[new release] The Prepless GM - play rpgs without prepwork

Annoying isn’t it? When you’ve spent hours on prep work and your players cancel. Or what about when they decide to set fire to the forrest they were supposed to explore. Every DM has seen their careful work go up in flames. And then there are those evenings when you just didn’t have time to prepare and everyone is looking to you for a fun evening. The solution? Run a prepless game! Or why not just run a prepless campaign? Why should players have all the fun of discovering where the story takes them when you can find out together? With the Prepless GM, it’s easy to run entire campaigns without any prep work. Of course, if you like preparing you stil can, but with the skills you learn in the Prepless GM you don’t have to. The choice is yours. So check out the Prepless GM here:&nbsp; <a href="https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/gameaddon/5478/the-prepless-gm" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/gameaddon/5478/the-prepless-gm</a> Have fun! Paul Camp

Brilliant! Love your many clever and uniquely-helpful Roll20 Marketplace products. Highly recommend: <a href="https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/publisher/91/paul-camp" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/publisher/91/paul-camp</a> the entire line by Paul Camp.

Gold said: Love your many clever and uniquely-helpful Roll20 Marketplace products. I'll second that.&nbsp; While I don't have the whole line, I do have some of the puzzle offerings.&nbsp; I especially enjoyed the potion puzzles, and have 4 of them set up in a small lab to give small persistent bonuses (depending on which one they have active) over a little kingdom my players are building in one of my games. Pretty much anything with random tables intrigues me.&nbsp;

Are these tables in handouts or does it include macros that roll?&nbsp;

The tables are handouts for two reasons: 1. I've chosen handouts because all the other resources are handouts as well, and I wanted to create one system instead of having to go through different methods to find stuff. 2. If you can see the entire table and feel like a result doesn't fit the whole, you can easily pick another result. For inspiration, I find it easier to see the whole table.

Hi Paul C! Just purchased this on the marketplace and I'm already excited about the possibilities, but I'm having trouble pulling anything up in my games. As one of the new DMs making the transition to Virtual Play, I'm probably just missing an option or something, but please let me know how to pull up this info in the game itself. Best, S

No worries, roll20 has a lot of options. Go to ‘my games’ in the menu of the roll20 website and click on the name of your game (not on the launch button). You’ll come to a webpage where you can add the ‘prepless gm’ addon to your game. Add it, then launch your game. In your game look to the right. Open the third tab, called ‘journal’. There you’ll find a folder called ‘prepless GM’. Open it and then open the handout with the cover picture. A handout will appear with lots of links. Click on the link of the first chapter to read it. I’ve also included links to subheadings of stuff you might want to pull up during the game for quick reference. It’s best to read through the entire chapters in chronological order first. If you have any questions, let me know! Have fun! - Paul

I have bought the prepless gm an have to admit, that i am a little disapointed.&nbsp; I hoped for specific tipps for playing on Roll20 like prepared Handouts, collection of macro formulars ("best off"), technical tipps...things like that. Unfortunately this is not the case. Tables for manual rolling names (there are a million online rpg name generators in the net!)...Tables for rolling traps...etc.&nbsp; This might be helpful for a total beginner GM but for me, it was a bad investment. But this is just my personal oppionion. nonetheless there is a lot of these things in the addon and i appreciate the work you did.

Hi Steve, Thank you for letting me know. I'm sorry to hear it didn't meet your expectations. It's always my goal to give you as much value as I can. I can explain my reasoning behind some of the choices I've made: Macros: Instructions on how to use marcos are already on the roll20 website for free. <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Useful_Macros" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Useful_Macros</a> You could just add a handout with this link to the Prepless GM. And in the chapter about roll20 I show you how to do so. Personally, I've found that using the more complex macros slows down gameplay too much for prepless play. That's is why I don't recommend it for prepless play. So the choice not to include those was by design. (If you are prepping a session it's fine of course). Prepared handouts: I could have created generic handouts with story content prepared, but this the Prepless GM is about creating your own content on the fly so you are free to create your own story. The handouts I did create with formulas are to help you generate your own story content faster. Manual tables: Like you said, there are a million tables and generators on the internet. And since you are already behind a computer when playing roll20, you could just use those. Of course, you can use the tables in the book, but they are also there to serve as examples of how to build more powerful tables yourself on the fly. The two tricks I mention here are: 1. Let everyone at the table come up with a couple of results. 2. Use multiple columns to supercharge your table output. This lets you create your own campaign specific tables in about a minute. No generic random generator will do that for you. For instance, if I want to create a big random table of a 'campaign specific environment' with my players, I just create a handout and put in a multi-column table. Next, I share the handout with my players and set it so it can be edited by everyone. (or just give all players DM privileges like the book mentions). That way, everyone can add their ideas to the table and it will be filled in seconds. And you can always come back to it. That is a MUCH faster way to generate campaign specific complex tables than any other method I know. And it doesn't require much technical knowledge. Just have the Chronicler link it up to the main campaign handout and you're good to go. In short: The vision behind the Prepless GM is very much that you can generate your own campaign specific content on the fly, and to ditch everything that slows down your game. And to focus on the players and story, not the technical side. I may be wrong but from your response, I get the feeling you expected the tools to be technical tools? I did mean them to be storytelling tools, like the question system, the alphabet method, and formulas. If you have any questions about how to do technical stuff in roll20 for prepless play, I'll be happy to answer if I can. Perhaps we can add those answers in this thread.