The players won't care about how pretty you make your maps. Make them functional and ugly, and you'll save up so much time for other prep.

I found a map-making site that is, let's be honest, shit. The maps it makes can only ever be "good enough", and never great. This means I don't waste time trying to make them great, and can actually finish the dang things. Plus, if the players decide not to go to the noble manor, then it's no big loss. This idea goes for a lot of the game, actually. If you spend less time on the story, then it's no big loss if the plot takes a tangent. And they probably weren't going to be as invested in a forced narrative as they would be for something more organic.

When I first started DMing as a kid, my dad told me the best thing I could do to prepare was just know the whole world. He then told me about an adventure he was running where the players, for literally no reason, started digging in the middle of a tunnel. There was a whole dungeon set up for them ready to explore, and they went 50' into the tunnel and started digging their own tunnel.

A few favourites from the Alexandrian: - Don't prep plots. Prep scenarios. If you give the players a goal and a world, they will make the plot themselves, and it'll be more interesting. And it's not like you wouldn't need those things for a railroad plot anyway. - Don't plan contingencies. Instead of explaining everything the party could do to get past the guard, just describe the guard. It's a lot more flexible, and it takes less time to prepare. - With the 3 clues rule, make sure to have different rule types. If all your clues are pieces of evidence, then a party who prefers to talk to people is clueless. - If you feel the need to ask "are you sure you want to do that", there might be a miscommunication to figure out. Maybe you didn't explain the situation clearly, or a player misheard you, or the player has an item to help things work out. - When creating a system within your setting (eg, nobility), add two exceptions to the neat and tidy rules. "Each region is ruled by a count, except for those over there which are ruled by comtes." This adds history to your world while making it less daunting to add more exceptions if you need them later.

I think better advice in that situation is to find players who want to play the game you're running. It might be fun to make a tunnel-exploration campaign, but I'm running that dungeon over there. We'll do the tunnel thing another time. Also, to rephrase your dad's advice, know enough of the world to be able to add shit where you need to. I don't even know if the world is round, but I don't need to. If the players are in a church, I'll make sure to know the popular religions in case I need to roleplay as a priest.

If you need to "cheat" (e.g. fudging a roll because you made your monster *way* too powerful) then **never** tell the players, it will only ruin their sense of immersion. Try to do voices, players love them even if they're shit and it helps distinguish the NPCs. The voices don't have to be remotely good and you don't need to be good at accents, just try things like "gruff voice" for the grizzled mercenary or "weirdly enthusiastic" for the mad old wizard.

I recommend players make their characters together. Fate's rules for it are pretty good, and can be ported to many systems: https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/phase-trio . The whole "You all meet in a tavern for the first time" mode is a valid way to play, but I've had friends do that and then struggle with how contrived it feels to fight to the death for people they just met, or go on a whole dangerous sidequest for someone else's hobby. I also recommend reading other systems. Not everyone needs to know dozens of games, but if you always play d20 games spending some time in a different branch of the RPG family tree can really be eye-opening. Or if you've only really played really light games, looking at how something crunchier does detail can be insightful.

> I don’t even know if the world is round, but I don’t need to. The players will find a way to make you need to.

Of the responses so far, this one brought me the most joy.

Use every opportunity to turn planning into information gathering. I try to use every opportunity to stop the planning "phase" of the game and go to the information gathering before continuing the planning. This can be pretty much any unknown that the characters bring up, like some if -statement in their plan, some fact they are unsure about etc. The information gathering might be anything from a simple skill check to a full adventure and after that we go right back to the planning. This has removed a lot of planning hours that wouldn't have had anything to do with the situation they are going into.

No, the world is enormous and you only need to worry about a small part of it. There is literally nothing over there, and no reason you'd want to go there. The game is over here. Leaving this area is the same as leaving the game, which you are free to do.

> I was about to comment “When one of my players asks whether they can do something > completely unreasonable I look at them, roll a D20 openly on the table and without > checking the result, say ‘no’” Oh, GM Fiat... I always preferred the GM Camaro, but you do you...

• I refer to this as the 'Video Game Rule'. In the last thirty years the visual aspects of the hobby have become more important because we’re think we are ‘competing’ with video games. Once we realize we are making a different kind of experience it allows the *story* (that is the narrative elements) to outshine the *graphics*, if you will.-

Let them look cool. Too much time is spent working around the players’ abilities to make a fight challenging. Some fights should look hard but have a player ability break them. Let them use the powers they earned. This slightly ties to the idea that the game is not the players against the DM, it is the players against the world, while the DM narrates.

For depth in world-building I use a rule I call "Y-cubed". (I got it from somewhere else but can't recall the source anymore.) For every detail you make, you ask the question "Why" three times. So a village the characters have reached stop all work every 77 days for a festival. Why? It celebrates an ascended local hero who saved the village from a magical blight. Why 77 days? It took 77 days for effort for the blight to be defeated. ... And so on. This is a rapid way to both build depth in your setting quickly, as well as inspire possible mysteries and intrigue for investigation later. A slight modification works also for giving NPCs depth.

Read George Polti's _The 36 Dramatic Situations_. It's a list of plot elements that have a snappy title, a list of participants in the plot element, a brief discussion of how it works, and then (unfortunately dated) references to dramas that used them. Using this when building a world, or a campaign, or a local setting, lets you quickly set up a bunch of conflicts (ideally with interlaced participants so that single NPCs (or PCs) can be in different roles in different dramatic situations. Then you just let the events flow logically, and as the dramatic situations get resolved you get a plot. PCs can interfere with these dramatic situations and thus have an impact on resulting plots even if the overall setting is far larger than they are.

What's... What's GM camaro?

Also make maps that people in universe would use, not a god or modern satellite images. Romans used maps that showed main roads and villages, why would a random adventurer need a super detailed map with borders on it.

It is much faster than a GM fiat.

oh its a car joke ffs