New to Sly Flourish? Start Here or subscribe to the newsletter. Listen to articles on Readings and Reflections.

What Excites You?

by Mike on 14 September 2026

Focus your prep on what excites you about your next game. Use what excites you to motivate you to prepare and run your next session.

Getting Overwhelmed

It's easy to get overwhelmed when thinking about our games. RPGs offer us wide open and uncharted seas to explore. We can go anywhere. Anything can happen. If we can imagine it, it becomes real. That's a lot of potential territory.

We also know we're going to be running a game for our friends and that's scary too. We're exposing our child-like wonder, a wonderful trait to cultivate and share, and, at the same time making ourselves vulnerable in front of the people we care about.

We also want our players to have a good time. They're taking time out of their lives to spend time with us enjoying stories about monsters and sorcery. That's a big responsibility too.

All of these things can overwhelm us and yet when we do them, we're engaging in something wonderful enough that it's worth all of that. Gaming reduces loneliness and can even save our lives.

I've mentioned often that I think the eight steps of lazy GM Prep are useful because they focus down those vast worlds and scary insecurities into an easy-to-use checklist. Follow these steps (or your own version of them) and you'll be ok.

The Cool Part of your Next Game

Here's another trick to help you break past all of the internal barriers that make it hard to prep — focus on the cool parts.

The cool parts of your game can be many things:

Fun monsters you're excited to run.
A neat theme of your campaign.
A cool map.
A fun scene you want to run.
An NPC you can't wait to step into.
A bit of history you're excited to reveal.
A neat miniature or piece of terrain.
A secret you want to expose.
A funny event you want to take place.

You get to decide what the cool part is. It can be something big or small. It can be part of a published adventure or setting or something unique to your homebrewed world. When you find the cool thing, zero in on it during your prep. Make it your strong start or highlight it in your secrets and clues. Let the rest of your prep swirl outward from your cool thing.

It mostly doesn't matter what your cool thing is except in one area.

Build Situations and Watch Them Unfold

Don't let your cool thing focus on what you think the characters will do. Your cool thing should be independent of the choices of the characters. You don't want to force the characters (driven by their players) into only one path and you don't want to be disappointed if the characters don't do the thing you wanted or expected them to do.

Keep your focus on situational play. Build situations and let the characters navigate them how they will. Get excited by not knowing what is going to happen.

Find the cool thing in your next session and use that excitement to propel you into your prep and into your next game.

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 are last week's questions and answers.

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 RPG Convention Survival Guide and Infiltrating Mezar — Dragon Empire Prep Session 80.

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:

Run a mix of easy and difficult battles. Don't do just one or the other.
Roll a D6 oracle die to let the story play out in ways you didn't expect. The higher the roll, the more extreme or dangerous the situation.
Use a mixture of random treasure and treasure selected for the characters.
Layer history on dungeons. What is it now? What was it before? What was it before that?
Take votes on choices. Make sure those who lose are ok with the majority path anyway. Facilitate the discussion towards a reasonable decision.
Choose one of the players as the "caller" who facilitates discussions and speaks for the group.
Let encounters evolve based on the changing situation. Sometimes combatants flee even before the characters arrive.

Share this article using this link: https://slyflourish.com/what_excites_you.html

Subscribe to Sly Flourish

Subscribe to the weekly Sly Flourish newsletter and receive a free adventure generator PDF!

Get More from Sly Flourish

Sly Flourish's Books

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only by including the following statement in the new work:

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

This site may use affiliate links to Amazon and DriveThruRPG. Thanks for your support!