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The Secret of the Eight Steps of Lazy Game Prep

by Mike on 1 September 2025

There's a hidden secret of the eight steps of game prep outlined in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. The steps themselves are less important than helping you feel like you're getting a handle on the game you're going to run.

Often that feeling of being prepared doesn't come from the notes themselves but from having a step-by-step process to get your head around the practical implications of the game.

You have friends coming over or jumping online to play – what are you going to run for them? Our games can feel limitless. Often we stare into the empty void of possibility and feel madness creeping in like we're some ill-fated Lovecraftian protagonist.

Structure fills this void. The structure of the eight steps helps us follow a step-by-step procedure to turn this giant ball of proto-soup into real things we can use during our game.

Our game prep process helps us feel like we have a handle on the game we're going to run. That's the most important thing. The specific elements of our prep might be less important.

Your prep has one purpose – to help you get your hands around the next game you're going to run. Whatever steps get you there – those steps are there to serve you. You don't owe your prep process or notes anything.

Because our prep process serves us to run great games, it's important to look at each element of our prep and ask if it helped serve that purpose. If it didn't, maybe we skip it next time and re-evaluate after our next game. Shaving down our prep to what we need saves time and gives us more freedom to let the game evolve at the table. It's easy to chase perfection – prepping more and more material we don't actually need – when "good enough" might be the better target.

Ensure your prep process and materials serve you to help you run a great game.

That is their only purpose.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video.

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here's last week's question.

How to Reveal Character Secrets

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

Last week I also posted a couple of YouTube videos on Chessex Battle Mat Versus the Pathfinder Flip Mat Basic and Sapphire's Song – Dragon Empire Prep Session 36.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

Roll randomly or seek input from players to build out components of your adventure or campaign.
Use books and paper character sheets. Digital sheets aren’t as convenient as you think.
Seek to understand the relationship between monster power and character power so you can gauge the threat of a potential encounter.
Start and end with the fiction. Describe flavor, then mechanics, then back to flavor.
Run short simple adventures and encounters to understand new systems.
A system may not be for you but that doesn’t make it bad. Find out why people love the ones you don’t.
Build adventures from the backgrounds and motivations of the characters.

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This work includes material taken from SlyFlourish.com by Michael E. Shea available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.

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