"Preparation for games is one of the most overrated things," said Josh over a game of Solomon cube-drafted Magic the Gathering (cube list forthcoming). This was on Wednesday, and I had not yet at that point started to prepare for my upcoming Rogue Trader game on Sunday. Josh runs a 3.5 D&D game that meets every 2 weeks. I play Grak, son of Grok, the half-orc barbarian in his campaign. I'm routinely impressed by Josh's DMing of the game. Nothing in particular about the campaign or the setting stands out... it's more that he gives us the opportunity (if we so wish), to explore these characters that we've created for ourselves in our own way. In terms of role-playing, Grak is not a sophisticated or deep character. He is a barbarian, frustrated by magic, short with words and quick to action. I sometimes like to think that Grak is a lot like me, rather than vice versa (not really sure if that makes a difference).
I, unlike Josh, am relatively new to DMing. I ran a reasonably successful 4th edition D&D game for about a year. In my mind, the best games of 4th edition were those in which there were no combat. The characters simply WERE for about 3 or 4 hours on a Friday night over snacks and beers & bourbon (B&B, is that a thing?). D&D 4.0 was a dragged down by poor design, which we managed to squeeze some unlikely fun out of by mostly not playing the game. Some of the group wasn't particularly into that (they're gone now, emperor be praised!), but for the most part we had a good time. I managed to time the campaign's end such that it coincided with the sad departure of Hogarth, warforged barbarian, from our table and also from the state. From that point, it was up to me really to decide what game to continue with.
After some research, I became deeply interested in running one of Fantasy Flight's Warhammer 40,000 RPGs. I owned a number of them (Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, Deathwatch), really all of them at the time, and as a fan of the 40k fiction I thought it would be a good fit for me as a GM. I settled on Rogue Trader, mostly because I felt that thematically it was the polar opposite of D&D, in which players tend to start as nameless nobodies rather than moneyed nobility. In D&D, I feel there is certain greed that drives players to accumulate the most GOLD or items, as though they think that is the measure of success. In Rogue Trader, you don't even track currency, as it is assumed the characters possess wealth such that carrying money on their persons is ludicrous. It is a system where the players routinely order dozens (if not hundreds) of their underlings to participate operations which will almost surely result in their deaths.
Anyway, one thing I learned during that year of D&D was that it's really important to NOT prepare for your games in advance. Preparing for games only results in disappointment for you and frustration for your players. All your machinations are sidestepped by players who you can never hope to understand, or even worse they're rail-roaded into pitfalls that they don't know how to escape. You wind up working 8 hours to prepare for a 4 hour game and you end up burnt out and exhausted. I've taken a different approach in Rogue Trader. Instead of working fervently to prepare for Sunday's game last night, I was eating home-cooked lobster yee mein and watching Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins. The product of my laziness was a game whose highlight included a routine tech-use failure by Vertus, the group's tech-priest, resulting in some confusion in the room-service order to a rival Rogue Trader dynasty's presidential suite. This confusion in turn led to the voidmaster Maritus (having assumed the identity of the Empyrean Hotel [finest in the Lek system - known for its delicious fungus!] staff member Carlos) having to deliver a service tray of fungus liquor to a room full of rowdy naval officers in a g-string and decorative cuffs and collar. At this point, he had exactly the length of Q Lazzarus's "Goodbye Horses" to extract information he needed from the rival dynasty's officers. You can't write that shit in advance. It just happens.
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