Don't Like Prep? Do Not Do It!
As an aside, this is also related to a question that I encourage everyone, but especially gamemasters, to ask themselves. “Is the game that I want to be playing, or is this the group I want to be playing with?”
Prep isn’t a chore, it’s play. Last week, I mentioned this, and today I want to explore it further. I am referring to, and I believe it was Matt Colville, who coined this phrase, the "lonely fun" part of Role-Playing Games and Miniature Wargames. All those creative activities that happen when you are not at the table with others.
As an aside, this is also related to a question that I encourage everyone, but especially gamemasters, to ask themselves. “Is the game that I want to be playing, or is this the group I want to be playing with?” The answer to this question is a very important qualifier to what I am about to say next.
If you are not having fun with your preparation, you should not be doing it. You play to have fun, and everything you do around your game should be fun. This is especially true if you are playing the game that you want to be playing. As a Gamemaster, and Gamemasters often do a lot of the preparation, you should enjoy creating non-player characters, weird situations, and plot twists.
If you do not enjoy this, maybe you should farm this off to one of your players. Surely, someone at the table enjoys the lonely fun of creating characters, has them write one paragraph NPC descriptions, that you can pull out later. If you do not like making factions, have someone in your group make them up.If you do not like painting miniatures or making maps, these things are not necessary for RPGs – I have even seen such tactical crunchy games as Dungeons and Dragons 4E played without maps and figures. I, who really enjoys painting miniatures (poorly) and making maps, played RPGs for almost two decades before 3E enticed me to buy a Chessex wet-erase grid. And I really did add miniatures until the 5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons.
Now, there are those for whom playing with a certain group is more important. I get it, I have a bunch of friends I play Dungeons and Dragons with weekly. I am typically the Dungeon Master, and it is a recreational game. Most of the time, I still really enjoy doing prep, making maps and figures, and thinking about voices and personalities. Being a recreational game, sometimes the prep gets overwhelming, takes too much time, or is something I just do not enjoy doing (like balancing encounters). So here is the deal: I do not do it when it becomes overwhelming. We can rotate Dungeon Masters, and I believe that every recreational game should have someone to cover stretches when the primary DM can’t make it. Also, we play a lot of hardcovers and modules, which need very little prep. Sometimes, I do not balance an encounter; there is a pretty solid bunch of tacticians, so balancing encounters typically means turning the difficulty up 11, Spinal Tpa style, but sometimes, we just end up doing a series of “easy” encounters because I run them straight from the book.
If you dislike prep and you're the only one running games, consider a low-prep game like Blades in the Dark, a GMless game like Fiasco, or a game with prep you enjoy.