@Ziggurat @rpg In my experience it's not a matter of preparing more or less but how you prepare. When I started out in the hobby I used to do very detailed scripts in preparation almost like a choose your own adventure game but work with much broader strokes these days and playing PBTA games very likely helped in that.

I like to prepare situations and characters. A situation describes some event that is happening or could happen, a conflict of some kind. "Bandits attach the bishop's carriage". Characters are usually a short description "Guard" and a motivation "Impress the captain".

The rest flows from this and lets me easily pull from prepared stuff when improvising.

I keep these noted down for each session and prepare along what I think the next story beats will be. I rarely end up using all but then simply move them along into the next session or into the archive of ideas that could be used later.

@tissek
yup, I'm using that. in particular a huge time saver in the initial prep

@TripHammer
@rpg
A bit of a summer hiatus now but by autumn I'll be back to running Stars Without Numbers. First time running a sandbox style game that really works for me, so many planets and places to visit