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Your Own Prep Framework

by Mike on 26 January 2026

Having a framework for your RPG prep is more important than having the perfect framework. Build your own flexible RPG prep framework from your own experiences and the experiences of other GMs. Prep your games, run your games, evaluate your framework, and modify it to help you run better sessions.

I have no illusions that Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master's eight steps for game prep are the perfect RPG prep framework for all games and all GMs. Instead, I think the popularity of the book comes from simply offering a framework – a flexible one that GMs can easily adapt to their own needs.

Lots of RPG books offer advice for prep but, because they want to write for as many people as possible, they stop short of having a clear set of steps and a clear framework. Instead, these books are often filled with loose general advice that doesn't really help GMs when they're sitting down to prep their games.

So Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master offers the eight steps:

Review the characters
Create a strong start
Outline potential scenes
Define secrets and clues
Develop fantastic locations
Outline important NPCs
Choose relevant monsters
Select rewards

The book is also clear about refining and customizing these steps for your own process and your own games.

I think this two-part approach makes Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master's prep framework valuable. It offers clear steps to help you prep your game and encouragement to customize the steps to fit your own style.

Learn, Prep, Run, Evaluate

What process can we follow to build and evaluate our own prep framework?

Learn
Prep
Run
Evaluate

This cyclic approach helps us continually refine our prep as we learn from the experiences of others, go through our own prep, run our games, and evaluate the results. We read stuff from other GMs, prep our own games based on what we've learned and what experiences we’ve had, run our games, and see how our prep served us during our game. Then we tweak our process based on our experiences and go through the cycle again.

Learn, prep, run, evaluate.

What Do We Evaluate?

To know whether our prep is working, we have to know what we're measuring it against. Like our prep, we might have our own evaluation criteria but here are some ideas:

Did my prep help me run a fun game?
What prep did I use during the game? Did it work?
What prep did I not use? Do I still need it?
Was there anything I wanted that I hadn't prepped?
Did my prep help me improvise as the game moved in new directions?
Did each element of my prep have a low or high impact? Was each element worth the time when considering its impact?

Some of these criteria might not matter to you and you might have other criteria you use to evaluate your prep. The point is to have some sort of criteria so you know if your prep is working or not.

Different Processes for Different Games

Even when tailored for our own style, how and what we prep for our games changes depending on the kind of game we're going to run. Running a session based on the continuation of a dungeon delve in our home campaign world is different from running a one-shot session for players we've never met using a published adventure. Our process for prep has to be flexible enough to handle the different types of games we run. I offer four different takes on the eight steps in my Choosing the Right Steps article but there are certainly other situations and approaches as well.

Each of us has different things we might want to prep and a different process for doing so. We can learn from one another through the books we read, the videos we watch, and the forums we engage in to help us build our own prep process. Then we can conduct our prep, run our games, see how it worked out, and continue the cycle again.

Step by step walk the thousand mile road.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

I was at PAGE3 in Philadelphia last week so there wasn't a Talk Show, Lazy GM Prep video, or any other stuff like that. I'll be talking all about my experiences at PAGE3 on the next Lazy RPG Talk Show, (also available as a podcast). I'll link to the various topics in the next newsletter.

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:

When in-game conversations get tiresome, have NPCs move the story onward.
Use maps and handouts to give players another dimension of play.
Leave a little decompression time at the end of a session.
Ask players what they have enjoyed in your game and what they want to see more of.
Old monuments at campsites are a great vehicle for secrets and clues.
Try to give hints when the characters are on the wrong track.
Give players the option to engage in certain battles so they can choose their gameplay.

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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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