Inevitable Gulash posed an excellent question on Discord. Would you rather do 1 or 2?

My knee jerk response was to choose 1, but as I thought about it more, I found it varied based on the system I was running. If I was running D&D, I'd prefer 1, but if I was running something else like Mothership, then I'd prefer option 2.

This led me to wonder how other folks prep their games. Prep is such a big idea that goes into playing RPGs, but it's kind of an ambiguous thing. What goes into prep? How much prep is needed? Where do I start with prep? It's obvious how contextual it is based on the person, system, and content being run that there's no right answer. The most important thing prep provides is this:

Prep builds confidence which builds agency in deviating from the written content.

Roll to Doubt captures this well by saying, "Prep is the material I need to comfortable improvise during pay as a reaction to player action and to conduct what is the shared goal for the session." I would agree with this as to the goal of prep, but it doesn't answer what it is. I'm adding to the prep blogwagon an entire year late with this post which is great as I have a bunch of material to draw on. Shoutout to elmcat for adding the search engine feature on the webring just as I began writing this. Anyway, the premise of the blogwagon was to share how each blogger prepped.

This outermost layer of prep relates to time. It's campaign versus session, and the prep for both vary significantly.

The next layer relates to travel. How is the party moving through the world? This will determine the types of prep being done. Arguably, this layer could be skipped as all things are a pointcrawl and prepping for them preps you for all. Although I'm realzing that while you can get lost in a hexcrawl, you can't get lost on a pointcrawl or in a dungeon, really. I mean...anything is possible, but I don't normally see that happening...

World Town

I realized I can't talk about prep without understanding my own prep style. I took my recent Cloud Empress campaign to analyze what I prepped versus improvised and how much provided module content I used. I ended up