup

Finally, my dirty little secret is that I keep zero prep in my back pocket. No matter what, players are sometimes going to go completely 180 of anything you ever expected. Before, this was an issue we had to have to whole “Hey guys, I don’t have anything for this, lets do something else” song and dance. Now I don’t. If the players decide to travel months away from the starting area and start poking around, then I just use zero prep methods for that session. I generally don’t enjoy it as much, but it is a session; and not every session has to be this grand adventure. Sometimes an evening of gaming just sucks. The goal is the aggregate. In the aggregate I’ve found that my games are the most enjoyable for me and my players when I put the effort in ahead of time to 1 create an interesting campaign world and 2 continue engaging with that campaign world, even if that engagement isn’t always (or even mostly) immediately applicable to the group. As I said earlier, most enjoyable for me and my group does not mean that it is the objective best. Different groups have wildly different goals, and standards which are frankly bizarre and alien to me. I trust that they have the intelligence to read this and decide for themselves whether it’s useful for them.

Conclusion

This post is a bit of a jumbled mess, and I am at peace with that. The fact is, I’ve been very put out with the state of hobby discussion in the last few months, and haven’t really wanted to engage with it in any way. I see clout chasing and cliche spitting constantly, both on Twitter where it’s expected and in discord that I frequent. The fact is Zero Prep has positive use cases, but it also has serious drawbacks. It’s not my preferred tool by a long shot. I think the games it produces are formulaic, boring and more akin to a slot machine than an adventure game. But, I still think referee’s looking to increase their skill should learn it. It will reduce the number of sessions that don’t fire drastically, and at the end of the day the point is playing the game, not blogging about it. But so long as the people behind it refuse to acknowledge those drawbacks and instead reach for insults and buffoonery, we aren’t going to get anywhere.

Sail On,
-ShockTohp

1. This is not months of 40 hour weeks. I prep when I can in between real life.