I definitely agree with this (I’ve found myself making worlds, cities, creatures, etc, just for the fun of creating), however, in my personal experience, it isn’t really prepping it, as much as it is being creative and making environments as the game develops and plays (making it up as you go). This may be because I do not have a good understanding as to how one should prep a game, as I really don’t have have much experience with role playing games (nor have I been playing with people who have any more experienced than myself, in most cases). Either way, so far, I tend to find it far more fun to create the adventure as the players go, rather than preparing a lot of material before hand. Not to say I don’t have anything prepared, but I’d say about 3/4th or more is created during the session. I tend to find that if I prep a lot prior to playing, it feels like I’m restricting the players too much.

I make outlines as to what is going to happen, but all the details in between major parts is purely made up as I go, and created around the players reactions.

I’m rambling a bit, but, I hope that gets what I mean across.

P.S: I’m starting to think that low prep games are not that cool. My players were like: “Right on!” when I handed them the map I drew of the town and surrounding area. The simple map I drew was enough to draw them closer to the world.

This works for me because if I know my NPCs – what they want, the type of people they are, what their background is, who they’re connected with, etc – then I have everything I need to manage their interactions with the players.

The bottom line is: let the characters tell the story. In the case of an RPG, the “characters” include both the PCs and NPCs.

I do love world creation, but I think I’d benefit from more player-generated content, so to speak.

Perhaps most enjoyable for me is that it stretches me as a GM. It can be harder work than a high prep game because of the time constraint. I ran a game of DRYH at a con and I sweated bullets because of the time pressure. But in the end it was a great experience.

I very strongly disagree with that statement. My rich, detailed homebrew setting, which I’m running a sandbox game in at the moment, is easy to run because of its high level of detail. I have NPCs and organizations that have clear motives and complex interrelationships. This gives the world verisimillitude, rather than just being a backdrop for the orc-bashing of Thog the Barbarian and his friends.

Granted, I run D&D 3.5, which can be very heavy on prep (so you wanna roll a enemy NPC with many class levels? maybe even a prestige class? Cue at least 30 mins of chargen), but at least I don’t have to dwell on how my world reacts to what the players do.

I have heard somewhere that inside every GM lives a frustrated writer, so there is some level of thruth to what you say. IMO, this is the motivation for quite a few GMs – the _collaborative_ storytelling of running a game.

Besides, for many games you need to prep in a wholly different way: if you play with a relmap and bangs structure you’ll have to think how the “map” evolves from game to game, what the NPCs will do, and what bangs you can prepare (even if most of them will not go off, probably) for the next session. The best thing is that you can do most of that while driving to work, instead of pouring over manuals.

…if you really feel the need to write and detail a word, really, you should write fiction, ’cause that’s what you are doing anyway.