Oh man, this is complicated for me. No-prep games are fabulous: I love how the only prep I need for Swords Without Master is to bring a deck of Magic cards or other source of inspiring art, and I love how PbtA games question the players to learn about the world. I love discovering things about the game world that I didn’t know, and yet…

I once spent a half hour on the bus doing a character burn for an NPC in my Burning Wheel campaign. I built her from a briefly sketched relationship and some scant prior onscreen time. I learned unexpected things about her as I made the write-up, reconciling things and making everything add up right. And I really enjoyed that. It gave me a unique insight into that part of the world, and made it more real to me.

One of the players killed her with an arrow through the head during the following session.

They apologized when they found out how much time I’d spent on this one character, but…I didn’t mind. I wasn’t regretful. The whole moment made me reel briefly, like one of those gut punch plot twists. I realized that I loved seeing carefully-assembled imaginary worlds toppled by the chaos of players.

And I think it’s probably a little selfish of me, because it’s not something that necessarily benefits my players. But I get a great deal of enjoyment out of seeing prep come into contact with the characters.

(Another aside: canon arguments notwithstanding, I love the idea of playing in an established setting, because it gives unique consequence to many actions. I spent a lot of my early gaming career drinking in the world details for White Wolf games.)