After having written about how much we should write, and how abstraction relates to what material we prepare, I’ve been thinking more about how much detail we should prep for games. Now there’s kind of a shortcut answer here: as much or as little as you want.
But I’m someone who preps heavy. The sort of person who always feels like I could have done more. So for my own sanity, and perhaps the sanity of others, I dug into the idea of the benefits and trade offs of preparing more detail for our games.
What I came up with is a system of ‘prep levels’ which help guide me as to how much to prepare for a game.
Levels of prep
We’ll consider a very simple example: there’s a bandit in a dungeon room.
Level 1: Essential
This is the bare minimum you need to establish facts. In this case, noting ‘Bandit’ in the location key. We know a bandit is present, and we probably have a statblock.
Level 2: Present state
Next, we might describe the present state of the bandit: ‘Slumped against the wall with a stab wound’. Perhaps we give a name and quick description too: ‘Argrin, stocky and grubby’. Maybe a behaviour too: ‘scared to die’.
Level 3: Connectivity and causation
Here we move onto stuff that might not be immediately apparent. Stuff like:
Does the bandit have a long-term goal?
Who stabbed the bandit? Why were they down here?
What happens if we save them?
What NPCs is the bandit involved with?
Level 4: Window-dressing
This is detail which might be nice to have in the sense of presentation but goes beyond anything that’s categorically useful for scenario design. This is going to be pretty subjective to different GMs.
Minimise Level 4 prep
It is worth minimising level 4 prep as much as possible to reduce the problems that come with prepping heavy:
It becomes harder to navigate your prep (density).
You have to read more in-session (presentation).
Your prep is more likely to break or not be used (brittleness).
It becomes harder to improvise because of the constraints that heavy preparation sets on the game world (narrowness).
And all of this without much gain at level 4.
When prepping, we should ask: does this piece of information warrant the trade-offs we pay for by adding more detail? For level 4 prep, the answer is always no. Unless we are twiddling thumbs and want something to do of course.
Level 2 is the baseline
By default, we should prep content to level 2. The reason for that is so that we can easily arbitrate any in-the-moment actions by players. It also means we don’t have too many instantaneous holes-to-plug with improvisation without a foundation.
This is to say it’s good to detail what the current situation of the bandit is. Do we need to describe the current situation in totality? No. It’s ok to not give the bandit any aesthetic detail. But let’s get the core stuff in place so it’s easy to fill in other details if we need to.
Level 3 prep highlights what is most important
Areas where we plan connectivity and causation are the most important parts of our prep. It’s taking a highlighter and scribbling ‘THIS IS IMPORTANT’ next to your notes.
But if we scribble that next to every piece of prep… none of it is important.
So we deploy the classic 80:20 rule. Connectivity and causation should be an additional layer of design placed on up to 20% of our prepared material. More than that, and we get problems:
Players get overwhelmed attempting to engage with all the connective tissue.
GMs get overwhelmed and lose track of the state of play.
We can make the flow of our game design difficult to navigate.
So we stick to using more complex designs for around 20% of our prepared material.
Level 1 prep highlights what matters less
We use level 1 prep to fill in gaps that do need to be filled but that we don’t want to care about much.
You might note that there are bookcases in a room but provide no details about the books. It needs to be clear that this room was a library, but the books don’t matter, nor the nature of the bookcases.
The negative space left here can be filled with some improvised window dressing because the details aren’t important, or used as an opportunity to inject some improvised content to change things up.
A threshold percentage isn’t needed for this level, you just use it when it makes sense.
Wrap-up
I’m not going to adhere to this like a strict set of rules, but I’ll refer to it when I want to take a look at my levels of game prep detail. It should keep me focused on a practical level of prep and stop me overprepping.
It should allow me to spin my game design web without over-engineering and to keep the game world from becoming too brittle due to the amount of established detail.
Hopefully it’s useful for you too!
Level 4 may not be important and yet also often asked for by players.
I couldn't tell you how many times someone has asked, "what makes the chair ornate?", Or equivalent.
The most common one seems to be names of bit NPCs. "Hey, GM, what's this person's name?", may be a question you dread hearing and this captures how level 4 varies from GM to GM.
It also helps us think about smart prep. Make a big list of names that fit your setting and just cross them off when you use one. We are still preparing 'level 4 detail' but we have made it less costly.