80/20 Game Prep in Tabletop Roleplaying Games

The 80/20 Rule is also known as the Pareto Principle. It states that in a given endeavor, 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes.

This basic theory has been applied to all sorts of areas. Today we are doing the same, but with preparation for running Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop roleplaying games.

The 80/20 Rule Examined

A classic example is in sales. Your “best” customers often account for a large percentage of your total sales in a business. The theory digs into this fact to suggest that you could potentially cut a lot of your work that’s spent on less valuable customers and still retain the 20% that’s producing 80% of your sales results.

It’s a theory with a lot of applications for business, productivity, and more.

And let’s be very clear, 80% and 20% are placeholders, not exact figures. In sales or anything else we discuss in this article, the exact percentages you’re working with might be 60/40 or 98/2 or whatever else.

The overarching principle is what matters: that it pays to focus on the areas that produce the greatest results, and cut the equal (or greater) amount of work you’re spending for far less benefit.

Over-Prepping Dungeons & Dragons

This story will sound familiar to many of you: it was my first time running a campaign for D&D. It was set in the sprawling city of Waterdeep, an urban metropolis with hundreds of thousands of people walking its streets every year.

So what did I do? Naturally, I prepped a small novel’s worth of material for just a handful of sessions.

The campaign ended up lasting around 30 sessions and we spent the majority of the time in Waterdeep. But do you think I used 100% of the material I prepped for the city of Waterdeep? Obviously not.

But what about 50%? This was several years ago, so any estimate I make will be approximate, but I’d be shocked if I used 50%. In fact, I’d peg it at around 10%.

A lot of first-time game masters have similar stories. And they’re good ones to learn from.

Applying 80/20 to Game Prep

So the first step is simply auditing your preparation after a chunk of sessions. How much of your prepared material did you actually reference?

Then, put prepped material into three buckets:

1. Stuff I used
2. Stuff I still think I might use
3. Stuff I’m pretty sure I don’t need.

Remove anything in the third category from your prep. And if you do two such audits and there’s something that is in the second category both times, remove it until it proves otherwise.

But you’re also mentally cataloguing a fourth category:

• What did I end up needing that I didn’t have prepared?

So now you have a new list of what to prep, and what to avoid.

Now here’s the magic secret…

Do it again. And again. Until you’ve whittled down your preparation to the stuff you absolutely know you’re going to need at some point.

It’s eliminating 80% of your preparation time (or in my case, more), and keeping 80% or more of the useful stuff.

The End Result

At some point you’re going to need something that you didn’t prep, or that you previously eliminated from your prep. This is fine; this exercise is a fluid one. There’s no such thing as “done.” It’s simply about minimizing wasted effort and maximizing useful effort.

Stated differently, your prepping needs will change as your campaigns do. You can never be 100% prepared, and honestly don’t want to be, because that would mean prepping perhaps 500% of what you actually need.

For me, the end result of this practice has been roughly a single page of notes for every session of D&D that I run these days. I’m excluding stat blocks for creatures, which generally take up more space, either physically or digitally. But in terms of actual notes for myself during a session, it’s rare that it goes beyond one page.

This comes with time, patience, learning to improvise past situations that you previously had to prepare specifically for, and introspection into exactly what is useful to you in sessions.

So while I wasn’t necessarily thinking of this process as “80/20ing my prep,” that’s exactly what it became. And I went from a gigantic binder of unused notes to a single page of utterly important notes that I use every time I play.

You can do the same with time and practice, and it will speed up your preparation and make running games a whole lot more fun!